Each year tech companies will try and tell you what gadgets to get for Christmas by blabbing on about RIM, RAM and terrabytes. Yawn. And don’t even get us started on the pink and sparkly gifts of season’s past. But fear not –  hopefully no returns will be necessary if you write this year’s letter to Santa with a little help from Lady Geek. Whether you are looking to give or receive (or just receive…) we are bringing you our favourite gadgets that belong on everyone’s wishlists.

Stocking Stuffers

iStand

First up for a fun stocking stuffer, the iStand offers a way to prop up your mobile phone in the stylish manner it truly deserves. It also doubles up as a nice grip for when you’re sending out Boxing Day ‘thank you’ texts to everyone who got you something. Well everyone who didn’t buy you socks, anyway.

£4.49 at Lazybone

The first app I remember seeing was shown to me by a guy friend of mine, and it was the Wobble app. In case you don’t have the pleasure of familiarity with this app, it allows you to add “boob jiggle” to a photo of any woman of your choice. And we wonder why our research with YouGov (Source: The App Economy YouGov/Lady Geek 2010) has show women with smartphones were nearly twice as likely as men to have never downloaded a SINGLE app.

Quite remarkable when the same piece of research showed that more women than men bought smartphones in the last 6 months.  So women are buying smartphones but are not buying apps for 2 main problems.  One like me, women perceive a lot of the apps are not relevant to their lives such as iFart, i Burp and so on.  The second is that there is just too much choice out there. Who needs 200,000 apps- most women want a small selection of apps that make a difference to their lives.

And that is exactly the ambition and purpose of the brilliant IdeasProject “Apps to Empower Women” Challenge run by Nokia. The competition asked for submissions of app ideas that would make a real, practical difference to women’s work, education and leisure. The top app chosen in the challenge will be developed by a team of women software developers.

Honours went to Mobile Women African Crafters by Atim Oton, Easy App for Elderly Women by JoJa Dhara and Trigger Free by Jenny Evgenia. Mobile Women African Crafters would be an app  that creates and increases sustainable income for local women crafters in Kano, Nigeria who stay at home and work. The idea is an online space for crafters to share and sell their crafts via Mobile phones. The Easy App for Elderly Women would help elderly women navigate their way through various social networking and communication tools to help them stay in contact with their friends and family. Trigger Free would allow survivors of sexual violence to identify media that can trigger post-traumatic stress. Allowing users to add media to a database, rate them and help other survivors enjoy trigger-free leisure.

The winner was Woman’s Personal Private Market Place by Rustam Sengupta. Often women, especially living in the rural areas of emerging markets do not have access to personal care products such as contraceptives, or the means to purchase them from traditional sellers. The app will have a catalogue of such products and allow the process to be as discrete and comfortable as possible. Now that is what I call a real app.

These ideas show the force for good in innovative technology like apps. Yes we can download apps to get the weather or play a game, but its amazing to see how apps are transforming how women gain access to everything from health services to banking, and employment opportunities to educational tools. The mWomen Programme is an important component of this, and addresses key barriers to women’s access to mobile phones. The appetite for empowering apps is a hunger to feed, and there are inspiring women making it happen.

Written by Sarah Fink from Lady Geek TV.

The judges for the Apps to Empower Women Challenge were Mitchell Baker, Abigail Disney, Libby Leffler, Elizabeth Varley, Angelique Mannella and Belinda Parmar.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek TV. Please join the Lady Geek campaign to end the stereotypes and cliches towards women in tech and Like us on Facebook

I hate the feeling I get when my kids watch TV. When I see them slumped there, zombied out in front of the screen it’s so hard not to feel guilty. I should be doing more to get them out of the house. Pump them full of fresh air. I imagine many parents feel the same.

So I wasn’t sure how to greet the news that Xbox are making a big push into the educational market with their new ‘playful learning’ range of Kinect titles aimed at 4-10 year olds. Of course I could see the huge potential that the Kinect’s controller-free interface might have to encourage kids to use their bodies and motor skills to engage with subjects. But the guilty parent in me couldn’t help but worry – might this just another way for us to abdicate responsibility, to plonk our kids in front of a screen and tell ourselves that were doing our job? It’s ok, i tell myself. It’s educational.

Needless to say on arriving at the press launch this week in New York my built in British skepticism was turned up to eleven. Could this be really be ‘education’ or was it really ‘edu-tainment’? As I sat there waiting for the presentation to begin the voice of a member of Lady Geek’s influential mum panel rang loudly in my ears: ‘At the end of the day, I want my children to be climbing trees not playing on an Xbox.’

