Lady Geek TV founder Belinda Parmar joined BBC Breakfast’s Simon Jack to discuss the most-wanted devices at this year’s mobile world congress.

You know what would have been brilliant? It would have been brilliant if one of my Grandmothers had been from Russia.  Even better if she’d given me her antique matryoshka dolls and told me magical stories about ‘the old country’ while we played with them. That would have been brilliant and, for the purpose of reviewing Double Fine’s new Russian doll puzzle game, quite useful. But neither of them were from Russia, they were from East London and Kent, and they knew me well; one gave me toffee and the other gave me the excellent pop magazine Live and Kicking. That’s the kind of kid I was, the kind of girl I am. No Russian dolls. I did sit in boxes a lot as a child, so perhaps I had matryoshka sympathies.

It doesn’t really matter that I missed out on the hollow doll wielding Russian Grandmother experience, because with Stacking I’m right back in the 1930s of yore(ski). They certainly can’t be described as ‘the good old days’ though. Through one of the many silent film inspired cut scenes you learn that your family has been captured to work for The Baron, an evil industrialist who forces children to shovel coal.  Yeah, that kind of evil. You, Charlie Blackmore, the smallest of a family of matryoshka dolls, and your mother are the only ones that managed to evade him.  She cries a lot, so it’s up to you to rescue your family. And you will rescue them through the power of puzzles.

You solve puzzles by stacking yourself (teeny tiny Charlie) inside bigger and bigger dolls and using their unique abilities to move through the game.

Stacking’s cute design is easy to enjoy because the puzzles themselves don’t take a huge amount of brain power. If you find yourself stuck at any point you’re never more than a button click away from a handy blue line telling you where you should go next, or a set of tips on how to complete the puzzle. If you find that all too simple, there are plenty of other things in the game to keep you entertained. Go back and figure out all the different ways you can solve the puzzles – the easiest one isn’t the only one. Or earn more rewards by completing the Hi-Jinks. Or just walk around and talk to your fellow dolls. They can be very funny.

If you, like me, have lived a life largely devoid of dolls you can put in dolls, fear not: stacking is here to fill that hole! And then fill it again with something slightly smaller. And then fill it again with something slightly smaller. And then…

If that doesn’t sort you out, go and sit in a box. Nana Scantlebury will be along shortly with some toffee.

Stacking is available for download on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.

Ann Scantlebury is the accomplished actress and co-presenter of the award winning game show One Life Left.   Ann will is a regular contributor to Lady Geek.

When I was 14, I had my first kiss. I can’t say it was the best kiss I’ve ever had, it really wasn’t, but there were fireworks. It was bonfire night. At 14, giddy from fireworks and kissing, I thought that was as exciting and eventful as life could get. That’s what I was doing when I was 14. What I was not doing when I was 14 was making a chart-topping physics puzzle game.

Earlier this year Bubble Ball knocked Angry Birds from its position as the number one free game in Apple’s iTunes store, presumably by throwing a bird at it. And yes, Bubble Ball is a physics puzzle game, and yes, it was made by a 14 year old.

So, what do you do in a game made by a 14 year old? Here’s what you do: You are shown a ball and a flag. You have to get the ball to the flag. When you hit the ‘START’ button gravity happens and the ball can’t get to the flag. Gravity wins, and it sucks to be the ball. But wait! Seeing this is a problem (and, actually, the crux of the game) our 14 year old developer has given you apparatus to place around the screen, to harness the power of gravity and get that ball to that flag. Haha! Sorry, gravity. Through the 32 levels you’re given different apparatus to use, from wooden planks to power up buttons. You’re even able to reverse gravity. Poor gravity. Gravity’s been used, the ball has won and nobody’s bothered to ask how the flag feels about any of this.

Of course it’s impressive that the game was made by a 14 year old (with a bit of help from his mum). But if you forget that that and just play the game, you might be a bit disappointed. For a game that has been so popular and successful, it isn’t very fun. It’s satisfying and interesting and technically it works very well, but I didn’t get hooked on it and I didn’t feel the need to keep playing level after level. Maybe because the design is quite utilitarian, or maybe because the game seems a little bit too much like a physics lesson. It’s definitely missing something.

I look forward to seeing the next game from our 14 year-old developer (Robert Nay, Utah). Who knows, maybe it’ll be a firework themed platformer. Maybe you play a 14 year old desperately trying to catch their first kiss. Probably not though, right?

Bubble Ball is available on the iTunes Store and for Android devices, and it’s completely free to download.

Ann Scantlebury is the accomplished actress and co-presenter of the award winning game show One Life Left.   Ann will be a regular contributor to Lady Geek.

Just in case you missed my bad dancing moves with BBC’s Tech Correspondent Rory-Cellan Jones and Founder of PocketLint Stuart Miles, you can watch our review of the best gadgets of 2010 and what’s exciting for 2011.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12085177

And you can also hear my Persian voiceover here.  Far better than my own voice

And don’t forget to join us in our campaign to end stereotyping of women within the tech industry and put an end to the ‘pink it & shrink it‘ approach that goes on.  You can find us on Facebook here.

