LSQHA Blog Reviews

Doing research to attract more women to our Mobile Summit on May 7, 2010 , I revisited some of ReadWriteWeb's past articles on gender and tech. In January, we discussed " 'Sexy Girls,' Smart Women and Tech " in an open thread where we asked for readers' opinions and had an open discussion on women's issues, like whether it's true that some good-looking women get flaunted as sex symbols, while other women get overlooked, are underpaid and not taken seriously. Sponsor Commenters, among other really interesting discussion points, asked for stats to back up statements. In Harvard Business Review Magazine this month I stumbled across a rather depressing recent study [ PDF download ], which, on the bright side confirms that looks have little to do with pay scale, ability to secure a leadership role, or smarts. However, on the dark side, it showed gender still very much does matter. Findings of the study show women's transcendence to leadership roles has not occurred, inequality remains entrenched in terms of pay, career advancement, as well as career satisfaction. Shockingly, study respondents weren't just any other Joanne or Joe Schmo in the workforce. The study tracked the smartest and brightest grad students from elite MBA programs, around the world, from 1996 to 2007. These are motivated and talented men and women. In the words of Harvard Business Review, "Pipeline's Broken Promise, examines the past two decades in which leaders have counted on parity in education, women's accelerated movement into the labor force, and company-implemented diversity and inclusion programs to yield a robust talent pipeline where women are poised to make rapid gains to the top. " The survey took into account experience, time since MBA, first post-MBA job level, industry and global region of work at the time of survey, and found that: Men were twice as likely as women to be at the CEO/senior executive level. Men's pay out paced women's. Men significantly outpaced women moving up the career ladder when starting out in similar level roles. These findings are not specific to any industry, including technology. Even I was shocked looking across this Microsoft org chart . For some reason seeing things in list format made the differential of men to women in Microsoft management even more striking. Note this isn't for lack of women candidates as women make up almost half (49.9% in October 2009) of the workforce - no, we aren't leaving work to have babies either! I am stereotypical myself. I personally have clawed my way all the way to middle management after 20 years working in the tech industry, while men younger than I hold more senior roles. Is this simply because I am a woman? These findings would say, "Well, yes." So what is it about men and women? Will there ever be a time where women aren't looked on as women in the tech industry, but just as smart people with skills that fit a certain role, best? I personally know a lot of extremely smart women, all of whom that have had to go out on their own to make it above the glass ceiling. So is it just men in management holding us back? I find this study pertinent, not just to my own work experience, but also as we are a month away from the Mobile Summit in San Francisco on May 7 . Looking to encourage a stronger female presence, we felt compelled to get out and ask women and men alike the following questions: Who are the most fascinating women working on the mobile Web? As a fascinating woman in mobile industry and working on the mobile Web, what topics would you find of interest? And yes, finally... Why do you think women when compared to men are STILL underpaid, less likely to be in a senior role, and less likely to be satisfied with their careers? Your thoughts and comments please. Also see these related articles on other websites from Clay Shirky , Jeanne of Feministing , danah boyd and Gina Trapani , which have some interesting comments and counterpoints on why the glass ceiling still exists. Photo by Faakhir Rizvi . Discuss

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Open Thread: Women in Leadership Roles Yet? No. But Why?

