Girls In Tech

Tags: BlogWorld
Posted in All Chapters, Event, Los Angeles | No Comments »

Guys, please welcome Jacqueline Urick as the new MD of Girls in Tech’s Minneapolis chapter. Its my privilege to introduce such a warm, smart and talented person, and glad to have her relieve me in this role. She has more than 12 years of web development and online marketing experience, and was the founder and owner or Fruition Consulting, Inc. (Minneapolis, MN). To know more please checkout her linkedin profile or best just reach out to her.

Jacqueline Urick, new Managing Director, Minneapolis Chapter

At my end, I look forward to my new role and responsibilities as a leader in technology with Girls in Tech Corporate. It was my pleasure to know you and would like to thank you all for your excitement and support in making GIT Minneapolis launch a huge success. I am sure your will continue to show your encouragement to Jacque and her advisory team in celebrating women in technology and their achievements.

Best wishes!
Urvashi Mishra

Ex-MD, Minneapolis Chapter.

Tags: ex-managing director, Jacqueline Urick, Minneapolis Chapter, New Managing Director, Urvashi Mishra
Posted in All Chapters, Minneapolis | No Comments »

GIT and MediaBistro present…

Following the overwhelming success of the inaugural Freemium Summit in San Francisco, the one-day event moves to the East Coast and will explore best practices for succeeding under the freemium business model. Across all segments of the media landscape, entrepreneurs and executives are pioneering online business models that combine a free offering with a premium, paid offering. This hybrid business model is one of the most exciting areas of business model innovation affecting the world of media and the Freemium Summit will explore the most important topics on the minds of leading practitioners.

See such amazing industry leaders as:

• Anne Driscoll of Ning
• Ryan Holmes of HootSuite
• Brent Chudoba of SurveyMonkey
• Scott McMullan of Google

Venue

Sentry Centers
730 Third Avenue (Between E. 45th St. and E. 46th St.), 17th Floor
New York, NY 10017
http://www.sentrycenters.com/

Register here!

Get the 15% Girls in Tech discount with this code: FSGIT

Tags: Freemium, Google, HootSuite, hybrid, Survey Monkey, Zing
Posted in All Chapters, Event, New York | No Comments »

 Please join us as we partner with MediaBistro for the Smartphone Game Summit – September 24th at the Hotel Nikko, San Francisco! ~ It is an event not to be missed.

The Smartphone Games Summit is a single day conference focused on the emerging smartphone games space. As new developments emerge such as the iPhone Game Center, is it game over for a number of gaming companies, or does it open an even larger opportunity? How do new technologies like the iPad change the game? The conference will bring together leading developers, investors, and executives from around the globe to share their collective wisdom on what’s working today and where this exciting industry is heading. The Smartphone Games Summit will touch on a number of key trends, including:

• International trends in smartphone games
• Engaging smartphone game design
• Lessons from leaders
• Mobile social games
• Keys to successful monetization
• Building and executing a successful distribution strategy

You’ll also hear such prominent industry speakers such as: Charles Juof PlayMesh, Andrew Lacy of Disney Mobile, Si Shenof PapayaMobile, Inc., Chris Williamsof PlayFirst, and Aunkur Arya of Google.

Register HERE  using discount code:  SPGIT for your 15% GIT discount

Then, on October 1st…

Join us in New York at the New Yorker Hotel, NYC – for the Social Ad Summit!   — At Social Ad Summit, leading brands and agencies will share how they created successful social marketing and advertising campaigns. The rapid growth of social media provides marketers and advertisers with larger reach, stronger customer relationship opportunities, and increased relevance. Make the most of it — learn firsthand what is working and how to implement a successful strategy for your organization or client. 

What will you learn?

• How to dramatically boost your social media PR effectiveness
• Top reasons to include social media in your business strategy
• Breakthrough mobile marketing techniques
• Proven methods for making money with social media
• Customer relationship strategies for the social media age
• Social driven advertising solutions
• How to build a loyal community of influencers

See and hear from such industry leaders as:   Anna Banksof Organic, Inc., Rebecca Watson of gWallet, Aaron Shapiro of Huge, Joe Baratelli or RPA, and Royce Carvahlo of Johnson & Johnson.  (See the complete list, here.)