Happy New Year.  And thank you for all your support in 2010.

Belinda

“I listen to a customer call every day. Every single day.”

Dell Global Chief Marketing Officer- Paul-Henri Ferrand.

I am impressed: I have met hundreds of heads of marketing and never has any of them told me they devote this much time to actual customer contact. Most marketing directors I meet speak of their customers as an abstract quantity, or perhaps an undiscovered exotic species. This probably explains why most heads of marketing are have a disproportionate reckoning of the importance of their brand in their customer’s life.

Not Paul-Henri from Dell. He seems different. He is French and charismatic (which helps) but more than that- he talks with conviction and ambition about the the transition towards a ‘new Dell.’

The old Dell as I remember it, is a commodity box shifting business which was sales focused and masculine. If they had a motto it would have been “pile em high and sell ‘em cheap”.

The new Dell, Paul-Henri envisions is a company that puts customers at the heart of the business. The new Dell strives to be more of a product advisor rather than a vending machine. Dell should guide customers through the tyranny of overwhelming choice. This company should provide personalized devices but without making you feel like you are building your own computer from scratch. This re-invented company strives to understand what women want and “help women achieve their objectives and their dreams.”

Sounds good but has Dell really changed or is this just the same old Dell dressed up in blingy crystals? Does Dell really communicate what women want from technology other than laptops in a pink or red shell? And why does the Lady Geek/The Times Survey show that only 6% of women think they speak the female language?

I asked the Lady Geek Panel what they thought of Dell’s understanding of women. Here’s a few quotes;

“When I think of Dell as a brand, I always think that you will get a decent quality spec netbooks, good value for money but I don’t like the way they position technology as a fashion accessory-its not as if I am 15 years old. The sorts of women buying these products are professional educated women”

“Dell’s marketing still doesn’t reflect what they are truely trying to achieve here and still dumbs down the technology when talking to women. I look forward to the day when their advertising agency truely understand what the business is trying to do with personalised technology.”

I firmly buy into Paul-Henri’s vision of a company that is trying to understand what women want. Are they there yet? By no means. Do they need more insight into women? Absolutely. However, no-one can dispute that Dell has clearly changed. One look at their product pipeline shows that like Apple, Dell are trying to re-define product categories and are looking to women as an audience for these product categories:

For example, the Dell Mini 5 aims to bridge the gap between tablet and smart-phone. This is intended to be a portable, always-on Internet device which is small enough (unlike the iPad) to fit into a hand-bag, and yet big enough to offer a PC like browsing experience.

It may seem like a small thing, but it’s refreshing to see Dell trying out new form-factors at a time when the rest of the industry is converging on specifications which were previously invented by Apple. Dell recognise that women and men want different things from technology.

And with Paul-Henri leading the ship, I am confident the best is yet to come.

PRESS RELEASE: TOP 20 MOBILE APPS CHART

What is Britian’s favourite app? Lady Geek and YouGov Sixth Sense have just released the first of a series of surveys conducted intended to discover what Britian’s smart-phone users are actually downloading. Unlike music publishers who are keen to publicize their Internet sales, downloads of mobile apps are a closely guarded secret.

Our Top of the Pops for apps went directly to 16,810 smart-phone users. In addition to revealing the most popular apps, we also discovered some surprising gender differences in the kinds of apps that men and women download.

Gaming, long presumed to be the domain of teenage boys, is actually a female obsession: six of the apps in the women’s top 20 are games. Women’s biggest app obsession is social networking, particularly Facebook.

While men in the survey also download social networking apps, these are less popular than mapping and navigation tools.

Some apps appeal to both sexes such as Guardian, Shazam and Twitter apps.

The facts:

• In the top downloads chart in the survey, six games appear in women’s top 20: Bejeweled, Sudoku, Solitaire, Scrabble, Tetris and Doodle Jump. For men, only two games chart – Doodle Jump and Scrabble.
• Approaching half of all women between the ages of 18-24 say that their favourite app is for social networking, compared to a 1/3 of men in the same age group.
• Six times as many men say their favourite apps is a Maps app.

“What our research highlights is that women are becoming engaged and getting excited about the app world and what it can do for them.  Everyone seems to think it’s a young bored male who spends hours on his iPhone.  The reality is that in the future, it will be as likely, if not more likely, to be your mum, sister and grandma.  And contrary to received wisdom, women are not looking for horoscope apps- women are using apps for gaming, shopping on ebay, getting their Twitter fix and messaging their friends” says Belinda Parmar, Founder of Lady Geek and on a mission to help companies understand what women want from technology.

According to the Harvard Business review, marketing to women is now a bigger financial opportunity that India and China combined.

Methodology

For this report, Lady Geek in conjunction with YouGov SixthSense ran a survey on YouGov’s monthly Oracle survey, which is sent out to all of YouGov’s 270,000 panel members. The survey was conducted throughout the month of February 2010. A total of 78,835 responses were received. It should be noted that results were not weighted and are not nationally representative.

