Press Release

GUCCI Partners with Twitter and Women Who Code to Host #Chimehack, Creating Innovative Mobile App Solutions To Support Girls And Women

The #CHIMEHACK hackathon to create mobile app solutions to support girls and women through Gucci’s CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign concluded Saturday with an awards ceremony honoring five winning teams.

Winners developed apps to impact the lives of girls and women around the world in the areas of Education, Health, Justice, Social Entrepreneurship and Technology

December 9, 2013, San Francisco – The #CHIMEHACK hackathon to create mobile app solutions to support girls and women through Gucci’s CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign concluded Saturday with an awards ceremony honoring five winning teams:

  • Kevin Berry, Suzanne Kiihne, Sharon Ly, Maryam Quadir and Amrita Ramsaransing created an app for CHIME FOR CHANGE, that leverages Twitter to bring people together and create awareness of challenges facing women and girls across the globe, winning a $10,000 cash prize from Gucci
  • Rosemary Jammal and Kate Schnippering created an app for Vital Voices that connects and inspires women leaders, winning a $10,000 cash prize from Hearst Magazines
  • Cesar Ganbaldo, Dom Gaudioso, Tiernan Lee and Samer Masry created an app for UN Women, to help women and girls enhance their career skills, winning a $10,000 cash prize from Chegg
  • Nikita Attiguppe Dasharath, Vinu Charanya Athangudi Purushothaman, Anna Haeger, Mary Ann Jawili and Yadagiri Lertlit created an app to gamify UNICEF’s Trick-or-Treat fundraising program and accept mobile payments, winning a $10,000 cash prize from Jawbone
  • Kara Yu, Matt Morgan and Slava Kim created an app for Riders for Health that helps medical workers plan their routes so they can deliver medicine and treatment more efficiently to rural villages in Lesotho, winning a $10,000 cash prize from the Skoll Foundation
  • This hackathon was about more than just creating the best mobile app solution,” said Maryam Quadir, who worked on the team developing the winning app for Gucci’s CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign. “We were working together to really make a difference in people’s lives, and having the support from the biggest names in technology added to the excitement.”

    The three-day event was created by Gucci, Twitter and Women Who Code in partnership with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and TEDWomen, as well as prize sponsors the Skoll Foundation, Hearst Magazines, Jawbone and Chegg. Additional sponsors included Yelp, One Kings Lane, PayPal and Riviera Partners. Top engineers and tech leaders – including Dick Costolo, Susan Wojcicki, Hosain Rahman, Ali Pincus, Hugo Barra, Jared Morgenstern and Andrew “Boz” Bosworth – participated in #CHIMEHACK, serving as judges, mentors and speakers. CHIME FOR CHANGE Advisory Board members Alyse Nelson, President and CEO of Vital Voices, and Pat Mitchell, President and CEO of The Paley Center for Media and co-host of TEDWomen, also participated, representing the girls’ and women’s issue space.

    #CHIMEHACK reflected the innovative nature of the CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign, celebrating the power of women in tech, and connecting the tech community to issue experts and non-profit organizations to identify ways for disruptive mobile app solutions to support girls and women globally.

    The group of 105 hackers spent Friday, December 6 and Saturday, December 7, developing their apps, and presented their ideas to a panel of expert judges on Saturday, December 7.

    "As hosts, we were thrilled to see the energy all the teams had for using technology to improve the world and the lives of women in particular,” said Twitter CTO Adam Messinger, who joined Juliet de Baubigny and Pat Mitchell to host the #CHIMEHACK kickoff event on December 5. “It's something all of us at Twitter believe in too."

    The #CHIMEHACK judging panel included Kate Aronowitz (Facebook), Andrew (Boz) Bosworth (Facebook), Andy Chen (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Ohad Eder-Pressman (Chegg), Sara Haider (Twitter), Renee Kaplan (the Skoll Foundation), Megan Quinn (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Aza Raskin (Jawbone), Debbie Sterling (GoldieBlox), Michelle Titolo (Women Who Code), Trevor Traina (Traina Interactive, IfOnly), Alexia Tsotsis (Tech Crunch), Phil Wiser (Hearst Magazines) and Susan Wojcicki (Google).

