Search results matching tag 'Technology'

Technology: Is it different for girls?

2085942 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:15:00 GMT

I am frustrated. I am bored. I feel patronised. PC World is telling me My World is Pink (it has not been pink since I was 7) and I need a new laptop to match my outfit (it would never even occur to me to match my outfit with my technology). Samsung is asking me “What Colour is my Life?” (hello?) and Dell is telling me that technology is like candy (do me a favour).

I am a 35 year-old professional woman with my own home. I am educated, fairly tech literate and, most importantly, I have cash to spend. Plenty of cash to spend, on technology that will make my life easier, more creative and fun.

Out of every ten gadgets bought in the UK, four are now bought by women. And, before you ask, we are not talking about fridges and washing machines. No, these are high-end items such as HD TV's, games consoles and smart phones. And there are more games being played by women than men between the ages of 25-34. I am not alone in feeling patronised or alienated by technology and consumer electronic brands.

I recently conducted some research for Forrester. This highlighted that one third of all British women do not feel connected to a single technology brand. Over half of all women walk out of shops because they cannot find what they are looking for. This missed opportunity is calculated at £0.6 billion. The technology industry is where the automotive industry was 20 years ago- nervous boys at the school dance who do not quite know what to do or say to women. They end up leading with two left feet.

So why do technology companies think that pinking up and dumbing down their marketing is the way to get professional, well educated women to part with their cash? Why do they treat young girls and women alike - as an afterthought? Why are companies not researching “what women really want” and getting advice from expert consultants?

How can we help technology companies understand what women want?

Many technology brands believe that the way to a woman's purse is to make her feel “special”, and have aimed to achieve this by giving women their “own” space, site or product. Dell's disastrous Della website, which handed out technological advice alongside recipe tips and fashion articles, was shut down within weeks. Carphone Warehouse, Dixons and Comet (Comet Angels) have all had their share of “initiatives” and women's only days, all with the aim of helping women turn the telly on. All, one assumes, with a glass of Prosecco held in their manicured, nail-varnished hands.

No woman wants to be a target with an overt "female friendly" message. Being singled out as different is as off-putting today as it was when you were singled out at school. Nor do women want to be stereotyped or bamboozled by obscure jargon. It is ironic, given its widespread reputation for untarnished machismo, but the BBC’s Top Gear has democratised cars. It might be a legacy to make Jeremy Clarkson flinch, but he has helped to make cars accessible to women. Once purely the domain of men, the programme now has nearly as many female viewers as male, thanks largely to being both playful and light-hearted. It stands for unadulterated honesty and entertainment looking at how people in the real world think and relate to their cars.

In September this year, the Harvard Business Review stated that women now represent a bigger market opportunity than India and China combined. Technology brands must put an end to these clumsy marketing strategies and put money and time behind understanding how real women in the real world engage with technology.

Women are no longer the second sex. We are the more profitable sex.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek http://ladygeek.org.uk, which helps technology companies understand and sell to women. Belinda would love you to have your say on how technology companies are talking to women by filling out this short survey Follow me on Twitter:

Spontaneous people power

209478 — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:14:00 GMT

Ever wanted to review restaurants and shops right there and then? Well, there’s an app for that. Users can now enter 140-character reviews or ‘quick tips’ which are then published to the mobile site. They can also begin a draft of a review on their phone, save it, and publish it from a computer later.

Yelp finds itself attempting to balance immediacy with relevance. Which does present potential problems, e.g. while instantaneous reviews better capture a reviewer’s feelings, this ‘heat of the moment’ reaction may be inaccurate or even misleading. Professional restaurant critics, on the other hand, visit a restaurant several times over many weeks to really understand the restaurant’s capabilities and consistency. Review sites must also consider how to encourage user posts, as the more time passes between the meal or event, the less likely it will be reviewed.
This all creates added pressure for restaurant and business owners to provide high quality customer service, as a poor online review might be just a few key strokes away. So while this may cause standards to rise, customers’ patience may well decrease as their expectations for immediate redress increase.

