Girl Geek Dinners

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner #6: Sponsored by Polyvore

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner #6 will be hosted by Polyvore on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 from 6pm to 9pm at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Event is FREE for all girl geeks. » Free RSVP for the event here. Are you a guy geek who wants to attend this event? Have a girl geek register you as her guest. There will be a panel discussion along with drinks, heavy appetizers, schwag, interactive games, and a photo booth with props. Girl geeks will also be treated to Polyvore kiosks and live demos. About the girl geek panel discussion: Meaningful product innovation is redefining the consumer experience for browsing, discovering and shopping on the Internet for the first time. In a panel discussion moderated by Polvore CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, we will discuss the intersection of technology and style with a handful of women technologists and leaders driving Commerce 3.0 innovation: » Jess Lee, VP of Product Management, Polyvore » Corinne Chan, CTO, Chictopia » Julia Kung, Director of Marketing, Moxsie » Sandra Lin, Director of Fashion Vertical, eBay
Schedule of events: 6pm – 7pm: Registration, heavy appetizers & drinks, networking, demos, and photo booth 7pm – 8pm: Moderated panel discussion on “Reinventing Fashion Online” 8pm – 9pm: Networking, demos, and photo booth About our girl geek panelists: Jess Lee is the VP of Product Management at Polyvore, the web’s leading fashion social shopping platform. Prior to Polyvore, Jess was a product manager at Google for 4 years, where she led front-end development for Google Maps and launched features such as draggable driving directions and My Maps. After falling in love with Polyvore, Jess decided to officially join the team and has done everything from writing code to ad sales to washing dishes. Jess holds a degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. Corinne Chan is the CTO of Chictopia, a privately funded social networking site for fashionistas which she co-founded with Helen Zhu and Richard Ho in April of 2008. Corinne spent 12 years as a software developer and systems engineer for companies such as Wells Fargo and other various startups in the Silicon Valley. Corinne holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Julia Kung is Director of Marketing for Moxsie. In her role at Moxsie, Julia utilizes the new media landscape to help grow the retailer’s traffic, brand presence, and sales, earning Moxsie top industry attention from trade media including Ad Age, California Apparel News, Women’s Wear Daily and more. Prior to her role at Moxsie, Julia has held marketing positions at Google as well as within the startup environment. Julia holds a B.A. from Stanford University. Sandra Lin is the General Manager leading the re-launch of eBay’s fashion marketplace for an online and mobile experience. Before eBay, Sandra led strategy and operations for PayPal Mobile establishing partnerships with MTV, Fox, NBA, NBC, Sony BMG enabling them to reach consumers through the mobile medium. Her early career began at Procter & Gamble, before her product management and marketing roles in Silicon Valley. Sandra graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is CEO of Polyvore. She spent 5 years growing new businesses at Google as President of Asia Pacific and Latin America for Google and as the General Manager for Google Local & Maps. Sukhinder was also Co-Founder and SVP of Business Development at Yodlee, CEO-in-Residence at Accel Partners and previously worked for Amazon.com, News Corp and Merrill Lynch. Sukhinder has served on the board of J.Crew and is currently a board member at A Woman’s Nation and Jobtrain. For her work in the Internet industry, Sukhinder has been profiled in numerous publications globally, including Fortune, Business Week, Canada Post, India Today, and the book Innovation Nation which includes Canada’s most innovative business leaders. Polyvore is redefining how people around the world experience, create and share fashion on the Internet. To see more of what Polyvore does, please check out what Polyvore’s all about. Polyvore’s easy-to-use virtual styling tool lets people mix and match products from any online store to create their own fashion collections called “sets.” With over 6 million unique visitors and 140 million pageviews per month, Polyvore is the largest fashion community site in the world. Polyvore is backed by leading venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners and consists of technology industry veterans from Google and Yahoo.