    “Gucci’s CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign continues to focus on unconventional approaches to make a difference,” said Juliet de Baubigny, CHIME FOR CHANGE Advisory Board member and Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “This gave us an unprecedented opportunity to combine some of the world’s top tech talent with experts from highly-respected NGOs, in an effort to revolutionize how technology can support girls’ and women’s rights.”

    CHIME FOR CHANGE was founded by Gucci in February 2013 to raise funds and awareness for girls’ and women’s empowerment, with a focus on Education, Health and Justice. So far, the campaign has raised $4.4 million to support more than 260 projects in 81 countries through 87 non-profit partners. CHIME FOR CHANGE is powered by Catapult, the first crowd-funding site where people can make real change happen for girls and women. CHIME FOR CHANGE selected Catapult as a strategic partner to ensure transparency, accountability and measurable impact, by allowing the CHIME FOR CHANGE community to choose exact projects where their donations go and to track the results of their contributions.

    Some of the newly created mobile apps will be refined and launched in 2014 as part of the CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign.

    “#CHIMEHACK is a truly great idea for bringing together global tech and non-tech leaders to make a difference in the lives of girls and women,” said Hugo Barra, VP at Xiaomi Global. “This type of cross-sector collaboration can be unexpectedly magical and lead to disruptive new ideas and opportunities.”

    To stay informed about the CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign, please visit www.chimeforchange.org and join the community on Facebook at www.facebook.com/chimeforchange.

    For information about #CHIMEHACK and CHIME FOR CHANGE please contact: camilla.orlandi@it.gucci.com.

    CHIME FOR CHANGE

    CHIME FOR CHANGE, founded by Gucci, campaigns to convene, unite and strengthen the voices speaking out for girls and women around the world, with a focus on using innovative approaches to raise funds and awareness for Education, Health and Justice projects. Through its crowdfunding partner Catapult, CHIME FOR CHANGE has fully funded more than 260 projects in 81 countries through 87 non-profit partners. In addition to Catapult, CHIME FOR CHANGE strategic partners include the Kering Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, Hearst Magazines, P&G Prestige and Twitter.

    CHIME FOR CHANGE reports on the impact of these projects, and shines a spotlight on powerful stories of girls and women globally through journalism and film. To learn more about the campaign and the girls and women it reaches, visit www.chimeforchange.org and www.facebook.com/chimeforchange, and view the

    CHIME FOR CHANGE short films at www.youtube.com/chimeforchange.

    The CHIME FOR CHANGE Founding Committee includes Frida Giannini, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Salma Hayek Pinault. The CHIME FOR CHANGE Advisory Board includes Hafsat Abiola, Muna AbuSulayman, Valerie Amos, Humaira Bachal, Jimmie Briggs, Gordon and Sarah Brown, Lydia Cacho, David Carey, Joanne Crewes, Minh Dang, Juliet de Baubigny, Waris Dirie, Helene Gayle, Leymah Gbowee, Yasmeen Hassan, Arianna Huffington, Musimbi Kanyoro, Alicia Keys, Yang Lan, John Legend, Madonna, Pat Mitchell, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Alyse Nelson, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, Francois-Henri Pinault, Julia Roberts, Jill Sheffield, Alison Smale, Jada Pinkett Smith, Caryl Stern, Meryl Streep, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mpho Tutu, and Monique Villa.

    GUCCI

    Founded in Florence in 1921, Gucci is one of the world's leading luxury fashion brands. Alongside the values of quality, creativity and Italian artisanal craftsmanship, for which the brand is renowned, Gucci also believes in the importance of a responsible attitude towards people, the environment and the communities in which it operates. Corporate citizenship is a fundamental part of the mission and operating philosophy of the company. For more information about Gucci, please visit www.gucci.com.

    Women Who Code

    Women Who Code is a volunteer driven organization dedicated to inspiring women to pursue and excel in technology careers. Founded in late 2011, the organization has grown to nearly 5000 members strong. WWC is known for free weekly technical study groups and larger monthly events including tech talks, hack nights and career trainings. More than 70 top tech companies including Square, Twitter, Github, Heroku, Yelp, and many more have sponsored events for the popular and growing organization.

    TED

    TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California almost 30 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED Conferences invite the world's leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes or less. Many of these talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. The annual TED Conference takes place each spring, along with the TEDActive simulcast. The annual TEDGlobal conference will be held in fall 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. TEDWomen 2013 will be held in San Francisco for the first time.