TechCrunch
She++ Documentary Features Industry Leaders, Stanford Professors and Students Talking Women In Tech [Video]
She++, a Stanford community for women in tech, publicly released a 12-minute documentary today featuring Stanford students, professors, and alumni discussing gender in technical fields.
High profile Silicon Valley leaders like Kimber Lockhart, a Director of Engineering at Box; Tracy Chou, a software engineer at Pinterest; Jocelyn Goldfein, a Director of Engineering at Facebook; Sandy Jen, CTO and co-founder of Meebo; and Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital share their personal experiences with gender in the classroom and workplace in the documentary.
She++ was founded in 2012 by two Stanford seniors, Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni. Since then, the two have hosted two conferences, produced the documentary, and started a mentorship program.
“I wanted to share a story that could relate to girls who had parents as doctors, or girls whose parents did not go to college,” Agarwal says. “I did not want to just target the mainstream communities in the Silicon Valley, nor the high schools dominated by surrounding technical influences. The point was to widen our reach, and make the story accessible and relatable.”
The documentary has been screened over 100 times in 12 countries and has been translated into five languages. Nearly 300 people attended the documentary’s premiere at Stanford in April, where I saw both the documentary and an interesting panel discussion on challenges facing women in CS at Stanford and in Silicon Valley.
“The she++ documentary brought light to the issue in a way that is very accessible for all students, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background,” says Cullen White, a teacher at Fairmont Heights High School, where he estimates 120 students and parents viewed the documentary. “It provided me, as a male teacher, with a tool that can be used to inspire my female students more than I can alone.”
Israni and Agarwal say one of the biggest surprises for them was how professional the final product looks and the feedback they’ve received.
“We also had a surprising number of technology companies–we spoke at screenings for Facebook, Twitter, EA, Zynga, Foursquare and Square–host screenings,” Israni tells me. “They weren’t our target demographics, but at those screenings there were hundreds of women who confessed that they still face some of the challenges explored in the film, and that this is the first time they had been brought up so publicly and forcefully. The fact that this issue has been so pervasive really reinforced our belief that this is necessary. And it was those women who begged for copies of the film to show to their daughters, nieces, and the like–a huge part of why we chose to make it public.”
Chou, a panelist at the first she++ conference, says she thought it was a really valuable experience and that “participating in the documentary made a lot of sense to me.” She says she got really positive feedback from women in the audience and is excited that the documentary will make some of the conference’s ideas more accessible to a broader audience.
Disclosure: Israni and I currently work together in Stanford’s student government. It doesn’t affect my coverage in any way. I began covering she++ before either of us started working in Stanford’s student government.
Frontback Is A Deeply Personal Photo-Taking App To Capture Fleeting Moments
From the team behind Checkthis, Frontback is a straightforward iPhone photo-taking app to capture the moment as it happens. You launch the app, take a photo of what you have in front of you, take a photo of your face and share the digital collage on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. It’s addictive, very easy to understand, and, more importantly, deeply personal.
“People tell us that they want to see their friends, not only what their friends see,” co-founder and designer Frédéric Della Faille told me. “We want to own the selfie,” he continued.
The Frontback concept isn’t something new. When you make a post on Checkthis, you can add as many photos as you want, as well as text and headlines. Nearly four months ago, Della Faille first posted two pictures on Checkthis of New York’s beautiful landscape and his reaction. He explained the concept of a ‘#frontback’ at the same time.
Over the past few months, I started noticing that more and more users were posting #frontback pictures on Checkthis. Like in the early days of Twitter, a user invented a new use case — except that this time around, the user was Checkthis’ co-founder. There wasn’t any sort of #frontback wizard tool to ease the process of creating them. Users were only experiencing with this newfound lingo and artistic rules.
It’s all about immersing yourself and putting yourself in your friends’ shoes.
Enter Frontback, the app. It was released today in the App Store. Now, there is no whitespace around a Frontback photo, absolutely no chrome. The photo itself doesn’t have any filter. It’s just two square-ish photos on top of each other, filling up the entire screen of your iPhone. It’s all about immersing yourself and putting yourself in your friends’ shoes.
“It tells so much more than a photo on Instagram,” Instagram designer Tim Van Damme recently told Della Faille. “Two photos change everything,” Della Faille told me. “On Instagram, you share something because it’s beautiful, but you don’t share the context,” he continued.
Frontback isn’t another social network. For now, it’s built on top of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. When a friend joins Frontback, you automatically follow him or her, without having to do anything. And of course, you’ll probably start seeing their Frontback posts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as well.
Della Faille now hopes that users will launch the Frontback app to capture fleeting moments, just like they would launch the default Camera app. He calmly went through a few examples of great Frontback posts. “This guy thinks about Frontback while piloting a plane. And this guy thinks about Frontback when he’s at the new Belgian king parade. And this guy when he meets Martin Solveig. All of that happened over the weekend.”
Scenes From The Seattle TechCrunch Meetup
The startup scene in Seattle is for real. More than 1,000 people came to the Showbox Theater to mingle, have a drink and hear pitches from 18 local startups. During the meetup, we got a feel for the general mood of the Seattle startup scene. Everyone we spoke with embraced the grueling startup life and were eager to prove they have something compelling and unique.
Check out the video above to see scenes from the event and interviews with attendees and participants in the one-minute pitch-off, which include Daily Dollar, a service for saving digital copies of customer receipts, and CPUsage, which is offering a platform-as-a-service for developing high-performance computing applications.
And don’t miss out on the next TechCrunch meetup, which will take place August 22 in San Diego.
No comments:
Post a Comment