Iridescent Announces Technovation Challenge “Pitch Nights”

April 28, 2011

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Iridescent's Technovation Challenge provides high school students across the country with invaluable "start-up company" experience.

Over the next two weeks, girls participating in the Technovation Challenge will present their business plans to a panel of high-profile judges at “pitch nights” across the country. These students have been working in teams over the last nine weeks to design mobile phone apps using Google’s App Inventor for Android, as part of a mentoring program hosted by Google and other tech companies this spring.

The Technovation Challenge course builds students’ computer science skills, while teaching them how to think like entrepreneurs and create an innovative product. Each team of five girls is supported by two female mentors: one high-tech professional and one undergraduate computer science student.

Thursday, April 28^th kicks off the first of the pitch nights hosted by Google, at their headquarters in Mountain View. The panel of judges at this event will include Alan Eustace, VP of Research and Systems Engineering at Google, Anand Rajaraman, Co-Founder of Kosmix, and Mia Blume, an Interaction Designer at IDEO. The keynote speaker for the evening will be John Lilly, partner at Greylock and former CEO of Mozilla.

Winners of each regional pitch night will advance to a national pitch night on May 21^st, where they will compete to have their app professionally developed and distributed on the Android Marketplace.

Background

The Technovation Challenge is a program of Iridescent, a Los-Angeles based 501(c)(3) non-profit which provides STEM education for underserved and underrepresented youth.

The Technovation Challenge program was founded in 2009 by Dr. Anuranjita Tewary, who wanted to offer young women the experience of participating in a “start-up company” and understand what it takes to be a high-tech entrepreneur. The pilot program was run in the spring of 2010, with 45 girls and 25 mentors from all over Silicon Valley. The Technovation Challenge has now expanded to New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mountain View and Berkeley, CA reaching 230 high-school girls and 106 women mentors.

Pitch Night Schedule

Pitch nights are happening in Mountain View and LA on April 28^th, Berkeley on May 4^th, SF on May 5^th, and NY on May 9^th. For a detailed list of dates, times, and locations for each upcoming pitch night, visit: www.technovationchallenge.org