Introducing the WITI Virtual Hackathon! Sign up now to show off your "entrepreneur" style!
In 1935, three decades before the Equal Pay Act, IBM recruited its first women in the workforce. IBM's founder, T.J. Watson Sr. promised women, "the same kind of work for equal pay." Since then, IBM has been acknowledged as a world leader in its commitment to women both in and out of the workforce. In 2014, IBM was named one of the 諺Best Companies for Women”by Forbes.
It should come as no surprise that IBM has partnered with WITI (Women In Technology International), a powerhouse dedicated to women in tech, on their first ever Virtual Hackathon. WITI started in 1989 as The International Network of Women in Technology and, in 2001, evolved into The WITI Professional Association, the world's leading trade association for tech-savvy women. Today, WITI is the premiere global organization empowering women in business and technology to achieve unimagined possibilities.
I personally invite you to join Bluemix, IBM's premier cloud development platform, and WITI for an international hackathon where developers, scientists, students, and entrepreneurs will gather virtually to build software, applications, hardware, data visualization and platform solutions focused on the Internet of Things and wearables. The hackathon runs throughout the month of May and is open to open to all.
Follow these easy steps to get started and get hacking!
1. Register for the hackathon at ibm.biz/witiregistration
2. Register for your free Bluemix trial at ibm.biz/witihack
3. Participate in Bluemix virtual education sessions and review technical resources here: ibm.biz/witihackathon
4. Start building your app and submit it for review by May 27th.
Prizes include IBM Cloud Credit, a 1-hour virtual meeting with me, 2016 WITI Summit tickets, free WITI memberships and more.
As a board member of WITI and mentor to several women in IBM, I am thrilled to see this type of collaboration and can’t wait to see the apps you come up with!
No Fear Friday - Take that Risk!!!
Our short and sassy Friday message is ... take that Risk!
There's no success without risk. Everything good has some risk associated with it. This does not mean you don't look and evaluate reasons you might have challenges or even small failures along the way, but plan your journey with clear goals.
Make sure you are flexible in how you solve the minimal and big challenges along the way. Don't let them derail your overall ambitions!
Learn, learn, learn!!! Each of these mistakes help you to learn.
I love Barbara Corcoran's quote: "Failure is what I'm best at." Of course, she is wildly successful because she learned from her failures!
Top 5 Personal Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs!
I was reading a few articles on entrepreneurship and the secrets of success of the entrepreneur themselves, vs just the company. Here's the Top 5 Personal habits that I found in common across all the articles in both first time entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs as well!
- Prioritize! 81% of the top entrepreneurs (value of $3.2M or greater and successful exit) make one the night before for those priorities that are most important.
- The Early Riser! 44% get up and going an average of 3 hours before they officially start "work"
- Get Help! 77% of those who are successful have an adviser!
- Networked Connectors. 79% network 5 or more hours a month.
- Return that call. 86% return all their calls in the same week they were received.
Some great habits here that I will adopt as well !!!
BlueMix Winners from the NASA Challenge!
During the NASA challenge, we named IBM BlueMix most Innovative solutions. For the most innovative use of IBM Bluemix per City participating they received $12K of Cloud credit and if the winning team is a qualified startup, they will be granted up to $120K of Cloud credit in addition to up to 80 hours of technical support and assistance over 6 months by an senior IBM Bluemix developer.
Judging criteria
• Application originality and uniqueness: 25%
• Usage of Bluemix services and runtimes: 25%
• Solution completeness: 25%
• Business value: 25%
Drum roll please .. and the winners are:
Boston: Asteroid Heroes
Alex Huang, Korina Ysabel, and Mohib Hassan
They developed a solution to help classify asteroids. Today this is a manual process requiring hundreds of hours from volunteers. This solution provides an automated mechanism using pattern recognition on existing photometric data and then displays the results visually in a graph. It should save countless hours of manual drudge work. Used the Node.js runtime on Bluemix.
Carmel: Launch Window
Mr Jarvis works for Software Engineering Professionals service organization providing market research, software developers and operations professionals to clients. His solution used the Ruby Sinatra runtime and the Mongodb service to provide a website hosting video (the SpaceX CRS-6 rocket launch from Nasa Public videos)) and a social media response mechanism to allow comments.
