Contributor: Tech Mistress is not a so young ‘eccentric’, tech loving lady. She likes to share information in funny and witty ways, to inform but yet motivate. You can follow her on twitter – @AbiikeBlogger, and check out her blog – Mumuocrats.
Google has now added a launching pad for female entrepreneurs to their long list of accomplishments. As reported on their blog, they recently began a program called Women Entrepreneurs On The Web, or WEOW. The program was created specifically to help women in India find a voice, it teaches their students how to use web-based technologies and apply them to their businesses.
The program is divided into five groups of study, or “circles”, which were created with different levels of web knowledge in mind:
- Building an online presence: Creating a website, a YouTube channel, and a business page on a social network like Google+
- Collaborating effectively: Tools like Gmail, Calendar and Docs
- Connecting with customers: Hosting Google+ Hangouts, creating and distributing targeted offers and discounts
- Promoting organization: Online product demos, creating viral videos on YouTube, advertising through AdWords and AdSense
- Tracking and optimizing your online presence: Google Analytic, Google Alerts, ripples on Google+, the +1 button, webmaster tools
More than 300 women have signed up for WEOW to date, and Google hopes to up that number exponentially in the near future as word of mouth spreads.
What about LinkedIn?
It has just announced a first Women’s Hackday– DevelopHer, which will be hosted from June 30 – July 1, 2012. DevelopHer is a public competition for female engineers to unite by hacking all night, eating food and doing yoga, meeting judges, and competing in Silicon Valley. The networking site is encouraging engineering students, enthusiasts, professionals, and interns to participate in the event and demonstrate their talents. Women who desire to participate must request an invitation to do so.
LinkedIn engineers describe Hackday as ” a special day each month where every engineer across the company is given permission and actually encouraged to work on something new and innovative.”
Throughout my student life and career as an engineer, I’ve loved participating in programming contests. There’s nothing like the rush of cracking a difficult problem, but over time programming contests started feeling rigid and I realized I was more interested in producing creative solutions to meaningful problems and not just code.This is when I discovered hackdays and fell head over heels for them. – Prachi Gupta, Hackday Master at LinkedIn
Some of the products on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Labs started out as hacks.
We look forward to have such programs here in Nigeria to encourage female tech entrepreneurs and developers. We’d definitely be on the look for such.
Geek In The Pink: Where Is The African Female Developer? - Part 1 | bits.ng
[…] outside of Africa: Y-Combinator, Disrupt, and Silicon Valley as a whole, often have one or two female developers and founders making the headlines, same goes for Asia and South […]