Girls In Tech

MediaBistro, along with sponsorship by Girls in Tech presents…

Already wildly successful in San Francisco and London, Social Gaming Summit comes to New York for the 1st time this year, and will focus on building, monetization, and growing social games.  Social Gaming Summit unites leaders in free-to-play games, social networking, and payments infrastructure for a full day of panels andsiscussions. Social Gaming Summit is where established and emerging leaders in the social gaming space converge to share their thoughts on what works in the world of social games as well as the key issues impacting the future of the industry.

This one-day event will feature a series of talks organized around the following key themes:

Growth

• How can new social games developers grow on Facebook in the current environment?
• What does it take to bootstrap a successful new social game?

Distribution

• What opportunities exist to build successful Facebook games off Facebook?
• How can developers take advantage of opportunities to build games for international audiences?

Monetization

• What role will brands play in monetizing social games?
• What new opportunities are there for social games developers to monetize their games?

Speakers include:

• Davin Miyoshi, GSN
• Katharine Lewis, FM Ventures
• Manny Anekal, Zynga
• Trip Hawkins, Digital Chocolate
• Paul Chen, PapayaMobile
• Dennis Ryan, Popcap
• Peter Wexler, TrialPay ….and More!

To register, click HERE. |  Use GIT Discount Code: SGGIT – for 15% off

See full details, HERE.

Correction, change of date…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: AllFacebook, Charles Hudson, Digital Privacy Forum, MediaBistro.com, Monetization, privacy, Social Games, Social Gaming, Social Gaming Summit East, Social Times
Posted in All Chapters, New York | No Comments »

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement yesterday about the changes being made to Facebook’s privacy structure, it looks like #privacy is about to have yet another run as the trending topic du jour. Well, that and that couple that crashed the White House dinner — as Demetri Martin would say, they’re like the herpes of hyped up news stories. Scheming social climbers aside, privacy is one of the web’s biggest concerns. As girls in tech, we talk about it all the time. Are our identities safe? Are our personal and professional brands secure? Are the kids in our lives making smart choices when they surf?

Months worth of memes have been made out of relatively minor changes to Facebook’s privacy policies in the past, and the comments are already piling in to the Mashable Article discussing this most recent development. It’s easy to understand why people get so worked up over what happens to their information on the internet. From cookies that track our every click to the fact that between docs, mail, maps and search, google knows more about you than your parents probably do, it’s clear that there’s plenty of reasons to make even the sanest surfer paranoid about what they post. As the product manager at a growing user generated content site, I deal with difficult decisions having to do with privacy all the time. What our decision making process always comes back to is a simple question: what would we want someone else to be doing with our data? Nine times out of ten, the answer is simple: give the user as much control over their content as you can.

Of course, as a user, it’s up to you to take advantage of that control. Fortunately, there are as many tools to track the people tracking you as there are mistresses in Tiger Woods’ skeleton closet. There’s google privacy dashboard, which allows you to see all the data points that google’s got about you. You can also set up a google alert that will let you know when new content about you is indexed by the search engine’s spiders. Keotag lets you put in a key word, and see what people are saying about it everywhere from Technorati to Twitter. And, Boardtracker lets you do the same sort of thing across multiple comment boards. Which means you can post your complaints about the new Facebook privacy policy today, and see all the trolls’ responses tomorrow.

It ain’t exactly privacy per se, but it’s pretty powerful stuff nonetheless.  At the end of the day, I strongly believe that the best privacy policy on the web is still the one you set up for yourself by watching what you post, where you post it and what gets said about it after you leave. However, if that’s too complicated for you, then just remember this simple rule: if you’re going to crash a White House dinner, don’t post photos of your uninvited self shaking hands with the president on Facebook. Unless, of course, your personal privacy policy involves a camera crew from Bravo and a hefty chunk of reality show change. In which case, I’ll see you on Thursdays at 10 in my living room.

Tags: facebook, mashable, Obama, privacy, salahi, social media, social networking, zuckerberg
Posted in Los Angeles | 1 Comment »

In this classic novel, 1984, George Orwell described a society in which the government had almost total control over the people. The ruler of the party was called “Big Brother”, and he utilized the “thought police” to invade the privacy of all citizens.

In a social climate where getting a job is a major coup, keeping it could be a just as challenging if you aren’t monitoring access to your information. In our tech-driven, social networking saturated society, nowhere is this concept ringing more true than in the area of employment law. Workplace privacy protection has become a major area of interest for both employees and employers.

Employers are utilizing Facebook and other social networking sites more and more in all stages of the employment process, from application and hiring, to firing and even in the defense of lawsuits. Human Resource departments are more frequently searching an individual’s social networking pages for inappropriate pictures and interactions before hiring. In the same vein, companies do the same as a reason for firing, an even easier task as most employees are at-will to begin with. Companies are seeing these sites and individual pages as a reflection, real or imagined, on the company as a whole. These lines of privacy are being further blurred by current litigation that is creating precedent in this area of law.

Recent case law has gone both ways. Some Federal Cases have held that an employee’s personal information is not protected in a lawsuit if he or she utilizes the internet to search sites, check personal e-mail and go on social networking sites during office hours. What most employees fail to notice is that a majority of companies now have explicit policies restricting to their information, history and passwords. The real underlying question remains: Do employees have a reasonable subjective and objective expectation of privacy?

Whichever way you answer this question, the fact remains that telephone, computer, and electronic mail and voicemail monitoring have become much more common in the workplace. What is even more challenging is the limitation this puts on social networking sites and the perpetually hazy lines being overstepped by co-works and bosses.

The lesson to be learned is relatively simple but crucial. Make sure that you have privacy settings in place on your personal networking pages so that not just anyone can see them, make sure you are filtering what you put on your page and what you let others post, and make sure you know who has access to your information on these sites. This is a particularly important issue for the younger generation of people who have not yet seen the value in these sites for business purposes. Similarly, be aware of what you are doing online on company time, as this information and your right to privacy may soon no longer be protected. So consistently clear your cookies and search histories and never save passwords at work because big brother is watching, and thanks to the law, may be able to watch you in ways you never imagined.

Laurel Kaufman, Esq.
Co-Founder, AK Consulting Group
www.ak-cg.com
follow me on twitter @LaurelKaufman
facebook: Laurel Kaufman

Tags: big brother, employment law, facebook, privacy
Posted in Girls In Tech, Los Angeles | 2 Comments »