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How To Make a Simple Facebook App in 20 Minutes

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By Anna Billstrom (Developer, Momentus Media) Facebook apps can be as complicated as Frontierville, or as simple as a Facebook app that simply announces to all your Facebook friends, "I'm pregnant!"

Last weekend, a dozen SF-WOW attendees built from scratch a Facebook app to announce a pregnancy to their friends. The workshop is based on a blog post I wrote: Making a Simple Facebook App in 20 Minutes.

We covered the core aspects of Facebook development, namely OAuth2.0 and the Graph API.

Check out the Facebook app we built in 20 minutes! Visit http://apps.facebook.com/impregnant and the blog post with instructions on how to get your own Facebook app up and running in 20 minutes. Be sure to check out the links at the bottom of the post ("Further Reading") for access to FB API documentation.

Intro slides from the "Making a Simple Facebook App in 20 Minutes" workshop are below.

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VC Funding: It’s Time to Invest in Female Entrepreneurs

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By Laura Vanderkam (Writer, 168 Hours) New York - It was a scene straight out of the 1990s: A web start-up, flush with nearly $1 million in new investor cash, threw a party at a downtown bar to toast that success. But here's the 2011 twist to the story of DailyWorth, a daily e-mail newsletter of financial tips: the founder, Amanda Steinberg, isn’t a 24-year-old male Stanford dropout. She’s a thirtysomething mom of two who is determined to change the image of what a serious entrepreneur looks like.

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Partner event: The Lean Startup Machine in SF

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The Lean Startup Machine is back in San Francisco on May 20-22, 2011 -- spend the weekend with the stars of Startup Lessons Learned before the big day. Speakers include Eric Ries (creator, Lean Startup methodology), Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits (Co-Authors, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development), Hiten Shah (Co-Founder, KISS Metrics), Laura Klein (Principal, Users Know) and Janice Fraser (CEO & Principal, LUXr). Apply for your spot at Lean Startup Machine by May 7. For more details and to apply, click here -- and tell them Women 2.0 sent you!

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“I learned to program in an Intro to CS class in high school. Thanks Mrs. Elia!”

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By Jean Hsu (Android Developer, Pulse) I recently came across I Learned to Program..., a website for which anyone can submit a sentence-long story on how they learned to program. I expected to see a plethora of stories about learning to program at age six, but after refreshing the page 20 or so times, I was surprisingly pleased to see a wide range of stories. Some were predictably about learning to program on a TI-86, or hacking around on the family computer at a young age. Others learned to program in a high school class, or in college. Interestingly, most male contributors' stories seemed to fall into several buckets: getting an early start, programming basic games, programming on a graphing calculator, or having a computer as a kid. Most female contributors' experiences were very different, and seemed to be mostly about learning to program in a high school or college class or getting introduced to programming through another interest (design, biology, music, etc).

I'm currently reading Unlocking the Clubhouse, which discusses these exact trends. It's inspiring to see these stories of women who, like me, hadn't been programming their whole lives and ended up in the industry. At the same time, I can't help but think of the many women who fell through the cracks (what the book refers to as the "leaky pipeline") because they felt like they didn't have enough experience, and couldn't catch up with their mostly male peers (of course, this probably applies to many men without previous programming experience as well).

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ILearnedToProgram Shows Computer Science Diversity

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By Emily Goligoski ("In Conversation" Video Producer, Women 2.0)

Part motivator and part story showcase, the new ILearnedToProgram project has earned nearly 500,000 pageviews from developers, students and general Internet users in its first weeks of existence.

By inviting people to share their experiences and finish the sentence “I learned to program…”, it’s capturing and sharing the work of featured programmers, a third of whom are women.

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Fresh Off Her Appearance on the White House Website, Raissa Nebie Talks Startup Incubators and Node.js

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  Women 2.0: Great participation on the Startup America panel last week, which was held at Facebook HQ after President Obama's Town Hall. Did you get to meet the President?

Raissa Nebie: I did not get to meet the President in person, but it was an awesome experience to watch him from only a few feet away. Overall, the event was great. I really enjoyed connecting with my co- panelists and learning about their experiences. Scott Case, the CEO of the Startup America Partnership was a fantastic moderator and made the experience a lot of fun. I think I speak for everyone when I say that we all enjoyed sharing our founder stories. Hopefully, we each inspired someone to pursue an entrepreneurial dream somewhere.

Women 2.0: Our favorite line from the event was your joke: "[I thought] you come to San Francisco, you throw a rock, you hit an engineer, you start a company". Jokes aside, did you share any words of wisdom at the Startup America panel?

