Washington Women in Public Relations has announced its 2009 Board of Directors: President, Lauren Lawson, Goodwill Industries International; Vice President, Debbie Friez, BurrellesLuce; Treasurer, Erin Wendel, American Pharmacists Association; Secretary, Chelsea Carter, PRNewswire; Marketing and Communications Co-Chairs Frances Reimers, ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership, and Meghan Sager, Susan Davis International; Woman of the Year Co-Chairs Mary Fletcher Jones, Fletcher Prince, and Marissa Friedman, PSA Dewberry; Professional Development Co-Chairs Kendra Kojcsich, Porter Novelli, and Rachel Maleh, VSA arts; Membership Chair, Jennifer Brand, Brand Solutions Group; Web Site Support Chair, Becky Booker, Grameen Foundation; Pro-Bono Co-ChairsNicole Arens and Rachel Henderson, both from Ogilvy PR. WWPR also announced its new pro-bono client, The Children's Law Center.
Women in Technology (WIT), has announced its call for nominations for the 10th Annual Women in Technology Leadership Awards. The awards program honors leading female professionals working in the D.C. area who have exemplified superior work in the technology industry over the previous year. Nominations will be accepted until March 13, 2009. There are five awards categories: Corporate Leadership, Entrepreneur Leadership, Government Leadership, Women in Technology Champion and Rising Star. In the past, Elizabeth Shea from Speakerbox, Eva Neumann from ENC Marketing, and Charlotte Pelliccia with Pelliccia Communications have all been recipients of the award.
Terry Prime has been named VP/director of technical services and chief technology officer at Virilion. Prime will be responsible for technology innovation and execution of all client technical work. He has served at four start-ups including Lightspeed, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1998 and became Cisco’s first voice services business unit.
Twin Tech III is history, but Kim Hart of The Washington Post had an interesting behind-the-scenes article about how some of the crowd got there. Hart wrote, in part:
Just after 4:30 on Thursday afternoon the first cork was popped and cups of wine were passed around to riders of the bus. Then came the chips, the cookies, the beer.
Making stops in Reston and Tysons Corner, the bus shuttled about 50 technology mavens based in Northern Virginia to the third Twin Tech party at Lux Lounge in downtown Washington. The three-story building was nearly bursting at the seams with more than 2,000 area tech executives, entrepreneurs, software developers and investors, along with the lawyers and marketing and business development folks who wanted to meet them.
The biannual Twin Tech parties have quickly become must-attend events for technology professionals since the first one was organized last year by Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs and the Northern Virginia Technology Council to try to merge the start-up scene with the government contracting community.
But with so many people crammed into the nightclub, mingling through the crowd and having audible conversations was difficult. The bus riders, who originally signed up because they didn't want to deal with traffic and parking during rush hour, said the best networking opportunity was on the hour-long trip down Interstate 66.
The shuttle was organized by Larry Roe of Leverpoint, a software outsourcing company; Cheryl Dickison, who heads business development at digital marketing firm R2integrated; Elizabeth Shea, co-founder of public relations firm Speakerbox; Bob London, who runs marketing firm London, Ink; and Marc Gonyea of Memory Blue, a Fairfax lead-generation company.
They each invited up to 10 people to go along for the ride, and Reston Limousine provided the bus.