Ada Lovelace is considered by many to be the first computer programmer, dating back to the 19th century. Ada Lovelace Day has become a day for bloggers to celebrate women in technology. In that spirit, Baltimore techie Mike Subelsky (co-founder of the Ignite Baltimore speaker series and OtherinBox.com) offers this guest post on a young woman who's very active in the Baltimore tech scene. Here's Mike:
Today is Ada Lovelace day which aims to draw attention to women in the science and technology fields. As soon as I heard about it, I knew I wanted to write about Heather Sarkissian (it's more like I'm writing about Heather to draw attention to the day!).
She's the CEO of an important mobile computing technology company here in town, mp3Car.com, which Gus has written about before. The company combines several different facets in a compelling way: it's a popular forum, a crowd-sourced design company, a consultancy with Fortune 500 customers, and a niche ecommerce store. Their office in the Emerging Technology Center includes a small warehouse of electronic parts, making it one of those rare web businesses that has actual inventory and real-world relevance. They do it all with a small staff led by Heather.
Heather is a very active member of the local tech community. We first met at the SocialDevCampEast unconference, which mp3Car had sponsored, and the company has supported many of our other tech community organizing efforts including my own project, Ignite Baltimore. Heather took on a lot of the burden for Ignite and is in charge of securing sponsors. Each Ignite costs over $2000 to produce so that is no easy task! She's become such a big part of Ignite that she recently became a full partner and co-organizer in the event.
Drawing on her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, last year Heather started BmoreSmart, a group of social entrepreneurs and technologists in Baltimore aiming to make the city a better place.
So you can get a sense of Heather and her leadership in the mobile computing industry, we did a short interview.
1) Where does mp3Car see the mobile computing market headed and where do you see the company fitting in?
In the longer term, the next 5-10 years, the mp3Car team sees devices converging - phones, netbooks, laptops, etc - all having the same core component that is the size of a penny. We don't think that people really want 10 devices that do 10 different things, but do each of them really well. Consumers will want simplicity with choice, which means that they want one core device which does everything fairly well. But there is a market for upgrades, attachments or even docks. For example, why the Kindle and an iPhone? Simple, because there is no attachment for the iPhone yet that allows you enlarge the screen.
These devices will always be connected, storage space will be cheap and almost all of your data will be in the cloud. We think that the user will access everything they need from a web browser. And you will not only interact with the touchscreen. New technologies are changing how we interact with devices. The creators of the Nexus showed us a prototype smartphone at CES which allowed you to interact by squeezing, scrolling your finger along the sides and scrolling on the back with a trackpad. The entire device was a sensor and part of the user interface experience [