The BlackBerry is often said to have transformed how business is done. People can now be always ‘on’. However some have warned of the addictive aspects of ‘crackberries’. I have used a BlackBerry for various months now and have to say that I like it to be able to read emails and to retrieve information wherever I go and I like the navigation function. Women in general praise the BlackBerry for allowing them to stay in touch with work while at home.

 

Given these benefits of the BlackBerry, it is not surprising that Research in Motion, the creator of the BlackBerry, has started to make more stylish BlackBerries that should appeal to women. Yes, they have done the obvious and created a pink version, but the BlackBerry also comes now in a range of colours including red. While a pink BlackBerry might not be entirely appropriate for, say, a female banker, she might like a red one and who knows maybe her male colleague prefers a more colourful BlackBerry too. 

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.

The Times last week picked up my Lady Geek report along with lots of surprising and somewhat dismaying points about how even fewer women are reaching boardroom status and failing to put their talents to use. In 2006 the Women and Work Commission calculated that if women’s skills were better harnessed, the country would gain £23 billion. It also states, to my horror, Rwanda has a higher female representation in its parliament than does the UK (49 per cent to our 20 per cent)

That is the question posed and answered in Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our next Economic Revolution. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, the author of the book, states that men need to become ‘gender bilingual’. “When a major business moves into China, it tries to learn and understand Chinese culture and language. That’s no different from learning to work with female differences in terms of aspirations, vocabulary, attitudes and priorities.”

Companies that have adopted this ‘gender bi-lingual‘ approach have seen the positive results in the workforce. PwC has more than doubled the number of women who return after maternity leave. Quite a feat as most men in business in my experience really believe that your brain disappears along with your pelvic floor muscles. I remember being introduced in a meeting after my first week back after maternity leave as “This is Belinda, and only half her brain works since she has had her baby.” Not quite the confidence building introduction I would have hoped for.

Work has taken on a new meaning in my life since having children. I am much more focused. I am less likely to talk corporate bull. I am less tolerant. I am better at multi-tasking. I deliver more albeit in a shorter worker week. I refuse to sacrifice time with my children unless it is for something I believe in. Something I believe that is actually going to make a difference.

In the 1990s Deloitte, the professional services firm, organised a two-day workshop on gender issues for 5,000 staff. It cost $8 million (£4 million). Douglas McCracken, the CEO, said: “The message was out: don’t make assumptions about what women do or don’t want. Ask them.” There are numerous studies on how women in business positively impact the bottom line but many companies still fail to realise the potential of women especially after they have had children.

I love the quote the Churchill quote they end with in the book, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

I read an interesting post from OCMod Shop which highlights the fact that many women are being ignored by technology companies even when they are often the key influencers of technology buying decisions even for male early adopters. Men may still control the boardroom but women definitely control the living room, bedroom, kitchen when it comes to buying technology. Its true that marketers have pretty much nailed the tweens, teens and older people with devices like the Wii, but very few with the exception of Sony Bravia, Apple (boring I know), BestBuy in the US and some of the UK department stores are doing exceptional things to inspire women to actually enjoy technology.

The article states that in the US, 84% of internet users now store digital pictures, 59% store music, 36% video clips, 26% store personal videos and 17% store movies and TV shows. We know that women are the drivers of capturing memories and personal videos of their families. In my household, this is absolutely true. It maybe be my husband who takes most of the pictures but its me who will store them on flickr. Its me that sends albums out to our families every 6 months. Its me that will go back to them time after time and marvel at how beautiful our sprogs are (even if they are not).

I don’t think that companies have succeeded yet in understanding what women use their technology devices for and why. Many companies, to paraphrase Sean Connery, just don’t understand women; what women are looking for and how to inspire them when it comes to technology. Listening to them, really listening (not just doing your average dull focus group asking the same old boring questions) would be a good place to begin.