Category Archives: Dinners

Scheduled Dinners

Registered But Can’t Make It? Please Let Us Know!

We’re very exited about the huge response for next week, when Dinner 4 will be hosted by Google. In fact, as you have surely noticed, we’ve already filled up our available spaces and created a waiting list.

For those who do have a spot via EventBrite, if you discover you can’t make it, please let us know as soon as possible so we can offer that space to someone on our waiting list. Send Stevi the email you used to register.

Thanks to everybody for helping us make sure as many people who want to come can, thanks to Google for sponsoring us, and we look forward to seeing you!

January 28 dinner sold out!

All the spaces we have available for the January 28 dinner have already been claimed! If you haven’t had the chance to register via Eventbrite yet, please email Stevi to get your name on the wait list.

If you have registered but won’t be able to attend, please email Stevi to let us know, so we can give your space to someone on the wait list!

We’re really excited at the high level of interest in this Girl Geek Dinner!

Seattle Girl Geek Dinner 4 is January 28, 2009

Hi all,

We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season.

Google has graciously offered to sponsor the 4th Seattle Girl Geek Dinner! Hope to see you there.

Liz and Stevi

Date: Wednesday, Jan. 28th

Agenda:

6:30 – 7:00PM: Registration, Food, and Networking

7:00 – 8:00PM: Welcome and Technical Presentation by Dorothy Nelson

8:00 – 9:00PM: Networking

Location:

Google Seattle office: 651 N 34th St. Seattle, WA 98103.
View Larger Map

Topic of the evening:

User Experience Design: the way of the Geek Artist
The best of both worlds. How minimalist design aesthetic and “form becomes function” make apps fast and elegant as well as usable, and how having geek skillz lifts a designer out of the “make it pretty” ghetto in product teams.

About the Speaker:
Dorothy Nelson is a User Experience Design Manager at Google. She has been programming and designing user-focused front end interfaces since the mid 1980s, from Bell Communication Research and Oracle to uber-dot-bomb Webvan, then to eBay (designing the selling experience) and Google. In her spare time, Dorothy enjoys traditional “dirty-hands” arts involving charcoal and ink and the non-traditional art of Silly Putty sculpture, as well as horsing around with her non-artistic but lovable husband and Yellow Labradors.
Please find street parking as Google cannot provide parking. There should be plenty of parking options with the lots, street and garages.


Great Fun at the Holiday Seattle Girl Geek Dinner

The Seattle Holiday Girl Geek Dinner was a great success. We saw a lot of familiar faces from previous events, and lots of new faces too! We hope everyone had as much fun as we did.

We’d like to give a big thank you to the Microsoft Entertainment and Devices division for their sponsorship. An especially big thanks to Dina and Megan, who made sure everything ran smoothly and put on a great evening for all who attended. Congratulations to the winner of the raffle prize, an Xbox!

Also thanks to Margaret Cobb. We really enjoyed your presentation on how your team took on marketing the Xbox to women. The demo of Lips at the end really got everybody excited.

We will be announcing the details for our January Dinner very shortly, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite RSS Reader, or via Email!

Margaret Cobb Speaker Bio for December 4th Holiday Dinner

Our December 4 Holiday Girl Geek Dinner is almost here!

We’re excited to have Margaret Cobb as our speaker.

Margaret Cobb, Director of Internet Explorer Consumer Product Management

Margaret Cobb is a wife, mother, sister, daughter and Director of Internet Explorer Consumer Product Management.  She’s been at Microsoft for over 13 years in various functions including Xbox LIVE Product Management.  The last few years at Microsoft she’s spent understanding female consumer audience trends. Specifically, how much money do women control and spend and where do they spend it?  As marketers what can we do to capture the interest and buying power of women worldwide?  Margaret is a graduate of Michigan Tech University where she earned her degree in Mechanical Engineering.  It was working as an engineer that she realized that many of the latest innovations in technology just didn’t resonate with the average female. For over 20 years she’s been working to demystify technology and capture the interest of female consumers.

It looks like we’re going to have a great turnout for this dinner, and we hope to see you there, too! Don’t forget to let us know you’re coming by registering for this dinner at Eventbrite!

Sign up for the December GGD at Eventbrite

We’re already seeing a great response to our announcement of the third Seattle Girl Geek Dinner, scheduled for December 4. Be sure to check out the Eventbrite page and let us know you’re coming!

Microsoft Entertainment and Devices division is sponsoring our Holiday Geek Girl Dinner.

Date: 12/4/08
Time: 6:30pm -9pm

Place: Microsoft, Westlake Terry Bldg
320 Westlake Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98019

Check back here for details on our fun events and speakers! Hope to see you there!

Seattle Girl Geek Dinner No. 3 on December 4, 2008

We can’t let 2008 leave without another Girl Geek Dinner. So save the date: December 4, 2008, we’ll have our third Seattle-area Girl Geek Dinner.

This dinner will be sponsored by Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division, and will be held at the Westlake Terry Building in Downtown Seattle.

As soon as the time and additional details are finalized, we’ll post them here and on our Facebook Group.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Details for tonight’s dinner

Hello Geek Girls!

We wanted to post some information about parking at tonight’s dinner! We’re starting at 5:30 pm at:

Pac Med Bldg
Conference rooms: AV West, East, and Central – 8th floor
1200 12th Ave South, Suite 1200,
Seattle, WA 98144

We will also be doing a drawing for an Amazon.com $100 dollar gift card!

