And I am so interested in hearing exactly how much time you spend – how much exactly is an “extraordinary amount of time finding those qualified women and asking them to speak?” A few days? A few weeks? A few months? And how many women, exactly? A dozen? Half a dozen? Three? And how do you actually go about doing this? What is your methodology for identifying, tracking down and approaching women? How hard is it, really?

1) As a conference organizer, you spend a disproportionate amount of time looking for women speakers. Put another way, using the same “find speaker” methodology you will discover one woman for every ten men (this seems roughly tied to the proportion of women in tech?).

2) In my experience, women have recommended other female speakers to us, although it does not usually fill the gender gap.

3) Speaker discovery methodology usually involves a combination of the following (among other less common things, of course): reaching out to obvious high-profile individuals in your particular topic area (3-4), posting a submission form on your web site and sorting through approximately 60-70 (at least) speaker submissions, 99% male, and reaching out specifically to women in your network and asking them if they know other qualified female speakers.

4) You CAN fill half your speaker roster with women, if you really do work hard at it. But it raises interesting questions, especially if you are hosting a paid educational conference, because for whatever reason, my experience teaches me that you are unlikely to find as many women speakers who are equally qualified to speak on their given topic as you will find male speakers. To clarify: this is not to say that said female speakers don’t exist, but rather that given the constraints of the event business, finding them is part of a trade-off. So you often need to decide if you want a 50/50 balance in your speaker list or a more engaging conference.

So why bother?

Honestly, the most engaging event you can put together is one where both men and women, who are equally qualified, are equally involved. As an event producer, it’s your mission to work your butt off to put together the best possible experience for your attendees.

Tech events are part of the tech ecosystem, and are certainly part of the cycle. How many women attend tech events? It’s related to how many women are on stage. How many women are on stage? It’s related to how many women are in tech. How many women are in tech? It’s related to how many women attend tech events.

In short: Aliza, we are constantly, unendingly looking for women to speak on topics relevant to our audiences. And it is, unsurprisingly, hard to take an industry that is, by everyone’s numbers, extremely male dominated, and make it appear fully balanced on stage. But it’s worth working on. Judging by your Twitter account it seems like you might have some interesting stories to tell – please send me an e-mail and let’s talk about what you can share.

There are a lot of cool people in Seattle doing a lot of cool things.

One of the takeaways from running parties of all different sizes over the past few years (for work) is that if you bring the right crowd together, most of the other details don’t matter as much as you think they do. If you’re putting a mixer together, the first thing you should do is find a few people that need to attend, and make sure you accommodate them. Any venue will do, any crowd will not.

Seattle is good at pulling a fun crowd together for drinks. I don’t know if it’s the weather that makes us all a little unhinged, but it’s a very vibrant community and I’m excited to catch up with people tonight.

Aside from one rogue article in the New York Times, which Gruber cleverly refutes, my evidence is all anecdotal and logical deduction.

I’ve been an AT&T customer and a T-mobile customer, and I switched to AT&T in 2008 for the original iPhone On the AT&T network I’ve used the iPhone 2G, a Blackberry 8900, and my new iPhone 4. (and a nokia in 2002, but that’s going back too far). on T-mobile i used some clamshell phone followed by an SDA running Windows Mobile.

Without a doubt, the best calling experience has been with AT&T, using my Blackberry.

Switching straight from the Blackberry to the iPhone 4 has made the difference very pronounced and obvious. In places where my Blackberry made calls quickly and flawlessly I wait 5-10 seconds for my iPhone to initiate a call, whether or not I’m holding the device (I haven’t experienced the kind of signal bar loss that many people have written about).

Gruber seeks to blame AT&T via the logical question: ”

In a word: no. In my experience Apple is not the type of company that would sacrifice industrial design for the sake of making phone calls, especially when they sell plenty of phones anyway, and even Walt Mossberg is blaming AT&T.

The iPod touch is in itself proof that he “phone” component of the iPhone is relatively unimportant. I’ve written this whole post from my iPhone, which is a far more pleasant experience than my Blackberry.

So my point is not “OMG I hatez teh iPhone,” nor is it that I’m going to stop using it. It’s just that I don’t think a Verizon based iPhone is going to solve anyone’s phone call issues.

And the reason I go to all this trouble every time I want to search is that it annoys me to no end that the last search string is retained in the searchbox after the search is performed.

Why in the world do I want everyone and anyone who looks at my browser or computer screen to see my most recent search string?

Why do I check in? It’s not for the points, and I don’t really care if I’m the mayor unless the mayor gets a discount. I check in so that I can share my location conveniently with my friends on Twitter.

With Foursquare, I navigate to the venue, compose my tweet, and it comes pre populated with a host of geo information about the *venue* – not just about me.

So really when I use Foursquare I’m just using Twitter, enhanced.

I also suspect that a significant portion of 4sq’s value is tied to Twitter right now, because they don’t have a great built in “stream” audience (yet). Who knows whether they’ll be successful in creating that independent community.

But as long as Foursquare is providing an enhacwd interface to Twitter, and driving use of the Twitter network, they won’t kill Twitter.

Heh.

“we all had a joke about Steve. If you wanted to get him to agree to a new idea, something that was a good idea but that he hadn’t thought of, you told him the idea, and then just let him reject it. A couple of weeks later he would come rushing over to you and tell you how he had just had a great idea and would proceed to tell you the same idea you had told him before.” As far as Steve was concerned, it was not his idea, so he had no problem with it being incorporated into the design.

Then take this:

1998: A revolutionary, lovable Apple PDA with little squareish icons, on-screen keyboard, common icons across the bottom, single-tasking, and the best compact keyboard of the decade, complete with an ungainly but functional fold-out case. The Newton.

2010: A revolutionary, lovable Apple PDA with little squareish icons, on-screen keyboard, common icons across the bottom, single-tasking, and the best compact keyboard of the decade, complete with an ungainly but functional fold-out case. The iPad.

And the fact that the Newton, created by John Sculley, was steved when Jobs took over as interim Apple CEO in 1997…

…and it makes you wonder where the iPad came from ;)

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• It feels like the future. The screen is crazy crisp and gorgeous, the iPad is as responsive as everyone says it is
• iPhone apps on the iPad are ok but not great. I’m going to use a dedicated app pretty much whenever possible.
• Netlfix on the iPad is brilliant but basically the web UI
• The larger screen really does make the web browsing experience unbelievable. The speed of the processor means that i can basically touch type on the digital widescreen keyboard.
• The Wall Street Journal app (you need a WSJ subscription to use it) is one of the most innovative presentations of news I’ve seen so far.
• I wish it had a camera.
• It can’t replace a laptop because there’s no real file management (i.e. I can’t upload a picture to this blog post via the web interface)

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- J

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