These are the days that reminds me of all the years I’ve put in to making sure women of all backgrounds are seen in the same view as others in tech. These young ladies have definitely made me proud and will put a smile on my face for the rest of the day.
Hats off to Jonecia and Jazmine. Living proof stereotypes mean nothing. All it takes is determination and opportunity.
Spelman Students Beat Out Harvard and MIT for Best Mobile App
I just think it’s important to celebrate and raise up when our folks beat the odds and assumptions about what we’re capable of. In past challenges, students from places like Harvard and MIT won this technical challenge. Check out the hotness:
AT&T is pleased to announce that Jonecia Keels and Jazmine Miller of Spelman College, a historically black liberal arts college for women, have won the 2010 AT&T Big Mobile on Campus ChallengeSM with their next generation e-learning mobile application, HBCU Buddy.
HBCU Buddy is a mobile application created to educate and inform users, including both prospective and current college students, about Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) across the United States. It is a fully-fledged mobile service application that provides detailed information about each and every HBCU in the nation and integrates all facets of college life.
The application opens with a directory profiling each HBCU with information on academics, admissions, research, student life, alumni, among other details. After selecting a school, students can navigate through the school – literally – by accessing virtual tours of buildings, on-campus videos, and local GPS and directions.
HBCU Buddy can also provide students with customizable social networking features to connect with each other, their school and community. The application connects to social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, and integrates tools such as chat and calendar to help students stay informed. Students can use the application to follow the latest on school club and campus happenings, local events, hot spots around the community, and more.
Jonecia Keels and Jazmine Miller were recognized and awarded a $10,000 scholarship (divided between them) and a mobile device of their choice each at the Higher Ed Board of Advisors Meeting in Miami, Florida, on October 7, 2010.
If you didn’t have enough time to promote your sessions or couldn’t find all the panels you were planning to vote for, you still have time.
Here are two sessions I’m involved in:
Social Media: The Pink Collar Ghetto of Tech? http://bit.ly/b45YDm
Diverse panelists on a Heated topic in the industry
Lifecycles Tech & Society: Is 14yr Olds too Old? http://bit.ly/94x6Qm
We will be discussing tech trends and which cycles remain.
If you have some time vote and please leave a comment with your insights on what you think about them.
And to all the east coasters that means you have more time so no excuse 12:59 EST
PanelPicker Voting Extended Through the Weekend!
With so many great Music, Film and Interactive proposals to choose from, we thought our community could benefit from a PanelPicker voting extension! Now you will be able to continue browsing, voting and commenting until 11:59 CST Sunday, August 29 on which panels you think will be the best fit for the event in March.
Your input accounts for 30% of the decision-making process, (The SXSW Advisory Board accounts for 40% and the input of the SXSW staff accounts for the remaining 30%), so take some time to read the panels and help us create the best programming schedule possible for SXSW 2011!
Read more at www.sxsw.com
Read Write Web has begun to take stories highlighting the work and risks of women in tech. There are women doing very cool things and this is just one opportunity to highlight them. If you know of any please submit them to @rww or Clair Cain Miller at the Times.
h/t to @rww for thinking about doing this and giving the upcoming www.womenwhotech.com summit a nod in the process. There will be some interesting women to get to know in tech who will be speaking there as well http://www.womenwhotech.com/2010-bios1.html
7 Stories About Women Heroes in Tech - Please Send Us More
By Marshall Kirkpatrick / August 27, 2010 2:28 PM / 2 Comments
The technology press is full of stories of heroic men. In the startup economy, they often take the form of brave men who quit steady day jobs to join crazy startups. That’s an inspiring kind of story; I wrote about Louis Gray doing that earlier this week and really enjoyed sharing his news. (How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google is a related example.)
But what about women who make that kind of leap? There needs to be more stories told like that. I put out a call on Twitter and Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times said she too wants to tell more stories about brave women in technology. We live in an incredible time of cultural, economic and political change made possible by changing technology. That technology is being driven in many cases by women - so whose stories would you suggest we write about here on this blog?
Earlier this week, TechCrunch wrote about Christine Tsai leaving Google to join Dave McClure’s investment firm 500 Startups. This Spring, Alexa Andrzejewski left design firm Adaptive Path to work full time on her startup FoodSpotting. Those are cool stories, but we want more.
ReadWriteWeb’s own Audrey Watters has written about the challenges and upsides of incubating women entrepreneurs.
Perhaps the whole hero-style narrative is a bad idea, unhelpful to community collaboration just like Kaliya Hamlin argues the “war” metaphor is in rhetoric like “the identity war.” “I think what is seen as heroic is a narrative of the lone cowboy,” Hamlin said to me today. “Teams and communities who foster innovation and achieve together are often not seen and therefor not honored in the same way.”
We’ve written about a number of specific women doing heroic or particularly interesting work in tech here on ReadWriteWeb. Here are 7 of my favorites - please let us know in comments or by email (staff@readwriteweb.com) whose stories are especially compelling that we ought to be writing about. Send them today, tomorrow - and don’t stop sending us interesting stories about women, please. Of course there are more ways to have an awesome story than just to quit your job - that’s just what got me thinking about this. Please send whatever recommendations you can of women who have great stories that people ought to read.
