Girls In Tech

The Founder Institute (www.founderinstitute.com), a pre-seed incubator, recently unveiled a program designed to increase the number of females founders in technology. Their goal? To launch 175 female-led tech companies in 2011.

The Female Founder Fellowship program will provide extraordinary female applicants the opportunity to launch their dream company with the Founder Institute – free of charge. The Institute will subsidize the course fee for the most extraordinary female applicant in each of it’s ten Spring Semesters; including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., San Diego, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, New York City, Boston, and Singapore.

Best part of all:  Any female who applies to any of these Spring Semesters is automatically eligible. Many of the deadlines are approaching, so apply today at http://founderinstitute.com/join.

To date, 16% of the Founder Institute’s 250+ graduated technology companies have been founded by females – which sadly is quite higher than the industry average. More importantly – the Institute’s acceptance rate amongst female applicants is essentially equal to that of the men, while the graduation rate amongst women is almost 20% greater than that of the men. With this in mind, the Institute hopes to double the number of female applicants with this program – which will in turn push the number of female graduates over 30%, equating to over 175 new female tech founders in 2011.

Some notable female graduates of the Founder Institute include:

1.     2RedBeans (www.2redbeans.com) – Q Zhao (Bay Area)

2.     Ergolution (www.ergolution.net) – Charissa Shaw (Los Angeles)

3.     EximFlow (www.eximflow.com) – Stacey Arbetter  (Boston)

4.     Fashioning Change (www.fashioningchange.com) – Adriana Herrera (San Diego)

5.     Memetales (www.memetales.com) – Maya Bisineer (Seattle)

6.     Micromobs (www.micromobs.com) – Himani Amoli (Bay Area)

7.     MySweetsBox.com (www.mysweetsbox.com) – Regine Harr (Berlin)

8.     Skimble (www.skimble.com ) – Maria Ly (Bay Area)

9.     WhatsFun.com (www.whatsfun.com ) – Katherine Chalmers (Washington DC)

10.  Zebraminds (www.zebraminds.com) – Oza Klanjsek (Denver)

Apply today!  *(You know who you are!)

Tags: entrepreneurship, female founders, Founder Institute, The Funded
Posted in Berlin, Boston, DC, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Diego, San Francisco | 2 Comments »

Whether it is ensuring people have access to water, girls and young brides go to school, or empowering women through microfinanance initiatives, you have to make time to care. CARE.org, a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty by supporting women around the globe, has made this part of their mission for the past 65 years.  They are inviting you to get involved this May when they host their National Conference & Celebration in Washington D.C.

The two-day conference on May 11 and 12 will bring together some of the top activists, lawmakers and speakers who are committed to women’s and girls’ empowerment around the world. They reached out to invite Girls in Tech members since many of you are focused on microfinance, women’s tech education and using ICT for development.

To register visit www.care.org/nationalconferencewomen.  Tickets for the two-day event cost $125. Students can register at the special rate of $40.

Beyond panels and speakers, the conference will offer interactive workshops focusing on girls’ education, women’s microfinance programs, maternal health, and global women’s empowerment. Attendees will also be able to meet Goretti Nyabenda of Burundi, whose inspiring story is featured in the best-selling book Half the Sky. Goretti is a successful entrepreneur and community leader who took part in a village savings and loan association with the help of CARE.

Finally, attendees will also get hands-on training for promoting the issues you care about on Capitol Hill, and then meet in person with your own U.S. Senators and Representatives to educate them about why women’s empowerment is important to you and your organization.

In addition, Girls In Tech NYC recently launched an educational program to address the pressing need for female advancement in technological fields. 

For more information about CARE.org or the conference, just follow the links!

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In escaping from the geek-dom of the Geeks on a Plane journey for a bit, the group headed over to the “Newseum” in DC’smuseum district. Coming from a communications and journalism background, I was ecstatic to discover the cool archives and exhibits that this unique and recently remodeled museum had to offer (even though I originally thought that the “Newseum” was all things new, rather than the history of news, newspapers and the evolution to new media).

The thing that struck me the most, was the fact that most museums are very historical in nature – whether the museum is showcasing art, artifacts or historical treasures. A lot of the exhibits at the Newseum revolved around news and incidents (mostly negative, unfortunately) that happened during my 32 years of life. Living through some of these landmark moments made me feel in touch with the world and current events and OLD!

