Philadelphia loves its geeky girls, as evidenced by the preponderance of female award winners at the 2012
Philadelphia Geek Awards. Geek of the Year went to Tristin Hightower, cofounder of
Girl Geek Dinners, and Event of the Year went to
Women in Tech Summit.
"Girls, if you are a little bit tech or geek curious, Philly is a good place to be," remarked Hightower. When
CloudMine's Brendan McCorkle posted her quote on twitter,
Nick Robalik quipped, "Maybe even binary-curious."
Geekadelphia's Eric Smith, co-organizer of the sold-out, black tie event with Tim Quirino, reports that an overflow audience of 500 attended at the Academy of Natural Sciences. "The museum was sold out last year, and was sold out again this year in record time," says Quirino. "It's incredible to see a packed house dressed to the nines just to support the local Geek community."
A sci-fi inspired, LED-enhanced podium glowed in an ever changing rainbow of color and video. The awards themselves, created by
NextFab Studio, also glowed. The podium and visuals were created by
Klip Collective. Quirino says of the awards, "NextFab took my robot illustration to a whole new level. Robotic lasers cut the form of the robot out of clear, thick, acrylic and etched the details in. Imagine that. A robot creating a robot! Then they built the base out of wood, which housed a simple electronic circuit that contained three LED lights that lit up the acrylic robot making it look like a hologram from afar."
"The passionate speeches by some of the winners were really quite moving. Scientist of the Year,
Youngmoo Kim from Drexel University, and Geek of the Year, Tristin Hightower, gave particularly lovely speeches," says Smith. Adds Quirino, "Eric doesn't want to admit that he teared up a little bit. It's ok, Eric. I did too."
Kim says, "I was honored to be nominated alongside my Drexel colleague Andy Hicks, who does amazing things with light and mirrors using mathematics. And Paul Ehrlich is a giant in the field of population biology. Hopefully this award highlights the incredible work being done by scientists and researchers throughout the region.
"I met a bunch of people doing very cool things spanning all kinds of 'geek-doms.' I mentioned this during my acceptance speech, but I absolutely believe that within the auditorium, there's the collective intelligence, passion, and experience, in short the 'geekiness,' to address some really tough problems (education, unemployment, digital literacy) and transform Philadelphia. And I look forward to working together with everyone to make that happen. And whoever put together the podium (very cool trapezoidal obelisk with video projections on the surfaces) should receive a special award. That was awesome!"
Accepting the award for Startup of the Year,
Curalate's Apu Gupta said, "We have to thank all the 13-year-old girls out there. Because they use Pinterest. Also,
Brendan likes them."
Other winners included
Zoe Strauss, for her Foursquare campaign associated with the citywide photography exhibit earlier this year;
BlueCadet Interactive won for Web Development Team of the Year; the Viral Project of the Year went to the
Opera Company of Philadelphia's Random Acts of Culture, and Hacker of the Year was
Georgia Guthrie. A complete list of winners can be found
here, and you can see pics of attendees taken by Photobot 3000
here.
How drunk did Smith get at the afterparty that went for hours at National Mechanics? "No comment. Though if anyone found a size 10 shoe (right) at National Mechanics, please email me at
[email protected]." We heard you had a big shoe, Eric.
Source: Eric Smith, Tim Quirino, Youngmoo Kim, Apu Gupta, Tristin Hightower, Phillly Geek Awards
Writer: Sue Spolan