Parking:

  • Parking at the Amazon We highly recommend car pooling, but parking will be located behind the Pac Med building, and is the 1st driveway on your right-hand side after you cross the intersection from 12th Street bridge.  Parking is $5.00 per day.
  • Street Parking:  There is free street parking around the Amazon building, please make sure to note that all day parking is only available on the east side of Golf Street/15th.  Please do not park at The Dr. Jose Rizal Park as this is only 2 hours max, parking on the west side of 12th near the park is typically day, please read signs.
  • Amazon Employees ONLY: If you work downtown, you can connect to the Pac Med building via a Amazon Shuttle for free.  The Amazon shuttles are white, and run by Standard Parking, look for Amazonians with blue employee badges.  Shuttles start running early in the morning, until after our event will be over. We have two locations downtown:
    • International District – The Amazon shuttle picks up on the corner of Weller Street & 5th Avenue across from Uwajimaya every 15 minutes.
    • Downtown (The Columbia Center-TCC) – The Amazon shuttle picks up in front of The Colombia Center (TCC) on 5th Avenue every 25 minutes

Thanks again to Amazon for sponsoring our 2nd Seattle Girl Geek Dinner!

See you tonight!

Liz and Stevi

Girl Geek Dinner #2

I hope everyone has had a fabulous summer! Amazon has graciously offered to sponsor the next Girl Geek Dinner. The date is set for Thursday, September 11th @ 5:30pm.

Please let us know if you think you can come by registering at our EventBrite site.

Stay tuned: more information to come regarding the agenda and guest speakers!

Address: Pac Med Bldg

Conference rooms: AV West, East, and Central – 8th floor

1200 12th Ave South, Suite 1200, Seattle, WA 98144
Click here for map

Thanks!

Liz

Roundtable speaker bios

Tomorrow’s the big day for our first Seattle area Girl Geek Dinner. We’ll be having a roundtable discussion. Our speakers will include Dorothy Nicholls, Randy Granovetter and Rebecca Black.

It’s not too late to join us! Sign up at our EventBrite page to let us know you’re coming. We can’t wait to meet everybody!

Dorothy Nicholls
Senior Development Manager, Digital Media Group, Amazon

Dorothy Nicholls is a senior development manager at Amazon’s Digital Media group. Digital Media is a relatively new group at Amazon that launched Unbox (Video download), and DRM free MP3 download in 2007. Most recently her group introduced the revolutionary wireless reading device Kindle.

Dorothy has over 11 years of experience developing both large scale distributed eCommerce services, databases as well as consumer applications. She spent the first five of these years as a software developer and the last six years in technical leadership. During her nine years at Amazon, Dorothy has personally been involved or responsible for some of the major initiatives that visibly changed Amazon from launching Amazon internationally, moving Amazon’s eCommerce backend to service oriented architecture, Amazon Prime to launching external payments web services. Prior to Amazon, Dorothy worked at Oracle Corporation where she worked on large database applications for Nike and Boeing. Dorothy holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

Originally from China, Dorothy is an active board member of China Tomorrow Education Foundation, a non profit based in Seattle with a mission to improve rural education in China. She is also the occasional web master for the organization. Dorothy enjoys traveling, running, rock climbing, gardening, and reading books on her Kindle.

Randy Granovetter
General Manager for Innovations, Microsoft
IdeAgency

Randy Granovetter, the General Manager for Innovations, is spearheading Microsoft’s newly formed Innovations Team.  Her team’s charter is to champion innovation from across the company, developing community-based techniques and tools for sharing and capturing co-workers new ideas. With the collaboration and integration of feedback from executives, internal experts, and their peers, the IdeAgency provides the innovators with the website, training and support needed to grow their concept from the idea phase to proof of concept leveraging Microsoft platforms and tools.

Before joining Microsoft, Randy was the Founder and CEO of JABRA Corporation, President of Blyth Software Corporation, President of Digital Orchid, Vice President at Qualcomm for QUALCOMM’s Enterprise, Co-Branding and MVNO strategy development in Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS), the QUALCOMM division chartered with driving applications and services for the wireless internet.

Granovetter holds Master of Arts in Language development and Special Education and Bachelor of Science degrees in special education, elementary education and language development from Vanderbilt University.  She has received several industry awards including Star of the Industry by Computer Telephony Magazine and the Distinguished Woman Award by Telemarketing Magazine and Call Center Solutions, Order of the Long Leaf Pine in North Carolina presented by Governor Hunt, the MacUser Magazine Award for Desktop Publisher of the Year and a member of Kappa Delta Pi (Honor Society for Education).

Rebecca Black, Principal Test Manager
Microsoft Antimalware team

Rebecca Black is the Principal Test Manager of the Microsoft Antimalware team.  Her group creates the Antimalware engine and platform that protects hundreds of millions of users from viruses, rootkits, Trojans, bots, worms, spyware, adware and other malware.  The Microsoft Antimalware products include: Windows Defender, the Malicious Software Removal Tool, Windows Live OneCare, Forefront Client Security, and the Forefront suite of server products.  Microsoft Antimalware APIs are also called by a variety of applications, including Internet Explorer and Office applications.

She manages a large and diverse team of full time, contractor, and vendor employees in Redmond, China, and Australia.  She has sixteen years software development experience, thirteen years at Microsoft, eleven years of which have been in technical leadership.  Before Microsoft, Rebecca worked at Symantec, Peter Norton Group in the Product Support and Quality Assurance departments.

Rebecca has a Master’s Degree in Music from California Institute of the Arts.  She paid for college and graduate school by teaching clients how to use software and working as an independent software developer.

When not saving online users from bad guys, Rebecca enjoys scuba diving, reading, gardening, cooking, hiking, volunteering, and attending cultural events.  She is married and lives in Seattle with her husband, two cats and one very old dog.