This is my dumping ground for quotes and other stuff relating to the wonderful world of digital & communications.
Women constitute 52% of the total European population but only one-third of the self-employed or of all business starters in the EU.
At Stanford, just under 21 percent of undergraduate CS majors… are women.
London is by far the largest startup ecosystem in Europe, even though SV is three times larger
London has been slow in adopting mobile as a new trend. It has 30% less startups than SV or NYC in the mobile space
Despite London being the first-choice for US Valley companies to base their European headquarters, there is the danger it could be supplanted by the rapidly emerging Berlin ecosystem
London has a funding gap (81% less capital raised in the second stage compared to Silicon Valley) for early stage startups before product-market fit. This is likely due to a lack of Super Angels / VC funds
London is the female tech entrepreneur capital of Europe. It has the highest proportion of female tech entrepreneurs in Europe:
London – 9%
Madrid – 3%
Paris – 7%
Berlin – 3%
Moscow – 7%
Lamarr’s invention came about, Rhodes said, because “she was keenly aware of the coming war. She was glued to the newspaper, reading the stories. … When German submarines began torpedoing passenger liners, she felt at that point, ‘I’ve got to invent something that will put a stop to that.’ “
Her idea involved making a radio signal “hop around from radio frequency to radio frequency,” Rhodes said, to interfere with signal jamming. Thus, a torpedo could be radio guided with less fear of having the signal jammed.
She and a partner obtained a patent, then gave it free of charge to the U.S. Navy. Brilliant, yes?
The Navy “basically threw it into the file,” Rhodes said. Later, however, the idea of frequency-hopping was resuscitated by the Navy, and “then the whole system spread like wildfire. The most well-known application today is Bluetooth.”
“Most of the female students were unwilling to go on in computer science because of the stereotypes they had grown up with,” said Zachary Dodds, a computer scientist at Mudd. “We realized we were helping perpetuate that by teaching such a standard course.”
To reduce the intimidation factor, the course was divided into two sections — “gold,” for those with no prior experience, and “black” for everyone else. Java, a notoriously opaque programming language, was replaced by a more accessible language called Python. And the focus of the course changed to computational approaches to solving problems across science.
“We realized that we needed to show students computer science is not all about programming,” said Ran Libeskind-Hadas, chairman of the department. “It has intellectual depth and connections to other disciplines.”
According to Girls Who Code, while women earn 57 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States, just 14 percent of computer science degrees go to women — and less than 10 percent of venture capital-backed companies have been founded by women.
Women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. But they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups, according to Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs. That disparity reaches beyond entrepreneurs. Women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies, and 22 percent of the software engineers at tech companies over all, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. And among venture capitalists, the population of financiers who control the purse strings for a majority of tech start-ups, just 14 percent are women
Whereas so-called mommy blogs were once little more than glorified electronic scrapbooks, a place to share the latest pictures of little Aidan and Ava with Great-Aunt Sylvia in Omaha, they have more recently evolved into a cultural force to be reckoned with. Embellished with professional graphics, pithy tag lines and labels like “PR Friendly,” these blogs have become a burgeoning industry generating incomes ranging from $25 a month in what one blogger called “latte money” to, for a very elite few, six figures. According to a 2009 study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, 23 million women read, write or comment on blogs weekly.