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Notes from AppNation 2011 by Eventabulous Developer Sophia Perl Who Pitched Her Mobile App Onstage

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By Sophia Perl (Founder & Developer, Eventabulous) AppNation 2011 was fun. I got a free pass, a demo pedestal, and a chance to pitch on stage. My 3 minutes of fame on stage was up so fast, but I loved the opportunity. What more can a girl ask for?

Also, my Eventabulous iPhone app got more downloads. Thanks to Women 2.0 for hooking me up!

Here are my notes from AppNation:

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A Midwest Entrepreneur’s Ride from Idea to VC Funding

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By Katie Hill (Founder, Commuter Advertising) Started with an Idea on a Train in Chinatown

The idea for Commuter Advertising came to us on a "L" train in Chicago coming back from a White Sox game. The train stopped at Chinatown and it dawned on us, "Wouldn't it be cool if a restaurant could distinguish itself by broadcasting a message that would pull people off this packed train and into their restaurant." At the same time, the Chicago Transit Authority was facing funding challenges so it seemed like a good way to get money into transit and a viable new business venture.

We voluntarily left our jobs in the midst of the worst economic crisis in 30 years

Leaving wasn't easy; I loved my company and my role as a technical manager at Arc Worldwide, an affiliate of Leo Burnett. Friends and family thought I was nuts to leave a corporate job two weeks after the stock market went bust. But I was encouraged by the three-year contract we had just secured with our first transit client, the Greater Dayton RTA, in Dayton, OH. With a lot of passion but no guarantee of revenue we moved our business and our life to Dayton. I'll never forget collecting our first check for the new media product we created. Even better was getting our first renewal from an advertising client and the sense that it's working.

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Ask The Wrong Question, Get Meaningless Answers

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By Chris Shipley (Co-Founder, Guidewire Group) Oy. My head is about to explode. I'm at an event listening to a panel that had such wonderful potential. I suppose it was inevitable, though, that an audience member would ask that question that makes my eyes roll like an exasperated teenager: "Why are there so few women in tech?"

For some seemingly interminable time, the audience member and the panelist (when she can shoehorn a word in) discussed the question. Amid the not-so-veiled hypothesis that women are back-stabbing bitches who perceive all other women as competitors who must be crushed under their stiletto heels, Sara made an insightful observation. As graduating men and women enter the job market, they are at relative parity in pay and status. "But somewhere along the line, a choice is made. Things change. I don't know what it is."

Really? This from a woman who is pregnant? I'm going to guess that the birth of that child might help identify the "choice."

Which leads me to my point. Beyond being tiresome, this relentless questioning of why not more women entrepreneurs or why not more women in tech is fundamentally the wrong question. We should be asking why more men aren’t choosing full-time parenting. The fact is that women stop out of their careers to raise children at a substantially greater rate than do men. And they tend to do it at exactly the time most professionals hit the inflection point of their careers.

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Partner event: APPNATION 2011 for Mobile Developers

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APPNATION (April 27 - 28 in San Francisco) is an ambitious and bold thought leadership conference and exposition focusing exclusively on the consumer applications revolution and global app economy. Featuring speakers and exhibitors including Digital Chocolate, Marvel Entertainment, Jumptap, Nielsen Mobile, RIM, Intel, Outfit7, Sequoia Capital, WIP, Fox Broadcasting, Greystripe, Norwest Venture Partners, and Wall Street Journal. On Thursday, April 28 (1:15pm - 1:50pm on the 2nd Floor Mezzanine at Moscone South @ APPNATION) join us for the "Monetization Strategies" panel with open Q&A - presented by Women 2.0 & Founder Labs!

Shaherose Charania (Co-Founder, Women 2.0 & Founder Labs) will be leading the discussion on monetization of mobile apps with the following panelists:

  • Cathy Edwards (Co-Founder & CTO, Chomp)
  • Jean Hsu (Android Developer, Pulse)
  • Rob Coneybeer (Co-Founder & Partner, Shasta Ventures)
  • Raj Singh (Entrepreneur-in-Residence, SRI)

Check out mobile developer Sophia Perl presenting her mobile app Eventabulous at the AppCircus on Wednesday, April 27 at 5:20pm.

We will also be showcasing 5 mobile developers from the Women 2.0 community in at the APPNATION expo with their own developer demo pods:

DEVELOPERS: Submit your app and have a chance to pitch at the AppCircus@Appnation on April 27! Powered by dotopen, this is a unique global traveling showcase of the most creative and innovative apps presented by their creators during some of the most influential international events in mobile/web. AppCircus is open to developers, startups and any other organization and offers each participant a chance to get a nomination to the annual Mobile Premier Awards at Mobile World Congress. Click here for full details, rules and submission information. Deadline for entry is April 17.

Women 2.0 members save 40% with discount code "APWN40".

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Uncategorized2 min read