The mission of the Technovation Challenge is to promote women in technology by giving girls the skills and confidence they need to be successful in computer science and entrepreneurship.

In the course, students design a mobile phone app prototype, write a business plan, and “pitch” their plan to a panel of venture capitalists at a high-visibility, “Pitch Night” event. Winners of each regional Pitch Night come to the San Francisco Bay Area for a “National Pitch Night,” where they will compete to have their app professionally developed and distributed on the Google Android Marketplace.

Technovation Challenge and Andreessen Horowitz hosted a panel of leading women in technology entitled Stories of Leadership. The panelists, included Padmasree Warrior of Cisco, Marissa Mayer of Google, Sandy Jen of Meebo, Angela Benton of NewME Accelerator, and Freada Kapor Klein of the Level Playing Field Institute.

We have posted videos with highlights from the event.

Our national pitch night was a huge success, and all the teams did an excellent job on their prototypes and business plans. The winning team, Sparkling APPles created an app called “I.O.U.” which helps users keep track of loaned and borrowed items. Their app will now be professionally developed and distributed on the Android Market. Congratulations, Diana Gong, Evaline Tsai, Rachel Shaffer, Shalmali Joshi and Sravya Patnala! Special thanks to their teaching assistant, Diane Kreil, and mentor, Christine Moon, who supported their team over the past nine weeks as they built their prototype and developed their business plan.

Photograph by Gustavo Fernandez