Girls In Tech

AcademyX is offering an exclusive 20% discount for Girls-in-Tech members for hands-on, instructor-led computer training in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and Los Angeles.  There are class offerings in MS Office, Adobe applications, programming, web technologies and more.

AcademyX has an outstanding reputation in the training community with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Google and Yelp, state-of-the-art facilities at convenient locations, and an average class size of 5 students with independent workstations.  The company is also Microsoft Certified and Adobe Certified Partner.

Lisa Blodgett, the Director of Social Marketing for AcademyX Los Angeles states “…during these times, furthering and pursuing more advanced computer skills is a vital asset; our curriculum offers a direct relation to Girls-in-Tech member interests and I do think we have an offering for everyone’s interest and skill level. I especially believe as a woman – empowering other women through education is an absolute must!”

AcademyX provides courses in a variety of formats including public enrollment classes (classroom training), customized group training, 3-month evening courses (Web Design, PHP/MySQL, and Online Marketing), one-on-one tutoring, online seminars in advanced topics, and mentored learning targeting certification in MS Office and Adobe applications.

The Girls-in-Tech member discount is for 20% off of the hands-on classroom based training in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and Los Angeles.  Use the special ‘GirlsInTech’ discount code when registering today!

Details:

Locations:

• San Francisco
• Sacramento
• San Jose
• Los Angeles

Format: hands-on classroom based training
Discount code: GirlsInTech
More Information: AcademyX

Tags: academyx, online marketing training, online training, programming, training
Posted in All Chapters, All Chapters, Girls In Tech, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, San Francisco, Silicon Valley | No Comments »

Apple’s iPhone, Motorola’s Droid, Google’s Nexus One, the much anticipated Apple iSlate, and of course, the one that started the smart phone craze—the Blackberry. These are just some of the many tech devices that suddenly a majority of us can’t live without. In a country where the concept of fast food was born, and later spread throughout the world, it is no surprise that America loves the speed and immediacy of smart phones. Nowadays, even a laptop seems slow (seriously, who wants to wait for it to load the home screen?) when you can browse the net with the swipe of a finger and receive your news as it happens through Twitter. With the smart phone becoming an essential rather than a luxury and social gaming and social media permeating all businesses, 2010 promises to be a great year for the tech industry.

Every year, San Francisco-based law firm Morrison Foerster surveys its lawyers from the US, Europe, and Asia regarding the current state of the world’s outsourcing markets and emerging trends that will most probably shape the market over the next year. This year, the spotlight was on the tech industry, as lawyers made predictions about cloud computing. This of course is no surprise, because of social networking. It has become a major trend in the tech industry, is in all aspects including marketing and gaming, and it’s all cloud based. In social media everything is in a shared network and because of its commonalities with cloud computing, the two are slowly but surely intersecting . Together social media and cloud computing are slated to be the big movements in the web 2.0 space.

The firm expects cloud computing-the return to centralized processing-to become even more important this year, especially with major providers like IBM, Google, and Microsoft offering attractive desktop deals. The internet will be used to distribute services to multiple customers and 2010 will be the first year in which cloud computing will have a real role in procurement decisions. They mark cloud computing as a “global trend” and predict that the Cloud will become more important as companies realize they can achieve significant cost savings by exploring this option. But the key question hindering this prediction is: can anyone really define what “the cloud” means?

In an attempt to answer it, I am posing my own questions: what does “cloud computing” mean to you? What role do you think it has in 2010 and how big of a role is the social media trend playing in this return to cloud-computing?

Posted in Orange County, San Francisco | 1 Comment »

As the World Wide Web 2.0 turns, women are disconnecting with melodramatic TV soap operas and logging onto social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter. According to an analysis by Information Is Beautiful, Facebook and Twitter boast 57% female membership. So why the gender gap? And what does this mean for the future of social media and advertising?

Explaining the gender gap is quite simple: just look at the modern woman’s lifestyle and behavior. Her time is divided between work, school, and social life — not early afternoon soap operas. Through it all she stays constantly connected – always on her iPhone on Blackberry – whether negotiating a big contract or picking up the kids from soccer practice. She no longer has time to read the morning daily, but will definitely use social media to exchange fashion and beauty advice, share pictures of her kids with relatives, and read Girls in Tech. And what about the TV? Well, as witnessed with the recent cancellation of the longest running soap in TV history (“Guiding Light”), there is very little time for someone else’s drama.

