Co-Authored by Senior Software Engineers Pallavi Agarwal and Yogita Singh Malik
“There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we erect ourselves.”
-Ronald Reagan
This year the Grace Hopper Conference focused on how to overcome many fears. GHC offered everyone a great opportunity to meet and learn from experiences of some of the world’s most successful leaders.
It was inspirational and motivational to hear from leaders who have reached heights in their life and career, and the entire conference was filled with rich content ranging from technical, to management to early career advice.
Some major highlights from the conference this year were:
1. Former Intuit CMO Nora Denzel (and current member of the FirstRain board) presented a keynote session. She had a very memorable quote that I haven’t forgotten since she said it: “It’s not about who you know or what you know. It’s all about who knows what you know”.
2. A session on cloud computing with an excellent overview of benefits, the risk, the lack of standards and where it is headed.
3. A great session on SDETs (Software Development Engineers for Test)—which I was pleased to see bore a strong correlation with what FirstRain Testers do daily. Some prominent speakers from premiere companies discussed how the testing industry has emerged over the last twenty years and how SDETs are gaining the necessary cross skills and complimenting the development life-cycle.
4. Dr. Noor Fathima, Behavioral Scientist and OD (Organization Development) Consultant, carried out a workshop called “Unleashing the Power Within”. The workshop was dedicated to today’s women who are multi-talented, juggling the work-life balance and dealing with the multitude of challenges that come their way. This session was completely sold out!
5. Aparna Gupta, Managing Director of FirstRain India and the rest of the panelists in a session called ‘Road to Executive Leadership’. They discussed the ongoing problem about the lack of women in executive roles. Aparna and the panelists discussed how this is an important issue we need to continue to address. She revealed the hurdles she had to overcome to reach the level of success that she has today.
6. Lastly, the highlight that stood out most during the entire conference was the sheer energy and camaraderie throughout all of Grace Hopper. The excitement of technical women from all over the world, networking and learning from each others’ past experiences was very inspiring and made for a great event.
When FirstRain first launched our FirstTweets customer intelligence and analytics capability last spring, we knew we were taking an approach that was unlike anything else we’d seen in the marketplace, and our customers have told us as much. Unlike social media monitoring tools designed to help you understand and monitor conversations around your brand, FirstTweet’s unique analytics extract only business-focused intelligence from the extraordinary noise of Twitter, and then our patented algorithms actually understand and organize that information into the exact business lines, companies and industries that B2B sales and strategic marketing professionals sell into.
With FirstTweets, many business professionals got access—for the first time—to a world of Twitter-based intelligence relevant to their most important customers, competitors and end-markets, and all easily integrated into their existing CRMs, mobile devices and workflows. It’s Twitter made easy and highly relevant for the B2B sales and marketing pro.
And critical to the success of FirstTweets was, first, to have comprehensive, authorized and reliable access to the Twitter firehose—and for this FirstRain relies on Gnip. Gnip is the world’s largest and most trusted provider of social media data, and in addition to being a fantastic team of innovative social data ninjas, they’ve been terrific partners in our quest to transform the way corporate enterprises drive revenue through Web and Social customer intelligence and analytics beyond social monitoring.
That’s why we here at FirstRain are thrilled to announce this morning that we have been selected as one of Gnip’s inaugural Plugged In To Gnip partners. Joined by only a handful of select companies such as IBM, EMC, Brandwatch and others, being selected as a “Plugged In” partner by Gnip reinforces the unique, leading-edge approach to B2B social media analytics for sales and strategic marketing that FirstRain is taking.
We believe that having access to Gnip data really does give us a competitive edge which allows us to deliver real value to our customers every day, and being selected as a ‘Plugged In’ partner is yet one more proof point that FirstRain is providing customer intelligence that delivers unique and powerful customer intelligence our customers can’t get anywhere else.
Thanks to our friends and partners at Gnip for selecting us, and we’re looking forward to doing even greater things together in the future!
