Advocates Unlock the Clubhouse at Google

Google last night hosted another Anita Borg Women in Technology meet and greet with authors Jane Margolis of UCLA and Allan Fisher of iCarnegie Inc. They were on campus to talk about their study Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing describing the trials and tribulations of women in academic computing. This discussion dovetailed quite nicely with an article I wrote last year for the San Francisco Chronicle Paving the Way for ‘Systers’, which explored the declining numbers of women in technology, especially at the managerial level, so I was quite intrigued.

Karl Schoenberger of the Mercury News SF Bureau and I three months ago had a conversaton on Tech Outsourcing and the Dwindling CS Major in Lynne’s Take on Tech. My view as expressed was that the impact of outsourcing, the loss of tech jobs, and parents refusal to pay for science degrees is interconnected. And, as I noted in my Lynne’s Take on Tech observations of Google, Tech, and Dinner a few days prior to my talk with Karl, the Systers were quite optimistic in their enthusiasm for more jobs for women in computing, stating at that time “Despite the doom and gloom headlines about outsourcing, prospects for meaningful jobs in these fields is bright.” Is it still as bright?

If You Can’t Beat Them, Go Lower

I remember when Linux was just gearing up, and many of the Sun people (who started with BSD, remember SunOS?) mocked them. I heard about what a lousy architecture it was (yes, that’s true, but what did it matter to someone who got something working for nothing?), that it wasn’t good enough for enterprise (well I’ve seen a lot of enterprise crap over the years, so that doesn’t wash), and that you’d never get it working or supported (seems that isn’t true either from the look of things).

The problem with smart people is that they can easily come up with a lot of good-sounding excuses when they don’t want to see it like it is, and what it is right now is that people don’t want to pay for free software – and I suppose that’s why it’s called “free”. This hits Sun pretty hard, since they built a pretty nice OS and want to get people to show their appreciation by actually paying for it. So it looks like Sun is taking a page from the Microsoft playbook (you know, “open source is evil, expensive, evil, and did we mention evil”) with today’s announcement.

Lions, and Spyware and Ads, Oh My!

Amusing article in the NYTimes by Saul Hansell and Timothy O’Brien discussing how impossible it is to keep malware, spyware, and adware from infecting kids’s PCs. Not that they don’t keep on trying. “You would expect that you could use these systems in a safe and sane way, but the fact of the matter is that you can’t unless you have a fair amount of knowledge, time to fix the problems and paranoia,” according to a harried computer lab supervisor.

I am impressed with the patience (or masochism) of the average American. After the 10th time painstakingly removing Wild Tangent from the kid’s PC in 1999, we decided to take a different approach. We switched the kids to BSD!

Fun Friday – Just Stand Right Here and Pitch

Well, just for the end of the week giggles, this press release came in for an “interactive CEO Pitch ‘video blog’… For CEOs that want to create brand leadership in their market space and attract new customers, strategic partners and investors, the CEO Pitch videoblog is a very powerful tool. In essence, CEOs can leverage their time by making their pitch available at any time of the day from anywhere on the planet”. Sounds supersonic.

So, what do you get, really? Well, one Internet elevator pitch video plus a page to view it plus a “rate this CEO Pitch” button and a wiki for comments (uh, oh – don’t know if I’d like my pitch page scribbled on by self-appointed critics – let them get their own page). Still, sounds pretty good, but how much? $2,995US. Ouch.

Check out MinutePitch – Your Video Screen on the Web! from , one of our partners. They offer five video pitches per month (because maybe your business isn’t stagnant but actually growing) done by you at any time via email (no appointments to keep or scenes to reshoot) with your own private page and program guide and email announcement list. It’s under your control – not someone else’s. Plus they offer professional guidance on how to improve your pitch. And it is a better value for your money.

But if you want to pay a lot more, I’m sure there are plenty of other people who’ll help you with that.

New Ventures, Pitches, and SJSU

Last week I wandered over to SJSU to listen to their panel on “The Entrepreneurial Experience: what starts up start ups?” as part of their gearing up for their Neat Ideas Fair. One of the panelist, Derinda Gaumond, workit.com founder (a business events calendar) is also a FWE member, and I and others wanted to cheer her on.

I’m actually quite familiar with the SJSU College of Business business plan competition, since I was a volunteer last year and saw a lot of interesting posters and heard some fun student pitches. I’m pleased they’re doing it again.

Last year’s SJSU New Ventures Fair pitch competition was quite interesting, since you can be more open to ideas and more forgiving of mistakes when presented by someone young and inexperienced.

TCP, Hold the Congestion Control?

