TEDWomen, The Day After

As a producer of events that are partly intended to bring more women technologists to the stage, I was glad to hear that TED conference curators planned to get 70 women speaking in December for a new iteration of their series.

The “Technology Entertainment Design” presentations have focused less on tech in recent years to accommodate more diverse topics (think philanthropy and medicine among other topics). While my first reaction is to be disappointed by the move to spend less time on deep and consumer tech innovations, the two days in DC were a welcome change from conferences and workshops with narrower focuses.

Co-host Pat Mitchell, who said she “takes TED like a mind spa,” said that about 500 names were on the table for potential speakers. (“Everyone suddenly realized that they know a woman who should be on stage,” she said in a press briefing. This was a major change from the 85 percent of speaker recommendations that usually come in for prospective male presenters.) Among the women who shared their work were Cynthia Breazeal, who runs the Personal Robots Lab at the MIT Media Lab and demonstrated how distant co-working can be improved by mobile phone docks with arm-like appendages, and Heather Knight, a roboticist and sensor-based artist who shared a standup joke-telling robot that gauges audience reactions and reacts accordingly. (Icelandic financier Halla Tomasdottir’s talk is the first talk by a woman presenter at this week’s conference to be available online, and I strongly suggest watching Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s observations about working motherhood when they’re released.)

I agree with Mitchell’s co-host, June Cohen, that it can be harder for producers to find women speakers, as they’re less likely to accept invitations to present and more likely to cancel to be with their teams and children. This was a sad reality when Carmel Hagen and I planned local Ignite Bay Area events but one that just requires more work to bring women’s contributions to conferences in bigger ways. more

Sandberg at TEDWomen: “Keep your foot on the gas pedal”


Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg spoke at the first TEDWomen conference today about the challenging but vital contributions of working mothers. “Let’s start by acknowledging that we’re lucky—we live in a world where not all women have human rights,” she told participants in DC before citing dismal percentages of the number of women in C-level jobs. When only about 15 percent of corporate board members are women, a number that has hardly risen in the past 10 years, she says she’s concerned not only about the rates at the highest earning parts of the economy but that women are too often dropping out of it.

To stay engaged, she advised:

  • Sit at the table. Whether physically or metaphorically, it’s important to “raise your hand and keep it raised.” Women don’t negotiate for ourselves in the work we do enough, she said, and no one gets a promotion they don’t think they deserve (especially those who underestimate their abilities).
  • Make your partner a real partner. Even when they’re working, Sandberg estimates that women perform three times the amount of childcare than men do in two parent families. She suggested working inside the home to create more systematic balance, including not pressuring children of different genders differently to succeed.
  • Don’t leave before you leave. After seeing women opt out of new projects before they were pregnant or went on maternity leave, Sandberg says she’s tired of seeing women lean back, not forward, even before they take a break from working. “Keep your foot on the gas pedal.”

She brought up the success/likeability paradigm (which says that the two together has a negative correlation for women but a positive one for men), which wasn’t a first for an afternoon that included searching for a new analogy for the “glass ceiling.” Going back to working motherhood, Sandberg said her vision of success—and one that doesn’t include 500+ million Facebook users–is for her daughter to not just succeed but to be liked for her accomplishments.

GigaOm >> Incubators for Tech Entrepreneurs

When yet another smart pal told me that they’re applying to an incubator for their early early stage startup, the scale of incubator and accelerator programs’ growth was notable. GigaOm wanted Women 2.0′s take on the trend (which has expanded so much that TechStars’ co-founder David Cohen warned recently of an “implosion”). Shaherose Charania and I collaborated on the piece you can read here, and the graphic is hers.

Traditionally, business school gave young businesspeople the “chops” to get ahead in corporate America. But even though the tech startup has become an almost everyday part of modern business, B-schools are still highly focused on issues that large corporations face. And while many do now offer entrepreneurship classes, today’s smaller, more nimble, and highly iterative businesses need a place that’s specifically dedicated to their unique needs. Where’s a person with an idea to learn how to make their own job or company? Enter incubators.