Will popular websites, especially those from news and entertainment companies, work on the iPad? Apple, in an arguably brilliant PR effort now has an answer: an online collection of iPad-Ready sites . The Cupertino-based maker of iPods and iPhones made a bold, potentially Internet-changing decision when it decided that the upcoming slate computer known as the Apple iPad would not support Adobe Flash technology. This browser plugin, used across the Web for everything from streaming video to casual games, is slowly being phased out by HTML5, the next revision of the core markup language used in the creation of Web pages. The video support included in the upcoming Web standard requires no downloadable, installable plugin in order to work. But HMTL5 is still new, and details - including what video codec it will support - have not been ironed out. Sponsor Apple's New "iPad-Ready" Collection Initially spotted by the eagle-eye bloggers at The Next Web , the new "iPad Ready" resource available at www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad is a collection of websites that now officially work on the iPad. According to the site's description, this collection includes websites that take advantage of standards like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. In other words, these are sites that have been designed just for the millions of new iPad owners expected to be online by the end of the first quarter this year. Included in the list are CNN, Reuters, New York Times, Vimeo, Time, Major League Baseball, The White House, Virgin America, Sports Illustrated, Flickr, People Magazine and TED. Site owners who want their website listed can use the included submission form to be added to the list. Also, at the bottom of the page, there's a link to the Safari Technical Library documentation detailing how to get your Web content ready for the iPad . Flash vs. HTML5: Did Apple Make this a War? This "iPad Ready" site's launch seems all the more relevant in light of yesterday's news from Apple's newest rival Google : the Internet giant announced it would begin integrating Flash into its Web browser Google Chrome . Was that a shot at Apple? Or was Google genuinely interested in making Web browsing less complex for everyday users? It's a valid question. The debate about Flash's future on the Internet is so hotly charged at the moment, that even WSJ reporter Walt Mossberg seemed afraid go into detail in his otherwise stellar, in-depth iPad review . The only mention he made was this: "I probably used the laptops about 20% as often as normal, reserving them mainly for writing or editing longer documents, or viewing Web videos in Adobe's Flash technology, which the iPad doesn't support, despite its wide popularity online." Perhaps he honestly doesn't think the iPad's inability to display Flash content will be an issue...and maybe it won't be. But to ignore the burning question that many soon-to-be iPad owners have - that is: will my favorite websites work? - seems like an oversight at best. These days, the Flash vs. HTML5 discussion is being framed as a "war" (and if you read through the comments of a post detailing video performance test results, you would think it certainly is). But the truth is, HTML5 isn't displacing Adobe Flash anytime soon. It likely will...eventually...but that day is years away. This is according to Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire , whose company is helping website owners prepare for iPad. The issue, said Allaire, is that the percentage of Web browsers that support HTML5 is "tiny," and those that do so haven't yet settled on one video codec as the default. Until there's uniformity in the implementation of HTML5 video, he said, publishers will offer multiple versions of their websites, dependent on what device, browser and operating system is in use by their website visitors. So in the meantime, that means desktop Web surfers will see Flash, iPad Web surfers will see HTML5 on some sites and the " Flash broken blue lego " elsewhere. Even if that's the case, it won't, in the end, take away from the iPad's relevance in the new age of touch-based computing. It will just be a temporary setback until the rest of the Internet catches up with its own future. Discuss

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Worried About Flash on the iPad? Apple Tries to Ease Your Fears

Unvarnished is a new website where you can post and read anonymous reviews of people and their professional performance. That sounds a little frightening, doesn't it? TechCrunch has been writing about it for days and the company just started rolling out invites. See Michael Arrington's thought provoking, if extreme, post Reputation Is Dead: It's Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions and Evelyn Rusli's review Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation . I told Unvarnished founder Pete Kazanjy that I thought he was doing more harm than good, I heard his response and now I've tried his site. It turns out that reality is a lot more complex than the hype. Unvarnished is both more intellectually interesting and less freakishly prurient than you might think. Sponsor Above: A "trusted reviewer" badmouths VC Dave Hornik. But the criticism isn't anything you couldn't read elsewhere (like TheFunded ) and is pretty debatable in its validity. This was the only criticism of a person I could find on the site in early browsing today, and it's pretty tame stuff. Unvarnished could be positioned as a place you can anonymously slam your former bosses or a place you've got to visit in order to see what's been written about you. It could just as accurately be described as LinkedIn with teeth: minus the sappy reviews people post to each others' profiles on that site. LinkedIn with teeth makes it seem more mundane, and that is the truth of the matter. Browse around a little and you'll calm down pretty quickly. Come back later when you're considering working with someone and you may find it useful. Could the service be abused? It could, but first let's look at how it works. Unvarnished operates on top of Facebook, which is both good and bad. You have to get a request to be reviewed sent by a Facebook friend in order to create an Unvarnished account, you have to use FacebookConnect to log-in to the service and you have to have demonstrated a certain amount of activity on Facebook in order to prove that you aren't setting up a fake account just to post critical reviews of people on Unvarnished. At many points in navigating the site you're encouraged to post reviews of your Facebook friends. The reviews you post are tied to your profile, but readers and the people you review cannot trace back from your reviews to see who posted them. They can only see your aggregate activity history on the site and how highly rated your other reviews have been. In other words, if you've reviewed a lot of people and many other users have approved of your reviews, then your next review is going to carry extra weight in the minds of readers. Chronically judgmental but on balance positive? You'll love Unvarnished! The downside of the close Facebook integration is that one more time Facebook is centralizing our identity while we navigate around the larger web. Expect to see many more sites do this, though, as it makes authentication really easy and means that every new user automatically arrives with demographic, social and taste data. Sorry OpenID and distributed data portability, 400 million people voted for Facebook. Opportunities for Abuse You can't delete things that get said about you on Unvarnished. It's like Yelp but for individuals, and many businesses already hate Yelp. What's to stop people from saying untrue, unkind, unfair and unattributed things about you? Not much. "A lot of people say 'I don't want people to make reputation claims about me'," site founder Kazanjy says, "but they also say 'I certainly would like to consume repuation claims about other people'." People on the site have the opportunity to say bad things about you and your supporters have the opportunity to respond. You might be a bully with a posse of bullies who have your back. Your critics might be marginalized people who make no use of Unvarnished other than to shed much-needed light on your abuses of power, or they might be people with an axe to grind who jump onto the site to post terrible, untrue things about you. Kazanjy's contention is that a low reputation on the site and a group of vocal supporters can overcome any unfair criticism of you. That's not very convincing. Unvarnished as a Democratic Force When he says that both the offline world and the web at large work in the same way (anyone can post anything about anybody) but that Unvarnished is merely centralizing this discourse, then things start to get interesting. Few people have the knowledge, the broadcast platform or the search engine pull to really post a free-flying slam against a person online in a place it could be easily found. The relatively few people who could do that have an unspoken agreement not to do so. It would be uncouth and open them up to other powerful people doing the same thing to them. Unvarnished aims to create one centralized, democratized place to learn about a person's reputation. Suddenly even people who are not powerful public figures will have a single, prominent place to post their criticisms of others - and they'll have very little disincentive to doing so. Is that evil? Perhaps it is, a little. Is it a little bit genius as well? Time will tell. Unvarnished invites have begun filtering through Facebook today. If you see one, take a few minutes to check it out. Discuss

