I was always slightly bummed that I never got a chance to try speed dating. The concept intrigued me on so many levels. Seems like it would be great blog fodder and a blast in general.
But I found a workaround. I’ll be trying an alternative version of it in April through SeedNetworking, which sets up speed dates between entrepreneurs who need developers and devs who are looking for projects. Seven minutes max per “date,” 30 developers, 30 entrepreneurs.
I am so looking forward to this. I have no illusions that I’ll find the partner and CTO of my dreams, although stranger things have happened. If nothing else, it’ll be a chance to talk to devs who are completely unfamiliar with my project and see what about it piques their interest and where I lose them (interest and comprehension). Plus you get so deep into your own fantasy universe when you’re trying to create a startup that you need to explain it to the uninitiated every now and then to see if they think you’re in total lala land. If they do, then you reassess. It’ll be a challenge and a social experiment. I love both.
SeedNetworking on Facebook and Twitter.
Filed under: tech events, web trends , startuppity
March 22, 2010 • 11:20 am
There’s a huge wave that Internet people are paddling like fools to catch right now. It’s the “women are starting to realize they’re under-represented in tech and startups, so we’d better start to care or at least pretend we do” wave. Some effects of this wave include a rise in women-in-tech organizations and an effort by tech event organizers to give women more visibility.
It’s great to see that tech events are giving women a little limelight of their own. I’m going to an event soon that has given women their very own panel! And they’ve called it “Women’s Panel.” Kind of like Women’s Room. But with the latter, there’s little doubt about who uses it or for what. But what about this mysterious Panel…?
Read the rest of this article on frogblog.
Filed under: tech events, web life, web trends , grrls, words
There’s a new addition to my family! Meet the Francophilia Gazette.
It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of juicy news tidbits and spicy culture bites from France: gossip, trivia, pop culture, high culture, history, and more… A fresh take on France and Frenchness, with none of those tired articles about Brie and beaujolais nouveau…
I’ve tested this material on Francophilia’s audience for a year through Twitter with excellent results, so I decided to deliver it in a format that the other 81% of Internet users could handle.
The content is literally bite sized, and visiting the site is like walking into a chocolate shop. The design is pure delight too: resize your browser and watch what happens, or Ctrl + and – a few times. Go to the site on your iPhone and feel the love…
The Francophilia Gazette is rated “French,” which means it won’t always be safe for work in other countries… Vive la France !
Filed under: web life , Francophilia, fun, startuppity
My latest article on WebWorkerDaily is about how quick and painless it is to use Posterous to share the treasures you find on the Web across your many online social apps. Using the Posterous bookmarklet, you can send goodies to all your social apps at once, or pick and choose where you want things to go in literally a minute or two.
But although Posterous makes it easy for you to spread your Internet finds around, this doesn’t appear to be its primary goal. I have reason to believe that the people behind the app don’t want you to use it solely as a personal “cloud,” even though that’s how I suggest it be used in my article. The fact that all the content you send to your various social sites also appears on a Posterous site tells me that Posterous wants to be a blog unto itself and a stand-alone element of your online presence. Plenty of people do use it that way.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: apps, social media, web trends , blogging, tools
Do you think there’s room on the Internet for startups that aren’t the product of a programmer’s brain? I do. But some things need to change. Way back in 2008, Bernard Lunn of ReadWriteWeb wrote about his vision for the near future of the Web in a brilliant three-part series in which he said:
The Main Street Web is about people who don’t care about technology or media, they just use it. Above all it is about really simple business models that work in the physical world as well as online world. The Main Street Web will empower small business and level the playing field with big business.
He talked mostly about how usage would become more mainstream, but in my article, You Can’t Launch the Next Generation of Internet Startups Without Women, I suggest that startup founders with viable ideas are likely to start coming from the mainstream too, and that they might be better able to meet the needs and address the interests of an ageing and increasingly diverse population of Internet users.
It’s time for the puppet masters to start looking at paper projects again, like they did in the old days. The way publishing houses look at manuscripts.
Filed under: web life, web trends , startuppity
