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. ]]> http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd5-google/feed/ http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd4-lolapps/ http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd4-lolapps/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:00:53 +0000 admin http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/?p=22 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.
]]> http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd4-lolapps/feed/ http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/bay-area-girl-geek-dinner-3-with-shes-geeky/ http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/bay-area-girl-geek-dinner-3-with-shes-geeky/#comments Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:06:57 +0000 admin http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/?p=19
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.

]]> http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/bay-area-girl-geek-dinner-3-with-shes-geeky/feed/ http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd2-facebook/ http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd2-facebook/#comments Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:06:43 +0000 admin http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/?p=12 June 26, 20086:00 pmto9:00 pm

The next Girl Geek Dinner and Dev Garage will be hosted by Facebook on Thursday, June 26th from 6pm to 9pm at Etiquette Lounge in San Francisco. There will be free drinks, appetizers, schwag, dancing, with fun & silly geek-themed photo shoots by professional Zivity photographers! Guests will be treated to a presentation about Facebook Platform, followed by a Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner Panel featuring top female geeks, including a few from Facebook. This event is FULL. See you at a future Girl Geek Dinner!
Facebook Platform Presenters: Julie Tung, Software Engineer, Facebook Julie Zhuo, Product Designer, Platform, Facebook
Featured Panelists: Ruchi Sanghvi, Principal Product Manager, Facebook Julie Zhuo, Product Designer, Platform, Facebook Alina Libova, Founder and Developer, Easter Eggs Holly Liu, User Experience and Co-Founder, Watercooler Annie Chang, Co-Founder, LOLapps Moderator: Sandra Liu Huang, Program Manager, Facebook Introduction: Cyan Banister, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Zivity		Thursday, June 26, 2008 Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm Etiquette Lounge 108 Market Street, San Francisco, CA
Speaker Bios:
Julie Tung is a software engineer on the Platform team at Facebook, where she currently works on the new profile design, including some of the new Platform integration points. In addition, she has worked on the Platform open source efforts along with other backend projects to improve performance for applications and the site. Prior to joining Facebook in 2007, she worked as an engineer on the backend ads targeting systems at Google. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Stanford University.
Julie Zhuo is a Product Designer at Facebook, where she focuses on Platform integration and user profiles. She has worked on the two main Facebook site redesigns as well as building application integration and developer tools. Julie is also the main artist for the Facebook application (fluff)Friends. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.
Ruchi Sanghvi is the Principal Product Manager at Facebook, where she oversees Facebook Platform and News Feed. She is responsible for the company’s Platform product strategy and new product initiatives. Ruchi was an early engineer at Facebook and is one of the primary developers for News Feed. Prior to Facebook, she was a software engineer in the Real Time Communication Group at Oracle. Ruchi holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Alina Libova developed a Facebook application called Easter Eggs using Ruby on Rails and sold the application in March 2008 with over 300,000 users. Alina is currently a second year computer science major at UC Berkeley. She enjoys programming, graphic design, hiking, and ice skating in her free time.
Holly Liu is in charge of product design and founding member of Watercooler, a creator of sports and television entertainment applications within Facebook and other social networks for millions of fans. Prior to Watercooler, she was a Lead Designer at AOL in the Community Product Line. Holly holds a Masters from UC Berkeley in Information Management and a B.A. from UCLA in Communications.
Annie Chang is Co-Founder of LOLapps, provider of custom applications spanning pop culture, entertainment, and a variety of special interests for Facebook and other social networking platforms. Prior to LOLapps, Annie was a product manager at BitTorrent and an engineer at Adobe. Annie has a B.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley.
Sandra Liu Huang is a Platform Program Manager at Facebook, where she focuses on new strategic initiatives and programs for developers on Facebook Platform. Prior to Facebook, Sandra worked in product management and product marketing at Google for business products including Google Checkout, AdWords and AdSense. She holds a master’s degree in management science and engineering and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.
Cyan Banister is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Zivity, a subscription-based social network and royalty distribution platform that nurtures artistic freedom. Cyan is bringing sexy back to the Silicon Valley, and was the 2000 winner of the Sexiest Geek Alive award. She recently launched a blog with other amazing writers (http://sexiestgeeksalive.com) that celebrates sexy geeks everywhere. The Sexiest Geeks Alive team also produced a Nrrrd Grrrl music video that received nearly 1M views on YouTube and was the 5th most popular music video on Youtube for over a week. Cyan has succeeded in a dizzying array of leadership roles throughout her career, from leading technical operations teams to being the CTO of a non-profit helping women master technology.

