User:NatzGC/sandbox

= Jude Ower= She is a British enterpreneur, founder and CEO of Playmob, a gaming-for-good company. But for Ower, it was her mother, a teacher, who introduced her to games.

“We would play them as a family. We always had consoles at home and Friday nights for me were like the Holy Grail,” she smiles. “We’d sit around our little console and wait 20 minutes to load up and put a tape in and then play Donkey Kong.”

She hails from Dundee

who grew up on a diet of Commodore 64 and Spectrum games.

Ms Ower is just one of a growing number of entrepreneurs - many of them women - exploring how technology can be harnessed in the cause of philanthropy.

This is tech for social good, or "philtech" as it's sometimes called.

Education
She got a BA with honors in Tourism and and MS in International Marketing from University of Abertay Dundee. For her master's dissertation she studied a gaming startup that was building games for education and training. She joined forces with them to explore marketability of the concept.

Career
After finishing her master's degree, she moved to London and set up a small consultancy in the games for learning space. She did consultancy work for big names such as Shell, the Houses of Parliament, the White House and the Singaporean government.

Through her second business, which had helped companies like BP, Shell and RBS train their staff to learn new tasks and techniques by getting them to play simulated games, she saw the potential of video games to impact society for good. When the Facebook game Farmville started selling virtual seeds to raise money for the victims of the Haitian earthquake, Owen hit on the idea for Playmob, a platform that pairs games developers or businesses with a charity and then sets up in-game advertising campaigns.

She has become an influencial player in the video game industry in England. She is on the advisory board of eGames. She is a member of the BAFTA academy.

Awards

 * Playmob was named in The Creative England 50 report as one of the most creative bussineses in England.
 * She won the "One to watch" at the Talent Unleashed Awards 2014 UK
 * She was named as one of Europe's Top Women in Tech in 2018
 * Ower was Awarded an MBE in 2015 for services to entrepreneurship.
 * She is a member of the BAFTA academy.