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

We already know that women rule social media. There are more women users on Facebook and Twitter, and they spend more time than men on these sites. What makes certain social networking sites more female or male oriented?

Less than 15% of Wikipedia editors are women. Only 36% of Digg users are women, and its content doesn’t exactly scream gender equality. Meanwhile, Pinterest (a virtual pinboard sharing site) seems to be a community mostly made of women.

New social network Chime.in is actually not calling itself “social,” but an “interest network.” This means it will revolve around subjects, like tech, rather than people. Is there a clear divide between the two? And what does the answer to this potentially mean for women?

For now, Chime.in appears to be a gender-neutral place where men and women can speak and share freely and equally. Then again, so did Google+, which is still only 31% women. The most headline-grabbing aspect of Chime.in has been the concept that it could generate cash for users through advertising sales, leading to a deluge of get-rich commentary. Will the site even be social? Or a profit-driven interest site for the self-interested?

As for whether women will buy into Chime.in, it depends on whether it caters to their basic roles and natures. Women are expected to be caregivers. They get pregnant. They have families. They are the glue of their interconnected communities. They can’t be 100% self-interested. Perhaps this is why they tend to dominate community based social networking like Facebook, rather than linear, systematic sites like Wikipedia.

Women won’t chime in to a site without a strong community. Chime.in won’t have much of a relationship with women unless it remembers what keeps them interested–a place that feels like an extended family, a real community in their virtual worlds.

–Written by Sarah Fink from @ladygeektv

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

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.

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.

I was glad to have been invited by Maggie Berry from WomeninTechnology, an online job board, networking and event group for women working in technology jobs in the UK, to attend the glamorous BlackBerry Women & Technology Awards. This was the third edition of the event celebrating women’s achievement in the field of technology.

Maggie Philbin, who used to be a presenter of Tomorrow’s World, led through the evening and various speakers such as Glenda Stone, Aurora and Charmaine Eggberry, VP and managing director, EMAE for Research in Motion.

The evening started with a reception and then we were asked to sit at the tables for a wonderful meal. The WomeninTechnology table was fabulous with a variety of people ranging from representatives from NBC and the WISE – Women into Science, Engineering and Construction to Suzanne Doyle Morris who offers coaching for female leaders who also authors an interesting blog.

After the dinner the award ceremony started. The winners were

• Best use of technology by a woman within the corporate sector: Jayne Opperman (Lloyds TSB)
• Best use of technology by under 30 year-old woman: Lisa Ditlefsen (Base One)
• Best woman in technology (public sector and academia): Professor Lizbeth Goodman (SMARTlab)
• Best use of technology within the multimedia industry by a woman: Beatriz Alonso-Martinez (Avid Technology Europe)
• Best company advancing women in technology: BT Group
• Best use of technology by a woman in small to medium business: Polly Gowers (Everyclick.com)
• Best female mentor: Kate Bishop (Dell)
• BlackBerry outstanding woman in technology: Professor Lizbeth Goodman (SMARTlab)

What I found particularly interesting was Charmaine Eggberry talking about research commissioned by Research in Motion with girls aged 11 to 16. 90% of these girls described technology as ‘cool’. 38% of the girls talk about the latest technologies daily. However only 28% of girls in contrast to 52% of boys wanted to work in this area. Girls simply saw technology work as too geeky. We know from research on stereotypes that role models have a major impact on perceptions and honouring women of achievement in technology is one way of changing the image of technology and encouraging more girls and women into the area.