Girl Geek Dinners « Girls n Gadgets

Posts Tagged ‘Girl Geek Dinners’

Girl Geek Dinners turns 5 (Guest post by Judith Lewis)

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Have you ever heard of London Girl Geek Dinners? What started as an organisation of a few passionate women has blossomed into a worldwide network of “dinners” from New Zealand through to Toronto and now the home of that movement is turning 5 years old!

London Girl Geek Dinners really does hope to change the world. We’d like to inspire more girls to get into tech, more women to stay in tech and more not-currently-techie women to get involved. We run events in high schools, in businesses and in pubs with inspirational women and men talking about technology in its varied forms. Whether discussing using computerised techniques in creating manga or digital cows, London Girl Geek Dinners appeals to a wide range of people.

LGGD is free to join and we do welcome everyone. Our main list is on Google but we are also on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Men are welcome to join our groups and events but we do ask that they are the guest of a girl geek. Most of the time our events are free to attend as well but we do rely on sponsors like SciFi London, Norton Symantec, Regent St, Microsoft, Google, HMRC and others to help us put on events. We’re working on getting Girl Geek Dinners charitable status as well!

So what’s happening as we turn 5? Google is our main sponsor and they will be feeding us and giving us goodie bags. The wine has been supplied by Dinastia Vivanco and in the goodie bags we have lovely goodies from Green & Blacks, VitaminWater and Juniper Networks. We’ve also got raffle prizes including LGGD sweatshirts and all money from the raffle will go to helping us to gain charitable status.

Excited? Want to be a member? Just pop over to http://groups.google.com/group/london-girl-geek-dinners/ and sign up for free!

Want your company to be associated with this positive organisation? Please do get in touch with us on Londonggd –at- gmail dot com and we’d be happy to talk to you about the really inexpensive ways you can get involved in sponsoring a London Girl Geek Dinner event!

Tags: Girl Geek Dinners, Girls 'n' Gadgets, london, women, women in tech, women in technology
Posted in Internet, Social Media, Technology | 1 Comment »

Geek Girl Dinners go down a storm

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Last night I was invited to the fourth anniversary event for London’s Girl Geek Dinners and it was the first one I had ever been to.
The event, which takes place every few months, looks at and debates how girls and tech can be moved more into the mainstream arena and get advertisers to take us seriously, through questions and situations put to the audience through a discussion panel.

It was set up by Sarah Blow who thought it would be a “few girls based in London having some nice food and a few drinks talking about what they have been up to with their work.”

However, it’s grown massively since then with heads such as Maggie Philbin, science and technology broadcaster and former Tomorrow’s World presenter, taking the stage and really debating how we girls can get our feet firmly into the technology door.

On the debating panel last night was Belinda, who is a consultant at Saatchi and Saatchi and has been campaigning for girls to be recognized as the technology “geeks” we are instead of fluffy fashion victims.

Top of her terrible advertisers list was PC World and Dell, which aired a despicable advert suggesting us girl’s only go for the colour of items and what they look like rather than the specs. If this wasn’t bad enough the advert was also followed through (quite a fitting term) with a ditzy voice over.

“Our research has shown only 9% of women want the Jordan fashion and pink look, and 45% want specs and sophistication,” she told us.

Thankfully, as the audience agreed, the technology gap is closing, but as we all know there is still more to be done to change the pink puff tech image we girl’s have involuntarily fallen into.

Geek Girl Dinners

Tags: gadgets, Girl Geek Dinners, women and technology
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

G ‘n’ G Women in Tech Week – Diane Perlman, Branding Matters

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Diane Perlman www.brandingmatters.com

Closet geek and entrepreneur, Diane Perlman has spent time learning and practicing nearly every marketing discipline over her career, both agency and client-side, and the last 12 years focusing mostly on digital and working with tech and telecoms clients. Diane, now director of ‘virtual agency’ Branding Matters for the past 4 years, provides strategic consulting to direct to clients and often via agencies who retain her as a strategist and planner to work with their clients on a particular challenge, whether that be naming and branding assistance, digital planning or strategic account management.

Diane has worked both in the US and the UK with both large multinational clients such as Microsoft, Unisys, Nokia and T-Mobile on a global basis, as well as with smaller, early stage companies and start-ups. Check out one of her most recent projects: www.activinstinct.com – an end-to-end branding and ecommerce project for a large sporting goods retailer. Diane conducted the strategy, naming and branding, as well as overall project management for ActivInstinct and managed the other aspects of the project via a virtual project team of likeminded partners. She is also managing global email and search marketing campaigns on behalf of Microsoft. And, for a London branding agency, she recently participated in two naming and brand architecture projects for clients in the electronics industry. Other examples of recent projects can be found at www.brandingmatters.co.uk.

send someone a compliment today!

Diane is also the co-founder and marketing director of ililkeucoz the world’s first appreciation engine. Diane helped establish ilikeucoz along with a small team of passionate entrepreneurs at Launch48 in London where attendees were challenged to create and launch four new web app in 48 hours. ilikeucoz was one of them. ilikeucoz encourages people to spontaneously send Twitter-esque compliments to the people they like in their life. It’s all about bringing the feel-good factor back in a time when, more than ever before, people need a bit of a boost. Follow ilikeucoz on Twitter @ilikeucoz and check out the ilikeucoz blog.

