The Next Web

Women speakers at Web 2.0 expo SF?

Written on April 12, 2008 – 11:49 am
Simone Brummelhuis, writing about women on the web

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As the Web 2.0 conference in San Fransisco is approaching, I thought to take on a look how many ‘female Steve jobs’ will appear on stage. By counting the list of 200+ speakers, 20 are women, so that’s 10%. Among them is somebody whose according to my definition a female hero, Tara Hunt, CEO of Citizen Agency.

Tara Hunt (photo: Randy Stewart / Stewtopia)

Interesting is that of those 20 women, at least 10 still need to submit their bio (10 days before the actual conference), while of the male speakers about 99% have their bio submitted. Come on women, write down your achievements, or if you are to shy, hire a personal branding agency.

Of the keynote speakers, I only counted 2 women. One of the underlying ideas of these series is to promote that more women put themselves, or are asked, on stage. Not only could these women act as role models for aspiring Internet entrepreneurs, another effect of making women visible in the Internet industry from the beginning, is that it may prevent devaluation of the industry at a later stage. Indeed, what has happened in some industries when women entered or became visible at a later stage is that the whole profession started to devaluate, in status as well as money wise. This happened, for example, when women entered the education workplace or became judges or doctors. But since the Internet industry is only 5000 days old…, an thus we are at the beginning of an era, it is in the interest for men and women not to let this happen in this industry.

So, as a tip to the organization of Web 2.0 expo San Fransisco, here are a few American female heroes from my database: Patricia Gallup , CEO of PCConnection. Jean Armour Polly, founder of netmom.com, and the first woman elected to the Internet Society board of Trustees, currently working on connecting rural libraries to the Internet. In this time of social networking by kids a valuable contributor to the discussion. And just to name a few other American female heroes: Nancy Cruickshank, CEO of Videojug, Michelle Pelluso, CEO of Travelocity, Dawn Lepore, CEO of drugstore.com, Rebecca Blood, author of a weblog handbook, Janet Hanson, founder of network 85broads.com, Lisa Sounia founder of Dopplr, Joyce Chung, early stage investor at Garage Ventures, Peggy Liu of Mustang Ventures and Joanna Rees, also an investor. Who else is ready for last minute booking?

ceo, female heroes, founder, speakers, Web2expo, women

4 Comments »

TheNextWeb2008 Update: Love, Internet Access and Attention

Written on March 30, 2008 – 2:31 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

In only 3 days The Next Web Conference 2008 will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We will post short daily updates about speakers, initiatives and events here.

A lot of people have been asking us if we would provide Internet access and Wi-Fi during The Next Web Conference 2008. We sort of avoided the question and sometimes even said ‘No’. This has caused concern with some people so I thought it would be a good time to explain our ideas about the subject. But first THE answer to the question: “Will there be Wi-Fi for participants at The Next Web Conference 2008?”

The short answer: Yes.

The long answer: Yes, and a lot more! We will have a special area with wired ethernet connections to a 100mbit Up and Down connection, the fastest connection we could get. This area (front left at the main conference area) will also have enough power sockets to keep everybody online all day. In addition, we will have Wi-Fi connections for the rest of the audience people. We plan to split these up in several groups of 50 people who will all be able to connect to their own access point.

This means that if one of those groups takes the network down, at least the other groups will still be online until we restart the device. And if the Wi-Fi fails we always have wired backup for you. One thing: we DO expect the wireless network to go down. It is our experience that Wi-Fi becomes extremely unreliable when you get more than 30 people in the same room connected.

We hope that the speakers will be so extremely inspiring and captivating that the use of computers will be limited to live blogging, twittering and digitally reporting about the speakers on stage.

The Next Web, just like the current web, runs on love and attention.
We hope you will give our speakers lots of both. ;-)

attention, connectivity, internet, speakers, thenextweb2008, wifi

9 Comments »

Conference Bay: Dutch entrepreneurs stimulating Singaporean start-up culture

Written on March 5, 2008 – 2:34 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.

This week we’re interviewing Arnout Mostert, a Dutch entrepreneur who lives and works in Singapore. Together with Frank Bomers he founded Conference Bay. This is a service that aims to make visiting, organizing and speaking at conferences a more pleasant experience. They do that by offering innovative online services to conference organizers, delegates and speakers such as an online bidding tool for tickets and an online booking application. They’ll soon launch a speakers section where speakers can create their own profile page.

How did you come up with the idea of Conference Bay?

“When I was working in Marketing for Shell in London during the the late nineties, I got the chance to join a new business that was set up to investigate the opportunities that new media could bring to a company like Shell. I attended quite a few conferences at the time and was amazed how often I would get calls or emails from the organizers offering me the ‘exclusive’ opportunity to bring a colleague for free, which basically is a 50% discount. One day I was sitting at a particularly boring conference and after finishing off the Mentos we sketched the idea for Conference Bay on a napkin. Basically, we borrowed the Priceline model where people can name the price they’re willing to pay for something.” (more…)

booking, conference bay, Events, five questions for start-ups, speakers, tickets

2 Comments »