Girls In Tech

Girls in Tech is honored to announce its first, confirmed keynote speaker for the upcoming Catalyst Conference on January 26th at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco – Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch. Heather Harde is a role model and an inspiration for all women in the tech and business industries. With such an impressive background, including her work experience as well as education, we thought that she would be an amazing fit to present her stories, provide guidance and express words of empowerment to the 350 female leaders who will be attending the conference. As noted in her TechCrunch profile, Heather Harde is the CEO of TechCrunch. She spent the last ten years working within News Corporation. She held a variety of corporate development, strategy and operating roles both in Los Angeles and New York. Most recently, she was part of the founding team at Fox Interactive Media and their SVP Mergers & Acquisitions. Her team spent over $1.3 billion on eight acquisitions and two equity deals during her tenure. Their acquisitions spanned pre-launch start-ups all the way through public-company and pre-IPO buyouts.

Prior to Fox Interactive Media, she held a variety of posts at News America Marketing, TVGuide and ASkyB. Before News Corporation, she also worked for Viacom at Showtime Networks. The common theme in her media life has been working on assignments that focus on the impact of technology on media. This theme continues, of course, with TechCrunch. She started out doing investment banking for a small, private bank Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. She had the opportunity to work both in New York and Tokyo on corporate advisory and private-equity transactions. Heather is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Harvard Business School.

The Catalyst Conference catalyzes the career development of women working in high-tech. By offering high-level keynotes and discussions from successful women at the top of their game alongside workshops led by experts in innovation and collaboration, the Catalyst Conference enables & propels women to take the next step, whether they’re launching a venture, making waves in the corporate world, looking to join an innovative startup, or building their online and digital-media media brand.

Catalyst Conference will bring over 350 passionate, creative women together to fuel new relationships and ideas. Come prepared to share concrete technology and business tools and tactics, meet energetic leaders and entrepreneurs, and develop your own business ventures. This conference is for women at the top of their industries as well as those leading their first ventures, and will guide them all in discussions of strategy and success.

Click on the following link to register for the conference: REGISTRATION

Tags: Catalyst Conference, CEO of TechCrunch, girls in tech, Heather Harde, keynote, women in business, women in tech
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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
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