Just wanted to share the Nerd Girl love and invite you to check this out - The Revenge of the Nerd Girls ! I am so happy that finally this exists too bad it has taken so long for our society to accept attractive and smart as socially acceptable.

So not sure if I was the only one that loved to watch Star Trek and was looking to see when V was on when they were little, but to see something I always thought was possible brought to life and by Microsoft leaves me feeling all kinds of things. If you haven’t seen it here it is - The Table.

My emotional reaction to this word when it is used to describe the “Web 2.0″ and “the Valley” leaves me frustrated, annoyed, and irritated. This environment is not about echoing what is cool and what everyone else is saying - this place is about freedom of thought. It’s about having an idea that changes the way people live. It is about Innovation. The ecosystem that enables this to exist is vital and critical and should be protected not abused.

Stop the Echo chamber:

Have an Opinion. It does not have to be right, but it must be your own. An opinion that you have developed, not because you heard something, but because you took the time to analyze the information and come to a thought /feeling about the issue / product. Do not offer up information that you have “heard” as your own opinion.

Offer value. This comes in so many forms; listening, connecting one person to another, and giving real honest feedback…you get the idea.

Provide insight. Be a critical thinker and take a real look at things and when capable provide relevant insights.

International aspects. Try and remember that while Silicon Valley is the “end all be all� in our minds there is an entire world. And fortunately for us technology is rampant and widespread. Travel and seek out others in other markets and learn from them.

I have no idea what sparked this rant or this above list. I have a strong notion that it’s because people building companies and businesses need to have the right environment around them, and Silicon Valley is far to valuable to loose.

I am in the process of getting my website together for Covered, nothing special by any scope of the imagination, humble beginnings and all that. But the amount of support I have from truly great people has left me speachless…like this comment from Dennis Howlett

http://www.accmanpro.com/2007/05/10/hating-pr-loving-julia/

A great reminder why I wanted to go and build Covered in the first place.

Forbes

Melissa McJannet joined the Mayfield Fund seven years ago after getting a degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business. In no time she distinguished herself from new hires in the venture industry. She was willing to look beyond the obvious for investment possibilities. She worked closely with me on Convedia, a firm that produces IP media servers and was our first Canadian investment. Mayfield sold that to Radisys this year. We also collaborated on Mobileway, an early mobile-messaging company in France, which we sold to Sybase last year for $400 million.

Melissa and I sifted through stacks of business plans, flew to meet with prospects and spent hours discussing the relative merits of entrepreneurs, as well as what kinds of experts–from customers to suppliers–to pair them with. They were among my most exciting years at Mayfield. Melissa’s network of young professionals helped me realize the importance of text over voice. As a native Canadian, she helped navigate us through governance issues.

Today Melissa is a principal at TD Capital, a Toronto firm that manages $2 billion in private equity assets on behalf of pension plan sponsors, endowments and financial institutions. On her recommendation TD Capital invested in Mayfield’s first fund in China, which closed in January with $200 million in capital. I have no doubt that our relationship will prove increasingly valuable to me and to my firm.

You could call it the New Girls Network. It’s growing one introduction at a time and often by serendipity. It’s a small, informal but thriving group of competitive and talented women who respect but don’t revere tradition. They look to performance more than pedigree; their idea of chat is a conference call between Menlo Park, London, Shanghai and Bangalore.

A few things have changed since I arrived in Silicon Valley from the U.K. 16 years ago after selling my company, BICC Data Networks, to 3Com Corp. Well-meaning friends and colleagues congratulated me on my good fortune. “It’ll be so much better for you in the States,” they assured me. “Professional women are embraced there.” Well, that was not quite the case. Europe was more traditional but group-oriented; the U.S. was–and still is–much more focused on the individual. But I adapted my style and must say that I have never felt compromised by being a woman.

Nor, I suspect, have any of the pioneering women executives here in the Valley. Among them: Carol Bartz, executive chairman of Autodesk; Judy Estrin, former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, who sits on the boards of Walt Disney and FedEx; Audrey Maclean, Stanford University professor and angel investor; and Heidi Roizen, a managing director of Mobius Capital. Many of these women are now involved in entrepreneurial pursuits–by example and coaching–encouraging the next wave of women to excel in the high-tech world.

My experiences and network served me well by the time I joined Mayfield in the summer of 2000. Now I handle investments in communications, networking and mobile applications. As a venture capitalist I can give support and guidance by way of an investment, a reference or an introduction. And I often find that the favor gets reciprocated. We do it not out of obligation but because it’s good business. The girls rarely disappoint.

Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital, a global investment and advisory firm in London, came to see me in 2005 after hearing me speak at a conference. She was accompanied by the founder of a company looking for an American investor. I didn’t invest–not then, at least–but hit it off with Julie instantly. I was impressed with her energy, determination and knowledge of her portfolio companies.

We stayed in touch, and Julie continued to introduce me to entrepreneurs in her transatlantic network. Eighteen months ago she brought me to William Barhydt, who founded Sennari, a Cupertino, Calif. company that provides mobile customer-relationship management. Mayfield led Sennari’s next round of funding; I now sit on the board, and Julie continues to be an adviser to the company. She and I are jointly working on new deals, and I expect at least one to lead to an investment.

Patricia Nakache of Trinity Ventures and I got to know each other through a joint investment in PlayFirst, a publisher of casual games largely targeted at women and families. We were brought together by another network girl, Dana Settle, at that time a partner at Mayfield. (Women partners are still scarce at VC firms.) Since working on PlayFirst, two Mayfield partners (men) have invested in two more deals with Patricia: Jobster, a job and recruiting search engine, and Affinity Labs, a portal serving nurses and policemen, among others.

Our network continues to adapt and grow. The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Executives provides 350 members with introductions, mentorship and funding. It has a heavy weighting to Silicon Valley, but programs like “Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Women,” organized by Stanford’s business school, have become international in scope, and so have the discussions. Women no longer talk about glass ceilings and balancing children and careers. They want to know about running companies, how to get capital and from whom, and whether an overseas stint is vital to a curriculum vitae.

Recently I hosted a Six Degrees of Separation dinner for roughly three dozen women at a Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco. No one complained about the difficulties of being female in Silicon Valley. How far would any of these women have gotten if they had dwelled on obstacles rather than on possibilities? No, this was a celebration. At the end of the evening I had a case of Mo�t & Chandon from which to award bottles to the women who could claim connections to six others at the table. Two guests walked off with a bottle. The dinner will become an annual event, a chance for us to commemorate how far we’ve come. Someday I’ll carry home an empty champagne case.

Janice Roberts is a managing director at the Mayfield Fund.

Please join San Francisco’s ‘Girls in Tech’ for our second event!

As most of you know there is a serious issue around the lack of women in technology.
The purpose of this event and of Girls In Tech is to encourage everyone in the industry to look at themselves and what they do as individuals around this gender issue. Most of all it’s about celebrating the girls that are in brave enough to deal with a male dominated industry day in day out. Ask yourself - How do you as a person contribute to this issue and what changes can you make?

As always a picture says a thousand words:

I counted how many girls were in line before I got in it. There were 8. There were 45 blokes…Enough said.

What: GIT Going!

When: Wednesday, May 16th

Where: Harlot, 46 Minna Street, SF CA

Who: The ‘Girls in Tech’

COVER: $10.00 at the door, goes toward venue and production costs
7:00 PM - 7:45 PM: Upstairs at Harlot
–Girls-only networking with a toast by special guest Athena Von Oech from Ning.com

–”The GIT 90-Second Business Card Pitch” Maybe we will draw your business card from the fishbowl, and you can tell us all about yourself/your business

7:45 PM – 10:00 PM: Downstairs at Harlot
–ALL Welcome: Please join us for a good old-fashioned mixer downstairs at Harlot, sounds from Harlot house DJ, and light appetizers

For more information please email: afgascoigne@yahoo.com or lalassek@comcast.net or Julia@coveredco.com

GIT is about Girls in Tech -

Created in February of 2007, GIT - Girls in Tech was founded by technology marketing and PR mavens Adriana Gascoigne, LaurieAnne Lassek and Julia French.

GIT was born to further support girls in an industry that is traditionally male. GIT believes that we’d all be better off by developing more resources, cultivating stronger relationships and celebrating our achievements as women in technology. By creating this group our goal is to make it obvious that women are a minority in technology and that we as women need to bring awareness to the issue and encourage conversations around how this can be changed.

We are an organization which supports intelligent, professional, and influential young women working in the technology industry. The organization is a membership driven group, which aims to provide tools and information to empower, encourage innovation, inspiration and involvement among its members, while seeking to collaborate with like-minded people in the industry.

GIT offers a variety of resources to women to supplement and further enhance their professional careers in technology. Some of these resources include networking functions, round table discussions, conferences, dinner engagements, and recruitment events.