Glasgow- Tie! Two Winners: Icarus and Lost in Space
1. Icarus (Javier Herrera) used the Python runtime to deploy a website that allows you to find the International Space Station from whatever location you choose, giving you the direction and inclination in the sky to find the station.
2. Lost in Space (Jamie Stevenson, student) also addressed the International Space Station. They used the Ruby on Rails runtime with a PostgreSQL plug-in to get the Nasa data and returning a visual representation of the ISS orbiting the earth, allowing you to find and get more information on the various station modules.
Irvine: Water Matters
Quan Chau
Used the Node.js runtime and the MongoLab service to analyze data to help track water usage and drought conditions on the planet.
Instanbul: NTD - Natural Threat Determiners
Eray Hangul used the PHP runtime and the mysql service to display a catalog of earth hazards which you can view by type (atmosphere, land, etc) and date.
La Paz: Fanatic Code
Amilkar Shegrid Contreras Castro used the node.js runtime to display set of asteroids orbiting the sun at a distance that makes them a threat to earth. If you move your mouse over an asteroid, you get details on the asteroid (name, orbital radius, period, etc) and comets that
London- Tie! Two Winners: Space Watch and The Great British Space Race
Space Watch used the Node.js runtime, MQ Light, Mobile Application Security and the Android SDK to deploy a mobile app that allows a user to find objects in the night sky.
The Great British Space Race used the Node.js runtime and wanted to use Cloudant to persist their data, but ran out of time. Their solution allows you to compare your travel time to the speed of the New Horizons probe currently en route to Pluto (the fastest spacecraft ever launched from earth).
Madrid: Kepler Quest
Carlos Hayek used Node.js runtime, Push service and the sql database to create a game (similar to flappy birds) where you attempt to keep your spacecraft from running into various stellar objects.
Nairobi: eyeSpace
Nicolas Kisundu connected to a cloud hosting service which contained images and audio recordings and then used mysql and twilio services to do some twitter analysis and display all this on the screen.
New York City: FirstHand
Jesse Lee wrote a solution was using the Node.js runtime and the Node-RED service to gather sensor data from a special glove and its android controller. They hope to expand their use of Bluemix to utilize some of our analytics services in the future.
Noordwijk: Load Interactive
Davide Ricardo, Joao Abrantes, Gil Filipe, Florian Olivera
Used the Node.js runtime, android sdk, watson speech to text personality insights, and the PHP runtime to analyze speech patterns of streamed nasa content (astronauts, launches, etc).
Pasadena: CatSat
Brian Cottrell created a game using the gamification service where you take a satellite view of the earth and identify and discover natural events as they occur in your field of view.
Sao Paulo: Maintaining Life in Space With The Most Important Ogranism Based on a Story From Rivers and Oceans
no details, on-site mentors awarded prize
And finally our Virtual Winner:
Kelana Jaya (Malaysia): canyousee created a game using the Node.js runtime, redis and mongolab to allow users to practice spotting special events (wildfires, volcanoes, etc) so they can then analyze real time feeds from NASA!
Join me at the WITI Summit! From IoT, to speaker success tips, to millennials ....
[youtube=http://youtu.be/mD9emUMrWIE]
3 Surprises from Millennials on the Purchase Process
I love working with Millennials as well as understanding their purchasing habits.
From IBM's Institute of Business Value's study on Millennials, I had 3 Aha moments about how they like to purchase!
- The world's gone social! Millennials meet with vendors face-to-face during the sales cycle, but they would much rather interact remotely during this initial phase
- In God we trust, all others bring data. Millennials place equal weight on data analysis and the opinion of family and friends when deciding whether or not to make a B2B purchase costing US$10,000 or more
- Millennials are eager to share positive experiences, but very reluctant to share disappointments
These 3 ahas, tell me that in order to meet their needs, we need to:
- Be social in the sales cycle ! Since this social network scene makes the most sense to millennials, consider setting up an internal private social site to gain more input, and answer questions.
- Share data and analytics to assist in the progression! Since millennials want the data, share it! Do your homework to make it valuable but don't forget the "word of mouth" as well.
- Make it easy to shout it from the mountain tops! Since this new generation likes to share positive experiences, make it easy for them to do so. This enables them to become your brand ambassadors!
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