Girls in Tech is proud to be part of the Women@TheFrontier  2nd annual conference tonight: Tuesday August 16, 2011 6-10pm at The Tech Museum of Innovation San Jose, CA. This event is open to public. RSVP here

Women@TheFrontier launched in summer 2009- to inspire, to empower and to link female change-agents currently impacting the world through innovation, entrepreneurship, humanitarianism, policy, science and technology.

At its core, W@F celebrates the accomplishments of leading women that are creating positive and innovative change, global in reach and exponential in impact.

W@F also recognizes top organizations empowering and actively changing the lives of women and girls around the world.

 W@F is also collaborating with Women Go Global

follow me @MsSonicFlare

Tags: entrepreneurship, innovation, Ivo Lukas, Science, tech, Women at the Frontier, women go global, women in tech, women's conference
Posted in All Chapters, All Chapters, Events, Girls In Tech, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | No Comments »

The San Francisco Chapter is expanding it’s board and volunteers. If you’re interested in getting more involved with us- either for one of the positions or teams listed below- or just to help out with the occasional event- please send a message to SanFrancisco [at] girlsintech [dot] net

Director of Events-  This director will manage events production, coordinating with the Managing Director, Director of Sponsorship, Director of Marketing/Social Media and whoever is spearheading that event to produce the event. Will coordinate the team of volunteers assigned to organize and promote the event. **Commitment- Roughly 5-8 hours a week for 2-3 weeks leading up to an event, then 0-3 the rest of the time. Skills Required: Experience overseeing teams/projects, attention to detail, availability to be responsive via email on a regular basis (i.e. can’t do this only on your weekend- this requires regular communication to keep the event timeline moving), good communication skills.

Website Team- We would like a team of about 5 ladies to work under the Director of Website Development to build the SF website. Some qualifications are:

WordPress Experience
- PHP
- SQL (e.g. simple database skills, e.g. MySQL)
- CSS
- Any graphic design or UI skills (e.g. Javascript, Photoshop etc)
- Any web development experience

Other skills:
- Google Analytics
-  Facebook API or Facebook Connect
-  Twitter API
-  Linkedin API

-or general IT/CS/Engineering backgrounds

Commitment is 3-5 hours per week commitment while we are building it and will taper off after, though there will be opportunities for administering areas of the site once we have it live.

Calendar Administrator - I can have 2 people do this if necessary. Search all the relevant websites, mailing lists, etc and update the GIT SF Google Calendar to reflect tech events and conferences in SF. Commitment is a few hours per month- whenever you choose, as long as it is done regularly.

Bloggers- We are always in need of bloggers! You can be available to blog on assigned topics and/or blog on topics of your own within the GIT Blog guidelines. All levels of commitment welcome! Bloggers may be located anywhere. Contact us for details.  (editor@girlsintech.net)

Posted in Palo Alto, San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | 1 Comment »

Next weekend, the tech community in Santa Cruz will be hosting TechRaising, a first-of-it’s-kind event, where entrepreneurs (big thinkers, developers, designers, business men and women, marketers, etc.) can get together to actually build and execute on the very ideas they have been stewing on for months, years or even just weeks.

This event is about collaboration, execution, accomplishment and showing what you’ve done.

Participants will gather on the evening of May 20 at Cruzio (downtown Santa Cruz) and have 90 seconds to pitch their idea for a product, service, or company to the group.  After pitches have been completed, everyone will have a chance to dialog with each other and form teams to build the the idea over the course of the weekend.

Scott McNealy, an industry icon and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, will be keynoting the event on Saturday morning.

Early bird tickets are $29.00 (if purchased by May 13th) and $49.00 after that and can be purchased at http://techraising.eventbrite.com. For more information please visit TechRaising.com.

So let’s get together and build something. How awesome would it be if this is where your startup was born?