Diane’s initial introduction to technology and the world of all things geeky came when she joined a start-up called Cyveillance in 1998. Prior to coming to the UK, Diane was the marketing director at Cyveillance, where she named the company and developed its early-stage branding and marketing strategy in the US and later launched the brand in the UK and Europe. After the bubble burst, Diane left Cyveillance, but stayed in the UK and continued on the technology track and joined global ad agency Grey London where she looked after the Unisys and Nokia accounts and managed Nokia’s first ever global ad campaign for its N-Gage gaming product. Then, getting back to digital, Diane joined top digital agency Wheel (now LBIcon) as a Group Account Director where she was advising retail brands like Laura Ashley, Dixons and Disney, among others, on their online advertising and marketing campaigns, as well as website design and development.

Follow Diane on Twitter!

Tags: activinstinct, branding matters, brandingmatters, diane pearlman, Girl Geek Dinners, Girls 'n' Gadgets, GnG, ilikeucoz, london, web, women, women in tech, women in technology, Women who Tech
Posted in Internet, Social Media, Technology, e-commerce | 1 Comment »

G ‘n’ G Women in Tech Week – Sarah Blow, Girl Geek Dinners/ TweetMeme

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Ha ha… I’ve finally managed to take over Leila’s site… Well only for one blog post for now. But how on earth do you start a blog post about who you are and what you do…. geez… I have no idea… so I thought I’d just write and see what came out! So I’m Sarah Blow, Founder of the Girl Geek Dinners and Community Manager at TweetMeme. (formerly a software engineer at Cardinal Health). And I’m betting that you are trying to figure out what that lot means.

So let’s go from the top… Girl Geek Dinners… what are they… Girl Geek Dinners are technical events for females in the IT industry where they get together over food & drinks, network and hear a talk or three on a technical subject. Guys are allowed to attend so long as they are invited by a girl attending the event. (each girl has one invite to give out to a guy should they choose to do so) Why the events I hear you say… well I got tired of justifying why I was at technical conferences and informal tech gatherings. As such I decided something needed to change and I needed to find others like me… Female but geeky. There was no way my 4 years of university were going to be thrown out and replaced with stereotypical expectations. I wanted to be taken seriously as someone female in IT. And so the Girl Geek Dinners were born in 2005. today there are over 50 different groups around the world all with the same focus. To make the IT industry less stereotypical and more about the technology.

Interestingly it was due to my experience of taking Girl Geek Dinners world wide and learning how to install, create and use online media tools for creating online communitites that I ended up in the job that I am now as the Community Manager at TweetMeme. The two roles really do compliment each other well. My previous role to that was some what different and was more systems & software development and design than anything web focused. It was totally about programming, software testing, following the ISO 9001 standards and so on. I’m not sure that I could have got much further from one end of the technical spectrum to the other really if I’d tried to. Now I get to play with the latest and greatest technical tools like the Twitter API and so on. The interesting thing is I love both skills sets and no matter which set I use as a day job I’ll always end up using the other as a hobby one way or another. For example this weekend I’ll be down at the Yahoo Hackdays Event doing some coding and playing with their latest API’s just for fun.

So I guess the thing to take away from hearing from me online is, don’t always believe everything you hear about the IT industry, it’s fun to be here! Dare to give technology a try… don’t just accept stereotypes people try to pin on you if you think they are incorrect. And above all believe in yourself, work hard and dare to try to achieve your goals whatever they may be. My latest one is learning to kite surf!

Also just because you aren’t doing coding etc as your day job it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it at all. Have a play and come to the weekend events where you can learn how to do this stuff if you are interested in learning it! You never know it may just be the steps to getting your next job.

Tags: api, ggd, girl geek, Girl Geek Dinners, industry, sarah, sarah blow, sarahblow, Social Media, Technology, tweetmeme, Twitter
Posted in Social Media, Technology | No Comments »

Welcome to Girls ‘n’ Gadgets…

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

We girls love gadgets. Web and technology is an amazing world, filling our lives full of fun, fanaticism and functionality. Where would we be today without our laptops, mobile phones and of course the Internet? Lost most would say! These days, it’s hard to imagine not tweeting, tumbling, DMing or IMing your way through life. These gadgets are essential in almost every aspect of our lives whether it’s work or play. I for one couldn’t live without my laptop, mobile phones and especially the Internet!

Technology over the years has always been strongly male dominated, but recently this has started to change and the number of influential women in tech has greatly increased. With many groups and events being set up, such as Girl Geek Dinners and Women Who Tech , the female voice is finally being heard loud and clear.

This brings me on nicely to Girls ‘n’ Gadgets; As a Tech and Internet lover, I wanted to share my passion with the world and I knew I wasn’t the only girl out there wanting to do this. After going to many conferences and meeting like-minded people, I decided to set up Girls ‘n’ Gadgets to give women a place to go to get a female ‘take on tech’. The site will feature up-to-date news and reviews, as well as featured internet personalities and companies. To keep things interesting, we even have our own resident boy to review our weekly musings.

I hope that over the next month, whilst we are still in beta mode, you will enjoy what you see and read. As a new and growing site, all feedback is greatly appreciated and all comments will be taken into consideration. As time progresses, we will be adding more features and perfecting the site to the best of our abilities.

We are currently looking for more female bloggers to contribute to the site on a casual basis. If you are interested and have any questions, please email me - Leila@girlsngadgets.com

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter

Leila

Tags: Girl Geek Dinners, Girls 'n' Gadgets, GnG, Twitter, Welcome, Women who Tech
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »