Jerry yang, Yahoo’s ex chief exec announced that the advertising industry was facing the toughest downturn in decades. The age of extravagance is gone. The age of the hangover is here. No more big marketing budgets with money to trial and test cool ideas. Its about ROI. Its about bold, strong brands having a clear positioning. Tough times need solid, focused leadership, a lesson that Woolworths learnt the hard way.

Napoleon declared the essence of strategy is sacrifice. Never has this been more true than in the current climate. And the sacrifice should be allocating marketing spend to men- a well saturated market. Lad’s mags are already pregnant with tech-brands competing for their attention. Women are the financial opportunity and Jupiter estimate marketers are missing out on £0.5billion by not marketing to women.

Out of every 10 gadgets, 4 are bought by women. And no before you ask we are not talking about fridges and washing machines. More women than men play games between the age of 24-35 than men now And we are not just talking the Sims. World of Warcraft now has 50% female players.

The research I conducted with Jupiter highlighted (now Forrester), ownership is on a par with men in most categories. Couple that with the fastest growing segment on social networks is married women with children. And according to an N-vision survey, December 2008, approx 40% of women are transacting on the Internet (ie spending money rather than just using the Internet for communication, information and entertainment) compared to 30% of men. Hence, Women are no longer a niche audience – they are the budget-holders and drivers of growth.

The editor of marie claire is right when she says:

“When it comes to tech brands and women, technology companies are in the same place the cars industry was 20 years ago.”

With the exception of Nintendo and it’s Wii, Apple, no other brand is talking the female language. I agree with Hilary Chilura when she says:

“Like nervous teenage boys at a junior high-school dance, tech marketers haven’t figured out how to talk to women”.

Ask any family who was in charge of buying the Christmas gifts, and you’ll find out its women not men. Women are not only buying technology for themselves, but as the Chief Household Officer, are buying for kids, husband, gran and friends. Women are in charge of the house, but more importantly are in charge of the living room (see Battle for the Living Room) where many of the technology lives: PVR, console, HD TV…. In my house, its my husband who lives in ‘his’ world but its me who lives in the ‘real’ world. I am deciding what we should cut back on, how much we can save and what we will buy when it comes to technology.

If tech brands want to be successful, they should focus on women at the expense of men. Women are no longer ‘the Second Sex. ‘ Rather the most profitable sex.

As a  techno-utopian, I believe technology brings people together rather than disconnecting them.

Received wisdom would have us believe that technology breeds isolation:  I’ve lost count of the number of hysterical Daily Mail articles that warn us that computer-games are turning kids violent. As a child I was told that sitting too close to the TV would “make you go blind”. There’s a great deal of nonsense spoken about technology, and it’s often believed because many people consider technological progress to be the root evil of society.

When I think about how technology is used in my household, the HD TV is like a digital campfire which brings the whole family together to watch films, the Wii is a short burst of fun for my husband and I when the kids are in bed, Facebook connects me to a wider circle of friends that I wouldn’t have the time to see, and my mum and I listen to Woman’s Hour together on our new Wi Fi radio.

Not only is technology physically bringing people together through new shared experiences, its creating a new way of sharing an emotional experience albeit in some cases on different platforms and different devices.  The reactions and the emotions of the people with whom you are sharing the experience with is whats important.

This becomes ever more apparent with the shift towards mobile content sharing devices.   As Jan Chipchase shows with this photo of two Tokyoites – on the right of the photo engaged in the same task watching the same television program on their mobile phone each using their own device, with comments passed back and forth.   Whereas one screen can compromise the viewing experience, the same content can be shared and hence the same experience.

According to the leading tech bloggers, HD-DVD is officially dead and Blu-Ray has emerged from the battle victorious. This seems to be a Pyhrric victory – that is a victory which has come at devastating cost to the victor.

In this case the cost is not merely the vast sums that the two warring consortia spent on promoting their formats but the fact that three years after the initial hype behind Blu-Ray and HD-DVD began I do not believe anybody cares who won. While Sony and Panasonic / Microsoft squabbled over what kind of disks we should use, movie fans seem to have flocked to legal and illegal movie download services.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have both lost. The real winner seems to be DivX whose file-format has emerged as the universal standard for internet movie downloads. Neither Sony’s PS3 or Microsoft’s XBox 360 support each other’s disk standard but both support DivX. Every kind of home computer can play a DivX movie and most low end DVD players can play the format direct from old-school DVD disks.

The folk-wisdom that movie fans demand some kind of physical object in return for their money seems to have been proved false by the undeniable fact that the download market is booming. The idea of going to a shop to buy a disk seems like an irrelevant, obsolete idea from a different century.

From research we know that engineers and designers tend to use themselves as the ideal for which they create new technologies. That means that we often end up with technology that is designed by engineers and with engineers in mind. While a small proportion of technically-versed men (and women) might find this technology easy to use, most people probably won’t. My research on gender and technology has shown that women prefer to use technology that is intuitive to use and does not require you to study the manual for hours. In fact, many men would prefer this as well.

Creating technology that is more intuitive to use is an important step in making technology more accessible to all. While the graphical user interface and the mouse as input device was popularised in the 1990s, not much has changed since then. Until recently. Apple’s new iPhone and iPod touch use a multi-touch technology to make the technology more intuitive to navigate. And what could be more intuitive than using your fingers. Last week I attended a presentation by Steve Ballmer, Microsofts’ CEO. He presented a new piece of technology which included a multi-touch screen similar to the one of the iPhone. The Microsoft Surface is a table PC that is operated by touch alone. It syncs with other devices such as mobile phone and digital cameras through simply putting them on the surface. These new touch technologies make it more intuitive to operate technology. In fact they provide tools to integrate technology much more into everyday life. Then technology is no longer designed for engineers by engineers but by engineers for people.

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070530-what-lurks-below-microsofts-surface-a-qa-with-microsoft.html

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/iphone-review.ars

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/The-iPod-meets-the-iPhone-a-review-of-the-iPod-touch.ars