Tags: designers, Developers, entrepreneurs, event, girls in tech, marketers, marketing, santa cruz, Silicon Valley, techraising, women in tech
Posted in San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | No Comments »

Please join Girls-In-Tech for an evening of fabulous wine, keynote speakers,
and networking with the Bay Area’s top employers.
This event is an outstanding opportunity to connect with some of the Bay Area’s most accomplished leaders,
recruiters, and job seekers.

Register Now: http://gitajob2011.eventbrite.com/

Together, we’ll eat, drink and empower each other professionally and personally – providing an exclusive opportunity to join job seekers with outstanding employers, and learn insights from our keynote speakers about the job market today.

Companies attending the event will have access to the Girls-in-Tech membership and all resumes from event participants.

This event will sell-out and space is limited to the first 200 registrants. Early Bird registration is available for both job seekers and companies for a short time period. Once GIT publishes the finalized list of employer-attendees, prices WILL go up! Please note, without advanced tickets your resume will not be distributed to employers in advance of this event.

Speakers:
Rebecca Meissner, BranchOut

Rebecca Meissner is the Director of Enterprise Products at BranchOut, the largest professional networking application on Facebook.  In this role, Rebecca leads the product, design, and development teams building all BranchOut’s corporate offerings.  Prior to BranchOut, Rebecca worked as a Product Manager for Disney Interactive Media Group, an HR Business Partner for Playdom, and as a recruiter for a number of VCs, private equity firms, and large investment banking groups in San Francisco.  She has degrees from both Boston University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Olivia Watkins, Twitter

Olivia Watkins is a Technical Sourcer for Engineering at Twitter.

More Speakers TBA!! Stay Tuned!

Sponsors:
CloudCard – Share business cards from phone to phone.

Use our apps to share your card directly, peer to peer, from phone to phone. You can even share your card with multiple people at the same time if they have our app installed. Or, send your cards directly via email. Only person in the room with Cardcloud on your phone? Send your card directly to (multiple) email(s). Recipients receive a beautiful card with your logo, contact information and social networking profiles. They can store the card directly on their phone thanks to Cardcloud’s vCard support.

Featuring Guidebook App:

Guidebook is the best and simplest way to create a mobile guide – Going mobile has never been this easy! Guidebook allows attendees to access your event’s entire schedule right from their mobile device. Plus, they’ll never miss a session, panel or activity with our easy-to-use mobile alerts. Guidebook, located in Palo Alto on California Avenue, is looking to add talented mobile developers to our team!

Special Thanks to Founders Den for hosting our event!

Founders Den is a shared office space and private club for experienced entrepreneurs and their friends. Founders Den’s unique approach combines a selectively curated startup community with a focus on experienced entrepreneurs and graduates of accelerator programs. Space at Founders Den is offered on an invite-only basis to startups referred through the networks of the Founders Den community. Founders Den also provides a home base for experienced entrepreneurs who are between projects.

May 24th, 2011
Founder’s Den http://www.foundersden.com
665 3rd, Suite 150
San Francisco, CA 94107
6:00-9:00 PM

Tags: branchout, event, facebook, founders den, Job, mixer, networking, recruiter, twitter
Posted in Events, Girls In Tech, San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | No Comments »

After days of heated debate with your co-founder, you’ve finally settle on the perfect name for your startup. You go to check if the .com is available and, lo and behold, the domain is taken and being parked at Go Daddy. To add insult to injury, Go Daddy won’t even tell you who the seller is unless you fork over $75 for one of their “certified representatives” to fetch the information for you.

Sound familiar?

Every day, entrepreneurs with new ideas are discovering that the domains they’d like to build business on have already been registered, most likely by a domain speculator. Since nearly every business these days needs an internet presence, good domains are very valuable properties. Just like physical properties, domains are not fungible. Sex.com is tremendously more valuable ($13 million dollars more valuable, in fact) than xes.com, despite having the same letters. While domains only cost $5 – $10 to register, savvy professional domainers regularly flip them for five to seven figures. Domainers who got in early on the game and scored valuable short dictionary word domains (color.com, disco.com) can flip for millions.

