Manda QoP

Myles Matheson from Microsoft will be presenting "Demystifying Business Intelligence" and Carolyn Sanders from Fronde Systems Group will be presenting "Scrum 101 - Unleashing the theory!". Tickets are $35, price includes dinner and a glass of wine. Tickets available from www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz . DEMYSTIFYING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE BI is real hot right now, but I often find myself in situations where I have to try and explain Business Intelligence (BI). It’s not that easy to define BI in a universal definition that everyone agrees with. BI is as much a collection of technologies and principles as anything else. My talk will be about how companies use BI and what it means to the IT professional. I will take you through the first principles of BI. The who, why, and how we deliver BI systems today. We will also look at an end to end solution that many businesses already own. Myles is a Solution Specialist for Microsoft New Zealand. He has worked in the fiel...

The next Auckland Girl Geek Dinner event is on Thursday 27th August. We're holding it at GPK in Ponsonby. Tickets are $35. We have two speakers for August, Carolyn Sanders and Myles Matheson. More info and ticket purchasing on the website www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz.

www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz has joined the blackout to protest against Section 92. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Someone raised an interesting point on Monday night at a GGD dinner and I feel they have missed the entire point of Girl Geek Dinners and have also, with their comments, seriously undermined other women who are looking to come out of their shell and interact with other 'geeks'. If you don't agree with what we're doing then don't come to a Girl GEEK dinner, and certainly don't turn up and throw cold water on people, make belittling comments and then moan that it was too technical and you didn't enjoy it. So what is a geek? There seemed to be some confusion. These women throwing around the derogatory comments seem especially confused. So let's refresh everyones' minds. You don't need to be in IT to be a geek folks! It's not an exclusive club limited to women who don't baulk at the thought of writing code. We're a diverse crowd and we celebrate each others geekiness, even if it isn't something we're into. We certainly ...

After pulling an all nighter at the weekend my TechEd talk has been submitted to TechEd for peer review - WOO HOO! All I need now is a fantastic SaaS or S+S case study and feedback from the peer reviews to get it closed off. It feels so great to finally get that completed and means that I can spend the weekend concentrating on making sure the next Girl Geek Dinner is a fantastic success, preparing the GGD slides for TechEd and maybe fit in some shoe shopping as well. :-) PS: http://www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz/ if you want to buy tickets to the GGD event on the 28th. ;-)

Here's an alternative sponsorship request for you! Microsoft & Girl Geek Dinners are hosting a special Girl Geek Dinner at Tech Ed this year on Monday the 1st September. There will be around 300 women at this event at Sky City in Auckland. As a novel form of advertising, NZ Girl Geek Dinners are going to hand out free t-shirts during the Girl Geek Dinner at TechEd and at the TechEd conference itself. This is as an alternative to handing out flyers. The t-shirts will also be available from the Microsoft Stand and any other company stands who will let us cadge some space - hint hint. We are looking for sponsors to help cover the costs of making the t-shirts. Sponsorship for t-shirts will cost $500 per business. In return for sponsoring us you'd get your logo on the back of the t-shirt and on our National and Wellington websites. I am keen to give our existing and previous sponsors first dibs at this and will be limiting the number of sponsors so that the t-shirt does...

We've got another Girl Geek Dinner coming up in August in Auckland. This time we'll be holding it in a Chinese Restaurant, so there will be lots of lovely food, a speaker, a quiz, some prizes. The ladies who came to the last event got pretty lucky with the prizes as Microsoft gave us some fantastic goodies to give away. For more information on the next event go to: www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz See you there.