The minute I meet Eileen I like her.  Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb Books is warm, direct and funny.  She is one of those women who you know would give you a straight answer if you asked her a direct question.  I want to know more about her story. How did she get from being ‘an artist at heart’ to one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in San Francisco generating $45million in revenue in 2009 and shipping 1.2 million books to more than 60 countries?

And how did she manage to get VC funding of over $1million when just 5.7 per cent out of a total of more than $20 billion of VC funding in North America goes to companies with female bosses?  What is about Eileen that makes her just successful?

I ask Eileen about how she started the business.  She talks about the ‘kitchen cabinets’ she held, where she would group her friends and share her ideas.  The more people she told about her business, the more she became confident in her ideas.  This openness and exchange of ideas is something she says is fundamental to Blurb Books today.

The thing that most struck me is when I ask her about whether it was a struggle getting funding she looks perplexed.  Its almost as if it never entered her mind that her gender would be an issue despite the facts showing how difficult women can find it. She laugh and tells me;

‘VC’s don’t care if you are a horse, as long as they can make money from you.’

Eileen is not intimidated by being in a room of men ‘thinking they know best.’  She knows she knows best.  She learnt two valuable lessons in getting VC funding.  The first was be crystal clear about what you do.  You can’t expect anyone to invest in you if they don’t understand what you do.  The second lesson was to have a big vision.  Blurb’s vision is to democratise publishing and give everyone in the world a voice- far more impressive than trying to ‘encourage people to self publish.’ This is already becoming a reality with Blurb for Good which allows philanthropists and nonprofits to create and use books as a mean to generate awareness for social causes.

I can’t help feeling that there is an even bigger lesson to learn from Eileen.  One we don’t speak about in our interview.   A lesson every woman should adhere to.  The art of being fearless.  Not caring about or even noticing we are pitching our business to men or women.  Not caring if we get rejected.  Not needing to be reassured at every level. Culturally women, are still taught to be ‘obedient’ and the word ‘ambition’ is still used in a derogatory way when associated with women.  Eileen turns these outdated notions upside down.

Ask forgiveness not permission.  The most useful lesson to each and every female entrepreneur.

Cross-posted from Girly Geekdom

The ads for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini could not have been more tempting. Elegant model fingers slickly trip-trip-tripping on the highly touch sensitive screen had me drooling from the get-go. Cradled perfectly in the palm of my hand with a screen size smaller than an average credit card, the Xperia X10 mini is beautiful, responsive and sharp. Looking at the Xperia-exclusive Timescape social networking feature and a beautiful camera -

this tiny and probably highly lose-able phone was practically begging tocome with me to Glastonbury.

The phone helpfully came with a micro USB charger, 5 colourful snap-on backs and a 2 GB micro-SD card. Me, the X10 Mini and my untested sleeping bag were ready to go.

Superfast internet, a responsive touch screen, a powerful processor and the killer Google Android operating system powerthe social mind-meld that it is the Xperia-exclusive Timescape

.Timescape mashes missed calls, texts, multimedia mess

ages and Facebook and Twitter updates into a one-stop shop for social networking on a home screen. Responsive, reliable and beautiful, it was a pleasure to use and a great way to check in with Twitter, Facebook and messages quickly.

The sharp 5 megapixel camera took beautiful pictures during the day and night. Even when crushed by revellers at 10 pm and battling with strobe lighting and the surging excitement of an energetic crowd, the pictures of Muse performing on the Pyramid stage came out perfectly. So well, in fact, that other festival-goers commented on their sharpness as I took them. Each photo could be easily and instantly uploaded to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, sent as an email or MMS, which had my friend in a fit of jealousy.

The fast processor and Android operating system does come with a drawback – the battery drained faster than a kitchen sink. This problem culminated in the X10 mini dying twice in one day leaving a very lost me frantically handing over the device to the lovely phone charging guys by the dance tents for an emergency 1 hour charge. Oops! I spent a lot of time in Orange Chill n Charge tent over the festival. On the plus side, I did get to see Ellie Goulding play an acoustic set in the tent. Unfortunately, I could not take a photo as… my phone was charging. A little investigation on return home revealed that the X10 Mini constantly scans for network so, if you are in a low network area or a particularly busy area (for example, Glastonbury!), the X10 Mini’s battery will get sucked up just finding a network. Recommendation – switch the phone to airplane mode when confronted with this problem.