As a broke startup founder, you probably can’t afford to purchase a domain for more than a few thousand dollars. Even if you’re funded, you’d be wise to play the domain acquisition game right to not waste cash. This has lead to the proliferation of intentional misspellings (Flickr, Tumblr) and creative use of international top level domains (Frid.ge, GeneralAssemb.ly). Unfortunately, competition for domains has also led many startups to choose wacky and unwieldy names that make their companies hard to remember.  Before you make this mistake for your startup, get familiar with practices you may be able to use to acquire domains with terms acceptable to you. To get you the scoop on what’s worked for the industry, we talked to a number of experienced domain buyers, sellers, and brokers about how they handled their deals. Here’s the advice we distilled:

Understand the Value of Your Domain

Domain appraisal is a tricky business. Quantitative methods are based on SEO characteristics and historic sale prices while qualitative ones consider upcoming business and product trends. Kevin Ohashi, an entrepreneur and long time domainer, develops algorithms for appraisal competitions. His best algorithims hover around 44% accuracy, while the best ones in competition reach only about 68% accuracy. The long tail is very hard to predict.

Given this, the best way to think about your desired domain is the business impact of the brand value and whether you could possibly work with alternatives. With all the startup competition in the consumer web space, companies with short, easily memorable names like Path or Color have an advantage in standing out amidst the noise. That said, if you’re inventive enough to create your own brandable identity like Yahoo or Zynga, this path could be ideal since you’d own the keyword, but you’ll face challenges early on in trying to get your average consumers to remember just who they hell you are. Finally, if a number of brandable names could work for you, this can improve your negotiating power. If you desperately need a specific domain, you may be out of luck when it comes to price flexibility.

If you need a domain name in order to test a product and aren’t sure yet whether that product will be successful, consider whether social media might be a reasonable alternative to a brand name domain.  Rob Holmes, a cybersecurity expert turned domain broker, has been working with domains since the mid 90s and has represented many high profile clients in his career. In the past, when SEO was king, his clients would regularly pay six figures or more to acquire domains. These days, social media can deliver a superior ROI and many of them have discovered that their $50,000 budget is often better spent on a Facebook and Twitter campaign than on domain acquisition. These days, the domains Rob buys for his clients sell for substantially lower prices.

One final tip: do not be tempted to lowball a domain seller. Domains, like physical property, are valuable. Domainers get emails nearly every day offering joke amounts of money for a valuable domain. Give a reasonable first offer or you’ll risk undermining your own credibility.

Consider Alternative Deals such as Leasing and Buying With Equity

The original owner of Mint.com was Hite Capital, an east cost hedge fund. When raising their Series A round, the startup negotiated an equity deal with the fund to acquire the domain for stock as an alternative to paying six figures cash up front. The hedge fund reportedly received between 1-2% equity, which totaled “a couple million dollars” when Mint sold to Intuit for $170 million.

Equity deals happen surprisingly often with startups, especially because they give the entrepreneur the option for a low upfront cash outlay while preserving seller upside in the increasingly heated acquisition market. One domain broker we spoke to had brokered alternative deals for some of the hottest startups in the Valley. Each deal is individually negotiated, a process which can take months, but one of the more common financing agreements he’s structured involve the startup paying some portion of a fair price up front (usually 1/3 or 1/2) and getting three years to build out their business. At the end of three years, the domain owner can opt to get 0.1-1% of the company’s equity or buy back the domain for $1 if the business fails.

Another interesting deal structure he’s brokered is the 99-year lease model. In this arrangement, the value of a domain is paid out to the owner in what is effectively a lifetime annuity (ex: $4000 a year). Should the business fail, the seller simply gets the domain back and retains all accrued earnings from the lease.

