Female Hero of the Week

Gina Bianchini

Gina Bianchini

GINA BIANCHINI

Gina Bianchini is co-founder and CEO of social networking platform NING and a true innovator on the web scene. Gina was among the 20 most influential women in web 2.0 named by Fastcompany in November 2008, with other women including Leah Culver, founder of Pownce, Rashmi Sinha, CEO and co-founder of Slideshare, Dina Kaplin, founder of blip.tv, Marissa Mayer, Google’s first female engineer and many more.

Gina was one of the entrepreneurs early on that realised that people want to participate, share and collaborate online. By offering these people tools to share information and experiences on their interests, she did what others were doing at the time, but better, by giving people the possibility to create networks themselves and take full control of them. Read more here.

marina tognetti

marina tognetti

MARINA TOGNETTI

MYNGLE won the Accenture Media & Innovation Award. Marina Tognetti, founder of this online market place in language teaching, spotted the business opportunity a couple of years ago. With her mission to create an impact in the world, she realised a website with technology that enables anyone to be taught by anyone, anywhere in the world. Her presentation at the conference in Pakhuis De Zwijger was impressive. A worthy Female Internet Hero. read

SARAH MCVITTIE

You do not have to be a business veteran to be an internet entrepreneur, shows our female hero of the week Sarah McVittie. English Sarah McVittie, founder and CEO of TEXPERTS, dubbed one of ‘The top 35 women under 35’ by the Times, is one of those female heroes of who we expect more to come.

After a brief career as a city analyst, Sarah founded Texperts (originally 82ASK), a quick text question and answer service for mobile phones, in 2003. Texperts allows anyone in the UK with a mobile phone to get his or her question answered by texting a question to UK number 66000. Texperts then uses a combination of innovative internet technology and human resources to send users the answer to their questions. Read more here.

Female Hero Arianna Huffington

Female Hero Arianna Huffington

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

Arianna Huffington of THEHUFFINGTONPOST is blogger, opinionmaker, socialite and speaker at Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Ms Huffington can be credited with single-handedly moving the image of the blogger away from the somewhat geeky man blogging from his living room, to the influential opinion maker, be it male or female, with a glamourous edge. Arianna got interested the blogosphere in 2002, when bloggers proved their power in taking down Trent Lott for racist remarks. read more here.

christina domecq

christina domecq

CHRISTINA DOMECQ

Christina Domecq is co-founder and chief executive of SPINVOX, a voice-to-text messaging service that employs 300 globally and makes customers’ lives easier.  As for her being an entrepreneur is not a career option – it’s a vocation, she has set up three businesses, an IT consultancy and IT training, since the age of 20, and in 2006 was Ernst & Young’s UK Entrepreneur of the Year. This week she was named in the launch of Management Today’s 35 women under 35 in 2008.

catherina fake

catherina fake

CATHERINA FAKE

Catherina Fake is co-founder of FLICKR. The site is amongst the favorite destinations for bloggers and technologists to share their photos. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo for around $30 million in 2005. With all the billions quoted nowadays it seems like a bargain; it got her on the list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People.

Catherine’s seems an out-of-the box thinker, as Creative and Art Director at many companies, dealing with communities and social software. But she is also is a do-er, making sculptures, installation work, and writing fiction and poetry. Probably because she likes art, Flickr works with the Tate and with Blurb.

She publishes a weblog, Caterina.net, but not very regularly, it sort of stopped at the end of 2005. But now she has announced that she quits at Yahoo, where her main activities concerned new products, organizational innovation and process innovation. And see what happens: she has started to update her weblog again!!

We are curious what her next step will be where she can monetize on her longtime passions and experience.

ESTHER DYSON

Esther Dyson is an internet visionary and investor and are already around a long time. She is primarily investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. She was visionary with positions at - among others - Flickr, Delicious. She on the board of 23andme, of co-founder Anne Wojcicki. She invested also in lesser known companies, such as eTribes, a British (once) startup that provided identity management and community services, but now seems to be more a photo sharing site. She sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004. Recently she has been investing mostly in online services, health care/genetics, and space travel.