Women Powering the Next Wave of the Web

From Anita Borg Institute Wiki

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • NOTE This was an attempt of a quick transcription. Much of the dialog has been paraphrased to try and capture the discussion. I will try and clean this up later this evening ***********************

Women Powering the Next Wave of the Web

Presenters: Victoria Coleman, Samsung Electronics

Indu Navar, Serus Corp

Angela Biever, Intel Corporation

Susan Mernit, Yahoo!

Anu Shukla, MyOfferPal

Joyce Park, Renkoo

Eve Phillips, Greylock Ventures Capital Partners

A real definition of Web 2.0: The perceived second generation of web based communities (social networking.. wikis.. ) promoting sharing and content ownership of users.

Web 2.0 is all about embracing the power of the internet. Using network as a platform paradigm, the use of user generated and controlled platform. Harnessing the collective intelligence of its users.

Can you give a brief idea of what brought you to Web 2.0?

Joyce: Interested in how people can share their opinions of things with each other. Started in Friendster after the web 2.0 boom.

Angela: Technology is always an involving area and as one of the key leaders in technology, Intel is always right up front and what the trends are and how it is we can best provide end products for our customers... talking earlier about how there appears to be a merger between hardware and software and they no longer fit in nice buckets any more...

Consumer electronic market for web 2.0?

Victoria: Many more people have become franchised and are able to participate thanks to faster more accessible processing powers. From Samsung's perspective, for the people who don't use computers as their main access point for the web, smaller devices, in particular computer devices, are their main point of interest. How can they make the world accessible through these hand held devices to people who may or may not have computers in there home.

What does Web 2.0 mean to you?

Joyce: At the Web 2.0 conference in 2004, it meant API's and maybe some tagging kind of stuff.. the best definition she's heard as it evolved is that we create containers and the world fills them up. Some containers are kind of broad (like facebook) and others are much more specified.

Angela: What am i excited about? what am i see out there? I want to play off making technology more accessible. What we mean is more accessible to normal people. people who don't have computer centric lives. What's really great about web 2.0 is it is the engagement of the users. it's lowering the barrier, making it easier to used. it's making it more personalized. About Containers, it is about trying to tailor these technologies so they're more meaningful to you. I look less at the technologies and more at what these mean to people. There's more socialization.

Young people using chat in social networking people to eliminate email. Variations are emerging. More video distribution which is becoming very interesting. I can watch gray's anatomy on the computer when I forget to set my tvo. I've invested in a great company called Plug that does search for video and audio content.

more and more engagement, lower barriers for usage. I want to see things more seemless, easier, and relevant for individual users.

Victoria: What can we bring to the user that's new. My lab is trying to personalize the television for in teh future they'll be connected so soon a large population will be able to connect. We're looking at content customization ... taking advantage of some of the more advanced technologies emerging from AI which have not so far been deployed in consumer products because they haven't been reliable in the past. As these technologies mature they're more useful. We want to modify the web so that the interface is more intelligent.Another area that I think is important, and if there's one thing you leve the pannel with I suggest it's this one: virtual worlds.. this last year I've been amazed with their rate of growth. I think the next revolution of the web will be coming from that space. Everyone is trying to figure out what to do about this emerging phenomenon.

Web 2.0 has a more participatory nature, with the greater power provided by new technologies , like the ability to create photo blogs on the fly while on vacation from your phone,.. would you say the growth in web 2.0 technologies have created more openings for women?

Angela: I think the barriers of entry have been lowered dramatically. Starting a business can now be done at about 10% of the cost now than it would ahve taken a few years ago. In the consumer internet arena you can test out concepts in a low cost way so that's great because everyone in this room, with a credit card and you're savy, you can start up your own business. The barriers for everyone have been lowered and that obviously includes women. Does that mean web 2.0 is better for women than it is for men? I hate those questions, because if I were to say yes by implication that would mean I think some areas are less good for women than for me which isn't something I'm sure of. I think ti's great that we're seeing young entrepreneurs out there and I think that's a good thing for all of us.

Joyce: So I don't think it's happened yet but I think ti's going to happen if you guys all work hard, you know I'm tired. Two things 1) right now, my generation of female entrepreneurs in web 2.0, I'd say I'm the only one I know who has raised venture capital without being married or dating my cofounder. It's more comfortable for a lot of women adn I think that has to change. Another thing: women on these social networks are much more expressive, they use apps more. Right now I'm developing for facebook and my team just developed boozemail and it's interesting to see how the two sexes interact. men have booze wars, they're sending drinks to undermine the others masculinity. With women, it's more about connections.. they're sharing what they like and trying to connect with other people. So.. your'e going to have to build these things for these more expressive women and the guys running the companies are just not sure how to do that. The final part just comes about knowing how to make your case in the business community. Knowing how to get your ideas heard.. having the confidence to go out there and build what you want to see and that's where I see the gap.

