Girls In Tech

Through word of mouth, I recently heard about a new concept, which meshes crowdsourced design and innovation with social coupons built on an intuitive eCommerce platform – this concept is called “Fab.com” – this site allows users to design and share cool new products with the world at a discounted price.

Fab.com encourages the world to tap into their inventive, curious and creative side to produce interesting products, which could prove to be useful to others. With exceptional customer service, Fab.com ensures that each product featured on their site is built with quality materials and a “story”. Each inventor or designer has a story to share – the impetus for launching the product, the problem that they are solving and their passion behind innovation.

I had to share this with the community because at the core of Girls in Tech is creativity and we encourage our members and readers to check it out!

Tags: Adriana Gascoigne, crowdsourcing, design, discount, eCommerce, entrepreneurs, Fab, Fab.com, girls in tech, innovation, Invention, Social Coupons, women in tech
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Girls in Tech are giving away 3 tickets to the World’s Largest Crowdsourcing Conference, CrowdConf2011. How would you apply the crowdsourcing principles in a unique way?

Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine first coined the term crowdsourcing. Howe explains that because technological advances have allowed for cheap consumer electronics, the gap between professionals and amateurs has been diminished. Companies are then able to take advantage of the talent of the public, and Howe states that “It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.” A less commercial approach was introduced by Henk van Ess in September 2010: “Crowdsourcing is channelling the experts’ desire to solve a problem and then freely sharing the answer with everyone”. More >>>

Girls in Tech would like to offer 3 tickets to our members. To be considered, simply post how you would use crowdsourcing (crowdfunding, crowdwisdom, crowdvoting, or crowdcreation) for your business or any other business out there. It doesn’t have to be a a large submission, simply comment to this post with a few lines of how you would apply the crowdsourcing principles in a unique way. Get creative, think of how the fashion world and television has utilized its concepts, non profits (like Kiva) and how crowdsourcing could possibly grow an organization like Girls in Tech… you can post as many ideas as you’d like. If you do, please post each idea in a separate comment. Post away!

More about CrowdConf2011 >>>

Tags: competition, conference, crowdsourcing, entrepreneurs, event, Events, San Francisco, Terra Khachooni
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Be sure to grab your tickets for the World’s Largest Crowdsourcing Conference coming this November 1 & 2nd.

Curious about what Crowdsourcing? The Daily Crowd describes it as “getting a crowd of people to help you with a task. You ask an undefined group of people to perform a task for you, and anyone who’s interested may perform the task.  You’ll get finished work from dozens of participants, which you get to select the best one(s) from.

The principle of crowdsourcing is based on the idea that more heads are better than one, and you can hire people based on skill rather than lowest bid. By canvassing a large crowd of people for ideas, skills, or participation, the search for an elusive answer or design is made that much simpler and more accurate.” Read More >>>

I am sure you can think of dozens of business models that take follow the principle of crowdsourcing. It’s strategy can be differentiated into four types, crowdfunding, crowdcreation, crowdwisdom, and crowdvoting. Grow your understanding about crowdsourcing at the world’s largest Crowdsourcing Conference, CrowdConf2011. CloudFlower has set up a series of crowdsourcing competitions through their many sponsors for the conference. Read about them here >>>

Girls in Tech are joining the Crowd in giving away 3 tickets to CrowdConf2011! Learn More >>>

Tags: conference, crowdsourcing, Developers, entrepreneurs, event, innovation, Terra Khachooni
Posted in All Chapters, Girls In Tech, San Francisco | 3 Comments »

Samasource will host the first annual GiveWork Charity Gala at the University Club of San Francisco, bringing together writers, luminaries, and some of the most influential female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.  The event will feature a live auction, with items for bid including a conversation with Nobel Prize laureates George Akerlof and Myron Scholes, a secret challenge with “The 4-Hour Workweek” author Tim Ferriss, and a date with Bollywood actress Vida Samadzai (Miss Afghanistan 2003).

The gala aims to raise funds for Samasource, a non-profit social enterprise that creates computer-based work for women, youth, and refugees living in developing countries.  Samasource provides technical training, then connects workers with clients, like Stanford University Libraries and Bookshare.org, who need to outsource data jobs.  The core concept behind the program is what is called “microwork.” Samasource founder and CEO Leila Chirayath Janah says, “these little bits of labor that can be performed anytime and anywhere can add up to a real livelihood for people in many parts of the world. The driving force behind Samasource is knowing that hard-working people in places like refugee camps in Kenya and women in rural Pakistan can get life-changing work opportunities through the internet.”

