I’m supporting Ada Lovelace Day this year, will you?
Last year, I supported Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology and science.
The team behind it are now planning this year’s effort for 24 March 2010 and they’re looking for bloggers, old and new, male and female, whether you blog in audio, video, images or written word, and from all sectors to sign the pledge to write a blog post about a woman or women you admire in technology.
Last year, 1200 of us wrote blog posts, there was a great amount of press and it was even covered by the BBC News Channel.
I support this initiative, as women’s contributions, for whatever reason, often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned and their faces rarely recognised. So the Finding Ada initiative aimed to do something about that.
It’s a topic dear to my heart, as too often, women are invisible in the mobile industry. Yet as organiser of various mobile events, including the Women in Mobile Data Association, I know there are lots of women in the mobile industry, yet it’s the men in the industry whose voices are heard more often than not. And since women are more than 50% of the mobile phone customer base, it’s increasingly important for women’s voices to be heard and recognised and to be acted upon instead of ignored or sidelined, whether intentionally or not. This is one effort to do something about just that.
So the goal is to reach 3072 names this year – more than doubling last year’s effort. And there’s just over a month to go. There are 72 names on the list at the time of writing, so 3,000 to go. Will yours be on it?
Please sign the pledge at http://findingada.com/ and let all your friends know about it too.
To keep up to date with what is happening:
The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda
on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=253179284089
As much as I love the city, and I really do, I know it’s notorious for pickpockets and thefts. Too many of my friends have experienced this first hand…. like a friend of mine who had her laptop bag stolen and the thief called her up and ransomed it to her for 100 Euros. Or the fact that several of my male friends have had their wallets nicked when distracted by girls flirting with them. Or my pal who was beaten up for his laptop & wallet near La Rambla and ended up in casualty. Or the time when a group of colleagues all used the official cloakroom on site at La Fira during Mobile World Congress when going into a seminar. When they came to collect their bags and coats, they were all there, minus the laptops. Or the time in the expensive, fancy restaurant where a friend had his laptop stolen from under his chair whilst he was sitting on it. Or the one I’ve literally just heard about where they had a load of stuff stolen from their apartment by the ‘welcome’ guy – they got everything back when they challenged him, but even so…
There’s an app for that. Or so the saying now goes. 
We're now coming to the end of the Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition now and we have our 6 finalists. They'll be off to PICNIC next week in Amsterdam to fight it out to win hard cash for their start-up. There's 150k Euros up for grabs so it's a tough one. And there are six excellent finalists to choose from too. It wasn’t easy to get to the final six, but we did. There are three finalists from the UK and three from the Netherlands and there are 3 cash prizes up for grabs out of a total prize fund of 150k Euros.
After a short hiatus, Over The Air is on again this year. It’s a veritable 34-hour mobile fest starting on Friday 25th September at 9am at Imperial College, London. Proceedings close at 7pm on Saturday 26th September.
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