Ref. http://www.cscout.com/blog/2009/10/01/yelps-mobile-app-changes-reviewing-dynamics.html

Honest advice for women

2085942 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:59:00 GMT

I was chatting to a smart single twenty-something about dating. She wants a boyfriend but is too shy to go onto a dating site and feels uncomfortable touting her wares and telling everyone how beautiful she is (interestingly even the most unattractive men do not seem to suffer from this fear). She told me that she'd been using a site called datemyfriend.net: The idea is that your friends write your profile. Instead of having to blow your own trumpet, your friends showcase your talents and acts as your honest-broker. This is a much more comfortable way of approaching the dating scene because your friends can take care of the most frightening bits leaving you to focus on the pleasure. This aligns to how many women I meet have a fear of technology: There is an embarrassment and guilt that surrounds not knowing the difference between a megabyte and megabit. Between not knowing if you are connecting via a network, Wi Fi or 3G. The tech companies have been confusing and bamboozling us for decades. There is an opportunity to take the fear out of technology for those women who are not technology-literate and dread buying technology. What if you could go to a neutral broker and give her your requirements online? She could come back with a series of recommendations as to what most suits you. What if you could have a planning meeting once a year with someone who would come to your home and assess your current network and requirements, and make you a "technology roadmap"? This person would be like a "personal shopper" for technology. An ITA, sort of like an IFA but for technology. Whilst technology companies are realising the advantages of post-sales support such as the Apple Genius-bar and Carphone Warehouse's Geek Squad, no-one is taking the fear out of the pre-sales process, certainly nobody who can offer independent strategic advice. With women spending more on technology than ever before, it might be a good place to start.

Is Purefold pure gold for brands or pure confusion?

2292853 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:14:00 GMT

Coming soon from Free Scott, the new entertainment venture of Ridley Scott and his brother Tony, is a trippy new sci-fi entertainment project called Purefold that plans to let brand’s sponsor the content, and let the audience drive the plot line using social networking platforms.

Produced by Ag8, the concept will see participating brands “…take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.” The project explores transmedia entertainment and will launch off of cross-platform channels. What? Purefold just might represent pure gold for brands looking to reach audiences in an extremely interactive format, but as of now, it has a lot of people baffled as to how it will work, what it will be, and if branded content is a good idea or not.

Discussions about Purefold on Friend Feed, the main resource planned to “harvest” story ideas, are already brewing about the question of what it means to be human, the driving theme behind the story that will be loosely based on Blade Runner. Ag8 is getting people to explore the idea of what “transhumanism” is in the Purefold discussion group on Friend Feed, but the project is often met with confusion, with participants trying to understand what is happening, and what role they will play. For insight as to what people think of Purefold, I’ve been asking around.

A few entertainment insiders were willing to go on the record to share what they think of the project and here is what they had to say: Jenifer Hanen, a blogger from Los Angeles, was wary of the idea of brand’s sponsoring content based on projects she has seen fail, but likes the DIY media side of the project and the idea to have the plot line driven by the audience. Listen to a conversation I had with Jen about Purefold here.

Film Production Designer Tema L. Staig, who is based in Los Angeles, first reacted to the idea of Purefold saying “The project sounds almost like virtual mad libs for content and advertising.” She also had this to say: "Universally, people have always needed to create visual and/or verbal stories and have a cathartic experience through those stories, either through the telling or the viewing. This is what makes us human. This is what connects us across the globe. Historically, unrelated cultures share similar myths and stories, suggesting that we all have a desire to explain the natural, unnatural, and supernatural. It’s our most primal of needs.

It will be interesting to see how Ag8 takes story telling to humanity’s next level. The idea of us, the greater audience being involved directly in the story is compelling in that it creates (in theory) even more empathy for the characters – those characters are a part of us. It’s our baby, even if just a little bit. How will it effect society? Will it bring us together around a global campfire? What new brainstorms might it spark? The possibilities are endless."

Here in London, I asked Mervyn Lyn, who is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Sony Music and often gets involved with branded content for the entertainment company, what he thinks of Purefold. At first reaction, he said it reminds him of MTV’s Dubplate Drama that turned to the audience to drive the story line, a show he enjoyed because it made the viewers feel part of the show. As for letting brand’s sponsor the content, he was cautionary about the idea because so often people are suspicious when a company attempts to sell them something through a new medium. “It depends how it is done and if it is trying to lean on branded content then they will have to strike a balance between the brand and the content so that each side doesn’t feel they are losing out,” he said.

They need to be very careful in making it driven by advertising because people see this as being railroaded and people will be cynically asking ‘what are they trying to sell me?’” The approach Purefold is using will be ground breaking in entertainment, according to producers, and it will be distributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving both audiences, brands and platforms equal use rights through their participation.

