Reimagining ROI (A Nice Way to Win Your Way to Wine Country)

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A family trip to Sonoma this fall was a nice reminder of the sun, tasty Cab and scenery that’s a short rental car ride away. After four years in SF I definitely don’t get up to wine country enough (though a recent trip to Scribe winery has me rethinking that). And I’m already envious of the to-be-named winner of a new program that promises to send a small business team to wine country for a week.

HP has partnered with my company, Federated Media, and the Clever Girls Collective to launch “Reimagine ROI,” a program for its LaserJet printers that includes a contest with $30,000 in rewards for users who share stories of their best investments. The campaign for IT influencers and business decision makers runs through the end of October, and participants (that means you) can enter tales of value found to win a five-day trip to NorCal wine wonderland for six staff members along with an HP tech makeover for their office.

Eighteen FM authors, including BoingBoing, ReadWriteWeb and Small Business Trends, are contributing content to the project. They share anecdotes about getting more than they anticipated from cell phone upgrades, home improvement projects, and learning how to play music at an early age. (Not doing so–now there’s another regret.)

Local Celebrations >> Design + Radio Stories

This humpday I’m already bracing myself for Thursday’s goings on; most notably, Catapult Design’s annual SF party and Youth Radio’s book party to celebrate its book “Drop That Knowledge,” now in print by UC Press. You can hear co-author Lissa Soep on KQED’s “Forum” tomorrow morning discussing youth radio stories, and stay tuned for designer-humanitarian Catapult co-founder Heather Fleming in conversation with Women 2.0.

Last Call for Labs (Foodspotting Proves It Can Work)

imgThis Saturday marks the last day to apply for the pre-incubator Labs program through Women 2.0, but fear not: men and women can still qualify for the five week program for engineers, designers, and “business and marketing mavens” looking to start developing high-growth technology ventures in SF. Labs doesn’t require company equity or require that you quit your day job, so hop to it, advocates of rapid prototyping.

And if you’re seeking proof that concentrated time through these programs can pay off, look at Alexa Andrzeweski: after founding meal recommendation tool Foodspotting through one of Women 2.0′s incubator programs, the company has taken off in ways the former UX designer would never have expected. She sat down during final presentation night for the summer Labs to discuss picking business partners and surrounding yourself with entrepreneurial-minded individuals. Thanks to Alley Pezanoski-Browne for videography and VidSF for editing.

The OpEd Project Returns to SF

It comes as no surprise that opinion journalism seems troubled on the financial front (with fewer dollars for newspapers meaning less space for community editorial), but a lack of diversity of the part of those who author them largely goes unspoken. If the OpEd Project gets its way, however, women will start to contribute dramatically more than the 10 to 20 percent of opinion pieces they currently author.

imageAfter a few high profile newsmakers’ questioned female aptitude for intellectual pursuits–including Larry Summers’ controversial musings on women’s biology and Susan Estrich’s accusations that the LA Times’ editorial was sexist–Katie Orenstein founded the project as a way to see if changing the makeup of “gateway forums” could be teachable. The head of the nationwide organization explains that “the range of voices we hear from in the world is incredibly narrow, and comes from a tiny sliver of the world’s population: mostly western, white, older, privileged and overwhelmingly male. Which means we’re hearing from only a small fraction of the world’s brains–including very few women’s brains–which is a big problem for women and for all those of us who aren’t being represented – our stories and perspectives are not being told, sometimes with life and death consequences.  But it also suggests a tremendous opportunity for all of us:  what would be the return to society if we could harness all that brain power?”

I’m fascinated by this question and the longer term implications it might have on females being interviewed as experts in their fields more frequently. And in its efforts to get women to engage more with front door forums (op-ed pages and online communities included) the project will be offering its next training at the ACLU on Drumm Street this Sunday. Pick up your pens.

Mashable >> 5 Resources for Female Programmers

I’m grateful to social media news resource Mashable for helping highlight the work of notable organizations that are offering outside-the-classroom access to computer science education. Read on…

What happens when “equality in the workplace” is simply a numbers game? The ratio of women trained in computer science education is even lower now than it was in the 1930s. In 2008, girls made up just 17% of Advanced Placement test takers in computer science (the lowest percentage of any subject) and held less than 20% of CS degrees.

To combat these numbers, organizations have sprouted to improve and expand programming education for women. These include community workshops and regional networking groups aimed at school-age girls and working women. These organizations need to reach corporate sponsors in order secure money and space to hold their outreach.

Sometimes started out of frustration with the disproportionate ratio of male and female programmers, these five organizations are optimistic about building a community that includes first-time programmers and people shifting professional fields.

1. Grade School Girls: New York’s CodeEd

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“It’s our sense that by the time you get to Stanford or Princeton, you’ve made it,” said Angie Schiavoni, a tech product consultant who co-founded CodeEd with her husband Sep Kamvar. “But that doesn’t address the gap in education for young girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, and we think we can reach them in a fun way.” She and her husband, a Stanford computer science professor, personally paid for colorful notebooks with Linux operating systems for the middle-school age girls at Girls Prep, a charter school for low-income girls on the Lower East Side. Schiavoni and Kamvar teach a one-hour, Saturday class at Girls Prep.

