Marissa Mayer is Turning the Tide at Yahoo!

Source: The Daily Beast

In just a few short months, Marissa Mayer has shown the world that she can play with the big dogs of the tech world. She is responsible for reinvigorating Yahoo! - a company that suffered a downward spiral caused mostly by strategic mistakes. Difficulty recruiting and retaining the right leadership prompted investors to deem Yahoo! a bearish stock, allowing Google and Facebook to eat up its market share.

Since Mayer took the seat as Yahoo!'s CEO in mid-July of 2012, however, the former Google executive has helped the company reach positive revenue growth for the first time in four years. She owes some of her success to her repertoire, but hopes to keep consumers on their feet with new initiatives every week. Her strategy moving forward includes returning $3 billion in cash to shareholders, assembling a capable executive team, and customizing content as well as taking advantage of mobile offerings.

Mayer graduated with honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in symbolic systems and a M.S. in computer science while specializing in artificial intelligence for both degrees. Marissa joined Google in 1999 and became the company's 20th hire and first female engineer. She held key roles as an engineer, designer, product manager, and executive, and had a hand in Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Books.

Marissa is opening doors for girls who are apprehensive in pursuing math or science related careers and aims to remove the stigma that these fields are a mens' club. The Oscar de le Renta and Armani wearing trailblazer dispels the myth that tech is only for coders with wide glasses and pocket protectors, proving geek can be chic also. The percentage of women engineers in Silicon Valley currently hovers around 16%, yet Marissa says in her experience, organizations value gender balance. Her impetus to enter tech were words of encouragement from her computer science professor and mentor Eric Roberts. He said, "You know what? You're really good at this. You could go far in this."

There is no doubt in my mind that Mayer will revolutionize Yahoo! into a company that rivals Google's if she can revamp Yahoo!'s image and differentiate the two. Providing consumers with services that Google lacks or in which it fails to provide a good user experience should be the point of attack. I will surely keep an eye on Mayer for her next move.

Welcome to the Near Future

The tech world has been buzzing about a new product called the Leap Motion Controller, which senses individual hand and finger movements so the user can interact directly with a computer. The creators drew their vision from Star Trek holosuites and from the film Minority Report, which was released in 2002, but set in the year 2054, bringing the future much closer to home. To see for yourself why Wired called Leap Motion the "the best gesture-control system we've ever tested" and why the Verge believes "we've seen the next big thing in computing," take a look at this video:

There's No Such Thing as a Stupid Question

Source: NicoleLapin.com

     Nicole Lapin says the best advice anyone's given her is: "if I worried what every other bitch in New York said about me, I'd never leave the house." But she needn't worry about that because she has beauty and brains. Nicole graduated summa cum laude and as the valedictorian of her class at Northwestern University. Her hard work ethic and ambition are qualities that make her a positive role model for young girls. The daughter of a beauty queen and Nobel Prize nominee, Nicole got her start as the youngest anchor ever to appear on CNN. She was a rising star and made her way to the anchor desk of "Worldwide Exchange" on CNBC. She left the network to establish her own multimedia production company called Nothing But Gold Productions to "decode really intimidating money topics for different networks" and now serves as the CEO.

Her move from journalism to start her own company -described as the "Rosetta Stone of finance"- was inspired by a desire to improve financial literacy among today's generation. Too often, we act knowledgeable to avoid embarrassment. It is only our mind, however, that loses.

"For many years, I spoke to everyone but my younger self, whom I would have told to quit waiting for some guy to motivate her to stop hiding behind a cowardly smile and nod. I would have told her to figure out that The Journal meant The Wall Street Journal right after that interview. I would have told her that Helen Thomas would probably have respected her more if she had just asked what shorting the market was, instead of acting like she knew that it meant betting that the market would go down." 

My college professors seemed to be aware of this trait in their classes of inexperienced students and thereby welcomed any kinds of questions. Their rationale: if one student were confused about the material, it was likely that another student was confused as well. Nicole's words of wisdom should be a lesson for all to advance self-knowledge.

Nicole is an inspiration not only because of her young success in broadcast journalism, but also because she uses her influence to promote education in finance and participates in many charitable activities. Her other roles include being the ambassador for Operation Smile and DoSomething. Nicole was also a partner in the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation to create the campaign "Being Smart is Cool" and has founded a charity, Lost Girls, to provide young women with gently worn career attire and advice. She is a girl after my own heart - a financial guru, an explorer of new knowledge, and a stylish multimedia mogul.