As most of you know I have been working with Adriana Gascoigne and LauireAnne Lassek on GIT - Girls in Tech. We had our first event in February, we learned it was long overdue - here’s a video clip.
Join Girls in Tech, AdFemme, and Social Diva as they throw a bub.blicio.us party during AdTech.

The event will be held on April 25th at SWIG (561 Geary St.)

Proceeds will benefit GirlsForAChange.org.

We will also be holding another GIT event in May. Details soon to follow.

This could be classified by some as a rant, yet another angry girl banging on about the injustice against females within the technology industry. However, I think it’s more just my desire to start a conversation around why is this behaviour of celebrating men so accepted?

So what has put me off? This lovely article in Business Week “Tech’s Next Gen: The Best and Brightest - Here’s the latest crop of techno-wonderboys, from widget-wranglers to playlist-parsers. So let’s see, perhaps it’s the idea that in order to be great in tech and part of the next generation you must be a Wonder Boy. Where are the Wonder Girls? I also like this little snippet that comes after the title -
“Each year, BusinessWeek.com scours the tech landscape for those entrepreneurs, aged 30 and under, most likely to shape the world’s digital future.”

It’s classic political correctness and it makes me sad, angry and more determined to make a place for women in technology. I know of plenty of women that are attractive, smart, successful under thirty that sould be on that list. Where are they? Yes, the list is complied of great guys like Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian and Jared Kopf from Adroll, but for everyone of these guys there has to be a great girl out there making things happen.

Instead of inserting the names of all of the women that should have been included, I challenge Business Week to work a little harder, and find something other than our current acceptable picture of the poster child of technology.
While I love and adore them, I’m over celebrating men and entrepreneurship. I want to change our picture of what is acceptable, and that means writing posts like this to make us all aware of how we participate in this.

If you are a parent you will have heard of Club Penguin, this second life for tweens(eight to eleven year olds - still can’t believe that eight year olds and eleven year olds are grouped together). So some background: As most of you know I have an eight year old daughter Isabella. We have a no TV household, meaning we don’t have cable TV. Gasp! I know unreal. However, I firmly believe that little ones need to be out and about not sitting in front of the TV. But on the other side we have three Mac’s in our house, and Isabella loves adding stuff to her Wiki. Add that to my strong interest in social media and social networking, it was only a matter of time before we came across Club Penguin.

At first I was curious more than anything. Isabella a huge animal lover really liked the idea of being able to have her own penguin. So online we went to search it out. We created our account, as a parent you have to create the login and password so your child can not log on without you, very cool. You get to choose from several servers in various countries, nice. Isabella could also play with her mates in the UK as well as here. So then came the part that made me go hmm…Become a Member. Isabella being the curious sort asked, “What is a member? Do I want to be one of those mom? What do we get if we are one?” I said, “Let’s just see how it goes first.” So here we are in Penguin world roaming around and looking for stuff to do. Well, in Penguin world things cost money. And you are only given 100 coins to start out with. So Isabella said, “Mom, we need to find out where to make money.” Well in Penguin world you don’t really know where to go to make money, and then we realized we could make money playing games. Hmm…earn money playing games, not sure about this.

Isabella determined to stock up on coins went to work. Then came the question from the other room “Mom, I don’t want a big screen TV, can I buy another Iigloo instead?” “Or, Mom can I lend some of my money to another Penguin like Max so he has some too?”(have to inject a side note here: Isabella and I are very active on Kiva, so i think that is where she thought of the lending idea, still not too sure since I’m still trying to fully understand the eight year old mind)

Then I got to thinking, having your child waddling around in a virtual world where they play games to earn money, can only buy material things with their earned coins left me seriously disheartened. So being the active sort, I said, “Isabella why don’t you send an email to customer support and ask what else you can do with your coins.” So Isabella said, “Ok that is the place that fixes stuff right, Mom?” too funny. So Isabella and I sent her note to customer support and waited. Have to say the response was not totally unencouraging basically - It’s on our product roadmap and we need to make sure bullying won’t occur.

So Isabella is waiting to see what they come up with and Club Penguin has lost it’s glow, not sure it would be the same for other kids. But for Bella she’s waiting. As she says, “I just don’t have much to do besides, play the games to get the coins and buy stuff, it’s not that fun, I like the making friends part though.” I’m hopeful that they add a new way for kids to earn coins and other things to do with your coins. Have to say though the big parent discovery is that you now get to be a parent in both the real world and a virtual one, talk about a HUGE job…