Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner 2011

Microsoft Silicon Valley proudly welcomes you to join us for Girl Geek Dinner #13 on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 at our Mountain View campus! Mix and mingle with women in technology while enjoying awesome refreshments, fantastic speakers, and great fun.

You get the opportunity see demos and interact with some of our brilliant women and men working in gaming, speech/natural user interface, social search and more. Check out a preview of Windows 8 and have a chance to win an Xbox 360 Kinect combo. We at MSV know how to throw one heck of a party and look forward to having you join us!

Keynote by Tara Roth

She will share a personal account of her journey in technology, as well as valuable lessons learned along the way.

Talk Topic: “Scaling Up and Out” by Megan Wallent

Microsoft’s enterprise client management business touches hundreds of millions of computers a day, and generates nearly $1B of revenue. While Microsoft in the past has been a “Redmond Centric” development company, Megan Wallent’s team is distributed across more than six major development centers in Redmond, Cambridge (MA), Europe, Israel and Australia. Scaling this group effectively has taught her many lessons on scaling across regions and cultures, while focusing on people and culture as much as architecture and technology. Megan will discuss some of the lessons hard won through the process of scaling her team up and out.

Talk Topic: “Disruptive Creation” by Shannon Loftis

Kinect for Xbox 360 launched on November 6, 2010, and quickly set a Guinness world record for sales momentum. More importantly, Kinect has changed the way that people interact with technology, and Kinect has inspired hundreds of creative experiments that are continuing to evolve human-computer interaction every day. The creation and continued development of Kinect for the Xbox 360 and beyond has required the rethinking of most aspects of software development and innovation. Shannon Loftis will share the key decisions, thought process, and divergent development techniques that defined the Kinect innovation map, and that continue to define the way that Microsoft is thinking about innovative consumer experiences moving forward.