For this article, we ran a survey of founders to see how open you guys are about these alternative models. While 73% of you said you’d much prefer to buy outright, 76% of you said you would consider a leasing arrangement if an outright buy wasn’t an option. 58% said you would consider renting monthly at an average max rate of $220 a month or $2460 a year.

Should you be interested in such deals, we highly recommend speaking to an experienced domain broker. If you’re a venture-backed startup, email us for introductions.

Profile Your Seller

The domain investor crowd is quite diverse. You’ve got everyone from your stay-at-home mom looking to make a few extra bucks on the side to hugely profitable domain investment firms that manage over 500 million domains. In between are professional full-time domain speculators who manage anywhere from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand domains.

The first thing domain brokers do after collecting client requirements is dig up information on the seller. To conduct a strategic negotiation, you need to understand what type of seller you’re dealing with, how savvy they are, and what sort of return they’re looking for. About 10-15% of domains have a legitimate business built on top of them, so you’ll have to compensate the owner for having to rebrand their company after you buy their domain.

One unique way to research a seller, recommended to us by an experienced broker, is to make an offer on another domain in their portfolio, not the actual one you’re looking to buy. This allows you to gauge the range in which a seller is hoping to sell a certain type of domain. When you can’t agree on a price, ask to see what other domains they have in their portfolio.

If you’re hoping a seller will be open to leasing or selling for equity, be mindful that one characteristic that unifies domain sellers is that they like things simple. Most aren’t willing to deviate outside of the standard practice of selling outright, especially since alternative deals can mean months of negotiation between parties. Large companies like Oversee have the resources to monetize their domain portfolios and generally consider leasing to be leaving money on the table. To monetize unsold inventory, Oversee builds out quality content and makes money through SEO and advertisements. This process generally requires a high degree of industry knowledge, solid SEO skills, and website development expertise. Additionally, content development takes about 6-9 months to start generating revenue. Given this, individual domainers without content development capability might be your best targets for a leasing deal.

The sentiment may be changing, though. Nick Hoffmann, COO of Auzzy, a domain marketplace, has considered implementing a lease-to-buy model for his company. Adam Strong, an experienced domain investor and broker, has brokered several leasing deals for entrepreneurs. Even Oversee might be interested in working with you if you sell them the Mint.com story.

Founder’s Block would like to thank the many contributors to this story, including:

Kevin Ohashi, Entrepreneur
Adam Strong, Domain Investor & Broker
Nick Hoffmann, COO of Auzzy
Rob Holmes, CEO of IP Cybercrime
And several others who preferred to remain anonymous

Posted in All Chapters, All Chapters, Boston, Girls In Tech, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | No Comments »

Today is World Water Day!  So, we thought, what better time to announce our San Francisco Bay-based project.  In our ongoing efforts to volunteer our time in the Bay Area, (and for those who were unable to join our March event), GIT Gives Back in April will take us outdoors for Earth Day!

Please Join Girls in Tech SF for:

CSPF’s 14^th Annual Earth Day Restoration and Cleanup

Earth Day 2011, April 16th – Candlestick Point Park

What we will be doing:

We’ll be participating in one or more of the following:

• In Community Garden: gopher-proof garden boxes and rehab older boxes with new redwood boards.
• Wind screen painting and graffiti removal
• Install native plants in Day Use Area
• Spread decomposed granite on foot trails in day use area.
• Clean up shoreline

So, please come out and join us as we help restore one of the areas most prominent park landmarks — We hope to see you there!

To Register: email:  sanfrancisco@girlsintech.net or Laura@girlsintech.net

[Car pools will be organized.   Please let us know if you would like to participate in one when you register.]

Posted in San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | 1 Comment »

Join us & our new partners, USENIX, in San Jose, CA, February 15-17, 2011  for USENIX FAST ’11.

FAST ’11 explores new directions in the design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of storage systems. Learn from leaders in the storage industry with ground-breaking tutorials by experts such as Brent Welch, Mostafa Khalil, Benjamin Reed, and more. This year’s innovative 2-day technical program includes 20 technical papers, Work-in-Progress Reports (WiPs), and two poster sessions.

