Today we celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 2010 to honor Women in Technology! In the past year we have gone through quite the journey revamping the website, our look & feel, and our iPhone app. It was one of the biggest roller coaster rides we have ever been on and we couldn’t have done it without our two women furiously working day and night to make GeoGraffiti a better service.
Yannell at LACMA
Yannell, the brains behind all the creative design at GeoGraffiti, has been an immense asset to us. She helped out last year so much and did such a great job that we decided to fly her to Los Angeles to lead the entire design effort for the Voice Mark iPhone app this past summer. She quickly started the design effort to make the Voice Mark app “sexier” as soon as she arrived to work her first day. Her creative mind led to a really slick looking iPhone app that received positive feedback from several users. Check out the comments section at the bottom of the Voice Mark App page. While most of her effort went to the design of the iPhone app, she did spend plenty of time fixing up our identity package (logos, business cards, etc). That’s just the way she works… if she sees something ugly, she wants to fix it and makes it, in my opinion, pretty damn sexy! While she has returned to Texas to finish her undergraduate studies in 2010, she continues to consult on all the design work that is required for new features on the GeoGraffiti Voice Mark Map and the Voice Mark iPhone App. You’d be amazed at what kind of crazy stuff a creative designer and an engineer can come up with together! One of the best things we love about Yannell is how ruthless she is when it comes to design. If we cut corners, she basically slaps us on the wrist with a ruler. I can think of so many times when she stopped work and told us to sit down and told us why what we were doing is wrong and why it will produce and ugly looking graphic, logo, etc. Thanks to her we now know that a font is actually a typeface and that we should NOT distort types! We learned just as much from her about design as she did from us about building web apps and iPhone apps. She continues to excel while still working on GeoGraffiti … she recently won 1st place at an art show at the University of Texas El Paso for her photography exhibits and had some of her work featured in an ad! Yannell, we thank you for all your hard work and wish you luck as you finish your undergraduate studies in May!
Gisselli modeling
Gisselli, the goddess of data at GeoGraffiti has been helping us out for a few years. Initially her responsibilities were mainly part-time as a PA, but have since grown to be the gatekeeper of our data. With the release of the Voice Mark iPhone app, the amount of data we have, has grown to the point where we can’t handle it AND our other responsibilities… so we gave Gisselli the job. We spent a few days with her this past summer dumping our knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and GeoSEO (Geographic Search Engine Optimization) to let her take control the data. She scans all our Voice Marks making sure that they are legit and removes anything that might violate our terms of use. This is the easy part. One of our main objectives at GeoGraffiti is to let anyone gain a web presence by simply talking into their phone. We take SEO very seriously. It’s something we see as very valuable to our users and business users. What Gisselli does is makes sure all the data for each Voice Mark is accurate. She checks to make sure the transcriptions are as accurate as possible, and then make sure all geographic data is precise (think latitudes, longitudes, postal codes, phone numbers, area codes, etc). Once that is all done, she goes through a set of heuristic processes where she applies the SEO knowledge she has gained in order to optimize EVERY Voice Mark so that our users have the benefits of an optimized Voice Mark. This becomes incredibly powerful for all business users using Voice Marks to advertise their promotions and specials and Voice Marks that deal with information about venues. Did you know that on her spare time, she blogs about fashion? Yep… she’s pretty creative when it comes to fashion and she will soon release her very own fashion blog! She taught us that wearing 2 different types of prints, like zebra and snake, is a fashion faux pas! So not only has she made our data pretty, but made US pretty! Gisselli, we thank you for all your hard work keeping all our data legit and valuable and wish you luck as you finish up your sophomore year at Cal State Northridge!
Again, thank you both for all your work! We ask our readers that you make sure to share this blog post with your friends to make sure the GeoGraffiti Women are recognized for all their hard work in technology!
