Music teacher Tala Badri is the founder and executive director of Centre for Musical Arts,
 a non-profit organization dedicated to providing high-quality and affordable 
music instruction for people of all ages and walks of life in the UAE.

She has personally experienced the transformational power of music through her own life as well as that of her young daughter who has Asperger's syndrome.

Badri began her talk with a video clip of her daughter playing the violin, then later shared a heartwarming to camera talk of the youngster explaining what it means to have Asperger's.

It was both touching and personal.

In May 2009, with fashion as her medium, and education her cause, Sheena Matheiken launched the Uniform Project, pledging to wear one little black dress for 365 days as an exercise in sustainability, and a fundraiser to support the Akanksha Foundation – a non-profit organization providing education to children living in Indian slums.

For the next year, Sheena reinvented her one little black dress uniform on a daily basis solely using accessories that were either vintage, handmade, reused or donated.

Confronted with the fact that a dress she wore on a fashion shoot in India could have sustained an entire Indian family for several years, fashion model Monja Wolf decided to do something.

She founded Monyati Initiatives (monyati is an arabic word meaning "a little wish that is close to your heart"), a non-profit organization that "specialize in strategy and project development for non-government organizations.

Of her most recent venture to build homes in the slums of Sao Paulo she says:

"It was an incredible and very successful initiative. We took a trip down to Brazil, visited the beneficiary families in their old homes and constructed their new houses together with the families and 600 volunteers. Enjoy reading the presentation...and in the meantime please note that we still collect funds for our latest initiative -- a hand dug well in Ethiopia."

Former journalist turned online media powerhouse, Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.

Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation, she ran CBC.CA, the website for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one of Canada’s most prominent and best-loved cultural institutions (and one of my personal favorites).

I was especially interested in Gardner's talk as I am a HUGE fan and regular supporter of Wikipedia, without which Amazing Women Rock would not be the site it is today.

In this informal interview, Gardner explains how Wikipedia depends on the generosity of "strangers" to stay afloat:

Media and advertising companies still use the same old demographics to understand audiences, but they're becoming increasingly harder to track online, says media researcher Johanna Blakley.

As social media outgrows traditional media, and women users outnumber men, Blakley explains what changes are in store for the future of media.

Johanna Blakley studies the impact of mass media and entertainment on our world.

As the Deputy Director of the Norman Lear Center (a media-focused think tank at the University of Southern California) Johanna Blakley spends much of her time exploring how our entertainment interacts with our political, commercial and social habits.

She is especially interested in the surprising impact of intellectual property rights on innovation, organizing conferences around the lack of creative ownership in fashion as well as technology and the ownership of creative content.