Register HERE with discount code: SAGIT:

We hope you will take advantage and enjoy the wealth of knowledge and mindshare at these two great industry events.

Tags: girls in tech, MediaBistro, smartphone, Social Advertising
Posted in All Chapters, Event, New York, San Francisco | 2 Comments »

Girls in Tech Minneapolis is proud to sponsor Startup Weekend in the Twin Cities, during the weekend of September 17th-19th, 2010.

This supercharging event aims at bringing together teams of developers, innovators, and enterpreneurs to work on novel ideas in this 54 hour event to build something enterprising and showcase the new products. This conference was founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, based on the concept of ‘focusing on learning by creating.’

Startup Weekend Twin Cities

Featured in Washington Post, TechCrunch, ABC News, TECHdotMN and more, Startup Weekend continues to make the buzz with success in more than 100 cities world-wide, from San Francis to Athens. Thanks to Shane Reiser, Coordinator (also orchestrated Startup Weekend in New York City and Omaha) for bringing this event here.

While event planning is still underway, it is confirmed that Jon Dahl, Co-founder of Zencoder, will kick-off the event on September 17th, Friday, with Jeff Pesek, Co-founder of TECHdotMN, discuss ‘Future of Minneapolis tech scene‘. On Saturday, Rob Weber, VP of Business Development, Co-founded of W3i 2000, CEO 2000-2007, will share his thoughts on ‘From Dorm to Millions‘. Other highlights include Sunday night panel featuring: Matt Bauer (founder, Pedal Brain), Luke Francl (web app developer), Pete Birkeland (CFO, RAIN Source Capital), Kathy Grayson(reporter – technology, venture capitals, and startups in Minnsapolis/St. Paul Business Journal).

Excited? Feel the adrenaline rush?

You can be a part of this super exciting event, and amongst other things, learn, grow, and network! You have to act fast as, participation is limited to the first 100 (registration is open).

All Girls in Tech Members are offered a discount of $15.

To register now, click here: GIT Member Registration @Startup Weekend.

Others: Non-GIT Member Register here.

When: September 17th – 19th, 2010

Where: CoCo MSP

Stay tuned at Twin Cities Startup Weekend for more details.

NOTE: Tickets price include food & beverage throughout the event (reduced pricing for students and demo only).

Via: TechdotMN, Twin Cities Startup Weekend, Girls In Tech Minneapolis

Tags: Andrew Hyde, Co-founded of W3i, Co-founder of TECHdotMN, Co-founder of Zencoder, CoCo MSP, Jeff Pesek, Jon Dahl, Kathy Grayson (reporter - technology, Luke Francl (web app developer), Matt Bauer (founder, Minneapolis, Pedal Brain), Pete Birkeland (CFO, RAIN Source Capital), registration, Rob Weber, Saint Paul, September 17th-19th 2010, Shane Reiser, startup weekend, Startup Weekend Girls in Tech member discount code, TechdotMN, Twin Cities, venture capitals, VP of Business Development
Posted in All Chapters, Event, Events, Minneapolis | No Comments »

(Register for our upcoming event on Eventbrite, here.)

The she I refer to is:  Mariam Naficy, founder and CEO of the Minted.com.  Minted.com is the online source for crowd-sourced graphic design. Minted.com calls themselves “The Freshest Designs on Paper.” — And by virtue of how they’re selected, we really think they are!

The purpose of their site is to uncover exceptional design from all over the world and bring this to the savvy consumer who won’t accept anything less. Where does the crowd-sourcing come in? With their Design Challenge (c) – the site’s visitors decide which designers get into the minted collection by the “wisdom of the crowd” as they call it. Their design challenges are voted on by our users and winners are picked to be sold on their site. To see some of their designs in various categories, click:: here.

So, as they say:  They’re “here to help realize your vision for great design on paper. At Minted, all that matters is how good your design is. You submit, and the Minted community votes to tell us what to sell.” So, check them out …Or even take on the community and enter a design!