During our VIP tour, the group had the opportunity to check out the broadcast studio, the server room and the primary control and programming station (full disclosure: we all turned into kids again).

Here is a little more information around the museum. I highly recommend it next time you visit DC!

Newseum Blends High-Tech With Historical

The Newseum — a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits.

The Newseum is located at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., on America’s Main Street between the White House and the U.S. Capitol and adjacent to the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall. The exterior’s unique architectural features include a 74-foot-high marble engraving of the First Amendment and an immense front wall of glass through which passers-by can watch the museum fulfill its mission of providing a forum where the media and the public can gain a better understanding of each other.

The Newseum features seven levels of galleries, theaters, retail spaces and visitor services. It offers a unique environment that takes museumgoers behind the scenes to experience how and why news is made.

“Visitors will come away with a better understanding of news and the important role it plays in all of our lives,” said Newseum Executive Director and Senior Vice President Joe Urschel. “The new Newseum is educational, inspirational and a whole lot of fun.”

Tags: DC, Geeks on a Plane, new media, Newseum
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Guest post by Eric Ries, Lessons Learned and co-founder of IMVU.

It’s been an exhilarating first day here in Washington DC for the Geeks on a Plane tour. We met a number of policy makers from the White House and State Department, and had a solid Startup2Startup all about government policy and entrepreneurship. After a full day of talking, debating, thinking, and strategizing, we feel about read to take some good old-fashioned action. Will you join us?

In a previous post, I asked readers for suggested topics that the US government needs to know about startups and entrepreneurs, and got
some really interesting responses. I’ve done my best to represent those perspectives in the meetings I’ve had here over the past two weeks. In my presentation this morning, I emphasized three key areas: reducing the personal cost of failure for entrepreneurs, innovation-friendly legal reforms, and access to the digital means of production (slides from my White House presentation are available at the end of this post).

However, there’s one additional issue that has come up throughout the day today. It’s something that Brad Feld and Paul Graham have termed the Founders Visa. The idea is to enable up to 10,000 people per year to enter the United States if they are here to found a company that will employ US citizens. I think the benefits here are a no-brainer.

Let me quote from Paul’s original essay:

The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley. It’s that we won’t let the people who want to start them into the country.

Letting just 10,000 startup founders into the country each year could have a visible effect on the economy. If we assume 4 people per startup, which is probably an overestimate, that’s 2500 new companies. Each year. They wouldn’t all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.

By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn’t be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn’t work for existing companies, only new ones they’d founded. In fact they’d cause there to be more jobs for Americans, because the companies they started would hire more employees as they grew.

Brad Feld has been working on promoting this idea inside the halls of Congress. Today at Startup2Startup, an idea emerged to try and generate some grassroots momentum to help out. It’s actually part of a lean startup story.

David Binetti is an entrepreneur with some credibility in this area, having worked to create the original USA.gov. Recently, he’s been
engaged in a customer validation exercise around a new concept for a political action-oriented social network. When that concept didn’t pan out, he decided to pivot. His latest effort, called 2gov.org, makes it easy to contact your local, state and federal governments with just a tweet. For more on his lean startup journey, you can take a look at this slide presentation. 2gov.org automatically routes your tweet (aggregating it with everyone else who’s expressed a similar point of view) to the right legislator or agency. Because it checks your
registration against voting rolls, members of congress know that the contacts being received are from actual voters, not just astro-turf. In other words, the service transforms tweets into professional reports that are sent by snail mail, fax, and email – the channels that actually have attention paid to them.

He was at today’s event, and the Geeks on a Plane had a brainstorm. Let’s use 2gov.org to raise awareness of the Founders Visa movement in congress. To that end, we’re tweeting about it, and would like to ask you to join us. If you are a US citizen, tweet your thoughts on the
Founders Visa, using the #FoundersVisa hashtag and including @2gov. 2gov.org will take care of the rest. In order to have your tweet included in the printed packet that your representative will receive, you’ll need to register at 2gov.org (it really only takes a minute).

The Geeks are doing their part. Will you lend us a hand (or at least a tweet)?

Tags: 2gov.org, DC, Government, Startup2Startup, twitter
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A beautiful day in DC, the Geeks on a Plane crew hoofed it over to the Government MeetUp at the OEO with the White House Digital Media Group and the State Department Technology Innovation Team. The presenters included innovative technologists and policy makers discussing how government affects technology today and in the future.

