Snapdragon and Qualcomm branded products are products of
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.
For this year’s International Women’s Day, we’re continuing to tell the story of women in technology. We’re proud to participate in the Women in Hardware series presented by Adafruit and Hackster.io, focusing on women that are inventing, innovating, and changing hardware for the better.
I’ve posted before about Qualcomm Technologies strong presence at events like the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, highlighting our belief that a diverse workplace is the most fertile ground for innovation. Encouraging and inspiring more women and under-represented minorities to explore and pursue a career in technology is a big part of our long-term strategy, and among other things, we support great STEM programs like FIRST® and the Qualcomm® Thinkabit Lab™. Today we’re proud to see our own Tia Cassett interviewed as part of the Women in Hardware series.
Discussing supply chain management, embedded computing and more with Tia and Mary
The series tells the stories of women who run companies, build technology products and, in Tia’s case, broaden the opportunities for mobile hardware. Tia is senior director of product management for Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), where she oversees product enablement and readiness for embedded computing products built around the Snapdragon® processor, including the DragonBoard™ 410c development board from Arrow Electronics.
Tia’s roots in wireless reach back to the days of developing and selling RF test equipment when operators were first preparing networks for consumer mobile devices. Over the years at Qualcomm her name has appeared on multiple patents for technologies that have moved more and more of the work of network testing onto the device. She describes the initial role of DragonBoard 410c as a platform for QTI’s vendors to write software drivers for their components. Then, when the board caught on with embedded developers in a wide variety of industries, she and her team changed their business model and redesigned the DragonBoard 410c to make it more accessible.
Joining Tia in the interview is Mary Jungman of Adafruit Industries, which designs and sells products for makers. A self-described “person who never tinkered when I was a kid,” Mary came to technology from a liberal arts education and rose through expediting, purchasing, project management and sales. She now directs manufacturing and procurement at Adafruit, a top-20 USA manufacturing company.
Watch the interview
I hope International Women’s Day 2018 is a turning point for you and your company. Women make up half the population, so we should soon be generating a similar proportion of technology innovation as well. I think you’ll find the Women in Hardware interview series enlightening and inspiring.
Watch the interview with Tia Cassett. And if you feel the kiss of the hardware muse, try your hand at innovation on your own DragonBoard 410c development board.