After the first five weeks of HTML (which resulted in quite a few Justin Bieber fan sites) the girls can learn JavaScript, Python, and Java. The couple is currently seeking volunteer teachers to expand CodeEd to more schools in New York.

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Ignite Bay Area Talks Tonight

We hope you’re able to join us for the next Ignite Bay Area on Monday to celebrate Web 2.0 Expo. The following presenters will be sharing a series of 5-minute speed presentations on everything from social network sabotage, democratizing planetariums and hungry, hungry hippos:

Derek Dukes | Chris Hutchins | Kim Lembo | Ola Helland | Jesper Andersen | Deb Schultz | Tony Deifell | Tobias Peggs | Andrew Hyde | Cara Jones | Chuck Kindred

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This Ignite event is free, though Web 2.0 Expo conference attendees will be given preferred admittance. Seating at Mezzanine (444 Jessie Street) will be first come, first serve. No early registration is required. Videos will follow the event, which is sponsored by .CO, and we recommend being on the early side:

7:30 PM: Doors open for Web 2.0 Expo Conference Pass & Expo Plus Pass holders
7:45 PM: Doors open for the general community
8:15 PM: Talks and networking begin

Pick.im Released to Make Freelance Hiring Simpler

Anyone who’s experienced the contractual back-and-forth and mutual scheduling headaches that can accompany freelance creative and project selection may be excited about this week’s unveiling of Startup Weekend founder Andrew Hyde’s new undertaking Pick.im. The freelancer portfolio database enables talent-seekers to search for copywriters, developers, and other specialists in their geographic area and price range. An average of 10 freelancers are currently signing up hourly for what Hyde describes as a more ethical (read: not spec work-centered) response to “sleazy services” that had previously dominated the freelance planning process.

The Boulder-based startup aficionado said he interviewed 500 freelancers about what they would seek in joining a service like Pick before joining up with the Phoenix-based developers at FlatterLine. They skipped a beta release to go straight to the public launch that has resulted in the project hiring of a photographer and UI expert today, and Hyde says a legally binding contract feature is forthcoming. “What is on Pick right now is about 1/3 of the features the site needs to really tick,” he wrote on the Pick blog. “I have a good guess on the 2/3 of the features, but the last 1/3 is going to come directly from listening to our passionate freelancers and clients.” Said like true community advocate.

SFIFF Shares Filmmaker Award Plans

The lineup and special tributes for this year’s SF International Film Festival were announced this morning, and I won’t waste time relaying the handful I’m most looking forward to after a few well-selected 2009 premiers including advertising industry retrospective Art & Copy and (Untitled)‘s satirical look at the modern art market. Starting in April, the following look most intriguing:

Short film maker and animator Don Hertzfeldt will be honored with a “Persistence of Vision” award on April 23 at Kabuki Cinemas before the Life, Death and Very Large Utensils program. The semitragic work he draws by hand before shooting with antique 16mm or 35mm film cameras is can’t-close-the-browser-window good, including this rejected cartoons video (which won’t be screening during the festival, though shorts Intermission in the Third Dimension and I am so proud of you will be).

And, in the Golden Gate Awards competition for documentaries: more

What You Love, Want, Need? Welcome Ladywood

I had seen a porn for gals book a few years ago that was almost vision-straining in the eye rolls it induced in me. A clean sink and a Baby Bjorn are nice and all, but their turn on potential is…far-fetched for most women at best. Enter SF-by-way-of-Boulder designer Jamie Panzarella, an online experience creator who’s not too timid to invite women to put a Rick James track on a video of a gent shaving (or a plate of rotating gourmet cheese) and address it “supertramp.”

Knowing friends with varied triggers that make them melt, Panzarella sought a way to address the particularness and complexity with which many women pursue that which makes them melt. Ladywood.biz was born, and the just-launched site’s steamy video creation tool with a send-a-friend capability and array of curated news items make for entertaining reasons to return. (The eye-catching magenta and black color scheme isn’t bad, either.)

“It all started about a year ago when I was at a hotel and  decided to peruse the porn selection–just to see,” Panzarella said. “I was surprised by the variety: horny housewives, swinging soccer moms, naughty cheerleaders…All of them were cheap. Not one movie catered to ladies. This intrigued me: that we don’t have the options, and if we did, what would they be?”

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You Should Eat Something. Clooch First.

While still in alpha, the SF-based restaurant and dish finder Clooch is a helpful new local food guide whose pro and con breakout provides quick visual understanding. Husband and wife team Gene and Yelena Drabkin started the site when they thought that user review sites were too clogged with “who cares” information (according to Gene, “the amount of user reviews [and] review sites is growing exponentially while the amount of time people have to process the information stays the same if not decreases.”) Their response? Clooch aggregates restaurant reviews from Yelp, OpenTable and Citysearch while identifying relevant review snippets–and publishing only those portions deemed meaningful to diners. For fans of certain dishes, say tom yum soup or eggplant parmesan (may be ready to nosh over here), the popularity and user opinion criteria make for a quicker way to choose where to eat than browsing reviews. Nationwide rollout to follow.