Overall, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini is a very impressive small smartphone, especially in comparison to the unresponsive HTC Tattoo. With the slick Timescape giving the phone a social networking edge, its £200 price tag, great processor and the Android operating system gives this impressive smartphone a great edge.

The Pyramid Arena at Glastonbury 2010. Taken using the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini.

“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

by Laura Rich

“Can a smartphone take on all comers without flinching? It can when it’s operating a cargo-bay-ful of apps…that you can run while running other apps,” taunts the announcer in “All Comers,” one of the latest ads for Droid, the mobile phone from Google. There are no people, only machines, and made-up technologies. It’s a teenage boy’s fantasy dream.

Verizon has spent $100 million on the creative and media to blanket the universe with such positioning since the fall, and they’re pretty inescapable on television, radio, Hulu, etc. Which is why it’s somewhat surprising that the target market has seemed to be so narrow.

I’m talking about the robots, the space void, the landscape free of humans, only machines and the cold, empty clicks and whirr of this barren universe. Which mainly appeal to the boys, who don’t want an easier-to-use, more instinctual device but a storyline that makes them a character in a futuristic, inter-galactic adventure. And who don’t want any girls around. (Watch the ads here.)

It seems like a step back. So much progress has been made in the last two decades to make technology friendlier, easier to use, more intuitive. And this has helped to integrate technology into our lives, create more communication, more community, more opportunities for individuals to be creative, start companies, help companies save money, be more accessible, etc. Making technology easier is not a bad thing.

But if you listen to the Droid ads, it kind of is. The ads are aggressively aimed away from women. They emphasize apps that “pinpoint any location to find the star in the sky above you… and identify planets you’re not on.” Really? This is an app we need?

Women don’t need pink, but they do want accessibility, sociability, utility. The Droid ads use technical language and insider taunts like the one about multi-tasking, which is aimed squarely at the iPhone’s inability to multi-task. (You can’t, for instance, run your Pandora app and then check your email. It’s one or the other. And it’s a pain. Thankfully, Apple has announced that the iPhone 4.0 OS, due out in the fall, will finally allow for multi-tasking.) Droids seem to want boys, not girls.

Anyway, lots of people agree that Droid is going heavy on the dudes.

But here’s another thought on why: it could be about more than just share of the immediate consumer market: As a friend reminded me, these devices—Droid, iPhone, Pre—live and die on their apps. Just as a computer without any applications is kind of pointless, too. So far, the iPhone leads the pack in apps, with more than 185,000 in its App Store. The Droid counts 38,000, but growing at a clip that’s expected to hit 100,000 by end of year. The Pre is not really even worth mentioning, with just 2,169.

So if the apps are the thing, it’s obvious why iPhone is king. But if the Droid really begins to capture the imagination of geeky boys—I mean, even those in their 20s and 30s, perhaps nerdy programmer types—well, who’s going to win the app race then? If the developers like the Droid, that’s where the apps will go. And if there are enough apps that make our lives easier, allow us to be more creative, efficient with our time, connect with others, etc.—no ad will be needed to convince more of us, no matter what gender, that the Droid is the better option. (Especially if the wireless service provider also prevents calls from dropping so frequently, too.)

More: Read the full breakdown on the anti-girls approach from this reader on Contexts.org, here’s a part of it:

0:04. The voice over’s question “Should a phone be pretty?” is
visually answered with an effect reminiscent of melting celluloid. The
rupture starts on top of the woman’s head, exploding her “pretty” face.

0:06. Women are beheld as dolls.

0:08. Images appear superimposed over images beneath a verbal
judgment. The beauty queen (fake) made out of plastic (fake) shown on a
television (fake) is definitively stamped “CLUELESS.”

0:10. The commercial erased its first woman by destroying the medium
of her representation (supposedly celluloid). The commercial again
destroys its second “woman” by destroying the medium of her
representation (a television).

0:10 – 0:13. Words across the screen: FAST, RACEHORSE, SCUD. Images:
Lightning, racing horse, ripping off duct tape, SCUD missile.
Combining these motifs into one single image, we see the SCUD missile
flying across the screen with the word RACEHORSE as though it were
written with lightning.

