Various press clippings
Great female technology entrepreneurs (Computer Weekly, 10th Feb 2010)
Kate Ho recently started a business called Interface3 which specialises in designing and developing software for multitouch devices. She says of the company, “Despite the increasing volumes of multitouch enabled devices (including mobile phones, iPads, laptops and desktops), software developers have still not embraced the advantages of multitouch and gestural based interfaces.”
Kate did a computer science degree at Edinburgh University, followed by a PhD in Requirements Engineering. She says a TV show first got her interested in IT.
She says there should “undoubtedly” be more efforts to get women into tech and encourages women to use support networks like the Girl Geek Dinners. “Any industry with a strong pull towards one demographic is not healthy, and for an industry as prevalent as IT, it is of paramount importance to manage the significant gender imbalance.”
Kate Ho – Girl geek, entrepreneur and computer science student (GetSETWomen Blog)
I still remember that career defining moment. When I was 11, I was watching a TV show where the main character was a video games programmer. I thought that was the coolest job you could ever have so I studied Computer Science at Edinburgh. There, I became fascinated about how people could use computers to work more effective and efficiently. It kick-started a life-long quest in working out what makes software intuitive to use, and how we could use technology to improve our daily lives.
My pursuit has led me to my PhD topic: “Investigating Requirements Engineering in E-Science Projects”. I’m examining requirements and design issues which developers of next-generation computer-based scientific tools face. The hope is to help developers understand how to supporting faster, better and more collaborative science.
I co-founded and help run Edinburgh University Hoppers – a support group for female informatics students and also Edinburgh Girl Geeks Dinner alongside Morna, Bonnie, Allison, Sarah, Jenny and Caroline.
There was a joke between the boys about whether it’s possible to get 40 girl geeks in a room (there aren’t many of us in Scotland); not only did we achieve it, we sold out in two weeks! For women working in programming, there are still some major issues to be resolved. In the last six months, there have been two separate incidents where inappropriate images of women have being used in conferences. The percentage of female CompSci students are still low – typically 10-15%. And I hate it when people see a girl and assume they know nothing about computers. Appropriate behavior, recruitment and perception are three major themes the computing community still has to address.
I love twitter! I tweet about interesting links I’ve found, and places or events that I’m going to. My favorite twitter story was when I was leaving to go to W-Tech in Feb and a freak snow-storm hit London. I tweeted to ask whether I should go and got replies from strangers telling me how bad it was and not to bother. That’s the beauty of twitter: ask a question and you get human responses back. Be warned: it is a time-sink. You have to invest to get value back.
The future? I am launching a software design consultancy for multi-touch devices in the next few months. From iPhones to Microsoft Surface, natural user interfaces are going to become the norm in the next decade. I strongly believe that building multi-touch applications will require new ways of thinking about how we interact with computers. Being deeply unsatisfied that developers still think in the “single touch” paradigm, I want to ask – What else can we do with this technology? How will the next generation of users interact with computers?
Kate Ho is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. In her spare time, she blogs about social media, women in technology and entrepreneurship. She has a BSc Computer Science (Edinburgh) and MSc Technology Management (Manchester). She is involved with MyPolice.org. She is a member of BCS Women, and helps to organize Edinburgh Girl Geeks Dinner and Hoppers. In her spare time she blogs about social media, women in technology and entrepreneurship. She is one of four people running the Edinburgh StartupCafe – ‘a fun and humorous place to go to for local startup news’.
IT Girls in networking revolution (Scotsman, 26th July 2009)
KATE Ho is a 27-year-old graduate of Edinburgh University, and is about to launch her own software company in the city. She is a self-confessed “girl geek”.
Ho, who is originally from Hong Kong but has spent most of her life in Scotland, studied computer sciences as an undergraduate and is now in the final stages of her PhD. She attended the first Girl Geeks Scotland dinner earlier this year, and has since been involved in building up the network across the country.She said she was drawn to Girl Geeks because she was sick of being the only woman at programming and developing events. “If I went to meetings in pubs, there would be ten guys and perhaps one other woman. I would be pleased there was a woman there. But 90 per cent of the time it turned out to be based on false hope as she would be there because she was someone’s girlfriend.
“Through Girl Geeks I can meet like-minded women. A girl geek, for me, is anyone that enjoys being involved in technology and is interested in it.”
Explaining why it is so difficult to meet other women in technology, she said: “Of the 70 or 80 graduates from my computing sciences course at one of the best universities in the UK, there were only five females.”
