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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- UK-based web hosting provider Memset (www.memset.com) announced on Wednesday that its co-founder and managing director, Kate Craig-Wood, has won the Demeter award at the 2008 NatWest Everywoman National Awards (www.everywoman.com/everywomanAwards/).
Memset reported in November that Craig-Wood had been shortlisted for the IBM-sponsored Demeter award, given to the most inspiring entrepreneur aged between 26 and 35. On December 3, Craig-Wood was selected as the winner at a lunch ceremony at the Dorchester Hotel in London.
Memset co-founder and managing director Kate Craig-Wood.
"IBM is delighted to sponsor the everywoman Demeter Award for the fifth year and would like to congratulate Kate on her outstanding achievement," says Helen Cook, leader, UK women's leadership team at IBM. "Kate is a real inspiration and role model, helping to give confidence to other young women starting out on a similar journey."
The NatWest Everywoman National Awards was founded six years ago by Everywoman, an organization for women in business, to showcase the successes of female business owners, many of whom have overcome significant hurdles to get to where they are, says the organization.
Memset's press release also announced that Craig-Wood has recently been recognized as the IoD's South East Young Director of the Year, awarded to "young business people running companies with a turnover of less than 5m a year." She received the recognition on November 25.
The IoD Director of the Year awards are sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers and highlight the outstanding success and social responsibility of business leaders across the South East.
Craig-Wood began her career in the Internet hosting business with the somewhat incongruous Masters degree in biomedical sciences. But after working at web hosting provider Easyspace and gaining experience in the industry, she founded Memset in 2002. Today, the company describes itself as "one of the UK's leading web and IT hosting providers with growth in the region of 75 percent year-on-year and an annual turnover of 1.2 million."
Memset says it also became the UK's first carbon neutral Internet service provider, in 2006.
As entrepreneurial women go, Craig-Wood bears the unusual distinction of having been an entrepreneur previous to having been a woman; Craig-Wood underwent gender reassignment surgery in 2005.
Perhaps ironically, she says she has since encountered challenges trying to be taken seriously as a woman in a male-dominated industry. Those challenges may make Craig-Wood further emblematic of some of the spirit of the awards.
Craig-Wood is also a member of the British Computer Society's Data Centre Specialist Group and recently became the youngest person and third woman to join the board of Intellect UK, an IT, telecom and electronics trade association.
She also recently participated in the world's first skydive over Mount Everest to raise money for Computer Clubs 4 Girls, which aims to attract more girls to the sector by improving their technology skills.
Further information on Craig-Wood's rather varied professional and personal achievements can be found on her website.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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