I interviewed Paula Gould, CMO Greenqloud from Iceland @GLAZED Conference. Greenqloud are in the Cloud Computing Space. They power the cloud on renewable energy to help reduce the IT industry’s carbon emissions which has become larger than the automobile & airline industries combine. They tap into the Icelandic electrical grid which is the only 100% renewable energy grid in the world! Their market is global, biggest customer base is US, the Netherlands & Iceland. She spoke about the Iceland community & art is part of the culture. They have tech startups which are extraordinarily creative. She spoke about investment in Iceland for tech startups & unfortunately the community doesn’t reinvest in itself. Startup Iceland are trying to change that. She spoke about a female Icelandic venture capitalist who is investing in a lot of startups.
Information technology
Lucy Sanders, NCWIT: Advancing Technical Women
Video Interview with Lucy Sanders, NCWIT. Lucy is CEO and CoFounder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and also serves as Executive-in-Residence for the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has an extensive industry background, having worked in R&D and executive positions at AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs for over 20 years, where she specialized in systems-level software and solutions (multi-media communication and customer relationship management.) In 1996, Lucy was awarded the Bell Labs Fellow Award, the highest technical accomplishment bestowed at the company, and she has six patents in the communications technology area. You can find NCWIT on Twitter @NCWIT
Funding Support for Women
Recently at the end of a long trek attempting to pitch for funding, I discovered an organization that supports funding & mentors women, Astia. I am only sorry that it was so late in my journey that I discovered them. In UK & Ireland, I found there was an old boys club when I was sourcing funding. I also found the UK to be a nation of what I termed ‘shop keepers’, having come from a background of manufacturing & trading tangible goods, they are risk averse to technology (more intangible) investments. In Silicon Valley they like to fund locals so it is more like a ‘young boys club’.