But then something surprising happened. As the scarily passionate Microsoft team began to show off the new titles, I could feel that, in spite of myself, I was softening. The Kinect really is a wonderful piece of kit which is intuitive and immersive, and the new games take full advantage of its technology. As I watched the demonstrator and her child enthusiastically navigate round a virtual Sesame Street with a series of wonderfully fluid physical gestures, I was amazed when they both appeared within the game itself. I couldn’t help but think that what I might be looking at was the future of learning.

It can be easy to dismiss something as bad for our kids because it involves staring at a screen. All parents do it, and it’s impossible to shake off our natural prejudices that children should be outside hopscotching and bike riding and scraping knees as if it was a Beverly Cleary book and a stash of hidden pirate gold depended on it. But we have to embrace the fact that our children are being raised in a brave new technology age and my 3 year old daughter similar to the baby in the video, thinks a traditional magazine is a broken iPad.

Products like the Kinect can and will play a huge part in their future development. With it’s immersive interactivity, the experience becomes as much about kids teaching themselves as it is about being taught. They no longer have to sit and listen, but can get up and participate. Its no longer about passively sitting in front of the TV, but jumping in and learning with them. It’s wonderful.

Maybe I’m being optimistic, but if used to it’s full potential – and the Xbox demonstration I witnessed showed me that this is entirely possible – I see no reason why Xbox, the darling of the ‘traditional’ gamer, could change mum’s perception and win the Battle of The Living Room. But it won’t happen overnight and is going to take serious commitment from Xbox to understanding a new audience and in particular Mum – the CEO of the household and the ‘gateway to the living room.’ Xbox clearly knows this and as David McCarthy, Xbox General Manager for Kids and Lifestyle Entertainment said “We are listening. We are learning along the way and writing each page as we go.”

Titles like Kinect Sesame Street and Kinect National Geographic TV can let kids learn how to count along with Elmo, explore the wonders of nature as a bear or experience their favorite book from within the story itself. To me, that’s incredible. We have entered a new era where my children’s imaginations are augmented by technology, and I can’t help feeling what I saw will revolutionize the way our children learn.

@belindaparmar is the founder of @LadyGeekTV. Please join the Lady Geek campaign to end the stereotypes and cliches towards women in tech and Like us on Facebook.

This month’s HBR echoes  much of what Lady Geek has been highlighting for the past 18 months-perfect timing for my upcoming Symbian talk.  Firstly, that women represent the largest market opportunity in the world- in aggregate, the opportunity is bigger than China and India combined.

Secondly that despite this, most companies continue to market to men and fail to explore how they might meet women’s needs. Or they target women as an afterthought through patronizing initiatives.  Dell’s Della being a perfect example.  The NY Times said Dell needed to go to the ‘school of marketing hard knocks.’

And namely, that those companies that can offer tailored products and services are in prime position to win, when the economy recovers.

Interviewing over 12,000 women about everything ranging from their jobs and education to their hopes and fears, BCG found that women are vastly underserved.  Women feel few companies have responded to their need for products and services specifically designed for them. Too many businesses behave if women had no say over purchasing decisions.  With the recovery in sight now, women will represent one of the largest opportunities and are an important force in spurring a recovery.  One of the findings echoes Wave 1 of the Lady Geek Brand Survey;

I hate being stereotyped because of my gender and age, and I don’t appreciate being treated like an infant.”

Interestingly, the research highlights that women are happiest in their early and later years and the lowest point is early and mid forties.  Women struggle to cope with both children and aging parents, so are most receptive to products that help them better control their lives and balance their priorities.

I could not agree more with their final point;

A focus on women as a target market-instead of a geographical target- will up a company’s odds of success when the recovery begins.

Its official.  Ladies, get your pink handbags out.  The new ad from PC World and Dell is officially the most patronising ever.  It starts with the line

My world is fashion.  I just have to colour co-ordinate everything.  Even my laptop.  That’s why I love the new Dell laptop.

Pass me the barf bag.  Please.  It just gets worse.  Should I get pink to match my shoes….  Must I go on?  I am sure you get the picture.

This is an example of 2 companies who have money to waste.  2 companies who have no idea of how to talk to women and most importantly, no idea of the role that technology plays in a women’s life.

I thought that Dell would have learnt from their latest Della ‘for women’ website which seems to have such bad press that they have renamed it.  This is disappointing as the Dell Inspiron mini 10 is a  fantastic piece of kit.   I also thought PC world had made some progress with their latest work.  But alas, it seems a group of middle aged balding in marketing (sorry but it has to be) decided that “women are the answer.”

Here’s the logic.

Women like shoes.

Women like pink.

So to make women like technology, we need to pink it up and dumb it down and make it match her shoes.

Do me a favour.  None of the professional women I know (which is where the biggest financial opportunity is) would be seen dead with a pink laptop.  For most women over the age of 12, pink is definitely not their world.

