Lisa Shannon founded the first national grassroots effort to raise awareness and funds for women in the DR Congo through her project Run for Congo Women.
They have sponsored more than a thousand war-affected Congolese women through Women for Women International. These women are raising more than 5000 children.
Susan notes: as a wannabe geek and social media neophyte, I often feel lost and incompetent – there’s SO much to know! When that happens somebody eventually takes me under their wing and helps me move forward. Melanie Hetfield, a Professional Tweeter (yep, there is such a thing), kindly shared a few tips when I needed them most. When I asked her for a profile I could post on AWR, she modeled hers after the one that recently appeared about me and other Dubai Twitterati in The National.
@melaniejane88
Mum of 3, divorced twice, living in Margate, England. Self-employed for four years. Home educator.
Twitter Bio: Professional Tweeter for Companies, Web Designer, Home Educator & best of all mum of three children. Live by the seaside. Love Life! Love Twitter :) @melaniejane88
Following: 29,564
Followers: 28,205
Number of Tweets: 22,173 (most of my chats happen by Direct Message).
Listed: 1,080
Started Tweeting: Feb 2009
Sample tweet: Just Keep Smiling, it will help the day through. Here is a list of Active followers:
https://tweepml.org/active-followers-1/
Life has been a fight since my teenage years onwards, failing health has always been in the way of many things I wanted to achieve. I hit rock bottom in 2006 having failed with my second marriage and really ill with Lupus. Determined to keep things together even though in a wheelchair at that time, I focused on my health and my children, and I started to learn web design.
We moved to the seaside, a good, healthy move, and I went back to college for a year, but health got in the way there, so I continued to teach myself.
Regina Yau is a global citizen who synergises Western liberalism with Asian pragmatism and her own social conscience.
The hallmark of Regina’s working style is her blend of inventive creativity, strategic thinking, practical execution, and sheer bloody-mindedness at getting the job done.
All Regina’s pro bono non-profit projects, including The Pixel Project, are designed to hit a triple ‘bottomline’ of raising funds, raising awareness and raising volunteer manpower for causes.
Prior to The Pixel Project , she founded and organised the Time-and-Fund raising Charity Bachelor Auction (currently on hiatus) which raised an average of RM63,000 nett per year for Breast Cancer, 6-month publicity runs and over 200 hours of community service.
Caterina Fake was one of the early entrepreneurs to glom on to the power of Web 2.0. While working on an online gaming product for a Vancouver-based company, Fake and her then-husband started Flickr as a side project.
It launched in February 2004 without a single penny of venture capital—and a little more than a year later it was acquired by Yahoo! for nearly $30 million. Building upon this success, Fake launched Hunch.com in June 2009 to capitalize on the Web’s recently discovered power for crowdsourcing.
Hunch is akin to Amazon.com's recommendations feature, except that it makes recommendations for everything. “You can use it, for example, to find a hotel in Dallas that you'd like, even if no one in your social circle has been to Dallas recently," says Fake.
The company just secured an additional $12 million in funding, and claims 1.5 million unique monthly visitors. Though she’s nothing short of a power player, sitting on the boards of both Etsy and Creative Commons, Fake proves that an engineering degree and an MBA (she has a bachelor's in English literature) aren't the hallmarks of a successful Internet entrepreneur.
Her advice to aspiring businesspeople? Drop out of college.
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast
Poornima Vijayashanker has never been afraid to take risks. In 2006, she jumped ship on her master's in computer science at Stanford University to join the Mint.com team as its third employee and founding software engineer, aka "code monkey.”
As the only female on the team, she got "picked on a lot." But she thrived nonetheless, handling nearly everything from front-end to back-end. She even came up with the company's name.
Since leaving Mint in January, the self-professed "femgineer" has set out to start her own company, BizeeBee, and has been pitching her product to investors. "I came up with the concept for BizeeBee by exploring my passions, one of which is yoga,” she says. “Over the years I've noticed a lot of pain points”—in the business sense of the term—“that the owner of my yoga studio has had that I thought could be easily resolved with simple software solutions."
BizeeBee will produce software for small businesses, aiming to translate the simplicity of Mint’s user experience to her own product. Despite her entrepreneurial spirit, Vijayashanker is an engineer at heart. "I truly love coding and solving engineering problems day and night," she writes on her website.
Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast