>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. 26,000 people from around the world have descended onto the Orlando, here in Orlando, for Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Christina Warren. She is the senior cloud advocate at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about your work as a senior cloud advocate. And you are responsible for a lot of the video strategy of Channel 9. >> Yeah, I am. So we have a cloud advocacy scene within developer relations, and most of our advocates are focused on either kind of a specific technology area or a specific audience. I'm a little bit different in that I am kind of of a, I call myself, I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. So I go across a lot of different technology areas, but I look at our video content and our video strategies that we have at Channel 9 and our YouTube channel, Microsoft Developer, and some of our other channels, and I think about what are they types of stories we want to tell, what's content do we want to create for our audience, and how can we bring new developers into our ecosystem, as well. >> So what are those stories? I mean, what do you, what are you hearing from customers and what are you hearing also from colleagues at Microsoft that say, "Here's something that we need to tell the world about"? >> Yeah, so I think it's really interesting. I think there are a lot of things. One, there, we were talking a little bit before the show. There's kind of an insatiable, I think, need for a lot of people how to get started, whether it's getting started coding, if you're wanting to learn Python or learn JavaScript or something else, or even if you're just wanting to, you're starting to get into infrastructure, and you're wanting to learn, okay, how do I, you know, spin things up on the cloud. How do I set things up? And having some of that base fundamentals content is really important, but I also think sometimes it's about troubleshooting, and it's about figuring out what are the new services. What can this do for me? And I think a lot of times, when I think about the stories we want to tell, it's not, oh look at how great our service or our product is but it's this is designed to ease my pain points and make my life as a developer or an ops person easier. >> Christina, in the early days, everybody thought that, you know, the promise of cloud was it, it was supposed to be simple and inexpensive, and unfortunately, we learned it is neither of those things by default, so, you know, how do we help people to go from, you know, it's only 20% of applications today are in the cloud. You know, really simplicity is something we need to attack, and education is one of those areas that we need, you know. Give us some examples of some of the things that your team's doing to try to help us get to the majority of environments and work loads. >> Yeah, so a great example is, you know, .NET Core 3.0 launched a couple of months ago, and there's been a big push there with cloud-native apps and cloud-native applications, and so we have like a new video series, The Cloud Native Show, that my colleague Shane Boyer heads up, where they go through kind of all the steps of cloud-native development. And what's great about this is that you have existing .NET developers who have not, to your point, you know, 80% of applications are still not on the cloud, so they're going from that older environment. And then this is saying, you can take the skills you already have, but this is how you think about these things in this new environment. And for a lot of things when it comes to tech, if you're, the way I can always think about things is the next generation of developers, they don't know a non-cloud world. They're literally cloud-first, and I think that's an important thing for all of us to consider is that the next generation developers, the kids who are in high school now, the kids who are in college, they don't know, you know, the pain of having to provision and deal with their own, you know, servers or data centers. They've only known the cloud. And so, but that's an interesting opportunity both to create cloud-first content for them, but for the people who have been using things to say, okay, what you've already been doing, there are changes, but you're not starting from zero, and you can take some of the things you already know and just move that into, into the new world. >> Yeah, well, one of the interesting things we've found this week is that when we talk about engaging with Microsoft, it's not just .NET, it's not just Windows, or Azure. We talked yesterday with Donovan Brown and Scott Hanselman, and it's you know, any app, any language, your tools, pulling those off together. That's really challenging from, you know, creating content out there, because, you know, you're not going to recreate the entire internet there. So how do you tie in what you're doing with other resources and have that, you know, communication, collaboration out there in the industry? >> So a lot of it I think from what I do and what a lot of us do, I look, I used to be a journalist, so I look at what's interesting to me and what stories I would want to tell and what things I would want to know more about. And so, you know, Visual Studio Online, which was announced this week, massive announcement. I'm super excited about that. I am super excited about what that means, and I know that the audience is going to be excited about that. So I look at an announcement like that, and I'm like okay, what kind of content can we work with with those product teams to do? What sort of tutorials would I like to build? What things would I want to know more about if, if I were, you know, really experienced or just getting started? And I think some other areas are, for instance, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, WSL 2 will be coming out in the future. That's a great opportunity for people who are both familiar with Linux and might not be familiar with Linux to kind of get started and using Windows as their development platform. And so when I see trends like that happening or things around, you know, containers, you know, Kubernetes, you know, containerize all the things, start thinking about, okay, what are the opportunities? What are cool examples? What would I want to see as somebody who, who's tuning in? That's what I always try to think about is what would. I just try to think about it like a journalist. You know, what would an interesting story be to tell from my perspective? What would I want to know more about? And then we can go from there and work with the product groups and work with some of the other teams to make sure that we can tell those stories. >> So, I'm curious. As a former journalist, you spent a decade as a digital editor and reporter and commentator. What made you want to make the leap to big tech? >> You know, okay, so media is not a great place right now. So that's number one. Number two, you know, I was very technical as a journalist, and it was interesting because when I made that transition, I then had to really actually shore up my tech skills. And I said, okay, I have some of the basics, but I really need to like double down and invest in myself and invest in learning more. But I always, even when I was a journalist, I loved telling developer stories, and I loved advocating for developers. Even when I was, I was working at really mainstream places like Mashable, where, you know, they would send me to developer conferences, and I wouldn't just go to the press things. I would want to go to the sessions and talk to the developers and find out, okay, what are you excited about? What are the opportunities you see to build things? What's coming around that has you excited? I've always loved that. And so when the opportunity presented itself for me to be able to do that at Microsoft, I was like, oh, you know, I'd never considered that before, but that's really interesting, and that would be a interesting way of maybe seeing if I can do something else. >> One of the skills that you, that you, is common between what you do now and as work as a journalist is breaking down this technical language and making it accessible for a wider audience, particularly at more mainstream publications. What is your advice for people in terms of how to do that? Because on this show, we have a lot of technically-minded people who can really go deep into technology. But how do you then make it accessible? What is, what is your advice? >> I always try to think of who is your muse as someone who might not know what's, all the intricacies that are going on but is an intelligent person that can understand. So for me, I always use my mom. Now this was easier when I was a tech journalist than it is what I do now because she understands even less what I do now, but I try to think about, okay, how would I explain this to her? She doesn't need to know all of the intricacies, the nitty-gritty. But how could I explain something to her that would be technically accurate but would get the basic idea? And I think a lot of times when it comes to breaking down content, it's just getting to the essence of what problem is this solving, what is this doing that's better or worse, and how does it do it and in starting from there. And it, a lot of times it just takes a lot of work, and you figure out as you go along what getting feedback from users, frankly, based on they might be asking more clarifying questions, or maybe they'll want to know more about something or less about something else. This is confusing for me. And just modulating that as you go along. >> Yeah, Christina, it makes me laugh, actually. When I started blogging, my mother was one of the people that would read, and she would say, "Oh, yes, I heard about this cloud thing before. "I watched it on NPR." It's a nuanced and complicated message. I actually, I roll my eyes a little bit back at the old Microsoft to the cloud videos there, because it was like it didn't resonate. It's the stories that you're telling these days. How do you balance there's the outcomes is, yes, we want to, you know, solve, you know, some of the great challenges and help healthcare, but, you know, underneath, there's some nitty-gritty developer and infrastructure things that get solved. How do you make sure there's the connections between, you know, what the products do and the outcomes? >> Yeah, that's really interesting. You're right, it is a challenge. I think the, the important thing here is not every message has to have all of those components. So you can tell different stories. You could tell one story that's just more focused on the outcome and is just more focused on the opportunity and what's happening in healthcare, and you could have another story that might be about this is what's going on underneath that is allowing those things to happen. >> Yeah, do you, do you have any favorite, you know, outcome stories from Microsoft? >> Gosh, you know, yesterday, during Scott Hanselman's developer keynote, he was, he was, I didn't even know about the Chipotle case study. That was so interesting to me and seeing what they're doing with the different technology. That's, that was a really, that's just the first one that comes to mind I thought was really cool. I'm really excited about the opportunities we have in Quantum, and I'm really excited about opportunities in healthcare because, you know, I think we've all been to the doctor, and we've seen how much IT and how much tech infrastructure could help not just the process of diagnosing and helping things but just, even just the minutia of data entry and record delivery and keeping track of everything. So there, a lot of the things we've done there have been really interesting. >> One of the things you said is you love telling developer stories, and I'm a journalist, too. And I cover entrepreneurs, and I feel the same way about telling entrepreneur stories. Talk about some of the common characteristics you've seen. I mean, we can't obviously generalize an entire population of people, but talk about what you have seen as sort of the common elements of their personalities and their approach to solving problems. >> Right, so I think it's interesting. When I think about any developers, which are a little bit different than enterprise devs, although there are some similarities, you know, you start with, and I know for me when I start first started coding and when I first started building websites and then other things, like, for me, I wanted to either solve a problem, or I wanted to create something that other people could, could see. And so a lot of times that probably one of the more commonalities is, you know, developers, they're in many ways wanting to scratch their own itch. I wanted to do something, I couldn't figure out how to do it, so I built this myself, found out other people were using it, too, and I added features to it. I mean, I think that's what's so great about open-source is that people have the opportunity to collaborate either contributing code or even, you know, doing bug reports and or sharing ideas. And so I, one of the more common elements is I wanted to do something, or I had a really interesting idea, and I didn't see anyone else doing it, and so I just decided to build it myself. It's not that different from entrepreneurs, right. Like it's I see, I see a business opportunity, I see a business I want to do, so I'm going to build it. And that's, wanting to build things is probably the most common thing I see. >> Yeah, Christina, any common conversations or things that are coming up that, you know, people that aren't at this show, you'd like to share? >> Oh, gosh, I mean, I think there's been so much good stuff. I mentioned Visual Studio Online, which I think is really exciting because I'm really excited about being able to like be on my iPad and also code. Like, that's going to be really great. Also, I think the Arc stuff, the Azure Arc stuff is really interesting, the idea of being able to not just be focused on, you know, one platform, but being able to control all of your infrastructure no matter where it is is really, really, that's a really compelling story. That's something that makes me really excited because I love to just automate and simplify things, so anything that can make, you know, the life easier, I think is great. >> As a former journalist, I'd love your thoughts on the state of news today. I know you said you got out of it because it's not a great career path, but the overreach of social media, the spread of fake news, the real and perceived media biases. I'm interested in your thoughts about where we are today, particularly as it relates to coverage of technology. >> It's interesting. I think in some ways technology. For a really long time, most technology coverage was almost cheerleaderish. You could even look back even 20 years when the dot-com crash happened, and I was in high school then, but I was following all of that avidly. The after flow of that, the business press was maybe a little bit burned, but the technology press was still very much gung ho and was still very much cheerleading. That's changed a little bit as we've started to have to grapple with some of the consequences, good and bad, that happened with tech and with the internet. Right now, I almost feel like maybe we've gone a little bit over the edge a little bit more, and some of the critiques are fair, and some of them maybe are just, you know, it's popular to kind of be more negative. So that's been an interesting change, I think to see. You're right, though, when it comes to the spreading of kind of misinformation or people just reading things in headlines, it's really difficult I think, for people to find authoritative voices and things they can trust. Weirdly, though, I do actually think this is an opportunity for the big tech companies to help. This is things that AI could really play a big role in. These are things that could really kind of help, you know, recognize patterns of scan bots and of other things that aren't there and filter that out. But I think even when, I still feel good about journalism as a medium. I still think that the press is one of the most important assets we have, and even when we are going through shakier times, there are opportunities. I think that we will, it'll find it's way. And honestly, I really do think that technology is one of those things that will help get the real things, the important stories out there. >> All right, so, Christina, I guess final word is how should people think of Microsoft in 2019? >> We're here to help. You know, I think that we are, we are a technology company that is, that is creating the tools so that you can build and solve the problems that you need to solve. >> All right, that's a, that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Christina. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat instrumental music)

(intense music) >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from our Palo Alto studio. Very excited to be joined by a CUBE alumni, the CEO and president of Anita Borg, Brenda Darden Wilkerson. Welcome back to theCUBE, Brenda. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> It's great to have you here. You have been at Anita Borg for about six months. You've got a great background in the tech industry and in education. Give us some perspective of what's happening, what's new with Anita Borg? >> Well, we are very excited to be in this space at this point in history. It's very exciting. Women are alive to the possibilities of what they can contribute in tech. We can thank so many important women who are contributing to the conversation, and it is our job to make sure that they have a voice. And so we are working really hard to make sure that the perceptions that would create barriers for women contributing to tech, having a career path, taking those really important positions of power in tech, that we obliterate them and that the flood gates are open for all who want to participate. >> I love that on the website I saw the what we do, one of the things that shattering perceptions. And I thought that word shattering, that description, was really, really important. >> It is very important because you would think in 2018 that these issues that our founder, Anita Borg, talked about years and years ago, I mean she was a visionary, when she said 50/50 by 2020. And actually we are coming back from the cliff that we fell off of in terms of being our percentages in tech. We're at about 22% now, and a lot of that has to do with those perceptions. What are the images that young women see? Or people in power in tech. What are those images that continue to contribute to those barriers, and that's first and foremost the thing that we're working to change. >> When you were on theCUBE at Grace Hopper 2017, just six months or so ago, one of the things that you said that I really love was people can be what they can see. So having awareness and showing females in technology and leadership positions, showing people this power of representation is critical. >> Very much, very much so. And really all we're talking about is telling the truth. You know? It's not as though the women haven't always been there. It's not as though they aren't making huge contributions, it's just making sure that when they do the work they get the credit for it and that people get to see it. I've seen it be very important in my previous work in driving computer science. All of the stakeholders needed to understand that underrepresented people of all kinds could do tech, and they were very much impacted by the images that they saw. And so it's our job to make sure that all of those stories get told. >> So you spent 15 years in education, and you had many years before that in tech. You made a massive impact with the Computer Science For All initiative that you founded back in 2013 in Chicago. Tell us a little bit about that because it's really exploded and I'm sure really kind of exceeded your expectations. Tell us about that initiative and where it is currently today. >> I'm very excited about the initiative. I mean, really it was born out of some of my own experiences. I was a person who, in my background, I wasn't exposed to computer science until I found it accidentally in college. I mean, obviously that accident changed my whole trajectory, right? So when I found out that that was still happening to women and underrepresented students when I got into education, that was sort of the genesis of wanting to do something about it. That was when we launched Computer Science For All. And yes, now it is a national initiative. In Chicago we have a graduation requirement. Students all have to graduate with at least one year of computer science, and we're seeing that transformation. I've got students who we started with in the beginning who are graduating this year from universities with computer science, data science, information science degrees, and they are doing amazing things. They're starting companies, they're developing products, all because they had that exposure. And so it's exciting now to be on the other side, really kind of coming home full circle, back to advocate for women in tech, as I started out. To make sure that those hundreds of thousands, millions of students have access to the opportunities that we need them to have access to. >> Right, that access is such a critical thing. And you kind of think in some respects, as we were talking about earlier, you've made a massive impact in Chicago, New York City, the Obama administration got behind this. Well, you started out with a goal of reaching four hundred thousand kids in Chicago, there's now over 1.5 million. But it starts with that awareness, that this shouldn't be an elective. But kids need access to understand I can be what I can see. If I can't see it, I don't know that it's an opportunity. >> And if I don't know, if I can't touch it and know that I have access to being the creator of technology, changing the world as we know technology alone can do, then we're going to miss out on the contributions that only they can make, and so that's what makes this so exciting. When we started out, I'm thinking of the kindergartners that started that first year. They're in fourth grade now, right? What is the world going to look like when they graduate from high school? It's just going to be amazing, I can't wait. >> Yeah, we were just covering Women In Data Science a couple of weeks ago, I was mentioning to you before, and I love that event because you walk into where the main event at Stanford is held, and you just instantly feel positivity, excitement of this movement. And there's so much opportunity within data science alone, and one of the things I wanted to talk with you about is we heard a lot of people that were guests that day talk about the creative element. And we often think of the hard skills that computer scientists and data science need to have, but you found CS accidentally as you said, and one of the things that I've heard you say is the opportunity to be creative. Tell us a little bit more about what, how people, young girls can get creative and expressive creativity through computer science. >> Well, that's very important. We found that we could attract more girls into computer science when we told them that they could use these skills and this knowledge to solve problems that they cared about. You know, initially because it was such a, thought to be such a male-oriented subject, it was all about computer games and the kill games, and the girls were like, I'm not interested in that, but I want to do things that are impactful to the world, to change my society, to change my community, and you can do that with technology, and you can create something out of your own ideas from scratch, from concept, and I can see the lights go on for them, wait, I can create an app that helps my friends through a particularly difficult time with bullies. Yes, you can do that. And so, that is the exciting explosion that's about to happen. People who are really using these skills to solve problems for the human good, that's what we're going to see an increase of, because that's what many times the women bring. So Grace Hopper 2018 is coming up, what in September? >> It's September 26th through 28th this year, and it's in Houston, we're returning to Houston. We're actually even going to use the Toyota Center for our keynotes. >> And you're expecting 20 thousand people this year? >> That's right, we had 18 thousand last year, we're inviting 20 thousand this year. We're going to have over 17 tracks. Last year we had 405 concurrent sessions. The whole point is to give women an idea of how they can transform their lives, coming into technology at whatever stage they found themselves in, whether they are just seekers and are interested in learning about technology, or if they are middle career and going to that next stage or the executive level, we have something for all of them. >> So, and you give out awards, the Abie awards, at Grace Hopper. Give us a little bit of an idea of the types of categories in which women are awarded. >> So we award the top innovator, we award top educator, so wherever women find themselves, we want to bring attention to the fact that we need participation not in just what we think as the high-tech sector, but all along the pathway. People who are bringing attention to issues using technology in their community. We award all of those, people who participate in creating more of a well-rounded experience for all of us to understand what technology can do for our lives. >> And it's really everywhere, right? And that's one of the thing that I think is personally really intriguing about technology is every company now has to be a tech company. >> That's right, every company is a tech company, right? And so that's another thing that we want to make sure that people are not just thinking, oh if I'm going to get in tech I can just work for these five or 10 high-tech companies. Tech is everywhere, it's across the country, it's around the world, it's right where women are living and having their existence. And we need their contribution in those places. >> Yeah, another thing about WIDS and women, we were talking about data science that I found interesting, was some of these female leaders talking about the hard skills, the data analysis, the interpretation, but also needing to have more diversity in the analysis to remove, we all kind of come with biases, but to start having more female perspectives to really kind of open up the analyses and remove some of the biases, which was kind of something, to be honest, I've been in tech for a long time, I hadn't really thought about before. >> Yeah, and it's really shocking just how impactful some of those biases are in the data on people's everyday lives. We've heard things everywhere from as serious as different sentencing levels for people based upon the algorithms that are there, to how much things can cost more for important things like insurance, based upon the data that's there. I think the New York Times did a piece a couple weeks ago about face recognition software and those images that are in those databases. And so it's so important that we have diverse faces at the table, as a black woman, my face is likely to be misunderstood 37% of the time. Right? So to be able to have the diverse background there that will check for those images to make sure that they are more representative of the whole population is just going to make all of our lives better. >> So at Grace Hopper your audience is made up of girls maybe interested in STEM, women that you said are in many stages of their careers, on the corporate side, one of the things I read recently is that article that you wrote in Mashable called Voices of Women in Tech collaboration with Anita Borg where you talked about corporate activism, and there's some pretty significant benefits that companies can achieve by speaking out. Tell us a little bit more about that. >> Well, you know, we have a much more engaged and active population, especially the millennials, and they care what their companies care about and how they contribute or don't contribute to the causes that they care about. And so one of the most expensive things that a company will ever experience is their ability to retain great talent. And what we've seen is that millennials will decide to stay or leave based upon some of the things that companies contribute to or don't contribute to, so being able to pay attention and to get into the game of other things that are outside just the product that they produce, actually contributed to company's bottom line. >> That's pretty interesting. >> It's very interesting and very important, and knowing that is something that they can immediately put in place that impacts the success of their company. >> Absolutely, and some of the things, too, that I've heard on various CUBE shows that we've done is the millennials perspective on the gender gap. And often they'll go, I don't know why you guys are still talking about this. And we think, we don't either, but we are, and it's refreshing to hear that this next generation thinks that that is just something that is just kind of ridiculous that we're still talking about, and also how important seeing a leader, a CEO being involved in something important, is to retention, so I think that's a great message that Anita Borg can help get out there and show businesses this huge impact and benefit to you and fostering your own talent. >> Yeah, you know, and it's encouraging, as you say, the millennials are jumping in, and many more people are jumping in and giving this perspective to companies, which is actually assisting them, right? So now they don't have to feel like, okay, this is just my idea, I'm going to take a risk and jump out. They've got people who are loyal to their organization saying, I believe in this and I believe in you, let's do this together, and so definitely our job is to make sure that companies have access to all the information they need to make these, what shouldn't be hard decisions, but we're there to help them. So the 50/50 idea, you have said that, and you mentioned that earlier, that you want to see 50/50 representation of females in the next 10 years. Tell us a little bit more about kind of what's coming out the rest of 2018 from Anita Borg, and how you guys are working to help make that, help get those numbers up from where they are currently. >> So it's all about awareness, and there's a lot of awareness out there, but what we want to do is increase it. You mentioned the idea of people can't be what they can't see. Images are so powerful, and so we want to work with media outlets, we want to work with entertainment companies with writers, with producers, and say help us create the images that can turn around and tell the truth, really. I mean we're not creating a fiction. Let's just tell the truth and allow people to understand that yes, this is how this works, and let's couple that with the data that shows that the bottom lines of companies that have more diverse workforces, that have more diverse boards, are muchly improved over those that are nondiverse. And so, we are creating that awareness, we are helping our companies find out what we call, not only best practices, but many times it's better practices. We're still working towards that best practice of here's how you can make incremental steps forward. Excuse me, you mentioned 10 years, I'm a little more urgent than that. I feel like the things that we get done are the things that we're most urgent about. One of the issues about why we're still dealing with these things, it's just been sort of like let's work on it in the sweet by and by. I want to say, let's work on it in the next two years, in the next three years. Let's make some goals, let's put some metrics behind them, and those were some of the things that we help companies do. >> I love that urgency. I think it's essential, but the awareness and kind of this idea that you have of, let's just tell the truth. There's really nothing more powerful than that. But also, the imagery and the representation is critical for that. If you look back at all of your success and think back to younger Brenda, what advice would you give somebody that looks at you and goes, wow. Where do I start? What's that recommendation for shattering someone's own maybe perception of themselves in getting into technology? >> Right, I mean we have to start with the conversation that we have with ourselves, but you know, we're in this world now where there's so many great images. Find those images. You know, you can find successful women. There are so many of them. Talk to them, reach out to those of us, because we want you to succeed. We want you to participate and come on board. And so, we have a world with social media that allows people to have access to each other that we didn't have before. The most important thing is don't take no for an answer. Not only because it's just not true, but because we need you, and it is an amazing time right now where you have all these women who are standing up saying that they want change, and we're here to support them, and we're here to support you. >> Speaking of this kind of movement going on globally about we want change, with the Me Too movement, a bit of a different genesis, however, the awareness is starting to be there. You talked about needing the entertainment industry to get on board and really start ensuring that we're sharing the truth here. What opportunities do you see to deliver through Anita Borg that maybe you can leverage that's coming from the Me Too movement and all of Hollywood that's really starting to stand up and be very vocal about this? >> Well, you know, it's interesting because people ask me that question a lot, and from my own perspective, there's this awakening because those same sorts of things are happening in tech as well, we know. We've seen the stories. It's not as though we're looking aghast at what's happening to women across the way. So these things have been happening, and what is happening is people are starting to look internally to say, how can I strengthen myself and stand up like these women did? And so at AnitaB.org we are creating those opportunities for women to network, for them to get mentored. We have communities around the world where women can get together and understand what the pathway was of other women. It would have been really helpful for me to have sort of some of those breadcrumbs out in front of me, some of those examples and other people to talk to, but we provide that as part of what we do in our organization. We provide training opportunities, other experiences where people can see all across the tech ecosystem where they can come in. It's not just one way in, it's not just one pathway, and so that's going to be a really important thing to make sure that women know they have choices. >> And I think it's so important in general, but you mentioned some of the attendees at Grace Hopper are maybe women who are in transition who are maybe, had a career in something different for a while, and are now getting into tech. I'd love to maybe understand that a little bit more, maybe some of the demographics there, but how do you see, what are some of the inspirational stories maybe that you can see where a woman who was maybe mid-career or somewhere around there, just went, you know what, I am interested in this, maybe didn't have the confidence when she was younger. Any stories there that kind of jump out at you that are great examples of it's never too late? >> Absolutely, in fact that was some of my first inspiration in getting involved with taking my background in tech and sort of lighting the path for people to get in who had traditionally been shut out. My first educational experience was at a community college level. And many of those people were people who, like myself, had not been given that introductory experience of computer science in K-12 space. Maybe they went to work and did some other things, maybe they got talked out of it. You know, it's not for you. And they came back later saying, you know, maybe I could learn, maybe I could try, and so really opening up that pathway to them. I've seen people who have gone from either having no education or maybe having even a PhD in linguistics figuring out once again that creativity. How can I take that and apply that technologically to creating solutions that only I would care about or know about? And so we've seen people come from all different walks of life, different career paths, and start small. Some of them are self trained, some of them are bootcamp trained, some of them go back and get an additional education. What we do at AnitaB.org is, not only help them understand those multiple pathways, but we work with partner companies to say, you know, there are other ways for people to come in. We've got these, what, 500, 600 thousand empty positions. Why don't you take a look at some of the people who are in your industry already? If you're a bank and you've got a woman who's been working for you for 20 years, she knows your business inside out, she is loyal, she can learn the tech. So we're seeing those types of transitions take place as well. >> Fantastic, well Grace Hopper in Houston in September. Is there also Grace Hopper, there are forums in other countries? >> Yes, so we also have Grace Hopper India that takes place in November, right after the one we do here in the United States. We've also started to have one day Grace Hopper events, we call them Hopper by Once, and we are planning those out around the world. And so we're increasing, we're trying to increase people's opportunity to come and experience all of the wonderful things that are available at Grace Hopper. We hear so many wonderful things about how it's transformative in their lives to see that many women in one place, to have access to training and mentoring and networking opportunities, and we're just excited for what's to come. >> Well we're excited to see what happens in the next few months, and Brenda thanks so much for stopping by, sharing what's new with AnitaB.org, your vision for that, and the transformation that you're already helping to facilitate. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, from our Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (intense music)

hello welcome back mark risen Hopkins here at South by Southwest 2011 and I'm here with Nick do cough from info chimps where I'm from I'm pretty familiar with because I'm a tech center and I hear about these guys all the time you may or may not you should probably should know who these people are but if you're not Nick I'm just going to have you start off with a little bit of an elevator pitch talk about what your company does and acquaint them I hope hopefully they can hear you over the whatever that is a keynote or contest what is going on out there sure thank you info chums is a market place to find share and build on data we have two big customer bases one is the developer community which we're just really focused on making it super easy for developers to build applications you know an application is really two things right it's code and it's a database and there's lots of folks out there that help developers get access to code such as github but there's really not a centralized repository for structured information data and so that's what we're building and we're really excited about it the other part of our business is our marketplace where we have data sets that are published and can be downloaded as flat files so if you're you know mom and pop or you know non technical user and you know data for you is you know viewable in Microsoft Excel that's you know that's the place for you the beautiful thing is it's all found at the same place and that's info gems com I was going to talk a little bit about your recent announcement and Michelle the former contributors SiliconANGLE if you're watching this video you probably know who Michelle Greer is has been excitedly talking in hushed tones don't tell anybody till we announced but check a look at this is really cool your API Explorer and the launch of is it 1000 API is 1000 2000 data sets so i've i've never really dug is deep into your data sets as I have in the last couple of weeks while you've been turning on the API Explorer and uploading these new things so tell me tell me for is all about the broadly about the data sets and the API explored how that works and then we'll dive deeper into a couple of these that are really cool thanks and you know sorry to steal Michelle from you but she's a rock star and we love her so we recently published two thousand new API calls and you know that that's pretty exciting for us we're trying to make you know as much data is available in one place as as there is on the internet and