And even more offensive is not the colour, but the positioning.   The women I speak to love technology.  The creativity and human interaction it adds to their life.  Not because it matches their shoes.

On the positive side, it confirms how much technology brands need specialists such as Lady Geek to put an end to patronising ads like this.

My WARC conference presentation stressed that the best way to market to women is to be inclusive rather than to simply overtly exclude men. Nevertheless, most marketing activities aimed at women do so simply by shutting-out the other gender. It’s a mirror-image of the current marketing worst-practice. Della, the new netbook sales portal from dell is a pastel-pink feminized counterpart to the unapologetically ultra-masculine Dell.com. It’s a perfect example of the current trend of exclusion marketing.

I remember interviewing one Lady Geek who told me in no uncertain terms that the ‘Dixons Women’s Only night’ was her idea of hell.

“What are they going to do, give me cheese and pineapple on a stick and tell me how to turn the telly on?”

Not exactly the response that Dixons were looking for, and in my experience a strategy which never works quite as well as the men who invented it might expect.

Marketing to women should not feel like “an initiative” i.e that a group of 40 something balding marketing men have been sitting in the boardroom and some bright spark says ‘We need to appeal to women. I know, lets create a portal for women, pink up and dumb down our products…we could even call it Della…(guffaw guffaw)

I admire Dell’s intent. Its brave. It shows that they recognizes that in the current environment, its a smart strategy to improve your bottom line by targeting women. I’m skeptical that Dell will achieve their objectives for two reasons:

Firstly,  do they really have a long-term commitment to growing the female market? Dell has a history of superficial and short-term business strategies such last year’s half-hearted flirtation with Linux . Is there any commitment to go beyond the shell of rebranding and create something which will profoundly appeal to this new market? As Elisabeth Kelan states, when you open the Inspiron artistic shell, its just an ordinary dull Dell laptop underneath.  How much of the products and community parts of the site have been specifically developed with women in mind rather than been re-skinned to appeal to women?

Secondly, I do not think that Dell have achieved a depth of understanding of their new female audience. Evidence of this is the handy lifestyle tips which state the excessively obvious. We also find the usual marketing copy cliches such as ‘giving extension to your digital life’ (I don’t want a digital life, I want a life with technology in it) and ‘enhance your life with technology’ and the ‘giving’ section – it’s the kind of vacuous text that means absolutely nothing.

From a product perspective, the site makes a big deal of their pretty new Inspiron Netbooks, however there’s not a whole lot else on the site – yet another echo of Dell’s failed Linux strategy which also presented an absurdly limited subset of Dell’s quite massive portfolio of products.

My research conducted with Jupiter found that a third of British women are frustrated, alienated and bored by the way tech companies market to them. Despite this most tech marketers are in denial about what must be done: There is plenty which can be done- it just needs to be executed and approached in the right way.

Strategies tech brands need to apply;

1) Go for an implicit strategy appealing to women rather than creating an overt exclusive ‘silo’. Overt branding such as Della, Dixon’s Women’s Only nights and Comets Angels give out wrong signals. Nintendo spent hundreds of dollars understanding women and their fitness regimes but never overtly positioned Wii Fit as ‘gaming for girls.’

2) Make women the heart of your strategy not the icing on the cake. Nike Women has invested millions and is part of a strategy which demonstrates Nike’s long term commitment to women. It goes beyond flogging products and starts to offer real benefits.

3) Develop an authentic understanding of women and what they want before you embark on women only strategies. Employ experts such as the Lady Geeks (shameless plug) who will help you go beyond the superficial and can deliver your proposition in a way that is not going to get women irritated. Dell have lost touch with the reality of those women its trying to sell to.

4) Position technology as entertainment rather than a female or male pursuit. Jeremy Clarkson, has equal appeal and ratings amongst both sexes. Rather than talk about the technical aspects of a car in a dry way, he has used humour and entertainment as a way to make cars appealing.

Della is a somewhat superficial step in the right direction. Lets just hope Dell listen to their customers and radically overhaul Della the concept before it becomes yet another of Dell’s six-month flirtations.

Women’s contributions to the development of technology are often forgotten or written out of history. It is all too easy to forget that women had a significant impact on the development of technologies we use today.

The Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated today by more than 1,600 bloggers who have signed up to blog about her today. We at LadyGeek want to support this initiative and are proud to raise awareness for this exceptional woman.

 

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) is rightly acclaimed to be one of the first  computer programmers. She wrote programmes for a machine  -  an early mechanical general-purpose computer - envisioned by Charles Babbage. Ada Lovelace was one of the visionaries who anticipated the power that computers can bring that go beyond number-crunching.

Ada Lovelace can be seen as a role model for women in technology and some of today’s role models are mentioned in this article in Computer Weekly.

