5 posts tagged “technology”

If you have roughly 100 minutes to spare and really want to be inspired, I cannot recommend highly enough this recent talk at CMU by Randy Pausch. I was literally blown away. His achievement in connecting art and technology is simply outstanding. Thanks for the inspiration!

I was thrilled to get such positive reactions to my previous post from Ustream CEO Chris Yeh and on-air guest David Stern. It left me feeling so much more positive about the event and really glad I spent my Friday night in the chatroom. Of course, a lot of those good vibes disipated when I saw this in my feedreader this morning.

Why ladies? Why? And why, of all the footage he could have shown, did Mike Arrington have to highlight this bit of drunken embarrassment in his official thank you post for the event? (I'm giving these gals the benefit of the doubt that they were actually drunk)

::headdesk::

Yesterday, I was able to "attend" Mike Arrington's TechCrunch9 Party in Menlo Park via the good folks at ustream.tv. While other services were also carrying the event live, I was really looking forward to the much-hyped live coverage with Ustream in particular because of the chat component that lets you interact with the hosts as they stream, a feature I've really enjoyed ever since Jeremiah Owyang of PodTech introduced me to the technology back when Ustream launched in March of this year. Overall, the coverage I saw was pretty good (although there were some issues with the hypersensitivity of the laptop microphone they were using which distorted the sound pretty grossly at times) and there was a fantastic (and unprecedented for many of us) access to David Stern of Clearstone Venture Partners, who chatted with us and fielded questions for close to an hour. So what was my big beef for the evening (besides the sound issues)? The guys in chat, at this major tech networking event, didn't want to talk tech. They kept asking either co-founder Brad Hunstable, CEO Chris Yeh, or interim host Jeremiah to grab "hot chicks" to be on camera. They didn't care if she was waitstaff, so long as she was hot. At one point, they managed to snag Joanne Wan of GigaOm's new NewTeeVee and they simply kept going on about her "assets." They did the same to another gal (whose name I can't recall) who was on for Jaman.com and yet another gal who was on for gomedia.com.  Sure, a few folks like myself were trying to ask legitimate questions. But the guys in chat were literally acting like they'd never seen a woman before. The even suggested they skip the women in tech, who are all supposedly dogs, and just go get some strippers for screen time. I was embarrased for these women who had to read this crap, and I was embarrased to be a woman in this chat room. They weren't much better when guys were being interviewed, particularly if the sound started to crap out, and would start demanding a new guest, preferrably a hot chick.

Now, I know chatroom trolls will be chatroom trolls.(and let me edit this to add that they called every Asian male they saw "Joi Ito" and there was at least one "Boomer" comment in reference to Joey Wan.)  But this wasn't just chatroom trolling. And the hosts of ustream did their best to actually accomodate their "audience" by actively looking for and putting women on camera at the request of the girl-crazy geeks in chat.  These same "gentlemen" were well-behaved and full of intelligent questions when the male VC was in the house. If I were one of those women getting the opportunity to chat about my company on ustream, would the guys actually care about what I had to say about EBSQ or would they be staring at my "nice rack"? Now, I don't mean to say anything disparraging about ustream here. I have the utmost respect for those guys in general, and I love how their platform has grown in the past few months. But I am concerned by what feels like blatant sexism in the tech industry. I've seen hints of it here and there, but last night it was just a little over the top. Am I being hyper-sensitive here? 

I thought I was pretty damned geeky just over a year ago by providing online customer support for members of my online artist community in the postpartum recovery ward (which still probably would have happened had Liam not been stuck in the NICU for meconium aspiration and me bored out of my mind). Just now, a gent on my twitter friendslist has been posting updates of his wife going into labour through the delivery, including the most recent post informing me that the baby is crowning.

ETA: Marc just tweeted the following: Naomi Tamar Nathan - born 7:46am 7lbs. 8oz 20in long - perfect health 10 fingers and 10 toes all in the right places!

Congrats to you and the fam, Marc!

I have noticed that since I got busy watching all of the activity at SXSW in real time roughly 10 days ago, I have been blogging less and less and twittering more. In some ways, I've noticed it fits my lifestyle very well. Who has time to blog deep thoughts when juggling a full-time business, a toddler, and an infant? There's also the admitted thrill of watching the pulse of web2.0 as it happens. The real world is beginning to take notice. I was amused beyond end to see the Tara Hunt/Robert Scoble twitter war make the Wall Steet Journal because I had been watching the thing unfold in real time in my friends' feed. We even twittered our most recent EBSQ Live event as it happened.

Following the lead of innovators 30boxes and mag.nolia, EBSQ even created its own official feed for news and service updates. And now the burden is upon me to explain twitter to a sub-group of people to whom I have had a hard time explaining the likes of Squidoo lenses or why blogging will help their art careers. It should be an interesting conversation that I'll no doubt document on twitter.