The gala’s silent auction, which hopes to raise enough funds to create work programs in two new refugee camps, will be designed Auctionomics, the auction-design firm created by Stanford Professor Paul Milgrom, the world’s most recognized expert in auction theory. Gala co-organizer Silvia Console Battilana, an Auctionomics co-founder, met Janah at the unveiling of the Her Code Report which was released by Orange Labs earlier this year. That study showed that fewer than 9% of Silicon Valley companies have a female board director, and only 3% of venture-funded companies are run by women.  Janah presented the topic of microwork at the conference, and Console Battilana was immediately impressed. “I saw an opportunity to address several challenges at once – poverty, education, and female empowerment,” she says.

With that in mind, the gala will also bring together many of the Bay Area’s leading female entrepreneurs. The event has garnered support from women such as Adriana Gascoigne of Girls in Tech, Women 2.0 CEO Shaherose Charania, and Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook, with whom Samasource has recently partnered. “It’s great that the work Samasource is doing on Facebook Platform is also giving all these opportunities to people in some of the world’s poorest places” Zuckerberg says. Samasource has developed a platform that allows application developers to outsource the testing of their products to workers in Africa and Asia.

Janah is scheduled to speak at the November 21^st meeting of TEDx in San Francisco, an independently organized offshoot of the international TED conference.  The large overlap in attendees between the two events has given the GiveWork Gala the distinction of being the “unofficial pre-party” for TEDx.  Tickets for the GiveWork Gala go on sale on October 1. Visit www.samasource.org/gala for more information.

Tags: crowdsourcing, Fundraiser, Gala, girls in tech, Microwork, Samasource
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The Web 2.0 Expo came through San Francisco last week and Girls in Tech made our debut splash as an official Media and Community Partner.

The atmosphere at Web 2.0 this year was sober, and it appeared that a majority of the 8,300 people in attendance were on scholarship — that is, they had the free expo hall pass that limited admittance to the keynotes and a handful of sponsored sessions. Girls in Tech was on scholarship as well and I was bowled over by quality of the free content. If you missed the conference, below is my Best of Web 2.0 “The Cheap Seats” report. Today I’ll highlight the top keynotes, and tomorrow I’ll cover the best sessions.

Best Keynotes:

#1 Designing for Big Data by Jeff Veen of Small Batch Inc.
Jeff Veen’s presentation stood out as the best of the sixteen(!) keynotes because he is a natural story teller and a master at using pictures to convey ideas. He used simple and vivid illustrations to show us that the presentation of data is far more important than exposing the hard numbers that lie beneath.

Take Away: Data is most powerful when users can easily access, understand and ingest it.

#2 A conversation with the founders of Threadless
Jake Nickell and Jeff Kalmikoff are the ultimate accidental entrepreneurs and they were delightfully candid and unbusiness-y as they discussed how they came to start Threadless, a highly successful community-centered online T-shirt store that has spawned an HBS case study on the use of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a term that refers to leveraging a community of users to build key components of a company’s service or product offering. If this doesn’t resonate with you, think Yelp!

Take Away: If you are a business wanting to leverage crowdsourcing, start by asking, “How are people using our products differently than we expected?”

#3 A conversation with Ellen Miller from The Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation is committed to increasing transparency in government through the use of the internet to catalyze openness and accountability. Ellen Miller talked about the powerful impact of creating websites that the public can use to easily access and digest thousand-page bills that are more likely to bury information than provide insights into what our government is doing.

Take Away: Let’s all think about how Web 2.0 applications can be applied to make government more transparent and accountable — and let’s make Gov 2.0 a priority and a reality.

Check back tomorrow for my take on the “Best Sessions at Web 2.0: The Cheap Seats Report”

Tags: crowdsourcing, Ellen Miller, girls in tech, Gov 2.0, HBS case study, Jake Nickell, Jeff Kalmikoff, Jeff Vee, keynote, scholarship, Small Batch, The best of Web 2.0, The Sunlight Foundation, Threadless, Tina Tran, Tina Tran blog, web 2.0
Posted in All Chapters, San Francisco | 1 Comment »