The Guardian

PRESS RELEASE

The world of ‘apps’ is not just the domain of young geeky males. Lady Geek’s survey (conducted by YouGov) reveals that technology and software are no longer just the preserve of geeks, with women over 55 feeling liberated by their smart-phones.

The report highlighted:

• Of all survey participants, 39% of female smart-phone owners aged 55+ have downloaded one or more app to their smart-phone.

• Gaming was the second most popular category for over-55-year-old women in the survey, with nearly 1 in 5 female smart-phone owners stating gaming is their favourite app compared to only 1 in 15 of men in a similar age band

• The number 1 app for female smart-phone owners over 55 is Facebook, with 18% of survey participants in this group saying that a social networking app is their favourite app.

• 22.5% of female smart-phone owners over 55 found out about their favourite app from a recommendation from a friend, compared to only 12.9% of male smart phone within the same age band.

“We set out on a mission to understand how older women use technology and raise the agenda of these ‘forgotten’ women. We are so obsessed with youth and yummy mummies in this country we forget that a third of our population is over 50. The women we spoke to loved what ‘apps’ could do for them whether it be ‘snacking’ on a 10 min Bejeweled game or updating their Facebook page with new photos. A revolution is going on within this older group but no-one seems to notice or pay any attention to these women.” says Belinda Parmar, founder of Lady Geek, an independent company which helps technology companies understand women.

In the US, the number of women over 55 on Facebook is almost double the number of men in the same age group (Source: Inside Facebook, Feb 2009). Yet despite this growth, companies tend to ignore this ‘invisible and forgotten’ generation and pay little or no heed to what they want or need.

Methodology

For this report, Lady Geek in conjunction with YouGov SixthSense, ran an online survey a sample of 16,810 smart-phone owners. The number of men and women over-55 was 1,639.

Lady Geek also conducted some informal interviews with older women to understand how they engaged with technology.

Lady Geek helps technology and gaming companies understand women through female insight, intelligence and influence.

SixthSense, part of YouGov plc, is a provider of comprehensive business intelligence.

To interview Belinda Parmar the author of the report, or to obtain a full copy of the report, please contact belinda@ladygeek.org.uk

One of the myths prevailing around women and technology is that technology companies think that women are not interested in technology therefore they need to ‘dumb it down’, ‘pink it up’ and ‘girlify it.’

The reality is that women are interested in technology. Four out of every ten gadgets in the UK are now bought by women.  The missed financial opportunity of NOT targeting women is calculated by Forrester at £0.6billion.

And more interesting than the stats, are the wonderful stories that women share with Lady Geek about how they feel about technology.  This woman Justine being a great example of how excited (!) she was when she got her iPad.

Apple is a great example of a company that spends approx 70% of all its research and UI testing with women as they see women as the ‘gold standard’ in terms of their unwillingness to ‘conquer’ technology.  Women want intuitive technology that is a joy to use, and like them or loathe them as a company, Apple delivers all of it in spades.

The other tech players must get a sense of anticipation and excitement amongst women.  They must target female influencers much earlier on in the product lifecycle. They must think about what women want at every stage of the sales experience from the pre-sales mania to the post-sales experience.  They must understand that men want to conquer technology, women want to it to enhance their life.

So yes women are interested in technology.  Very interested.  Understand us.  Come talk to us.  And for god’s sake, don’t dumb down your products and talk to us as if we were 7 years old.

My first ever PC was a noisy clunky beige-coloured box which sounded something like a hair-dryer and produced twice as as much heat. It was a useful workhorse, but profoundly unpleasent up-close. Such a device would have no hope in my living room: In most households women control which devices are allowed into that most precious of space – the typical grey PC is not getting in.

Fortunately the PC has evolved: The boxes got smaller, quieter and more beautiful- they gradually adapted to fill every possible niche in the household.

The Dell Zino HD is the most extreme example of this evolution: It’s a tiny box that’s built for the bedroom or the living room. Dell understood that you probably want to connect it to a TV, that’s why it has an HDMI port and comes as standard with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Who wants wires trailing across their living room?

Unfortunately, the living room is a fiercly competitive ecosystem: At best there’s room for no more than three devices beneath the TV. That means if you are going to introduce a new device you probably need to boot something else out: The Zino is likely to displace a games console or a DVD player since it can do the job of both.

Dell have clearly studied the aesthetics of Nintendo’s Wii, however unlike the wii, the Zino HD is no toy: It packs a 64bit AMD Athlon X2 chip and runs a full edition Microsoft’s Windows 7. That means it can play just about any game or media you throw at it. Imagine your favourite games on your wide-screen TV? This is going to appeal to all but the most obsessed Wii-sportsmen.

With most women being the gatekeepers of the home – Dell have a smart strategy with designing beautifully made PC’s that are as much architectural fittings as they are useful pieces of technology.  The worst thing Dell could do now is patronise women like Samsung are doing with their Genio and come out with fluffy marketing statements asking women ‘What colour is your life?’

Whilst the Zino has earned it’s space in my living room, the marketing has yet to earn my respect.  Only time will tell.