these two thousand API calls range from social media data to weather data to stock data and really you know our key focus here was just to try to think of what are the building blocks for an application and how can we provide just data sets that you know can inspire developers to build applications without ever having to bring data down onto their own server the API Explorer makes it super easy for anybody to come and see you know after they pass through an input what what the output looks like within their web browser so they don't have to go and start coding to figure out what the output is going to look like they can you know get a few samples right there in the browser so the and as someone who is a lightweight developer these days but was a heavy coder back in my early days the API Explorer is what really makes it real in my opinion because you can look at the documentation all day long and we spoke to somebody earlier today that's in the documentation business as soon as you hear that you know it's nor right you know I don't want some ads either you're thinking about it something has to write the documentation which is a which is a big task always or someone's got to read it unless you need it like five minutes ago you you're not going to be hitting the books so but being able to just see a little box and like okay here's what I put into this box and hit the button and see what comes out the other end that's what makes it real so that that's I think something that makes what you guys are doing pretty exciting now but one of the ones that Michele showed me was clearly which is another company that uses you as the platform to publish the data and the AP I and so talk a little bit about what clearly does I can see a hundred uses for this for applications we're developing so talk a little bit about what that does and in depth about as much debt as you can about how they get their data and all that so poorly is a company run by Mac Schneider Hoffer based in London UK and he was previously at Atlas ventures he was a VC you know came back to the bright side of things and started his own company what clerk poorly does is a database across social identities so you know who are you online who am i online I'm Nick do cough um Twitter I'm / do cough on facebook I'm / Nick dash do cough on linkedin and you know it's hard to sometimes find in a programmatic fashion you know all of the identities for a person online and so what queries done is you can pass through whatever you've got twitter handle or Facebook account or a linkedin account and it will help map across all of the other social networks and help you find your flickr account the youtube account your LinkedIn account so that you know developers can help build you know any number of applications we deal we're based out of the cloud air office our Palo Alto group is based on cloud our office so a lot of what we do is using Hadoop to bring structure into unstructured data and I know that API right there I think saved us probably about three months worth of development on one aspect so we're going to be using it just just so you know but I mean being able to surface a surface content in a way that like being able to access you know you know the people that are around it like invented by stop by Southwest you control feeds find people that are there at South by Southwest but you don't always have access to all the content they're publishing because they may not have an auto feed going but you know with something like we really you can pull all their other feeds and then you know just just filter it based on location or date range or whatever it is you're doing and really go up with something useful you know to speak a little bit about what they do and I'm happy to also introduce you to max he's coming into Austin for South by Southwest but I hope you get it through us and not them but so what max does is you know they use indicators you know strong links across your various profiles to see UK is at Nick Duke off really the same guy as facebook / Nick Duke off right you know am I linking to my facebook profile from my twitter profile or you know in my facebook have i mentioned you know back to my twitter profile or my about me profile or something else right so that they can see okay well is this person really this this person well and then this kind of links into the the other discs the other API we were discussing earlier which is the Twitter profile search that combined with maybe the queerly search would be a great way of surfacing like Authority nodes on you know amongst content providers so talk about the differences between Twitter's native profile search we did we ran it on Batman Batman comics my thing and versus the the profile search that you guys have so we're really moving to having you know the data store of choice for us is elastic search it's an incredibly powerful tool that allows you to do essentially boolean searches across large data files for instance the Twitter profile search is a hunt across 100 million nodes and what we've got now is the ability to search across those 100 million users you know with the key words that they use in their profile and that can be you know obviously name it can be how they describe themselves what they like we're even there from Twitter the way that they do it based on just a couple searches that we ran it looks like they have some kind of method of looking both at the tweets themselves as well as potentially other keywords around what you need Charlie in character Gotham news and all kinds of crazy stuff nothing none of it had to do with that man comics per se than loosely associated with Batman so I guess if you're into that there you go but if you want an exact match this would be the way to go so so it's not all social data you've got I know there's some sports related ones in there there's a the raw word searches it was at the British corporate national corpus you've got a couple other ones that escaped me at mall and just a well with 2000 but so lots of interesting data to be able to search tubing so let's uh let's look a little bit broader where did you guys where was the inspiration for this what was the amo because big data is this is the is a focus for us editorially for the next foreseeable future whatever that ends up being because we covered a couple of conferences recently strata Hadoop amazing viewership that we were just talking about the concepts behind big data and it resonated with both our consumer oriented audiences developers of course but also enterprise because big data is something that affects them too and it's not just all about social and mobile and you know the fun stuff that Mashable and the TechCrunch and the web to blogs like to talk about but it's it's crossed over at IT so what was your aha moment that led you to pursue