Leah Culver is the 24-year-old lead developer of Pownce from San Francisco. She earned her Computer Science degree from the University of Minnesota and has worked as a software developer for IBM, iLoop Mobile, and Instructables. She has also contributed to Chipmark.

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast. The Pownce Blog and Techcrunch recently announced that Pownce has launched a Public API allowing developers to create all sorts of Hacks, mashups, and widgets!

Pownce began as my hobby project, playing around with sending messages and media to my friends. I was also learning Django, a new web framework for Python. I really wanted to learn a new language and develop a web application from scratch. My friends Daniel Burka and Kevin Rose were thinking of their own ideas for a new website and after chatting we decided that together we could make something pretty cool.

She got a lot of attention online when she raised money to buy a new Macbook Pro by selling surface real estate on the front of her new machine to friends and advertisers. This is the video of Leah laser etching the logos onto her new Mac at Squid Labs where she works.

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