In an off-list discussion in the protocols interest groups, I got involved in a rather deep discussion of packet rate, congestion control, network neutrality, jitter and choices in Internet design, which are actually quite interesting to share.

A little background here – one person asked if it was true (it is) that the cwnd (congestion window) internal stack variable doesn’t have an immediate impact on the network, because TCP updates its actual rate only once per RTT in the congestion avoidance phase, so the cwnd += SMSS*SMSS/cwnd update with each ACK is only an internal calculation. You got that?

Which went on to the question posed to me – “While I now believe that it would actually be ‘legal’ according to the spec. to implement a TCP sender like this (no one seems to say that you MUST saturate your window at all times)…”

Wait partner. Going back into the Internet Wayback Machine and chatting with some of the earlier worker bees, it turned out it actually started out this way, and congestion backoff fell right out of this.

Send it By Messenger – it’s Faster

A certain very large software company which prides itself on providing the ultimate enterprise solution in Silicon Valley now wins the “Send it By Messenger – It’s Faster” email award.

A manager at that firm sent an email to a private channel for video production. And then waited…and waited… Where was the movie?

I wanted to know that myself. So I checked the logs and found we hadn’t received any email! What happened to it? As he investigated on his end, we watched and waited, until the email popped in at 1:34pm. He was sent our email after processing and deployment to the site successfully at 1:37pm. So we got it, produced, uploaded, and displayed it. All in about 3 minutes less some odd seconds.

However, we found it took about 2 hours to get the email from his company to here. As my Physics 110B professor used to say when someone was very dullwitted, “Talk about phase lag”!

The moral of the story – before you blame the receipient of the email for blowing you off, maybe you ought to check first with your firewall guardian.

Or as the manager himself put it sheepishly afterwards, “We are the cobblers children”. However, for shoemakers they have pretty ritzy digs.

Progressive Venture Dinner for Women Entrepreneurs

Last spring I was having coffee with a business journalist in Palo Alto, and we wandered onto the topic of why women find it hard to obtain institutional investment, how difficult it is for women to be taken seriously, and finally, how not “looking like them” can preclude consideration of a candidate company, because it’s easier to talk to people you relate to like yourself. So, what do we do about it to “level the playing field”?

The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs (FWE) Venture Dinner upcoming in Newport Beach, CA is one of the very few opportunities for women to pitch their companies to investment, with FWE-provided infrastructure and bootcamp. In contrast to other venture forums such as Art of the Start (sponsored by Garage Ventures), this is a venue where women are presenters, organizers, and judges, and where being a woman doesn’t mean you’re virtually standing alone.

CEO Pitches, Bows and Optimism

Well, a few weeks back I got to participate in two events. One was watching Rick Bentley, CEO of Connexxed, do his elevator pitch – not in an office, but in front of a plane at the Palo Alto Airport. The second was attending the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs farewell party to Susan Hailey, their retiring CEO, after a successful tenure.

What was neat is that both events were captured with video service (“MinutePitch – Your Video Screen on the Web!“) simply and easily. Rick’s pitch is simply great. There’s nothing like watching a second-time CEO take the helm.

It was so easy to take a digital camera and capture Susan’s farewell captured in Kick-off to Fall (“Forum for Women Entrepreneurs – Bay Area Chapter“).

Fun Friday – Read a Book and Shun the Web

Well, I was chatting with Karl Schoenberger of the Merc about the dismal state of the industry, and he had a great line I just had to pass on: “I am among the 0.35 percent of Americans between 50-54 who are shunning the Internet and re-reading Raymond Chandler novels. No, we don’t have a chat room or blog about it either.”

Lest people think I never have time to read books, actually I do read books – all the time. Give up random TV sessions – the great time waster – and you’ll have plenty of time to use the Internet, read. and even work in media.

I take my kids to the library weekly and we go through about 5 books apiece. I just finished “The Birth of Venus”, a 2003 best seller, noticed today they have a new Sharpe’s rifles book and a prequel to the Mist of Avalon, along with a new Skolian series book (the author is a Harvard physicist, and I always read books by physicists, esp. women, even though Berkeley physics is better since it’s my alma mater).

But that’s not all. My husband William has a large collection of classic scifi from the 30’s-50’s as well, if you’re into unique short stories. Look up “A Logic Named Joe” by Leister if you’re down on the Internet. Totally predicts the craziness (it’s a funny story) and it was writtten in 1946 (appeared in Astounding).

Finally, I also do video commentaries as well. It’s quite different to speak an opinion piece than write one. Good exercise for the mind of a writer and a reader.

So, since it’s Friday, read a book. You’ve got the weekend to enjoy it.