According to Ag8’s Tom Himpe, Purefold will be broadcast across a variety of media platforms and spread virally across the Internet. “Most brands are aware of the fact that social media has changed the dynamics of the conversation, and they can't just spell out their message in the same way as with one-way advertising methods,” he said. “We are giving brands the opportunity to create stories over an extended period of time, in collaboration with their audiences and relying on top industry talent in both writing and directing. That's quite a unique package, especially in view of the fact that they can use the audiovisual assets freely across all their platforms and channels, from retail to mobile, from cinema to television.”

For now Ag8 is not revealing who the brand sponsors will be, but based on Friend Feed discussions the writers are already compiling what the story line will be, all set in the near future. The question many have is how brands will fit into the discussion, and for that, Himpe had this to say:

“There are two ways in which we are "guiding" the conversation. First of all, the brand is setting up the framework of the conversation, by defining one or multiple brand propositions they want to explore and picking a story line through which they want to explore that proposition. This sets up the framework within which we harvest online conversations.

So we're not just harvesting random conversations across the entire web, we set out specific parameters with the participating brands. Secondly, while we're listening to what the audience wants to see within the episodes, the ultimate creative control still resides with our editorial team and the Free Scott Directors, who are making creative sense of the audience's input. So there is another level of control there. However, it's very important for brands to understand that Purefold is about creating top quality entertainment, and not about extended the length of their tv commercials.

There's a different balance here, and sure, that's something they might have to get used to.”

Still confused, but ready to watch Purefold unfold,

-Lisa

The Female Economy

2085942 — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:10:00 GMT

This month's HBR echoes much of what Lady Geek has been highlighting for the past 18 months-perfect timing for my upcoming Symbian talk. Firstly, that women represent the largest market opportunity in the world- in aggregate, the opportunity is bigger than China and India combined.

Secondly that despite this, most companies continue to market to men and fail to explore how they might meet women's needs. Or they target women as an afterthought through patronizing initiatives. Dell's Della being a perfect example. The NY Times said Dell needed to go to the 'school of marketing hard knocks.'

And namely, that those companies that can offer tailored products and services to women are in prime position to win, when the economy recovers.

Interviewing over 12,000 women about everything ranging from their jobs and education to their hopes and fears, BCG found that women are vastly underserved. Women feel few companies have responded to their need for products and services specifically designed for them. Too many businesses behave if women had no say over purchasing decisions. With the recovery in sight now, women will represent one of the largest opportunities and are an important force in spurring a recovery. One of the findings echoes Wave 1 of the Lady Geek Brand Survey;

I hate being stereotyped because of my gender and age, and I don't appreciate being treated like an infant."

Interestingly, the research highlights that women are happiest in their early and later years and the lowest point is early and mid forties. Women struggle to cope with both children and aging parents, so are most receptive to products that help them better control their lives and balance their priorities.

I could not agree more with their final point;

A focus on women as a target market-instead of a geographical target- will up a company's odds of success when the recovery begins.

The Masculinity of Marketing

2085942 — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:15:00 GMT

I have sat in numerous meetings where clients and agency people alike have spent hours talking about what the rational unique selling point (USP) is of a product. Very rarely have any of the products I have sold had a truly unique feature or benefit. And in technology, any unique feature is quickly copied and therefore unsustainable as a long term strategy.

Whats much more unique is the emotional features of selling a technology product. How it feels to the user. The retail environment in which it is presented. The feeling it creates in others who see you with your gadget. And ultimately the meaningful human interaction and creativity it brings.

So why then do we insist on spending hours debating the rational USP of a product? Comparing every tiny feature of a product with like for like competitor comparisons? And talking about one specific rational feature as if it is going to solve every problem you have ever had in your life? I propose we are asking the wrong answers and therefore coming up with the wrong solutions.

Take my previous article about Nokia's N97. Imagine the engineers and the marketing team's conversation.

"The n97 has so many USPs. Its sure to be an i-phone killer."

"For a start it has a 5 megapixel camera. The i-Phone only has 2."

"Not to mention the FM transmitter..."

"And the fold out keyboard."

The list goes on. Nokia got so hung up on rational USP's; they forgot about how people use the phone and the feelings it creates in the heart not the head. A great product is more then the sum of its features. The tragedy of most products is that despite the brilliance of their specification, these features are not how women engage with technology.