]]> http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd2-facebook/feed/ http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd1-google/ http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/baggd1-google/#comments Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:03:19 +0000 admin http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com/?p=6 January 31, 20086:00 pmto9:00 pm

Girl Geek Dinners are kicking off Thursday, January 31st at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Join us as our panel and the audience discuss ways to build credibility and reputation in technology and business, from leveraging a personal blog to managing social networks effectively, both online and offline. Event is FREE for all girl geeks, and each girl geek can bring one guy geek. RSVP required.
Featured Speakers: Irene Au, Director of User Experience, Google Rashmi Sinha, CEO, SlideShare Leah Culver, Lead Developer & Co-Founder, Pownce Sumaya Kazi, Entrepreneur & Social Media Manager, Sun Microsystems Katherine Barr (moderator), Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures Opening Speaker from Google: Ellen Spertus, Research Scientist, Google Event Curator: Angie Chang, Co-Founder, Women 2.0 » Please register you and your guest here		Thursday, January 31, 2008 Time: 6:00pm - 9:30pm Google, Charlie’s Cafe, Building 40 1600 Amphitheatre Pwky, Mountain View, CA
Speaker Bios:
Irene Au is dedicated to raising the strategic value of design and user research within software companies through better methods and practices, processes, leadership, and quality. She is Director of User Experience at Google, where her team is responsible for design and user research for Google’s products worldwide. Prior to Google, she spent eight years at Yahoo! where she was Vice President of User Experience and Design. At Yahoo!, Irene established the interaction design and user research practice, and led product and platform design efforts worldwide. Irene also headed up the Product Practices team which coached teams on Agile development practices and developed product operations programs to help business units deliver on corporate strategy. Irene holds an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction through the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.
Rashmi Sinha is a Designer and Entrepreneur. She is Co-founder and CEO of SlideShare, a website for document sharing for work and play. Rashmi was doing research in Human Computer Interaction at UC Berkeley, when she decided she preferred working on “real” projects. She started a user experience consultancy called Uzanto, helping companies like eBay, AAA and Blue Shield with the usability of their software. Rashmi blogs about social web at www.rashmisinha.com. For her next career, she wants to write a book about strange things people do on social websites. Rashmi has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Brown University.
Leah Culver is Co-founder and Lead Developer of Pownce, a social messaging application. Leah created the site and works on all aspects of the website development, including database design, user experience, scaling, and APIs. As a contributor to OAuth and supporter of various social network portability tools, she is considered a leader in open web practices. Leah writes a popular blog about web programming and her experiences in the Bay Area at www.leahculver.com. Leah received her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 2006 and enjoys crossword puzzles and spending time with friends.
Sumaya Kazi is a Social Media Manager in Sun Microsystem’s Global Communications Group. She joined Sun in July of 2005 and has had positions in Executive Communications, Worldwide Operations and International Public Relations. In addition to her full-time position at Sun Microsystems, Sumaya serves as the Executive Director and Founder of www.TheCulturalConnect.com, a media publishing company that distributes weekly e-magazines for young, driven and forward-thinking professionals in over 100 countries. Her entrepreneurial work has won her numerous accolades including recognition by BusinessWeek Magazine as one of America’s Top 10 Entrepreneurs Under 25, CNN as a ‘Young Person Who Rocks’, and by ColorLines Magazine as an ‘Innovator to Watch in 2008′. Sumaya graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in Marketing and Strategic Planning.
Katherine Barr is a member of the investment team at Mohr Davidow Ventures focused on Internet-enabled companies. Prior to MDV, she was a Senior Consultant at Vantage Partners (spin-off of the Harvard Negotiation Project) helping high tech clients such as IBM, Cisco and HP to better negotiate and manage their critical business relationships. Before Vantage, she worked as a Product Development Manager at HSA, an education technology startup in Boston. Katherine teaches a yearly Professional Education Negotiation program for the School of Engineering at Stanford. During her graduate studies at Stanford, she was a research and teaching assistant for the US-Asia Technology Management Center in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering. Katherine received her B.A. from McGill University, and completed M.A. and M.S. core curriculum in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.
Ellen Spertus is an associate professor of computer science at Mills College and a research scientist at Google. She received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science from MIT and has worked at Microsoft Research and The University of Washington. Since 1990, she has investigated and advocated around girls’ and women’s underrepresentation in computer science. She has done research in computer architecture, information retrieval, and online communities. In 2001, she was named Sexiest Geek Alive. She and her work have been written about in The New York Times, Wired, and The Weekly World News.

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