0:14. Droid applications: Reality Browser 2.1, Google Sky Map, Qik,
Mother TED, CardioTrainer, Where. While I doubt that these applications
were developed with the commercial’s themes in mind, their selections
reinforce the messages thus far enforced visually: reality (woman of
burnt celluloid, destroyed television), sky (SCUD missile), quick (FAST,
RACEHORSE), mother (a Freudian slip recognizing the infantile nature
of a power fantasy? ^_~), exercise (beef up for manliness stat +4), and
going places (which SCUD missiles, race horses, and THE MANLIEST OF
MANKIND’S MEN all do).

0:15. Word overlay: DOES. Men do things. Women are pretty and
useless.

Read the rest here.

–

This post originally appeared on LauraRich.com.

Oh – is that a woman speaking in the new PC World ads? Yes, that’s right, it is! Hooray a woman? Oh wait. Oh. Oh no.

Do you see the difference? The boy uses his computer to do stuff. The woman acquired it because she just cannot resist acquiring stuff when she’s shopping for fun because, you know, women like to shop. Even better when she can buy more shoes, right?

Believe it or not, and I suspect PC World doesn’t, I use my computer to do stuff. In fact, I am writing this piece on my laptop. I am also streaming music from Spotify, I have (one, two, three, four…) 9 tabs open in a Safari browser and another 3 open in Chrome (I am an equal opportunities geek). iTunes, Tweetdeck, Adobe, a mail client, a photo editor, MS Office AND iWork are all open right now and running smoothly(ish). All pretty useful, all pretty convincing. So maybe it would be nice to know if the proposed Samsung netbook can, for example, connect to the internet instantly or run concurrent browsers. PC World could show the kind of media the Samsung netbook does support or enhance. PC World Dolly Bird, on the other hadn, does not care but aren’t her shoes awesome?

Women are diverse and have competing needs and there is definitely a market for accessible technology, especially where you are not a power user. HOWEVER, PC World then follows up the Bargain ad with this little gem:

You’ll never guess what? Girls like to drink lattes and go to nightclubs! Wicked, innit? Also, this netbook is cheap. So is this all-in-one printer/scanner/photocopier/blackmail machine. PC World had a second chance to get this right and failed. Failed.

It is simply not enough to keep projecting female stereotypes in the hope this strategy attracts women and their purses. Women are as diverse, as disparate and individual, as men. PC World needs to talk to women like they are humans, not caricatures straight from a dumbed-down version of Legally Blonde.

The ads also disturbingly depict technology and, therefore, their products as a boring diversion, cruelly siphoning off money from the really fun things, like shoes and cocktails. I’m going to put my hand up here and say that many women find technology fun – it enhances their life and provides a constant source of entertainment. Make the product more appealing for women – sell the product, sell technology, sell a lifestyle, not the other things your customers can buy from other places.

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.

Having discussed women and gaming a couple of weeks ago, you can imagine how pleased we were to find out Wednesday’s announcement that OnLive will finally go live on 17 June.

Having had 11 months to refine a marketing strategy to appeal to the widest possible market, OnLive produced a product that got so much right and falls down at the last possible hurdles. The subscription fee model that will appeal to a broad range of consumers (read: women, too)? Check. The ability to work on both Macs and PCs without additional hardware requirements? Check. A microconsole to stream video games direct to a TV? Check! A fast, streamlined, informative website? Check, check, check. Check.

Now let’s look at the games – oh, dear. So close! The “featured games” on the website include Assassins Creed 2, Metro 2033 and the upcoming Prince of Persia.  Every single one of the games listed is graphically violent, arguably not the way to appeal to many female gamers.  By contrast, the most popular games for the Wii console (the most popular games console with women) are of the Super Mario Brothers/Mario Kart variety and multi-player sports games.  Two exceptions – the hugely successful Call of Duty and Lego Star Wars, my personal favourite, which involves shattering Lego walls, Lego objects and Lego storm troopers – no blood involved.

Given this evidence, the available games choices for OnLive needs to be rapidly re-examined to attract women gamers. Ignoring the huge female gaming market is a perilous tactic for OnLive, which gets so many other aspects right.  Making sure female gamers are catered to could turn OnLive from a quirky, interesting gaming footnote to a superstar player.

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.