One woman told me last week;

I love my i-Phone. It somehow manages to capture the human expression of technology; whether its flicking the screen like i would with paper or browsing through my photos. It just feels more human that other tech gadgets"

Pretty Little Head talk about how most marketing focuses on the Achievement Impulse- a male strategy which delivers competitive claims framed through a product advantage (largely based on Baron-Cohen's work).

Most advertising claims talk about how technology helps men succeed. In advertising we use 'male' language- military language of targets, strategies, campaigns, deployment and so on.

With the missed financial opportunity being at 0.6billion according to Jupiter, as a consequence of failing to connect with women, technology brands need to build marketing programmes around a female mindset and agenda. Forgetting about USP's is a good place to start.

The low end has never been riding higher

209478 — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:25:00 GMT

Wired magazine examines a trend within the marketplace that they refer to as the “Good Enough Revolution”. It’s a change in people’s priorities. Ease of use, availability and price are starting to matter more than quality and high-end functionality.

As with all paradigm shifts, this one is uniquely suited to the times. Our lives are increasingly plugged in and immediacy and output are key. Add in the credit crunch and you can see why products and services designed to reach the widest audience – ignoring the hardcore users and experts whose needs are different – with bare bones functionality are triumphing. They’ll do what needs to be done at a price that virtually anyone can afford.

The success of Take The Flip’s Video stunned the industry, although it shouldn’t have. It’s just the latest example of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

Ref. http://www.psfk.com/2009/09/is-the-good-enough-revolution-really-okay.html

Big-brained celebrity endorsements

209478 — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:19:00 GMT

There are big heads, and then there’s just canny self-promo. A giant crop-circle image of the face of The Streets’ Mike Skinner amazed people arriving at this year’s Glastonbury festival. The singer created the enormous work of art because he wanted his face ‘to be seen from space’.
(Thanks, Laura, for this one.)

“It’s the Great Wall of China come to a rock festival in Somerset,” he said. Mike Skinner had always been fascinated by crop circles and decided to create his own to celebrate his appearance on the Jazz World stage. After researching the phenomenon, Mike, his friend Ted Mayhem and Sony UK spent 24 hours creating the 100 sqm image using tractors, GPS remote-controlled vehicles and strimmers. The image was seen by thousands of festival-goers as they arrived at Castle Cary station, the nearest to the festival site.

On Twitter, he added: "My headphones have become part of my soul. I will be incorporating them into my crop circle”. Mike’s XB700 headphones are part of Sony’s new XB (Extra Bass) range and are the ultimate headphones for urban, hip hop and club music lovers.

Sony also made a short series of videos posted to YouTube describing why they did it and how they approached the practicalities. Over 30,000 people have seen them.

Ref. http://www.sony.co.uk/article/thestreets

The N97, the ultimate Symbian smartphone or Nokia's big joke?

2085942 — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:15:00 GMT

I have to admit that I was in a state of giddy anticipation when I got home to find that the courier had delivered a shiny new Nokia N97: It came in a under-stated black box which resembled a treat from a Regent Street boutique. It was a pleasure to unbox, as I appreciated the way it feels comfortable in my hands.

The N97 is a radical new design, somewhere between a classic touch-screen like the iPhone and a keyboard-phone like the Blackberry. The whole device slides open with a very satisfying swing that just exudes quality engineering revealing an easy to use QUERTY thumb-pad and a joystick for people who do not enjoy using touch-screens. Other bloggers have complained about the angle of the slide: The screen is at approximately thirty degrees to the key-pad, and it's impossible to push it flat. I never found that to be a problem because the shape of the phone when opened out makes it very easy to hold securely while typing and walking.

I agree with Susy Weaser when she says that the test of a good gadget is that you should not need to read the manual. It does not take me long to download the Facebook and Twitter application.

However, it takes me ages to find out how to change the basics: date and time, profiles, personalisation. I found the structure of the configuration application very confusing: It took half an hour to connect to one of the many WiFi access points in the house and even more time to download the Google Apps.

Nokia are pushing their "Ovi Store" as the one-stop shop for all applications, however I found that I couldn't find the applications I wanted. The search did not seem to work at all.

In all I think I must have spent about twelve hours customising and tweaking the phone's apps and settings before I had something which seemed vaguely right.

