Musings & Meanderings

Getting out when you are physically disabled and in pain isn’t easy, and I haven’t done it enough since the major physical setback last December. Attending my first Geek Girl Dinner yesterday evening was great for me in more ways than one.

This was the first time I’ve been in a room full of mostly women with whom I shared work interests and even passions. After a couple of decades in a business where I worked exclusively with men, meeting mostly men in technology hasn’t fazed me much, but I also happen to like being a woman and am always thirsty for more powerful female energy in my life. Combining that with being able to talk about internet and web development topics was perfect.

A few of the people at my table were Sylvia, Director of Client Services at Broadview Software, a company that makes software for the television industry, Heather, who’s with Tucows and who has the coolest tattoo, and Shelley, a web designer with a lots of experience in accessibility. There were many more geek girls to meet… I look forward to being able to attend again.

The highlight of the evening was entrepreneur Leila Boujnane’s talk, followed by an open question session. Leila told her story, of how she traveled halfway round the world and chose technology over medicine, with sassy wit, revealing both a delightful sense of humor and an indomitable will to succeed. Bravo.

The central concept underlying Idée, Inc. is the identification of every digital image to a level of detail comparable in uniqueness to a fingerprint. This concept is, imo, an extremely valuable contribution to the core application processes we need more focus on in harnessing and benefiting from the full and barely apprehended power of the internet. Applications such as Idee’s visual search technology have the potential to support and enable many rich cultural activities beyond traditional media.

One of the things that intrigued me last night was that this gathering represented a truly wide political and ideological spectrum, yet these differences were of no issue in the face of common interests and dreams for the future. This is one of the ways in which women as a group have more power than they realize, in their natural ability to care and connect.

Thank you sponsor Tucows and to my fellow attendees, for an enjoyable evening.

Has anyone posted pictures?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Toronto, Personal, Internet Society, Happy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.