Victoria, people have been saying there's just a lot of buzz and the web 2.0 phenomenon is just a bubble about to burst. Do you think there's more to it?

Victoria: To be honest I dont' think I know what web 2.0 is.. so many different answers. I was recently discussing with someone if we're in web 3.0 now or what is going on. It's a vacuous arguement though. Does it matter? Back in 1993 we had the document web, where we could increase the ease of exchanging documents. Was that 1.0? we didn't use that label but that's what it pretty much was. four years later ew changed to service web... all of a sudden you could go to pizza online. Very different than what you could do before. Corporations began to be the web. Was that web 2.0.. but it was different from teh previous web, and did it save that way? no.. Google came around and you could suddenly find stuff so there were more and more pages and you could find more and more information in this noise with google's precision search. Now we had the searchable web. Was that web 2.0? who knows. that was different. And hwat do we have now? we have this self expression web, where people can make up whatever they want and share it wit htheir friends.. you know wikis, blogs.. broad band made this possible. In many ways, the web is great because it keeps changing. Even though I wouldn't say it's necessarily better for women.. but you know sometimes women have to work out of their home and don't have the options that we have or had in our earlier ears and so having the opportunity to start a business for a couple thousand dollars is just amazing. I don't know if you can stop this creativity of people taking advantage of the web by popping a bubble.

Do you think this web 2.0 is a marketing phenomenon. Do you think the technology is just taking off or it's peaked?

Angela: I think from the technology point of view it's just taking off. so I don't think ti's a bubble in that sense. I think the separate side of that, which isn't necessarily related, is evaluation. Many companies, like face book, think they're worth $15 million..

throughout history we see this pattern that in the short term, these bubbles were over estimated and in the long run, they're under estimated.

There are so many of these websites popping up now and of course not all of them are going to survive. I think the most important thing is making this important to the individual. We're beyond the point of wanting something on the web, we seem to know intuitively it must be out there somewhere by now, the problem now is finding these things and presenting them to the user.

Entrepreneurial issues of being a woman: Joyce; I wont' say it was necessarily hard for myself as women.. but I will say you have to have a strong idea and some experience and support for your idea. I mean my own ideas weren't particularly female but some entrepreneurs do have these female oriented ides.. like babysitting services or hair appointments. And the people you need to make your case to are people who don't need these services.. other people do these things for them so you really have to have some credibility to make them see the potential. Go ot school. get work experience before you become an entrepreneur.

Angela: If youre' thinking about being entrepreneurial I'd say just go do it. I mean the experience you gain is unavaliable. You might not be successful this time but you might be next time. the barriers are so low now that you can just go out there and test things. There's a guy bringing in over 2 million dollars for his website too many fish that he's just running out of his basement in Vancouver. I think sometimes standards are different for women.. a lot of men are the ones writing a check right now so it can be hard. I am working with a female CEO right now and I think she's wonderful but many people say she seems abraisive and I think it was a gender bias.. or expectation that was being violated. Too many women are judging themselves by their gaps. you know, "I don't have this, or I don't have that" but I have seen these resumes of al ot of these guys and they have a ton of gaps. You need to look at what you've got and sell that. I look for passion.. and I also look for reasonableness and credibility and traction.. have you talked to people who might use your service, hvae you talked to advertisers you expect to use your website. They're questions I'd ask of anyone so just get out there and get the feedback and go do it.

Questions: I was wondering if anyone has seen the front page of the paper today. There was a paper, it may have been usa today, and on the front page was dealing with the issue of the pornography industry wanting it's own domain As people who work on the web and allow people to put up their own content, do you think the porn industry should get their own domain? (ie .com .org etc)

Angela; the dirty secret is that many technologies have come out of the porn industry. I haven't thought about whether they should have their own domain but I know there are many technologies being worked on to screen web content for users so they can choose to look at. We've all accidentally stumbled on porn and I wont' let my children use IM because you ca't control that and I dont' want to expose them .. I think technologies are growing to help protect us though. I mean the challenge of user generated content is that we dont' know WHO these users are and we don't know what their agendas are..

Question: do you think the web will segment to have separate domains for different areas

Resounding no

Question: Obviously one of the big problems at the W3C is the lack of female participation, right now the obvious big discussion is html 5 vs xhtml.. what do you have to say about women using the web and the lack of participation in the development of the languages the web uses

Joyce: W3C isnt' reaching out and a lot of people say they're reaching but they're not and it's unfortunate. I think as time and time goes on though is that these processes become more irrelevant. One of the good things I see happening now that too few people are talking about is that users want simple simple simple interaction. they want it quick on their cell phones. One buttons. Desigining for facebook is like designing for dogs. If a dog can't do someting with one paw, then it's too complex.. the users won't use it.

Question: Should education be kept up to date with the current technology or is it moving too quickly to keep up?

There are no courses that are geared towards educating people for this age of technology. Probably, by the time they introduce a course in the universities, in the next couple of years it's already antiquated.

Joyce: you need to join open source that's where it's all going down.