Speaking of customisations - the phone seemed to want to do it's own thing: For example even though I set up my own Google Mail application and then the "Mail for Exchange" client (which can be used to connect to Google's calendar and tasks) it still insisted on forcing me to set up Nokia's own mail software each time I powered on the phone. Even after I relented and signed up for "Ovi Mail" it still wanted me to set up the mail service every time I switched the phone on, which happened rather a lot given the phone's tendency to crash in the middle of whatever I happened to be doing.

And on the subject of reliability: The Symbian platform is known for it's dependable full-featured phones. I've been using Nokia's S60 phones for more than three years. Unfortunately somebody in Nokia's testing department must have been on holiday when they were preparing this for release: Even after upgrading all the software to the latest version this phone crashed two or three times per day. It usually happened at the least appropriate time, such as when I was talking on the phone.

The most annoying bug was a quirk on the key-lock: If left un-used for a minute the device automatically locks it's keyboard to prevent accidental dialling. You are supposed to be able to unlock it by simply flicking the keylock switch on the side, however from time to time it would decide to ignore this. Other than removing the battery to hard-reset the phone I could find no way to get back in control of the device. Given that this happened two or three times a week I'm astonished that Nokia's quality-control people did not spot this problem.

Finally, my biggest gripe is the screen itself: It looks just like any other mobile phone touch-screen however unless you push it quite hard nothing happens. I found it required quite a bit of pressure to make it work, and then given the force you have to use it becomes very imprecise so I often found myself pressing the wrong button by mistake. The N97's touch-screen is really quite clumsy. It's got no multi-touch and Nokia cheekily bundle a little stylus with the phone - suggesting that Nokia are well aware that this touch-screen is not intended for touching.

The iPhone has already set the standard for a touch-screen. Everybody knows how well the iPhone works - you can touch it with one or two fingers. You can manipulate images on screen with easy to learn gestures. You do not need a stylus or any special accessory to use it. Like most modern touch-screens the iPhone, HTC Magic, Palm Pre and pretty much everybody else uses a "capacitive" screen which can sense the presence of your fingertips without the need to push. The N97 uses an older generation of screen known as "Resistive" - it's the same kind of screen that you find on a Nintendo DS. This cheaper sort of screen relies on actual pressure in order to register input.

Please do not mistake me for an Apple fan, it's just that I recognise that they got it right whereas Nokia got it wrong. And that's a real shame because the screen was supposed to be the biggest selling point of this new machine. I cannot think why Nokia decided to go 2nd best for the phone's main feature.

The N97 is packed with features, cool things like a built in FM transmitter, the best mobile-camera on the market, and an email application that easily rival's Blackberry's flagship. On paper this looks like the best phone ever made however silly design mistakes frequent annoying bugs makes me reluctant to recommend this product. Other than the screen (which a great many people will not find a problem), all of the phone's problems are to do with it's software so in theory Nokia could release an update which corrects all of the phone's faults. Rumor has it that they will be releasing a refreshed version of the N97 with an improved screen (but without the joypad) - I hope that Nokia can pull it off second time around.

Finally, it's been said that the N97 is one of the most eccentric products that Nokia have ever made: The week before I had to give it back they sent me an even more bizarre product to review. It's supposed to be an "anti-theft" device for the N97. You clip your state of the art Nokia into what looks like an early 1980's phone and then run an application which is intended to make the N97's screen look exactly like an old-fashion phone keypad.

The end result is that your N97 is made to look like something that Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting might have used. My kids love it. It shows that even if they did not get the N97 completely right, Nokia has a sense of humour.

Woodn’t it be nice?

209478 — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:34:00 GMT

When the weather seems to turn on a sixpence, it’s good to know what to expect as soon as you wake up. WoodStation is a timber timepiece that doubles up as your own forecaster. It’ll sit on your bedside table (or mount it on the wall if you prefer) and look more or less like a piece of wood art. Wave an arm in front of its motion sensor, though, and glowing numerals and symbols let you know whether to get set for a sunny, partly cloudy, rainy, snowy or stormy day.

If the icons are a bit tame for you, you can check out the barometric pressure, indoor relative temperature and indoor relative hygrometry data and make your own predictions. And, as you’d expect, the alarm clock has all the usual hour, calendar, alarm and snooze functions.

One review says the face itself is more formica than wood, glorious, wood. But still, it’s an interesting mash-up of traditional materials and contemporary wizardry.

Ref. http://www.yankodesign.com/2008/10/09/divining-rod-technology-rediscovered-in-clock-form/