***Join us as she tells her story & gives advice for other women & soon-to-be entrepreneurs at our event this Monday, August 9th.  Register on Eventbrite, here.***

August 9th – 6:00 – 8:30 pm

Nextspace Workspace @

28  2nd Street | San Francisco | between Market & Mission

We’ll see you there!

About Mariam:
Mariam Naficy is the Founder and CEO of Minted. She has pioneered new consumer Internet models since 1998, when she co-founded Eve.com, the first online retailer of cosmetics, upon graduating from business school. Eve.com grew to $10 million in annual sales in its first year and was sold successfully to Idealab for a reported $100 million in cash in 2000. The company was then sold to LVMH’s Sephora in late 2000. After Eve.com, Mariam served as the Vice-President and General Manager of E-Commerce for The Body Shop, the international beauty goods retailer.
Minted, Mariam’s newest venture founded in 2007, is a crowd-sourcing design company that holds design competitions to source graphic design and lets its community vote to tell the company what to sell. (The designs are then printed on paper in the form of wedding invitations, holiday photo cards and other personalized stationery and photo card products.) Mariam received her BA in Political Economy from Williams College in 1991 and her MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. While at Stanford, Mariam wrote The Fast Track, a guide to investment banking and management consulting published by Broadway Books that has sold over 50,000 copies, based on her pre-business school experience as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. Mariam sits on the Board of Directors of Polyvore, the fashion social media site, and of RealSelf, the leading content site for cosmetic surgery. Mariam has been written about in Vogue, People, Fortune, USA Today, the Washington Post, and other publications.

(photo credit: VentureBeatProfiles.com)

Posted in Event, San Francisco | 1 Comment »

Strong passwords are your online defense shield!

Randomness is the key to strong passwords, but is strictly against the basic human instinct. We all love patterns and systematic structures in anything and everything we do. It is hard for us to remember or memorize something that we can’t associate a pattern with! And, this predictable behavior of online users is what makes them prey to most common of hacking attacks – cracking passwords – by intelligent password guessing (brute force attack) or applying all words in the dictionary (dictionary attacks) resulting in unauthorized access to their private online accounts.

Our tendency of not to tax our brains with complex processing and information overload involved in the process of first, creating a complex password, and then having to remember it, results in easy-to-remember, and in most cases, easy-to-guess (weaker) passwords – and this is exactly the upper limit on how secure one is! (Read: Easy to remember but hard to guess passwords on wiki)

Some wary users actually come up with a very strong password(s), but most quickly get tired of the constant need to remember these, and start using ‘same’ password for all or many of their accounts (a behavior that gave rise to ‘Open ID’ technology).

Difficulty in remembering complex passwords?

However, this is an extremely risky practice, as there’s too much at stake. One account being compromised puts all the other accounts (protected by this cracked password) are exposed to higher security threat. And, we all know, our creativity with passwords reaches stalemate when we start incrementing our beloved password by one or some other constant or begin recycling from a pool of previously used passwords! This is the death of our protective armor, and increases our vulnerability many folds!

When online, your identity is protected by your password. The stronger it is, the better shielded you are against hacking attacks. So protect yourself by flexing that intelligent muscle in your head and getting creative when setting the access code to your sensitive data online!

Use strong passwords as your armor when online!

Image sources:

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/technology/password_policies/images/passwords.gif

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:BMja-Wnct1YBuM:http://blogs.davenport.edu/its

Tags: brute force, defense, dictionary attacks, guessing password, hacking, information security, online security, open ID, shield, stolen password, strong passwords
Posted in All Chapters, Minneapolis | 1 Comment »

Geek Girl Happy Hour!

Girls in Tech, Minneapolis welcomes Summer of 2010 with friendly drinks and sparkling conversations among our women in  technology, industry and academia, and all enthusiasts.

Please attend Girls in Tech Minneapolis for our “Geek Girl” Happy Hour!

This is a “just for fun” event . Let’s get to know each other well in fun non stressful way

When: Thursday, June 24th, 5.30 PM – 6.30 PM

Where: Joe Senser’s, 4217 American Blvd, West Bloomington, MN 55437

Cost: Free admission to this event.

