Girl Geek Dinner at Google takes the cake

Last night I celebrated the 3rd year of the Girl Geek Dinners with a lovely dinner at Google's head office in London. You can catch up with most of what went on by taking a look at my Twitter stream.


I have been in Google's HQ once before, but for many it was their first time there and there was clearly some excitement about being at Google Towers. A number of us were taking photos and my friend L J Rich tried to take a picture of a screen in the reception showing all of the searches (minus the ones on sex) that were being made on Google. Apparently this wasn't allowed though.

For me it was great to catch up with friends I hadn't seen for ages, including my old boss, who is now Marketing Director at Webjam. As some of you may know we used Webjam's platform for the Nom Nom Nom site, where we did a blogger's version of Master Chef earlier this year. It was also a mini reunion as participants, L J & Nicole hadn't seen each other since the "cook off".


Nicole is one of the main helpers of the London Girl Geek Dinners, and plans to do some interviews and fun stuff with us over the coming months, so watch this space.

There were some interesting speeches after dinner including a great one from a Google girl on user centred design and how they build apps for mobile phones and the interesting challenge of putting YouTube onto mobiles.


It finished with a depressing panel session on work life balance which basically highlighted for me that even though it's the 21st century, we still mention the dreaded word "glass ceiling" and that women in particular feel they have to sacrifice success at work if they decide to have children. Luckily there were birthday cakes to brighten the mood.


I woke this morning to a lovely message from food blogger Rachel in the US who amongst other things runs a blog about cupcakes. She'd seen the excitement about the cup cakes & Google on Twitter and used one of my pictures in her blog and also noted that the toppings of the cupcakes were much more popular with one eater.

If you'd like to see the rest of my pictures of the Girl Geek Dinner at Google they're here. Hi to all the girls (plus a few guys) who were there last night and a big thanks to Sarah Blow and her band of helpers for organising it & of course to Google for their hospitality.