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner #5: Sponsored by Google

Join us for Girl Geek Dinner #5: How to Succeed in Mobile on Thursday, February 4th at Google (Tunis Tech Talk) in Mountain View, CA. The panel features heavy-hitting women developers, designers, and entrepreneurs discussing all things tech and mobile. Event is FREE for all girl geeks, and each girl geek can bring one guy geek. RSVP for dinner here.
Featured Speakers: Sarah Allen, CTO, Mightyverse Mary Ann Cotter, Founder and CEO, Smart Capsules Corinne Chan, CTO, Chictopia Christina A. Brodbeck, CEO, Pickv (formerly Design Lead, YouTube Mobile) Angana Ghosh, Product Manager for Android developer tools, Google Karyln Neel, Design Manager, eBay Moderator: Kris Corzine, Content Strategist, eBay		Thursday, February 4, 2010 Time: 5:30pm – 9:30pm Google, Tunis Tech Talk Building 43 1600 Amphitheatre Pwky, Mountain View, CA
Speaker Bios:
Sarah Allen is CTO of Mightyverse, a mobile startup focused on helping people communicate across languages and cultures. The technology is still being incubated, but parts of it are emerging at Mightyverse.com. Currently, Mightyverse is primarily self-funded, so Sarah is paying the bills with independent consulting and training at Blazing Cloud. She is writing a book about cross-platform smartphone development which highlights the Rhomobile and PhoneGap frameworks. She also has done some native mobile development development and is currently gaining real-world experience submitting to Apple’s App Store. In her spare time, she works to diversify the Ruby on Rails community with a focus on outreach to women. An industry veteran who has worked at Adobe, Macromedia, Aldus, Apple, Laszlo Systems and CoSA, Sarah was named one of the top 25 women of the web by San Francisco Women of the Web (SF WoW) in 1998.
Mary Ann Cotter is the Founder of Smart Capsules, Inc., the creators of the popular cooking app, Cooking Capsules. Cooking Capsules was awarded Top 20 status in the first Android Developer Challenge which won her international development team a collective $125,000 from Google. One of the first programs to grace the Android Market, Cooking Capsules was featured in articles by WIRED, TIME, The Wall Street Journal and others as a top pick for indie Android apps, praised for it’s innovative design and unique style.
Corinne Chan has over 12 years of experience in software development using Java related technologies. She has worked in various environments ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Most recently, she served as Wells Fargo’s Mobile Banking Lead Applications Systems Engineer and prior to that served as one of the team’s Systems Architects. In her years with Mobile Banking, she has navigated through the challenges encountered when evaluating and developing mobile applications in the progressively changing mobile industry. Corinne’s current venture is a fashion social media website called Chictopia. Chictopia has entered the mobile space with an iPhone app where users can browse the latest top photos from Chictopia’s Editor’s Picks. Corinne has a Bachelors of Science Degree from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering Computer Science.
Christina A. Brodbeck is currently the co-founder and CEO of Pickv, a relationship and dating site that matches people based on their interests such as music, movies, books, and tv shows. Prior to Pickv, Christina most recently worked at YouTube where she joined as an early employee in 2005 and was the company’s first UI Designer. In her last two years at YouTube, she led UI Design for YouTube Mobile and was responsible for creating an interface that brought YouTube to cell phones. Christina enjoys helping young start-ups, is an angel investor in Heyzap, and sits on the advisory board for Achron. Before joining YouTube, she worked at MRL Ventures, NASA Ames Research Center, and Keynote systems. Christina holds a Master’s Degree in Instructional Technologies from San Francisco State University, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Angana Ghosh is the Product Manager for Android developer tools at Google. In addition, Angana manages the Android Open Source Project and Open Handset Alliance partnerships. Ever since she joined the mobile industry 10 years ago, she has been in love with the industry: helping handset manufactures create great devices and developers create content that’s changing how people interact with mobile devices. Prior to Google, Angana worked at Sun Microsystems and Ericsson as a Product Manager developing mobile platforms, apps and ecosystem around it.
Karyln Neel is a currently a design manager at eBay. She was the design lead on the eBay iPhone application, a top shopping app that to date has brought in over $500 million in sales. She has in-depth understanding of the mobile industry publishing her first white paper, The future of mobile, in 2000 while at Quidnunc, a UK based digital consultancy. Some of the clients filling her extensive retail and financial sector portfolio include: Charles Schwab, Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual, MBNA, Providian, Natural Wonders, Macy’s, Mervyn’s, Musicland, WebEx, HP and Sprint. Karlyn received her degree in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Her certificate of Graphic Design, as well as additional MFA graphics courses, were obtained from the Academy of Art, San Francisco and UC Berkeley Extension respectively. As a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Graphic Artists Guild and former member of The San Francisco Design Museum Board of Directors and the Western Art Directors Club, Karlyn has had the opportunity to become a significant contributor to the evolution of her design community, thereby making her work particularly comprehensive.
Kris Corzine (Curator and Moderator of this Girl Geek Dinner on “How to Succeed in Mobile”) fell in love with mobile in 2000 when she picked up a disposable phone in London and started getting texts from friends. Kris has written mobile channels for 80108 Media and Go2 Network but it was her time at Japanese startup MobaMingle that really enabled her to push the limits of mobile design. While wearing several hats including content manager, interaction designer, social game designer and virtual good market manager, she pushed the limits of the WAP site and garnered kudos for “beautiful mobile UI” while creating a “bizarrely charming package“. Most importantly, users loved the site. Kris is currently honing her skills in ecommerce and user experience as a Content Strategist at eBay.