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Unvarnished: Is Pete Kazanjy an Evil Genius?

Wikipedia , the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it's a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5th, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit. Sponsor Easier is Better The upcoming design, code-named "Vector," has been in use over the past six months by a group of 500,000 beta testers. Included in the update are changes like simplified navigation, a relocated search box, clutter reduction and even an updated Wikipedia logo. Also, all English Wikipedia users will soon be able to create PDFs and printed books from Wikipedia articles, a service previously available only to logged-in users. However, the most interesting change is how Wikipedia is making the page edit functions easier. A new toolbar will be provided which lets editors more easily insert links and tables and an included cheatsheet will help users access the most commonly used functions. These editing changes launching next month are only the beginning, notes Naoko Komura on the Wikimedia blog . Later this year, the site will see even more radical revamps to the editing process. This includes the following: Reducing the amount of wiki code users see in the edit system and making it possible to change data in tables and information boxes through simple forms. Cleaning up the edit page itself, to use more understandable language and get rid of confusing clutter. Providing a new outline tool to navigate a long article while you're editing it. Wikipedia Needs More Editors Now the question is whether or not these changes will encourage more people to actually edit the online encyclopedia because, surprisingly, few users actually do. Wikipedia is often heralded as a shining example of how there's power in the "wisdom of the crowds," a phrase which implies how a diverse collection of individuals can be more accurate than individuals or even experts. However, the dirty little secret about the supposedly "crowd-edited" online encyclopedia is that, even though anyone and everyone can edit it, few do so. In fact, only 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits . Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has even been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers." Given these statistics, it's no surprise that Wikipedia wants to make some changes. Recent reports point to slowed growth , a downward trend that may be partly to blame on the increasingly complex editing process, according to some experts. Dr. Ed H Chi, a scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center in California, told the Telegraph that the site had become a "more exclusive place", where only a handful of the most experienced editors were responsible for editing and maintaining the site. In other words, Wikipedia became a site that wasn't representing the "wisdom of the crowds" anymore, but "wisdom of an elite group." That in, turn, may have caused the slowdown. Over the past several years, the number of new articles per day has dropped from 2200 in July of 2007 to 1300 today. Is It Too Late? Or Just in Time? By simplifying the editing process, Wikipedia could potentially reverse this trend -