FAST ’11 promises to be an exciting conference presenting leading examples of current research and a strong vision of the future of file and storage technologies.

Register by January 31, and save :: Additional discounts are available!
http://www.usenix.org/fast11/git
=============================

The FAST program will also be offering tutorials. Taking place on Tuesday, February 15, the four half-day tutorials will provide you with the opportunity to learn from leaders in the storage industry:

• Storage in Virtual Environments
  Mostafa Khalil, VMware
• Clustered and Parallel Storage System Technologies
  Brent Welch, Panasas

Posted in Girls In Tech, San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | 1 Comment »

The SF MusicTech Summit brings together 700+ visionaries in the music/technology space, along with the best and brightest developers, entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, journalists, musicians and organizations who work with them at the convergence of culture and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving music/business/technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking environment. For more information, check out http://sfmusictech.com, and use code “girlsintech” for 10% off!

10% off – SF MusicTech Summit
Dec 6th, 9:00a – 5:00p
Hotel Kabuki, SF

Posted in Girls In Tech, Palo Alto, San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | 1 Comment »

Vator.tv, a leading social network for entrepreneurs and innovators as well as news and information through VatorNews, has partnered with Girls in Tech to present the AMPLIFY Business Pitch Competition and Conference.   Together, we are hosting our first-ever Amplify Business Pitch Competition – Awarding women-led startups, which will be held at Microsoft Labs on Thursday, November 18th.  With first rounds beginning on November 8th, this event will culminate on the 18th, with those finalists chosen being asked to present their pitch on-stage in front of a panel of VC judges.

15 finalists will present onstage at the Amplify event in November 2010 in San Francisco to an audience of 150 and a panel of experienced entrepreneurs and investors as judges. Presenters will gain visibility, feedback — and perhaps even funding.  All applicable entrants will receive discount passes to the conferences, and runners-up will be given VIP passes.

The keynote speaker for the day with be Esther Dyson, an active angel investor in a variety of start-ups, for-profit and otherwise, around the world. She also operates as the Internet’s court jester, a person of no institutional importance who somehow manages to speak the truth and to be heard when and where it matters. She does business as EDventure, the reclaimed name of the company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004.

Judges will include:

• Jorge Calderon, Managing Director, hillView Ventures
• Cathy Brooks, Founder, Other than That
• Noah Doyle, Javelin Venture Partners
• Bambi Francisco Roizen, CEO & Founder, Vator, Inc.
• Adriana Gascoigne, Founder, CEO, Girls in Tech
• Maha Ibriham, General Partner, Canaan
• Anurag Nigam, CEO, BuzzBox
• Cynthia Ringo, DBL Investors
• Bipul Sinha, Principal, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Date: 11/1810
Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm
Where: MICROSOFT LABS, 845 Market Street, San Francisco
Ticket cost: $40

To purchase tickets to attend on the 18th, please go to:  http://gitamplify.eventbrite.com/

Vator.tv

Posted in San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | 1 Comment »

Defining and engaging in social media can be tricky, everyone will tell you that, but I bet you already are on your way. As an uber-popular topic (and one frequently requested for our Girls in Tech events) we thought it might be time to have a conversation around it.

• What is ‘social media’?
• What does it mean to you?
• How do you use it?
• Are you marketing yourself? Your business? Is it working for you?

This month’s event will be a round table where we can all discuss the topic, the tools, how we use them, what we find works, what doesn’t, etc.

So please, come join us at Little Tampico’s in Soquel for a margarita, some tacos and an educational conversation about how people are communicating today.

Please RSVP here: http://socialmediasc.eventbrite.com/
There will be a limit of 25 guests to this event. Plan on bringing cash for your beverages and snacks.

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to email seana at girlsintech dot net.

Posted in Events, santa cruz | 1 Comment »