It’s a sad but true fact that there are far fewer women working in the technology industry than men. I’m not just talking about journalists and bloggers; there are significantly fewer programmers, designers, and startup founders. Last year I was on a panel in Denver, the New Media Summit, and I met a lot of people involved with a program called TechStars. It’s a mentorship-driven investment fund, which gives out seed capital to a select number of startups. Some of the founders are straight out of college, and the advice that they got from other entrepreneurs and angel investors is invaluable.

However, out of the 302 companies that applied last year, only 7 had one or more women on their team. Only one of the finalist teams had a female on board. This year, those numbers are even smaller. What gives? Yes, this is an isolated event, but the ideas I saw last year were really great, and it bums me out that more ladies aren’t taking part.

Anyhow, this is a great chance for men and women alike to learn how to build their startup, but it would be great to see more women represented! If you’ve got a great idea, there’s still 34 days left to apply.

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As you may have gathered from my tweets of late, I was given the amazing opportunity to play Jonathan Coulton’s song “Still Alive” on Rock Band with Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, and of course Jonathan! Horrifyingly, it was also on stage and in front of about 600 people at the Great American Music Hall here in San Francisco! I was on guitar (in the video, my part is on the right), Jonathan was on (duh) vocals, Leo on bass, and Merlin on drums.

We were soooo close to getting through the song! 99% isn’t bad, and if we had more time to practice (instead of having only played the song once!) I’m sure we would have made it. But it was a ton of fun, and I even saved the band a couple of times with my overdrive

But I want to thank Jonathan for giving me one of the most memorable experiences I’ll ever have. I’m a huge fan of his music, and I got to live out my rock star dreams for real. Not much can beat that!

Jonathan Coulton performs “Still Alive” in Rock Band from Joy Stiq

Special thanks to Chris from Joystiq for recording the video! Go check out his post for more details.

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The Mahalo video team is here at GDC (Game Developers Conference) covering the event with Joystiq! The Mahalo Games team is pumping out tons of pages about all the games we’re covering, and we’ve been shooting constantly for the last day and a half.

Today’s Mahalo Daily is a feature on the Independent Games Festival, happening here in the West Hall of Moscone.

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I can’t say that I’m too surprised (especially after their dismal showing at CES this year) but it appears that Toshiba is letting HD DVD go silently into the night.

The format wars have been huge news these past few years, and it feels odd to say that Blu-ray has really won. I’ve said time and time again that physical media is going to be obsolete in the very near future (in favor of HD downloads) but I’m a little shocked that Toshiba is giving up the ghost so soon. But with getting dumped by Netflix and Wal-mart, I suppose it truly was only a matter of time. For some reason, I always felt like I was in Camp HD DVD. It was totally arbitrary side-choosing, but maybe spurned on by the fact that I was raised a Red Sox fan, and thusly (until very recently) a glutton for punishment.

Well, HD DVD, it was a pretty good run. I enjoyed using my Xbox HD DVD drive, but I guess I’ll be getting more play from my PS3 now. I wonder how quickly HD DVD will leave the store walls and become eBay gold (lol). Will a whole subculture of HD DVD enthusiasts spring up? Fans that refuse to let go? How does Microsoft feel about this whole thing? Do they care? (Answer: No.)

So many questions! What do you think?

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