The presenters included:

Evan Cooke, co-founder and CTO of Twilio talked about  building web applications that interact with phone callers. He provided a demo where he mashed up a service to ping him about local flu prevention centers in the DC area. The crowd was wow’ed. Twilio lets you use your existing web development skills, existing code, existing servers, existing databases and existing karma to solve real-time communications problems quickly and reliably.

Eric Ries, former co-founder of IMVU discussed “Lessons Learned” from building tech start-ups failing and succeeding. The focus of the presentation was that most start-ups fail – in order to realize how an entrepreneur can correct its mistakes, he/she needs to understand failure, its pivot point, that speed counts – lean startups go faster, and platforms enable leverage.

Kay Luo, representing LinkedIn discussed the power of social media within the Government 2.0 sector. She provided examples of LinkedIn profile pages of high level diplomats, including President Obama, and discussed how very closed societies can leverage this type of new media platform to communicate and promote the initiatives and projects that they’re working on and more importantly, as a digital rolodex to gather resources.

John Anderson, co-founder of Cash.IO discussed the platform providing mobile solutions for payment systems. An interactive gift corporation, Cash.IO helps businesses send money to consumers in a safe and secure manner. He mentioned that in less than three weeks, Cash.IO has live partners, customers and the only way they could’ve pulled this off is by relocating from Wisconsin to Silicon Valley.

Shervin Pishevar, CEO and co-founder of SGN, provided a product demo of F.A.S.T., SGN’s recently launched dogfighting accelerometer game. He discussed how global development starts with innovation and technology and noted that SGN has built offices in Argentina, Beijing and now Vietnam for that very reason. Development around the globe will provide an opportunity for people to join forces on a technological and entrepreneurial level, creating peace, incubation support, funding resources and overall opportunities. This will also be an opportunity to help the global economies as well as promote localization around the world.

Leonard Speiser, serial entrepreneur and innovator, discussed how he built 12 Twitter-related products in 90 days. Some of the products he created revolved around self expression, games, connecting on Facebook to find people on Twitter. Public Stream Optimization or PSO is not replacing SEO, but is very important because it will continue to grow and become an extremely valuable metric.

A Facebook representative noted that the issue with working with the government is that it is a closed environment. Getting the government comfortable with the idea of 1.0 and 2.0 – legal, security process, agencies getting on Facebook groups and fan pages – is not easy. The first step to fixing this issue can be addressed by using the ladder of engagement – This will allow new media specialists to continue innovating and moving forward in the White House.

Greg Cypes, technical lead for Open AIM, AOL Messaging explained the difference between asynchronous and synchronous communication. AIM is still utilized quite frequently within the government 2.0 space, not just for one to one communications, but also one to many – it’s a way to broadcast, real-time.

Dave McClure rounded out the event by providing an overview of the current start-up ecosystem and examples of how start-ups fail and succeed, efficient uses of capital to high fail rates. Over 30% of start-ups that are involved in the Facebook Fund – Incubator REV program will secure a second round of funding. Other notable incubator programs that he mentioned are, YCombinator, TechStars, SeedCamp, LaunchBox, and Betaworks.

Tags: DC, Geeks on a Plane, Government 2.0, innovation, Politics
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At Girls in Tech we base a lot of our guiding principles on inspiration and motivation. As it is, the organization that has existed for over two years, grown to over 6,000 members and reached over 30 chapters globally, was created by an all-volunteer team – volunteers with the same passion, drive and vision to make the world a better place by encouraging women to take risks, venture through unchartered territory and achieve their dreams.

A wise person by the name of Kobi Yamada once said, “Intense desire not only creates its own possibilities, but its own talents. Don’t be afraid to do something just because it’s impossible.” I believe this to be true. Together we can change the world.

And that is why I’m writing today about the nomination of federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor – the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. It gives me chills just to think about this. Born from Puerto Rican parents, Sotomayor grew up in the projects of a New York suburb. Defying all odds, she was able to rise above the trials and tribulations she encountered along the way and blossomed into a top-notch jurist with more credentials and experience on the bench than any of the current nine justices. President Obama clearly raved about her capabilities as having ”an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.”

Today, President Obama made a great decision. Through minds and hearts like that of Sotomayor, we will be able to redefine the impossible and inspire girls and women representing any socio-economic bracket, race or religion to reach for the stars.

Tags: Federal Judge, girls in tech, Obama, President Obama, Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor, Sotomayor, Supreme Court, White House, women in tech
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