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner #4: Sponsored by LOLapps

Join us on Thursday, June 11, 2009 at Roe in San Francisco (map) for a Girl Geek Dinner about women programmers! We have speakers on Python, Ruby on Rails, game development, and Javascript starting at 6:30pm. Doors open at 5:30pm for drinks, dinner, and networking. Event is FREE for girl geeks, and each girl geek can bring one guy geek. RSVP required on Eventbrite.
Featured Speakers: Sarah Mei, Senior Software Engineer, LookSmart Leah Culver, Software Engineer, Six Apart Dori Smith, Author, Programmer Amanda Wixted, Game Developer, Zynga	Opening Speaker from LOLapps: Annie Chang, Co-Founder and Head of Product, LOLapps
Speaker Presentations & Bios:
Sarah Mei has spent ten years doing interesting things with code and data. For the last three years she’s been working in Ruby on Rails, which she loves for how it handles the tedious problems, freeing her to focus on the interesting ones. Sarah is a Senior Software Engineer at LookSmart. Sarah also heads the Open Workshop project at RailsBridge, runs introductory Ruby on Rails workshops for women, and supports people running their own by releasing workshop tools. She has, among other things, a CS degree from UC San Diego, a blog, a husband, a preschooler, a baby, a weakness for puzzle games and pirates, and an apartment with way too many computers in it.
Leah Culver was a co-founder and the lead developer of the social network and micro-blogging website Pownce, which was acquired by blog juggernaut Six Apart in November 2008. Now a software engineer at Six Apart, Leah uses her experience with Pownce to develop large scale social applications for future Six Apart projects. While creating the Pownce API she co-authored both the OAuth and OEmbed open API specifications and now maintains the popular Python OAuth library. Leah promotes open source, APIs, and the Django web framework on her blog at leahculver.com. In her free time she likes to play around with new technology and try new restaurants near her home in San Francisco.
Dori Smith is the best-selling co-author of JavaScript and Ajax for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, Dreamweaver: Visual QuickStart Guide, Styling Web Pages with CSS: Visual QuickProject Guide, and Mac OS X Unwired. She also wrote Java 2 for the WWW: Visual QuickStart Guide and contributes to numerous online and print computer industry magazines. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, she has been a member of the Web Standards Project since its founding and is Publisher and ListMom for the Wise-Women’s Web organization. She co-founded and contributes to the long-running Backup Brain weblog.
Amanda Wixted has been developing games for mobile devices since 2005 and has worked on many platforms, mainly focusing on J2ME devices and the iPhone. She has worked for Octopi and Namco Networks, and was the first iPhone developer hired at Zynga, where she currently works. Some of her credited titles include Mafia Wars, Live Poker, Shuffleboard, Pac-Man, Ms Pac-Man, Pac-Man Arcade Golf, JellyPOP, and PoxNora. She lives in San Francisco where she sings in the band Delivery Is Possible and enjoys shopping and starting side project apps with friends.
Annie Chang welcomes the crowd at Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner #4. Annie is Co-Founder and Head of Product at LOLapps, one of the largest companies in the social application space, reaching over 44 MM monthly unique users. LOLapps offers tools that allow anyone to create, personalize and share customized applications on social networks. Prior to LOLapps, Annie was a product manager at BitTorrent and an engineer at Adobe. Annie holds a B.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley. Sarah Mei speaks on how she got into programming Ruby on Rails. Leah Culver and her paper slides held by volunteer. Dori Smith and Amanda Wixted get their presentations projector-ready. Amanda Wixted talks about developing iPhone games. Sitting, not standing. Dori Smith on JavaScript and AJAX.

