Monthly Archive for March, 2008

Flippin’ heck thats small

Published
by
belindaparmar
on March 31, 2008
in Articles and Electronics
. 0 Comments

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I am in gagdet envy again. Pure Digital have made a “Flip” video camera, perfect for the youtube generation. Its the size of a digital camera.   The beauty of this camera is its simplicity.  There are no tapes or discs, no menus or settings, no lens cap, no memory card, no headphone jack.  You turn it on and it’s ready to film in two seconds.  You press the red button to record and once to stop and play to review the video.  When the memorys full (30/60 minutes depending on model) you slide a button and a USB jack pops out and you are spared the hassle of finding a USB cable.  Amazing.  As the NYT states “Its the very definition of less is more.”  In the US, you have 5 year olds along with 80 year old grandmothers using it. 

Women love it.  Because they can put it into their handbags, coat pockets, beach bags.   Rather than make it more complicated with extra features due to the “forces of the feature creeps” that no-one will ever use like most technology on the market, the Flip goes back to basics.  Its simple, convenenient and good value and its flying off the shelves like hot cakes.  According to the NYT, it has captured 13% of the camcorder market in one year. 

I want one.   My husband is in the habit of carying a very heavy and inconvenient Nikon D200 - he says that even though he loves it, it’s a nuisance to get out of his bag and set up.  Most dSLR cameras sit on a shelf and gather dust.  I want the equivalent of a point and shoot, plug and play that I can use spontaneously to capture my son’s first steps and slip into my handbag.   We bought a JVC camera when my son was born and have hardly used it.  It’s quite bulky, quite complicated and the first time I used it I was frustrated as I couldn’t master it and I felt out of my mental zone.  Since then, it mostly lay on the floor of our office. 

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I agree with Hawkins, referenced in the NYT “If you are successful at something the first time you try, you fall in love with it instantly in love with it.”  So many of the women I spoke to feel frustration and annoyance rather than a sense of pride and happiness with much of the technology on the market.   Once they have had a bad first experience, they default to their partner or a male friend or they give up completely.  The Flip will continue to make women fall in love with it.   I hope the marketing strategy is as good as the product!

Styled for life? What are you talking about?

Published
by
belindaparmar
on March 27, 2008
in Articles and Electronics
. 1 Comment

I am often asked for good examples of how tech brands should commuinicate with women: The fact is that good examples are few and far between. There is of course Apple, but praising apple is now a marketing cliche, but Apple always seems to get their tone right: They make technology simple but more importantly, they make technology inviting to women.

We might compare the minimalist elegance of Apple’s advertising with this trade ad from microsoft which so desperately attempts to appeal to women.

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It fails on multiple levels:

Firstly, I am affronted by the thought that Microsoft think they have to make it feel like a fashion ad to make women interested. It smacks of a group of middle aged marketing men appealing to the same old stereotypes and assumptions, spesificaly that women do not care for technology.

I can imagine the moment in the team meeting where the oldest guy in the rooms suggests: “Why don’t we disguise the products and sell them as if they were…wait for it…SHOES!”, only to be met by raturous applause from his colleagues who are all relieved to get this messy business of female marketing out of the way.

In my own extensive research I found that women are interested in technology but are put off by exactly this kind of stereotyping.

Secondly, Microsoft need to make fundamental changes to their company that makes women feel that they are interested in talking to them rather than just paying lip service to women with one ad. This goes right from looking at ensuring women are in leadership positions (Sony now have an Executive Women’s Committee, Yahoo new president is Susan Decker and Google have promoted the first female enginner to VP status- Melissa Mayer) to designing products that are intuitive, instinctive and emotional.

Its clear that this product bundle has not been designed with women in mind. Maybe I am wrong, but this seems to be more about off-loading some excess stock than opening up new markets.

And lastly, from an advertising perspective, there is no compelling and relevant idea in this ad. What does ‘Innovation Styled for Life’ actually mean? This sounds like vacous marketese.

Where is the innovation in this product bundle? How are these products styled for my life? I can’t relate to the life of the women in this ad. She looks more like a Pop Idol contestant than a real person who might have a compelling need for these products. The women I spoke to do not want technology ’styled for life.’ They want technology to fit in their lives not style their lives around technology.

My advice for Microsoft - encourage your agency to spend some time investigating how women really engage with these products. There’s no shame in selling a product on it’s aesthetic appeal - however Microsoft need to find a way to lift themselves above the level of nonsense established by the fashion industry.

“Brain Training” in class: WRONG

Published
by
belindaparmar
on March 25, 2008
in Articles and Games
. 1 Comment

As “Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain” hits the Five million mark in unit sales at the begining of this year and “More Brain Training” gets to 2.8 million units, I am wondering if the world has gone mad…

… And then I see this story in the Times; Primary school children are being encouraged to play Brain Training in class to boost their “cognitive skills”. I have no problem with girls or boys playing games. But Brain Training is one of the dumbest games in the whole DS catalogue, and despite it’s maker’s claims I think it’s the least likely to boost any kind of skills.

