One night in May, the premises of AOL in downtown NYC vibrated with the chatty energy and nerves of 47 teenage girls from 17 local high schools getting ready to pitch their newly created apps to a group of four judges from the worlds of both technology and venture capital. The Technovation Challenge pitch night, the first on the East Coast, was the culmination of a nine week program, matching high school girls with high tech mentors from local industry and universities to create mobile phone app prototypes using Google’s App Inventor for Android. The teams met weekly for three hour sessions at Google‘s New York offices. Early support for the program came from the U.S. Office of Naval Research seeking solutions to a crisis in recruiting sufficient tech savvy professionals.
