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Silicon Valley’s Designing Women Give Tips On Talking Tech

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By E.B. Boyd (Silicon Valley Reporter, Fast Company) Some of tech's leading designers gather at 500 Startups to inspire the next generation. Step one: Learn how to code.

On Friday, a dozen of Silicon Valley's top women designers gathered at 500 Startups for a sold-out mini-symposium on everything from design best practices to how best to chart careers. The event titled "Women in Design" was put on by The Designer Fund. The idea behind the gathering, Designer Fund co-founder Enrique Allen tells Fast Company, is to "inspire the next generation of designers through storytelling."

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Prioritizing Startup Projects: Stop Worrying About The Cupholders!

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By Laura Klein (Principal, Users Know) Every startup I’ve ever talked to has too few resources. Programmers, money, marketing...you name it, startups don’t have enough of it.

When you don’t have enough resources, prioritization becomes even more important. You don’t have the luxury to execute every single great idea that you have. You need to pick and choose, and the life of your company depends on choosing wisely.

Why is it that so many startups work so hard on the wrong stuff?

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Google Provides Grants To Code For America And Samasource

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) In a blog post today, Google announces $40M worth of grants given to non-profits and academic institutions during the holiday season.

Congratulations to entrepreneurs Jennifer Pahlka (Founder & Executive Director, Code for America) and Leila Chirayath Janah (Founder & CEO, Samasource) for being among the recipients of Google's philanthropic grants.

Check out the Google Gives Back website to find a full list of grantees of over $100M donated by Google

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Trade In Your Recalled Jawbone UP Product For A LARK

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) Less than a week after Jawbone issued a recall of their new UP product, LARK is offering a trade-in offer.

What is LARK? Founder and CEO Julia Hu created a wristband that wakes you silently so your partner can sleep in, and tracks your sleep to help you discover how you compare.

From LARK's website:

We get why you got a Jawbone™ UP. You want a healthier life and a better night’s sleep, and you want it now.

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A Chilean Startup Founder Takes On Penelope Trunk

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By Michelle Veronese (Co-Founder, Novelo)  

In her latest guest post for TechCrunch, Penelope Trunk, the co-founder of Brazen Careerist, argues that there are so few women in tech because women are inherently interested in raising a family, particularly those in their 30’s.

Unfortunately, Trunk’s article fully misses the heart of the problem facing women in technology today, and she is instead causing more harm and division than any good.

It is correct to say that women

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Meredith Perry Harnesses Beamed Energy For uBeam

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Women 2.0 talks to Meredith Perry, Founder and CEO of uBeam, a company aiming to charge your electronics without the cords. Meredith graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2011 with a degree in Paleobiology. Women 2.0: How did you first come up with the idea for uBeam? Meredith Perry: My school, The University of Pennsylvania, has an invention competition every year, and I told myself I wanted to invent something cool before I graduated. I kept an idea book

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Siri Demonstrates High-Tech Gender Gap

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By Sady Doyle (Staff Writer, In These Times) Last week, tech and feminist blogs erupted with a startling story: Siri, the iPhone 4 app that responds to voice queries with pre-programmed or search-engine-based replies, refused to direct its users to abortion clinics.

Not only that: Apple’s Siri seems programmed to respond to sexual or sex-related questions almost invariably as if the user were a certain kind of cisgender man.

If you tell Siri you’ve been raped, she wouldn’t tell you to go to a hospital, or to the police; if you tell Siri you want

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Women (And Girls And Boys) Should Do Startups

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By Zach Holman (Ego Surfer, GitHub) Yesterday Penelope Trunk wrote a guest post on TechCrunch that told us all to “Stop Telling Women To Do Startups”.

Pardon me while I do just the opposite.

Startups don’t need to suck.

Trunk’s article has a lot of arguments that just aren’t relevant to the problem of getting more women in startups. Most of them are an indictment against startups in general

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It All Adds Up: TheoryMine Founder On Math And Entrepreneurship

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By Flaminia Cavallo (Founder, TheoryMine) I am not very different from any other young women you come across. I don't like waking up early in the mornings, and I like staying up late chatting with my friends. I like shopping and nights out. I like working out, but I like staying in to watch a movie even more. I love to travel and I count the days until my next holiday. I like mathematics and computers, which has always felt natural.

That's why I was once surprised by the weird faces that people pull when asked the inevitable “so what did you study?” question. I answer with a wry smile “Artificial Intelligence and Maths." I am now very used to it.

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Know Your Users: Beautiful Art Needs Beautiful Apps

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By Sian Morson (Founder & CEO, Kollective Mobile)  

I have always been in love with technology and I have always been independent. Together, those two things have brought me to where I am today –- CEO and Founder of Kollective Mobile, a mobile development agency. When I look back, every job I’ve had has prepared me for my role as a founder. It was a long road, but I’m convinced that every failure, success, irritating client and difficult project now provide me a much-needed reference when issues arise while I run my company.

I studied Film at NYU. For a few months after graduation

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Hillary Clinton: Increasing Women’s Participation Dramatically Impacts Competitiveness And Growth Of Our Economies

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By Shelly Kapoor Collins (CEO, Enscient Corporation) “To achieve the economic expansion, we all seek we need to unlock a vital source of growth that can power our economies in the decades to come… By increasing women’s participation in the economy and enhancing their efficiency and productivity, we can have a dramatic impact on the competitiveness and growth of our economies,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the APEC summit.

As the founder of a startup and ardent fan of Secretary Clinton, I 100% agree with this statement. I am a female entrepreneur who runs a technology startup, a mother to two young children both under the age of five, and wife to a C-level exec husband

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Watch The Women 2.0 Startup Weekend Documentary

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By Douglas Latimer (Director, Women 2.0 Startup Weekend Documentary) A year ago, I was in a Digital Video Intensive Class at SFSU and we wanted to do a group film project. Dave Kockbech pitched the idea of documenting Startup Weekend.

At the time, I had never heard of Startup Weekend. Dave proceeded to explain it was a bunch of hackers hunched over laptops writing code... This didn’t exactly inspire notions of a grand film in my mind.

Regardless, I decided to do some research. What I found amazed me and has continued to be a part of my life since that day.

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Nominate “Women 2.0” for “Biggest Social Impact” Today!

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)  

TechCrunch contributor Vivek Wadhwa identified a catalyzing moment at the Crunchies, the glittering awards show for the tech set hosted by TechCrunch.

His wife accompanied him to the Crunchies awards show and asked the perennial question, "But where are the women?"

Indeed -- the entire night of announcements, celebrations and awards one stop short of a ticker tape parade -- featured only one woman CEO onstage. That woman was

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Game Changers: The Women Who Make Video Games

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By Keith Stuart (Contributor, The Guardian)  

Three of the biggest video game releases this winter have something unusual in common. Gears of War 3, featuring space marines fighting aliens, Uncharted 3, an Indiana Jones-inspired game, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a dark science-fiction adventure, were all written by women.

According to research by Tiga, the trade body representing the UK games industry, women make up just 12% of the development workforce in Britain –- a percentage reflected by similar surveys in the US and Canada.

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Stop Telling Cats To Do Startups

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By Mark Birch (Entrepreneur, Birch.co) Editor’s note: Penelocat Trunk, writer and founder of Brazen Cattist, wrote a post that was published with a number of obvious errors. We regret the errors and have posted the following version with corrections.

We need to get more dogs who are running tech startups instead decide to be stay-at-home puppy sitters.

What do you think of that? That’s what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more cats doing startups.

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The Women 2.0 Editorial Staff.