I have played Brain Training. Its very basic and repetitive - I’d barely even qualify it as a game. Its mind blowingly dull. I can think of a number of DS games that have a greater potential to challenge a young mind.

Brain Training challenges players to quickly answer primary-school grade arithmetic puzzles. The puzzles in Zelda or the strategic challenge of Advance Wars both encourage a more useful kind of logical thinking than Brain Training requires. All Brain Training seems to do is rote-learning of basic arithmetic.

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I teach my nieces and nephews French. At school, they learn to recite the numbers. They can count up from one, but they cannot translate simple random numbers. That’s just one example of how rote-learning does not work. It’s a dumb, boring and ineffective way to study.

I think we should applaud Nintendo for recognizing a role for their technology in the classroom - but surely our children deserve something better than this?

Pixel Qi’s Sunlight Readable Displays

Published
by
elisabethkelan
on March 25, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Mary Lou Jespen, formerly the founding chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child, has recently set up her own company, Pixel Qi. I had the chance to meet Mary Lou at the Women’s Forum in Deauville in 2006, where she talked about her invention, the sunlight-readable display used in the OLPC project. Pixel Qi aims at bringing a new generation of sunlight readable, super high resolution, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream applications like laptops, e-books readers and digital cameras. Everybody who has tried to take his/her own laptop to the garden to do some work there will immediately recognise the value of such new displays. And they are prone to have a major impact in the developing world too. I have therefore no doubt that Mary Lou will be very successful with this new venture.

DAB’s sinking ship

Published
by
Sally
on March 18, 2008
in Articles and Electronics
. 0 Comments

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I heartily agree with The Register’s report last week on DAB’s failure, despite ten years of hype by Britain’s most powefull media monopoly. The Register’s Andrew Orlowski writes:

Well, DAB has to be the best thing to happen to the Corporation in the past decade. It screws commercial radio rivals, who hand over £100,000 for a property (licence), and then must give the “penthouse suite” back to the public broadcaster. The paltry audiences for DAB mean the commercial operators must bleed red ink, while the BBC runs its own deeply subsidised digital broadcasts. Trebles all round!

That’s why you’re unlikely to hear the true extent of the digital radio fiasco on the Beeb itself, and why the digital propaganda is likely to continue.

It’s not just commercial broadcasters who find themselves excluded from DAB - the extortionate cost excludes community and non-commercial projects who simply cannot afford to pay for the license and the high-end equipment needed to broadcast via DAB.

From the consumer’s perspective the future of DAB continues to look grim - prices of DAB sets have come down from their original crazy prices (the first Pure Digital branded radios cost in excess of £500), however at a time regular transistor FM radios can be bought for pennies the cheapest DAB tuner is closer to £40.

The reason for this is that DAB is a quaintly British standard - that has not been adopted in any other country. Accordingly few of the major foreign electronics firms have seen fit to develop a product which could only ever be marketed to a single country.

Orlowski argues that Britian might have been better off DAB+ or the popular AAC format as our next-generation digital audio platform, however I think this just misses the point that there are already so many other kinds of affordable devices that might soon be able to do a better job:

My Nokia phone has an internet radio receiver which can pick up far more stations than my kitchen-bound DAB receiver, and companies like Recieva alread market devices which look exactly like DAB radios but which work on entirely open standards.

If only the BBC had spent the taxpayer’s money advertising a standard that everbody can use then they might not have got themselves into such a pickle.

BlackBerry’s Initiatives for Women and Technology

Published
by
elisabethkelan
on March 14, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

The BlackBerry is a recurrent theme on this blog. One way in which BlackBerry aims at attracting women is by sponsoring an exhibition that is currently taking place at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition is entitled ‘Brilliant Women – 18th Century Bluestockings’ which also includes ‘Modern Muses’, an exhibition photographs of contemporary women of achievement taken by Bryan Adams. I went to a private viewing this week and enjoyed the way in which the National Portrait Gallery links inspirational images of women.

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Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, also sponsors the annual BlackBerry Women in Technology Awards. I think such initiatives might help raising the profile of women and technology and more is needed to change stubborn gender stereotypes.

Shadowing Lady Geeks

Published
by
elisabethkelan
on March 14, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

The skill shortage in the ICT sector has for some time been used to argue that more women should join the sector. The European Commission decided to counteract this skill shortage through encouraging young women to participate in so-called shadowing days. These shadowing days give young women an insight into what careers in ICT could look like through spending a day with a woman working in ICTs. The website claims this is “strictly for geeks!”. In fact, it seems to be strictly for Ladygeeks!

“Take me seriously” screams the Blackberry

Published
by
belindaparmar
on March 11, 2008
in Mobile Phones
. 1 Comment

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I am suffering from geek envy. I have a Blackberry Pearl. I used to love it. I still love it to some degree although lately I am falling out of love with it.