the path that that info chimps has because you're you're positioned at a good nexus for enterprise and all the consumer facing data stores so we'll just just talk a little bit about that journey sure so flip Cromer another one of our co-founders and CTO was pursuing his PhD in physics at UT and in the course of his research no spent a lot of time you know finding and munching data the kind of aha moment for him was it's a pain in the butt to find data online no Google does a wonderful job of indexing you know blobs unstructured information on web pages but they don't do a great job of indexing structured information and so flip set out to solve this problem and asked around his his fellow PhD candidates if anybody might be interested in pursuing pursuing this this this mission and found dhruv bandage m's team and kind of from there you know we've built up to 15 chimps trying to democratize access to structured information so so talk about the process of like data sanitization i know its a mix of automated and hand hand washing of the data so talk if you can talk about that it may be part of your secret sauce but if you didn't talk a little about that process I'd like to learn more sure so one of our kind of core philosophies is we take data and we publish it in a structured format we don't necessarily cleanse it when there's clearly articulated demand for a very high quality data set either we'll find it either through a third party supplier or we'll build it ourselves but unless there's clearly articulated demand we publish it the same way that we find it the only change that we make is we identify columns and rows so that you can make that you know in a machine-readable format okay but and also part of the rolls is documentation of that which is which is your next big but you can only do with 15 people do to so much at one time so you've got all the data published and part of that role is actually making it searchable curated and findable yeah so we absolutely want to continue to work on cleaning up the metadata you know around the data one of the things that we've been working on is a unified format of metadata and so that's something that we're pretty far along on and really excited about and I think it will really help with scalability because you know our data team can ingest data you know pretty quickly at this point you know we're pulling in you know hundreds of gigabytes a week or more probably closer to terabytes a week and but you know we got to make sure that we keep up with respect to you no documentation like you were saying and making it easily findable or we end up in the same place that we were before we started in foot jumps and so what we've done is we've loaded all of the metadata into elasticsearch as well as some of the data so that you know we obviously our search algorithm is part of our special sauce but we try to make you know the data set that's most relevant to you adjacent to the data that you either have or otherwise we're looking for so search search is really becoming a everything old is new again that's like a one of the themes people going back to search and reapplying it to problems that Google you know doesn't need to work on right Google is everybody thinks Google is solved search and I think they'll probably the first to tell you that we got ninety five percent of it down but I think it may be more than that really because there's so many different aspects of search that haven't been tackle I mean you got the semantic side you've got different different organizations that are trying to patch holes in micro site search you know or whitelisted topic-specific search and you're working on a couple different approaches to structure data search so that's that's one of the things I'm seeing is emerging theme what just stepping back I mean you've been like I suspend like a day and a half here in South by Southwest but you've probably been exposed to the the prep a little bit longer than I have been local to Austin what's what are some of the themes you're seeing emerge out of the conference here so you know it's it's all about location right you know you know location local and you know the data that powers that and so with respect to location you know one of the important themes is you know places where am i standing right now and there's a number of folks out there that you know might even tell you different things about where you're standing and so over the next couple months we're pretty excited to announce some partnerships that you know will save for another story to really make it easy for developers to build location-based applications and obviously a big part of that will be you know retail inventory and and and other things about where you are right happy hour specials you know all the other ratings and reviews you know all the kinds of stuff that folks ask for all the time you know can you scrape citysearch can you scrape yelp and you know we won't necessarily but we'll work with a lot of folks who have similar databases or those companies themselves to make it available to our developer community so one of the yet so that's a good position to delve into a little bit because i think that the fear is with companies that sit in a position you do where you envelop so much of an ecosystem is that you will compete with that ecosystem eventually we see it with Twitter you see with Facebook and you know those evangelists for those those organizations will will tell you okay we're not really competing but we know they are I mean either they are or they're just really bad at communicating how they don't want to communicate compete with their own ecosystem so that you leave the data sanitization scraping and otherwise organizing to other people and you're just organizing the organization of the data that that's an interesting point to elaborate on for instance a good number of those two thousand data sets where we took factual corpus of data sets and published them as api's right so we took what was you know structure data and made it published in an application programming interface right and that was something that hadn't been done before and now it's even easier to build on top of those databases right so you know they existed in the wild and we just made them easier to find an easier to access and that's really what we're what we're trying to do very cool stuff big data a theme search a theme South by Southwest 2011 I am Margaret Ann Hopkins we've been chatting with info chimps so a company to watch keep an eye on these guys play with the API Explorer I can't I am I'm not getting paid by these guys to say this I just really like it I played with it I really liked it so I think you should to stay tuned to SiliconANGLE console can hang a lot TV we'll have more coverage coming out of the conference so don't go away