Think of them as e-schools — entrepreneurship schools, to use a term from entrepreneur Steve Blank — of varying lengths and formats that help businesses launch by providing hands-on startup skills, space and mentorship (and often taking equity in return). more

In Conversation>> Annie Chang

It was fun to sit down with Lolapps co-founder Annie Chang recently to hear about her goal to make “awesome games that people really like” as part of the Women 2.0 In Conversation series. Chang, whose company has developed Ravenwood Fair, Band of Heroes and other games on the Facebook platform, also offered words to the wise about when it’s timely for an early stage company to take outside capital.

Thanks to VidNetwork for shooting and editing.

Congrats to Calisphere

I’m a sucker for vintage photography (as evidenced by the amount of time it took me to get through the Oakland Museum’s state exhibit), so getting turned onto Calisphere made for a less-than-productive but quite wonderful flight home this weekend. The “world of digital resources” features an extensive selection of images, artwork and articles from University of California libraries. Themed collections include “California in transition,” “emerging industrial order” and “social reform,” and there are emphases on population diversity and local history mapping. You  haven’t seen interactive archives like this before.

A few of my favorite shots include Angela Davis after a Black Panther shootout, Willie Ford’s 1970s balloon shot and crate labels by the Orange Fruit Company. Now that I’ve landed it’s back to project work, but not before a bit more browsing.

Lady Parts >> Not What You Think

San Franciscans, rejoice: Lady Parts, a co-working salon that was formerly limited to the East Coast, is making its Bay Area introduction this week. I like the concept of an “open, collaborative, creative salon for ladies in pursuit of independent endeavors” but I mostly like the call to BYOB. Bolt | Peters will play host to the typing creatives and photographers in attendance–if only we could all be so lucky.

In Conversation with Slideshare’s Rashmi Sinha

I speak for production company VidSF and myself when I say it was a pleasure to talk with Slideshare co-founder Rashmi Sinha at the company’s SoMa office recently about her early visions for the site and her career. The interview, which addresses her advice for people considering leaving their jobs to start a new endeavor, is part of Women 2.0′s In Conversation series (and, for the sake of disclosure, her company partners with my own, Federated Media Publishing).

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

girls prep image

“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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McClure & Crowley on Accidental Entrepreneurship at HiT

In celebration of Dia de L’Emprenedor (the Spanish celebration of entrepreneurship), startup advisor and Founders Fund manager Dave McClure spoke with foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley about his entrepreneurial beginnings at the HiT Barcelona innovation summit. Crowley told McClure (a self-described critic of check-ins for mainstream consumers) that he’s an accidental entrepreneur and “self-taught geek.” “I’ve found that it’s not about being a great coder but teaching yourself enough to make weekend projects work,” said Crowley, who says he learned basic programming through books when he couldn’t find already existing products he’d want to work on full-time. His two-person company Dodgeball grew to a Google acquisition before he enlisted the help of an engineer he’d poached from the company and 10 angel investors to grow foursquare.

“The roadmap goes out further than we can build because we’ve gotten distracted by things like building relationships with local merchants,” said Crowley, who described himself as having a competitive advantage because of his past experience selling a company. But monetization has still—and understandably–been a major question for the VCs he’s met with, and his answer has been local advertising through incentivizing companies’ best regular customers with check-ins (or “poor man’s tweets”).

With 40 percent of the product’s activity taking place internationally, it’s surprising to hear that the startup hasn’t yet created specific gaming systems for languages other than English. “We don’t want to create more reasons for people everywhere to use their phones when they’re with friends,” Crowley said, but with the world’s most checked in location being in Japan, it’s seems that battle may be lost.

City Centered Festival at GAFFTA; MIT Meets the Tenderloin

While the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts isn’t a new addition to SF multimedia and art coverage (or to this site), I’m regularly stunned by the work they unveil, and this weekend’s launch of the SENSEable Cities series featuring exhibits and conversations around urban futures is no surprise. GAFFTA, a nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital arts, will be hosting a locative media and art exhibit as part of the City Centered Festival starting this weekend at their 55 Taylor Street gallery. The exhibition is said to “bring together technologists, artists, community leaders, and companies to explore how the confluence of art and technology can build social consciousness.”

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SENSEable Cities is a retrospective show presenting 15 projects that illustrate the opportunities of pervasive computing for urban life. In collaboration with the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the work will focus on the implications that sustainable urban mobility, methods for data fusion, data mining, and various approaches to real time visualization can have on transportation, health, law, and commerce. more