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner #3 with She’s Geeky!

Join us as we celebrate our one-year anniversary and kick-off the She’s Geeky unconference with a Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 in Palo Alto.

For this Girl Geek Dinner, we are going “no-host” and asking everyone to chip in $20 for dinner at Ming’s in Palo Alto (off the 101 freeway in Palo Alto). You must buy your ticket online by 3PM on Tuesday, January 27th — NO WALK-INS. Doors open at 5:30pm and dinner starts at 6:30pm with your fellow Silicon Valley girl geeks!

The first 200 women to register will receive a shiny Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner mug! We have Girl Geek Dinner schwag for everyone, but are encouraging early registrations with nifty mugs — make your office co-workers jealous with your girl geek schwag!

Schedule:
5:30pm – 6:30pm: Check-in
6:30pm – 7:30pm: Dinner
7:30pm – 7:45pm: Introductions from women in tech groups represented
7:45pm – 9:30pm: Networking, including the opportunity to contribute ideas for She’s Geeky

Never been to an unconference or camp? This one provides an amazing opportunity to learn from a range of geeky women in a peer-to-peer participant driven event. Check out proposed She’s Geeky unconference topics on the wiki
and have the opportunity to contribute your own session ideas at the dinner.

What happens at a She’s Geeky unconference? Beginning at 9am each day, we start with a blank wall and create a multi-track conference agenda that is relevant and inspiring to everyone. Rooms are assigned to each topic and participants attend sessions they are interested in. Notes from each session are collected and a book is compiled with all the notes from the conference and distributed to everyone who attends. For a 3-minute peek at last year’s unconference, click here.

She’s Geeky (January 30-31, 2009 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View) unconference tickets can be purchased for Friday or Saturday or both days. Join She’s Geeky Friday evening after the unconference for a showing of a film about Ada Lovelace, the “first programmer” according to Wikipedia.

Kicking off Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners

Join our Facebook group for Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners or Become a Facebook fan of Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners to get updates on girly geekdom in the Silicon Valley and upcoming events!

Background
Girl Geek Dinners were founded on the 16th of August 2005 in London as a result of one girl geek by the name of Sarah Blow who got annoyed and frustrated about being one of the only females attending technical events. She was tired of being assumed to be marketing, tired of constantly having to prove herself and decided that she just wanted a change and to be treated just the same as any other geek out there, gender and age aside.

After all to be geeky is to be intelligent, have passion for a subject, and to know that subject in depth. It’s not at all about being better than others, or about gender, race, religion or anything else. Those things just detract from the real fun stuff, the technology, the innovation, and the spread of new ideas.

So what did this geeky girl do to change the world of geeks and girl geeks everywhere? She got in touch with a few well-known bloggers, posted online about her idea of getting geeks to educate one another over dinner and then arranged the first girl geek dinner event with a little help from her friends. The first event had 35 people at it all from London and the surrounding area, shortly after people started to hear about the events and companies started sponsoring them to cover the food and drinks cost. Then they started popping up in other UK cities as Sarah trained others up in how to run the events, spreading the formula for them.

Past Events
Where have the past events been, what is the format, and why? If we start with London, the birth home for the girl geek dinners, they started their life at the Texas Embassy over in Trafalgar Square, and soon decided to move about a bit and have since been found in bars such as Balls Brothers and offices such as Google, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Skype. The format of the events is to be informal, buffet dinner style with finger foods and wine as well as soft drinks for those who are driving. We have a speaker or three on a subject of choice either based on a technical subject area or business area, or even on women and tech issues (such as mentoring). The events are varied and the reach vast.

Who are the people behind Girl Geek Dinners?
Sarah Blow is the Founder of Girl Geek Dinners and heads up London Girl Geek Dinners

Angie Chang manages the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners in the Silicon Valley. She also co-founded Women 2.0 to support young women interested in entrepreneurship, business, and technology in the Silicon Valley. You can email her at angiechang@gmail.com