RSVP: (required, in advance) http://gitmspgeekgirlhappyhour.eventbrite.com

Happy Hour Specials:

$2.50 short domestic taps/bottles, rail & call drinks, house wine, short senser teas, more…

Visit our website: Girls in Tech Minneapolis Chapter

Become a member: Register here!

Follow us on Twitter: @GitMinneapolis

Join us on Facebook: Girls in Tech Minneapolis

Attend This Event

Tags: event, girls in tech minneapolis chapter, happy hour, mixer, social networking
Posted in All Chapters, Event, Events, Minneapolis | 2 Comments »

Time and again, studies reveal lower percentages of women in technical domain. There is a lot of on-going effort around the world to influence women to launch their careers in some technical field in order to bridge the gap. This decades-old question still lingering around indicates that the traditional approach to lure women into technical field is not effective and, emphasize the need for a new approach altogether.

Christine recently posted “AAUW Releases Report: “Why So Few? Women in Science, Tech, Engineering and Mathematics” at Girls in Tech blog. AAUW’s report highlights how ‘social belief system and learning environment’ affects initial mindset of the young girls.

I vividly remember during high-school, we were a class with 100 (approx) girls and, of these only 10% decided to choose a career in engineering, and relatively small percentage (4%) successfully sought a technical career. Looking back in time, and discussing this topic with a few girls who abandoned their goals midway, I figured that they were not comfortable in choosing a career in a field where women would be scarce, but most importantly that, they had some sort of inherent fear. Many girls doubted whether they could do well at math or physics, and did not wish to pursue the fundamental coursework required as basis for an advance degree in technical a field for example, engineering.

Along with positive encouragement at home and school (as AAUW report suggests, and I blindly second), there is profound need for an early exposure to technology as well. Most students have their first ‘real’ rendezvous during undergrad or graduate coursework. But, isn’t this kind of late, when most of us are already committed to our fields of specialization? I strongly feel that such opportunities of getting to taste technology should come at an earlier stage, which I prefer to call career forming age of students (junior-high school to high school), when almost all of us are faced with the question – “What do you aspire to be?”

A hands-on experience will allow these young minds make a better decision, and definitely break the ice. Those who are discomforted by the need to take basic courses like math, physics, chemistry or computers, will get a chance to see all of these in action, and hopefully get inspired and, overcome the fear factor!
Girls in Technology’s Mentorship Program shook hands with Iridiscent and launched Technovation Challenge 2010, aimed at providing a unique opportunity to high-school girls to learn directly from distinguished female entrepreneurs and professionals and get inspired! The success of this event underscores the importance of this cause.

As Managing Director of Minneapolis Chapter, I vow to bring this effort to state of Minnesota soon, and request others to spread the word. The desire to pursue a career in technological field will definitely grow deeper if winded at the right time. And, we will see professional demographics of women in technology change.

Tags: AAUW Report "Why So Few? Women in Science, education, Engineering and Mathematics", entrepreneur, girls in tech, iridescent, mentorship, Minneapolis Chapter, tech, technology, Technovation Challenge 2010, women in tech
Posted in All Chapters, GIT Mentorship, Minneapolis | 4 Comments »

Girls in Tech’s Minneapolis Chapter, is launching and we want to see YOU at the celebration!

Come and connect with your fellow tech ladies and enthusiasts, and find out what the Minneapolis chapter has in store for you.

(PS: This event is co-ed. All  are welcome!)

When: Saturday, May 15th, 4.00 PM – 6.00 PM

Where: Grumpy’s Bar and Grill, Downtown Minneapolis, 1111 Washington Ave. S

Cost: Free admission to this event.

RSVP: no later than 11.00 AM on May 15^th

http://gitmsplaunch.eventbrite.com

Visit our website: Girls in Tech Minneapolis Chapter

Become a member: Register here!

Follow us on Twitter: @GitMinneapolis

Join us on Facebook: Girls in Tech Minneapolis

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Urvashi Mishra

Managing Director, Girls in Tech, Minneapolis

@urvashi_mishra

Tags: facebook, girls in tech, girls in tech minneapolis, girls in tech minneapolis chapter, GIT, launch, Minneapolis, minnesota, networking, party, social network, social networking
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