Its great for reading my emails. It is good for texting. It takes OK photos. But its devoid of fun. Its a corporate device. It has very limited multimedia player functions. I can’t listen to podcasts on it. I can’t watch videos from YouTube on it. It has no instant messenger. I see my husband’s one-year old Nokia N95 which does all of these things and more, and I am suffering from geek envy.

He shows me videos of our son on his phone. He shows me nostalgic 80’s pop videos (sadly i remember dancing around my living room to Bros). He chats to me on instant messenger while he is on the move.

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But I tell him, the N95 is not sleek and sophisticated like my piano black Pearl. It looks out of place in the office - it’s just a bit plastiky. Unfortunately this argument will seem redundant in a few months. The N96 (the upgrade from the N95) keeps Nokia’s technical lead but borrows some of the iPhone’s good looks.

Its already set mobi-geeks into quite a frenzy. And got the Mobile World Congress buzzing. This tiny box of tricks seems to support every current standard of communication, entertainment & media on the market today.

Clearly Nokia are trying to out iPhone the iPhone. The first thing they fixed is it’s appearance. I’m not complaining about the N95’s looks (well I am actually as its boxy and chunky) - on the other hand the N96 is a great deal prettier. It has an impressive 16GB internal memory - that’s the same as the current generation of iPhones, however unlike the iPhone it supports removable memory which effectively allows users to double their storage of music and movies. Check it out on YouTube.

It’s also got something called DVB-H - a standard that allows users to receive live television, I’m not convinced that anybody wll actually bother with this one.

As an earlier post on Lady Geek highlighted, most people use their mobile phones to stay in touch with family and friends while at work. Instead of letting work into their private life, people seem to bring their private life to work. Many of the problems people face at work are related to that they cannot express part of their personality at work and have to be someone they do not want to be. This is particularly an issue for women.

Blackberry needs to realise that the boundaries between home and work life are blurred. Women want a fluid device that is not just a ‘tool’ as many previous research studies claim. Women want technology to be fun. They want something that will make them smile, stay connected and that they can play with during meetings. Women don’t only want technology for the boardroom, they want technology to enhance their life. With the iphone and N96 as strong contenders for the female pound, Blackberry needs to take themselves a little less seriously.

Lady Geek Squad

Published
by
belindaparmar
on March 4, 2008
in Articles and Electronics
. 4 Comments

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I’ve just spent the last hour chatting to a Geek Squad ‘agent’- Lee.    The company has grown in the US for the past 13 years and has now done a tie up deal with Carephone Warehouse and will be rolled out to over 100 of their UK stores, which quite frankly are not the most inviting and female friendly and you get pounced on as soon as you walk in the door.  As one woman told me, “I feel like bait when i walk into a Carephone Warehouse.” 

The Geek Squad is a great concept.  They will help you for a small fee with your IT issues in store or remotely.  They also offer a home service for £70 a visit.  They will sort out all your IT problems.  They describe themselves as a ‘Dr Doolittle, surgeon and witchdoctor’ all in one.  They are geek chic, they have to wear white socks (!), short sleeve shirts, have police style ID badges, clip on ties and call themselves agents.   Out of 40 agents, sadly only 3 are women but even so, they seem very friendly and don’t elevate themselves to a superior status.  We chatted to Lee who was obviously brilliant at his job and made us feel at ease asking what we considered very dumb questions (its funny how women begin their questions about IT with the prefice ‘I know this is a stupid question but…’   Men don’t seem to ever seem to do this).

Lee told us one example where he was trying to help a women who was getting so frustrated that she shouted at him when he told her he would have to charge her a nominal fee for setting up her Blackberry ‘IS THAT A WOMAN TAX YOU ADD ON?’  Women do get frustrated by technology.  It’s so much easier to default to a man/friend/partner and not feel stupid but in this way we will never feel comfortable with technology.   Women have to embrace technology.  Its up to women to take the lead and sort out their technology needs…and if they get frustrated…there’s always the Geek Squad.

Yet another video games “for girls”

Published
by
belindaparmar
on March 4, 2008
in Games
. 3 Comments

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As if we needed another video game for girls “Guppylife for girls”

The purpose of the game is to look after the furry inhabitants of the planet; what an innovation! I do agree with Alice though, the design looks great but please, its bad enough creating another video game for girls (have a look in any games store at the DS titles and you will agree) but to brand it “for girls” is not the best way to market it. Women and girls are put off by anything which overtly targets them as women. Not only does it put women off, but as one Lady Geek told me “just because I have breasts, doesn’t mean I gravitate to other breasts.” Nicely put i think. Apple never brought out the ipod and marketed it “for girls” but they did alot of research into understanding what women would respond to. Sony Bravia are positioning their TV as “a piece of furniture” not as “a piece of furniture for women” but their strategy is very much to appeal to the female market. The opportunity is for brands to understand the subtleties of connecting with women. Its complicated. Women are complicated. And an overt “girls only” approach just ain’t going to cut it.