 

 

 

Marketers seem to have finally come around to see that mothers use the Web 2.0. The insightful report called Digital Mom was produced by Razorfish and CafeMom.

 

The first part of the report is based on a survey with 1,500 mothers who are users of Web 2.0. The report produced some interesting findings:

1.    65% of mums use social networking sites, 56% SMS and 52% game online or via a game console. This is for me the most striking finding showing that gaming is no longer a niche activity for adolescent boys but has gone mainstream.

2.    There are also age differences. Moms over 35  are more likely to use the web as an information tool while moms under 35 are more likely to use social network sites. Also women with children over 12 tend to game more (57%) than women with children under 12 (51%).

3.    The mothers’ interests go beyond parenting. These women retain many interests. In the last three months the surveyed mothers had researched or purchases fashion items or clothing (40%), food and cooking (31%) and baby/parenting (26%), banking (22%), computer and electronics (21%) and medication/medical condition (20%).

Part 2 is based on an in-depth survey of 1,750 women active in CafeMum.

4.    Digitalmoms spent 18.5 hours per week online.

5.    These mums are active in social networking sites not passive consumers.

6.    The report develops five segments of digital mums: the self-expressor, the utility mum, the groupster, the infoseeker and the hyperconnector.

Marketers seems to have discovered that mums online a worthwhile target group. I wonder when we will see the Digital Dad.

 

 

Is her cleavage the ultimate signifier of a Lady Geek? Last Thursday I attended a Girl Geek Dinner and this was the question that led to a huge debate among the 100 plus women who work mainly in the area of technology.

 

Julie Lerman talked about her own journey as a woman in technology. She mentioned how her girlie interests were slowly relinquished to become one of the boys. She wanted to fit into the tech community and therefore she did not want to stand out as a woman. Over time she discovered how she can be a woman and a technical specialist and what combining these two identities means.

 

However she asked if some women in technology go in fact too far. Julie talked about how one female technologist used an image as her speaker photo for conferences which revealed her cleavage (the head of the woman was cropped to protect her identity). Julie commented that this sexualised image might go a bit too far. I somewhat shared her discomfort with it.

 

Some women in the room found this photo rather liberating. One woman said that men should get used to the fact that women have breasts. Others said that the cleavage shot is actually too sexualising and men would see the woman merely as a sex object rather than a serious speaker with a message. One woman replied that this might just be a clever way of advertising herself. But would that be an appropriate tactic for drawing attention to your work?

The issue came quickly to authenticity and being yourself. One woman said that the female technologist might just want to be herself. For her, this might mean to show her femininity through her cleavage. Is showing cleavage then the latest Lady Geek chic?

 

The discussion resembled debates around feminism and postfeminism. While feminists would stress that showing cleavage is demeaning to women because it objectifies them, postfeminists would say that it is actually liberating for women to show their cleavage and also – in a further step – to control men through it. We can think here about the Wonderbra ‘Hello Boys’ adverts with Eva Herzigova: many women found them empowering whilst others saw them as demeaning for women.

 

What would that mean for women working in technology and selling technology to women? Should technology being sold using women and their cleavages? This would be very similar to how technology actually used to be advertised. And these adverts speak mainly to men. Based on that, I would assume that only a fringe group of women would think that cleavage is geek chic.

 

There is also a professional dimension to all this: Women in the workplace in general have to navigate a narrow path of acceptable behaviour, and from my experiences, using too much of a cleavage is doing nothing for your professional image. It will position you mainly as an object of male desire rather than as a professional. That does not mean hiding your femininity but finding a way to emanate professional femininity.

 

 

 

Last week I had the pleasure to be invited by ?What If!, an innovation company, to join a good number of the Top 50 Women in Mobile Content. Jessica Sandin, who heads up mobile at ?What If! was named as one of the top 50 women in mobile content and to celebrate their success ?What If! invited them to the ‘Old Laundry’, one of their offices.

 

Offices sounds way too stuffy for ?What If!. It feels more like a mix between a living room and a playground. I wrote a case study about ?What If! a while ago and was impressed with how they generate innovation. Much of how they work resonated a lot with how I work with ethnographic methods in an academic context.  The difference is that we do not bring products and services to market but write academic articles.

 

The evening started with drinks and we then gathered around in a circle of sofas. We were not allowed to rest a long time because we had to complete a task: learn as much as possible about two women in the room. This was great fun.  We then heard more about what ?What If! does and Jessica started a discussion on what it means to be a woman in mobile content. The discussion resembled many of those ‘women in a male dominated environment’ discussions I witnessed before. At first there was some hesitation as to whether it is different for men and women in mobile content followed by a string of interesting stories which showed that being a woman does matter.

 

After an insightful discussion, we continued the evening with delicious canapés and fascinating conversations. All in all a fantastic evening to celebrate great achievements!