Advertisers are noticing this spike in activity online and pursuing these new opportunities. Social networks are now a viable platform for them to explore relationship-based advertising models, a more efficient alternative to the outmoded CPC, CPM and CPA pricing models. A case study of this relationship-based advertising is demonstrated by Total Beauty, a one-stop destination for everything beauty and the beauty products giant, Sephora.

Sephora leveraged the social content of Total Beauty to increase its market share and “top of mind” presence. Since they share the same demographic subset, Sephora and Total Beauty launched a sweepstakes that encouraged fans to create and submit product reviews for Total Beauty. For each product review written, reviewers received an entry for the Sephora gift card as well as an opportunity to share the review with friends, family and colleagues. The social component of this campaign trumped anything traditional media could achieve within this market segment. The social techie helped Sephora receive more entries into their sweepstakes and gain brand awareness while benefiting Total Beauty with yet another product review. Since females are more likely to spread the word by posting a link on Twitter and announcing it on their Facebook status updates, dollars spent marketing towards a female is broadcast, therefore going further than if it were spent on a male.

More women are being guided towards the light of their laptops, iPhones and Blackberry’s and advertisers are following. In the past, men commanded a dominant presence on the web, but social media has leveled the playing field. With her schedule increasingly filled, she relies on advice and input from her social network for the latest news bits, fashion tips and technology tricks. Web 2.0 has created the social techie and when it comes to being social, women rule.

Photo courtesy of: www.adage.com

Posted in Orange County | 3 Comments »

Pink is bubblegum. Pink is cotton candy. Pink is definitely Barbie. But laptops? iPods? Gadgets? Widgets? Gizmos? Please – stop it already. I may have to reach for my Pepto Bismol if this all this pink doesn’t stop. Yes, I’m a girl, but, no, I don’t need my tech toys to match my gender.

Don’t get me wrong, aesthetics play a huge role in purchasing decisions. This is why Apple’s art-deco avant garde designs go hand in hand with cult like following. This is why the question, “Are you a Mac or a PC?” has everything to do with superior design and superior technology as much as it has to do with a sound and functional OS. But it is the aesthetics of design, not color choice or “gender typing”, which make Mac such an attractive product.

Aesthetics are one thing and “gender typing” a tech device is another. Why do companies insist on splattering shades of pink on their products when selling to a female audience? Since when did women like only pink? Case in point: Blackberry. Last year, RIM released the Blackberry Pearl in a soft baby pink hue. If the words “pearl” and “pink” aren’t girly enough, I don’t know what is. Most women, in an effort to be taken seriously, stay away from pink. Just take “Legally Blonde” for example. Almost everything Elle Woods owned was pink. People found her juvenile and automatically assumed she was “too dumb” for Harvard Law. Her love for the rosy color kept people from taking her seriously–yet it helped her stand out (read: pink and scented resumes). As laughable as it sounds, pink is instantly associated with juvenile tendencies and a “dumb blonde” stereotype—one that has been broken too many times to name.

It’s not pink, but it might as well be. The purple-hued Hannah Montana PSP is another sexist technology device. The fact that I think Hannah Montana isn’t the best role-model for today’s pre-teens is beside the point. But honestly, does the console a girl plays with have to be purple? Lilac to be exact? And the Hannah Montana game is definitely not aimed at boys. Instead, it just reinforces the stereotype that women can’t play more complex and intricate games like Zelda or Final Fantasy and that there is suddenly a need to develop “girly” games that teach cooking, fashion design, singing, and dancing. I understand the lilac PSP is Sony’s attempt to recognize and capitalize on the female market and turn them into gamers as well, but I am very confident they can do it with neutral tones of whites, greens and yellows.

Since the 1920s pink has been a gender-associated color. Initially, pink was for boys and blue was for girls. This was because pink was thought to be more masculine since it was in same spectrum as red. It wasn’t until the 1940s that pink made the switch to a “feminine color” and since then it has been evolving and taking on many meanings.

I have mixed feelings about the color pink in the technology world. On one hand I am happy to see that tech companies are realizing the strong and savvy female audience they now have. On the other, I dislike the color for what it commonly stands for: fragility, daintiness, the absolute girly-girl just to name a few. However, the color is evolving to mean more, and pink can also stand for strength (it is the official color for Breast Cancer Awareness) but these uses are few and far between.

We here at Girls in Tech strive to be a voice in an otherwise male-dominated field and we are making it known and putting it on blast – pink isn’t just pretty, but pretty powerful.

Tags: Gadgets, girls in tech, Natasha, Pink
Posted in Orange County | 5 Comments »