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Meetup: Women in Mobile

Women in Mobile Meetup – Cool Apps

Walking into Hacker Dojo at the start of the Women in Mobile event there was a loud buzz in the air. Voices bouncing off the concrete floor and reverberating through the open space — a large gathering of women and several men mixed in. And…. (sniff, sniff)…the smell of pizza in the air! (thanks PayPal) Ah, the scent of a meetup. Smiles as I greet Seema and Grace at the registration desk.

After introductions to APWT by Shirley (surely you know Shirley Lin!), and Lilian Tham — they hand it over to the moderator, Ishita Majumdar (Executive In Residence, Plug-N-Play) to talk about how these women entrepreneurs in mobile got started, what they/their companies are doing, and their advice for creating your own products and startups. I walked in with no expectations, and walked out excited by possibilities — the Silicon Valley magic.

Here’s the 3 women presenting and what I found cool about what they do.

  • Georgi Dagnall, CEO, GeoGad
  • Bess Ho, ninja mobile developer with 10 apps in the app stores and speaker at Web 2.0
  • Katie McMahon, Marketing Maven,  SoundHound

Geodad – Your personal mobile tour

My first thought — isn’t this just a mashup of maps + tours? It reminded me of running routes that I could do and share with others. Ok, it’s an app, and it also has a web interface for creating personal tours. You mean I could create a personal tour of my home town Port Kells? (Ok, not really a town…more of a corner) Upload commentary, pics, and other stuff that I find cool about it? Ok, I could get into that.I could create my own personal tours around my interests and share it with others? Like a chocolate tour of SF? Ice cream tours? Coffee houses in tour of the South? City of Durham could put its Black History tour on this thing. Very cool.

But hey, I could use it for more than just tourist tours — I could use it for onboarding new people, and giving them a tour around a campus, office or facility (it’s based on longitude and latitude).  Hotels could use it to orient their guests/corporate users (could have used this as an event coordinator when I was trying to figure out what was possible in a space.) I could also use it to create an oral history project, combining it with locations. Or have students create their own oral history project! Or the local homeowners associations could use it to create garden tours, walking tours and more and more.

All right I get it, now I just have to try it. It’s completely free too! (Both iPhone & Android versions I think.)

SoundHound – sample sound, find music

SoundHound is probably the best-funded group that was here tonight. And SoundHound has some serious IP behind it. SoundHound  samples your voice, or a tune that you hum, the music via the radio or speaker —  and finds the song, artist, etc, AND link to places where you can purchase it! How cool is that? (The real question is can it understand MY tone-deaf humming?)

Most sound-matching technology goes from sound > text-text > matching. SoundHound does sound > sound-sound > matching. Much harder, many more possibilities.

So I can imagine doing role plays based on this sound matching. Stay with me — instead of a branching structure, imagine an algorithm that responds to tonality, to specific words, and creates a response based on that. Possibilities of more general role plays. Many things to play with here.

Very cool app. Download – there’s a freeium version or premium version at low cost. Both iPhone & Android.

Bess Ho – app creator, promotion-hacker extraordinaire

Bess Ho is amazing. That’s all I can say. Comes up with app ideas, does quick market research to see what’s out there, then if a competitor exists, designs to its failings, and then starts coding. Her advice: (a) Keep it Simple (2) Do One Thing Really Well (3) Make it Fun.

And she practices guerilla marketing – like showing up at the Palo Alto Festival with her music app, and just talking her way into performing, then near the Apple store in Palo Alto and just stop people on the street to promote her app. This girl is hacker to the core. Great energy, makes anything seem possible. Bess Ho rocks. You can follow here on twitter @bess.


That about sums it up –> check out twitter and search for the hashtag #apwt (or if you’re lazy, click here.) If you’re interested in following the APWT (Asian Professional Women in Technology) group here the Facebook page.

Posted in games, tools.

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3 Responses

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  1. Shirley says

    Thank you for the wonderful report. These speakers are pretty awesome. Bess’s stories especially arose many understanding laughs alright.

  2. Christine says

    Thanks for the fabulous recap. Love your inventive ideas on how to use these apps! Look forward to seeing you at the next APWT event!

Continuing the Discussion

  1. Tweets that mention Meetup - Women in Mobile - Cool Apps | wander@will -- Topsy.com linked to this post on May 19, 2010

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bess Ho. Bess Ho said: interesting post about me here from APWT women mobile panel http://wanderatwill.com/2010/05/meetup-women-in-mobile/ […]



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