I have a few different friends who are trying their hands at entrepreneurship; some have met with investors already, while others are closing in on their meeting date with anticipation and uncertainty. Based on hearing some of the things they were doing to prepare for their meeting, I thought it would be wise to roundup some of the best pitch advice I've come across not only for them but for the other first time entrepreneurs out there who may not know what typical VC pitches are like. Sponsor Pitches range in length from 5 quick minutes to a half hour or more, but what I have consistently seen while researching this topic is that no matter what length the pitch is, the key is to keep things simple and understandable while not patronizing the VC. But don't take my word for it, here is advice from six venture capitalists on various aspects of the all important pitch. David S. Rose - How to Pitch an Angel (or VC) If you're looking for "Pitching VCs 101," then look no further than Rose's 2008 TED University presentation on how to give presentations (embedded below). Rose, who has raised and invested millions through pitches, leads Rose Tech Ventures which after educating prospects on the art of the pitch saw investment rates climb. "Our investment rate more than DOUBLED, and we have funded over $35 million into more than 50 companies during the past six years," writes Rose. Highlights from Rose's speech include taking the VC on an emotional journey during your pitch by telling a story, and remember that they are there to evaluate you more than your idea. Chris Dixon - Pitch yourself, not your idea Investor and entrepreneur Chris Dixon reiterated Rose's point last November that VCs are more interested in the quality of the team than the quality of the idea. Ideas are subject to change, but how people work and interact are pretty solid and unmovable, so remember to be self-aware, he says. "What you should really be focused on when pitching your early stage startup is pitching yourself and your team," writes Dixon. "Of course a great way to show you can build stuff is to build a prototype of the product you are raising money for. This is why so many VCs tell entrepreneurs to 'come back when you have a demo.' They aren't wondering whether your product can be built - they are wondering whether you can build it." Mark Suster - Who Should Attend Your VC Pitch? Mark Suster, who has written extensively on pitching to VCs, brought up an interesting decision entrepreneurs need to make before their pitch: who is coming? Suster argues that for most situations just having the CEO is plenty, but that showing "the depth of your bench" can be beneficial too. However, there are several pitfalls he warns you to avoid when you start including more people in your pitch. "If you bring the full team make sure that you construct the entire storyline in advance so everybody knows how you plan to have the meeting flow," writes Suster. Who is going to cover which slides, who is going to field which questions, how are you going to answer difficult questions (which you should write down in advance and practice). Definitely don't "wing it" - have practice sessions to see how each member performs. Honestly I would say a good 50% of team presentations that I see seem like they really haven't practiced the flow very well amongst team members." Guy Kawasaki - The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint Though originally posted in 2005, Kawasaki's rule of 10/20/30 in presentations still holds true. We've all seen those terrible presentations with way to many slides and way too much text that is way to small. The slideshow isn't supposed to do the talking for you, its merely a supplement to the wisdom that will come flowing from your voice. "I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It's quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I'm in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc." In another related post, Kawasaki points out this presentation as a great example of using visuals and text together with expert ability. It's not a great example of a VC pitch, but the presentation does a great job of conveying the message of the presenter. In other words, be more like Steve Jobs - that man knows how to pitch! Don Rainey - The Top 5 Rookie Mistakes in Pitching VCs Enough about what to do right, lets talk about what not to do. Among Rainey's list of the top mistakes made by novice pitches is presenting terms to the VCs, being late to the meeting, or asking VCs to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). But the number one issue Rainey sees all too often is when the entrepreneurs come to pitch a VC firm without any prior knowledge of the firm and its investments. "One doesn't need be an expert on our history, track record or portfolio but a little knowledge can go a long way. Just a little awareness on our companies, professional background, and current boards, can drive efficiency for the person pitching an idea," writes Rainey. "If I've had three companies in Internet Advertising, for example, you can probably skip explaining simple concepts related to it. If one lacks that awareness, it wastes time AND undermines credibility. Plus, you look [like] someone who doesn't do what it takes to succeed because, in this instance, you haven't." Bijan Sabet - Startup Presentations Sometimes your aren't the only company pitching to VCs in a single day. In the case of this week's Y Combinator Demo Day, 26 startups presented back-to-back with one intermission. This means that by the 26th presentation, which could be you, the VCs in attendance are likely itching to get out of their seat and go meet the other entrepreneurs, so how will you grab their attention? Bijan Sabet says humor can be a great ice-breaker and get your audience engaged with your pitch. "A number of entrepreneurs used humor in their presentations in just the right amounts. Too little and the presentation can by dry. Too much and it's just, well, a joke. But the right amount is a wonderful way to engage your audience," writes Sabet. "It's obvious that Paul Graham, the founder of YC, plays a huge role in helping these (mostly) first time entrepreneurs find their way and put together their presentations. And it's also obvious that these founders practice their pitch over and over again so they can nail it in a room full of strangers." So what have we learned? Remember that you are just as much if not more important than the idea you are pitching, figure out before the pitch who is coming in the room and who is saying what, make sure your slides aren't poorly designed, avoid common rookie errors, and don't be afraid to spice things up with a dab of humor. Of course, there are a countless number of lessons to be learned before pitching VCs, but hopefully this has covered the basic and most important ones. If you need an example of a well designed pitch deck, Mint.com (which was eventually bought out for big bucks by Intuit) recently made an early deck of theirs available on slideshare. If you have other suggestions for first-time pitchers, leave your thoughts in the comments! Photo by Flickr user Dawn Ashley . Discuss

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The Art of the VC Pitch: A Roundup of Advice from 6 VCs