Read more at www.readwriteweb.com
This proves that Silicon Valley frowns up the innovation of tech that comes from either public government or the social justice nonprofit sector. I’m not completely shocked about that but it proves why there is such a disconnect with technology and the social aspect of people [users] and how they would truly use a product.
There should be a partnership in Social Tech that I haven’t seen happen yet and this piece may explain why. Software apps like Amplify and the team behind it gets the value of both. If you truly incorporate the social and tech you get a better quality product.
That leads me to diversity as well which Silicon Valley seems to have a void in many aspects but they love @chamillionaire so here is my video with him on that topic http://www.vimeo.com/13830059
With apologies to AOL and Frank Gruber
, few big tech hits have come out of Washington DC. Which is strange, because on paper, DC has those “ingredients” for a high-tech ecosystem that so-called experts love to tout.
It has money, it has universities, it has AOL which could theoretically spin smart coders off, it has a big, honking, recession-proof customer right there in the form of the government. And there are a ton of smart tech people in the city. On the book tour for Sarah’s last book, nearly 400 people came to the DC event where she did a signing—a record on the 15-city tour.
But for all these attributes, DC has struggled to define its tech scene as more than just AOL. That may be changing. There is a cadre of smart, young techies pulled in by the Obama campaign and its social-media-can-win-elections-after-all aftermath. A lot of those people are spinning into companies that hope to use SMS, Twitter and other basic social media tactics to do more than just win elections—to change the world.
What’s interesting about this world is how much of a mirror image it is to Silicon Valley. It’s about trying to take tools created here and use them in innovative ways. And it’s not about getting rich—many of the most innovative techies in DC are starting non-profits. Increasingly, DC techies aren’t trying to be another Silicon Valley—they are creating their own ecosystem that’s in tune with why people move to DC and what DC has that no other place has.
Today, more than 90% of large companies use open source technology, and yet the largest software companies in the world are still proprietary vendors. Might we see something similar with social media? Taking out the handful of obvious winners like Facebook and Twitter, will the social impact—the change in how we donate money, talk to friends, live life and participate in government—be ultimately greater than the returns to shareholders?
We asked Scott Goodstein of Revolution Messaging
Read more at techcrunch.com
Pew Internet life updates their mobile report and discovers some interesting trends about cell phone and laptop use. African Americans have increased their laptop usage however more youth & low income communities are found to have only cell phone access to the web and that doesn’t necessarily mean smart phones. The percentage of smart phone penetration is still very low.
There were a few other key points in the report not listed in this article:
The majority of the populations utilizes both handhelds and laptops with 70% still using stationary access due to handheld limitations.
Some interesting tidbits include charitable donations via text is higher among latinos and african americans, Latinos are the highest, which suggests that the majority of the Haiti and other efforts were from communities of color.
Unfortunately the survey wasn’t available in spanish so we might see a change in the data for Latinos if it’s included in the next one.
Mobile Web Use and the Digital Divide
The image of the affluent and white cellphone owner as the prototypical mobile Web user seems to be a mistaken one, according to a report published Wednesday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Center.
The study found that African-Americans and Hispanics continue to be more likely to own cellphones than whites and more likely to use their phones for a greater range of activities.
This increase in mobile Web use, first noticed in a similar study by the Pew Center last summer, is driven both by age and economics, according to Aaron W. Smith of the Pew Center.
Younger people and people living in households making less than $30,000 a year are increasing their mobile Web use at particularly fast rates, he said, and the African-American and Hispanic populations are younger and poorer relative to the white population.
Because mobile Web use has grown among groups that have traditionally lagged behind in Web access, it has been cited as evidence that the distinction between the digital haves and have-nots is eroding.
But the mobile Web means different things to different people. For more affluent populations, it generally means wireless access with a laptop computer. For poorer people it means a cellphone, which is not a perfect replacement for other forms of online access, said Mr. Smith and several others who study social issues related to technology.
There is a difference between accessing the Internet on a smartphone and a regular “feature phone” cellphone. The Pew report did not reflect this distinction.
Notably, rates of laptop ownership among African-Americans have risen to 51 percent from 34 percent in 2009, according to the study, a survey of 2,252 adults aged 18 and older.
But 18 percent of African-Americans use a cellphone as their only form of Internet access, compared with 10 percent of whites. People with low incomes and low levels of education were also much more likely to access the Internet solely through their cellphones.
Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Digital Sisters and a consultant on social media campaigns focused on women and minorities, said that the way in which people access the Internet should remain a part of the conversation about the digital divide.
“The quality of what is available through cell only is limited access,” she said. “We are moving in a positive direction about true cellphone usage and it’s relevant to online access, but there are still some challenges ahead.”
Ms. Mitchell said organizations or government agencies that are eager to move everything online should consider that some cellphones might not be able to take full advantage of the Web.
Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com
