Where are all the women redux

Given the topic needs to come up at least once a year, the Wall Street Journal has published an article asking where all the women CEOs and founders of tech companies are. (Answer - they’re just not there, only 11% of VC backed tech companies had women in management or as founders). 

It was an interesting article that touched on a few solutions such as women creating their own meetups, conferences and support groups, as well as the new TED women focused conference. All in all a fairly inoffensive article. 

However Techcruch’s Michael Arrington has had an overly emotional response to the issue and has taken it really personally. In fact, his headline is “Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.“ Despite the original article very clearly not blaming men, I wonder why this discussion gets such a visceral nasty response every time it comes up. Clay Shirky had his own rant earlier this year and I’ve been in countless arguments with many men and women about what the problems and solutions are. Men have had issues with me even raising the topic about male to female ratios at conferences or events - it’s like by mentioning that there’s a lack of visible female presence I’m personally attacking them for being men and oppressing us.

This post isn’t moaning about the lack of women in tech, by the way. I actually think we can be at an advantage as we’re in the minority, and there are loads of events I can think of where it’s a very even split. The next Ignite Seattle has 50% women presenters, and the Web Directions conference usually has an even mix of both speakers and attendees. I know this industry is what I make of it, and I appreciate both the women’s groups trying to get us all collaborating, and the fact that I’m more visible than most men in my position as I’m the minority. I’ve been asked to speak at a lot of conferences in the past and I suspect that in a lot of cases I was on the radar to speak as I was a woman. 

What I truly don’t understand is why Arrington is so angry -

The next time you women want to start pointing the finger at me when discussing the problem of too few women in tech, just stop. Look in the mirror.

I don’t know if this is a case of blaming the victims (and I’m loath to use that word as women aren’t seeing themselves as victims), but I just don’t see why he’s taking it so personally. Getting angry is helping nobody. 

As an aside, it’s interesting to see the gender differences between working in web and working in mobile. Working in web I was a definite minority -  maybe 10% of my colleagues were women, and in the case of two companies I worked for I was the only woman there. Mobile seems to be much more balanced, I was so happy to see the first Mobile Monday I went to had more women than men. 

Anyway it’s an argument that won’t go away but it does make me sad to see how much anger and hatred there is flying around the comments of both Clay Shirky and Michael Arrington’s posts. Reading the comments really makes me lose a bit of faith in our industry - luckily internet trolls are easy to ignore. It’s just a shame that our “industry leaders” set the nasty tone of the conversations in the first place. 

iPad leads the tipping point for journalism

The CEO of News Ltd has just given an opening speech where he discussed that technology is leading the tipping point of the most exciting era in journalism. 

I’ve always been skeptical of naysayers proclaiming the death of the newspaper - I have the kindle, I have an iPad, I have more computers than I know what to do with, and yet I still buy the newspaper every weekend and spend hours savouring each section. I can’t imagine ever changing this habit; technology just can’t compete with the tactile experience of spreading out with a coffee and the newspaper. So saying, I long ago stopped reading the daily newspaper and instead read it online… 

So it gives me hope to read the well thought and considered opinion from John Hardigan as I assumed that most Murdoch employees had Chicken Little syndrome about new technology. 

Our competitors are anyone who can satisfy an audience need with a richer experience than traditional media has been willing or able to provide in the past.

I’ve blogged before about the Australian app as it had a really horrible user experience with intrusive takeover ads and was essentially a glorified PDF with no iPad specific functionality.  It’s currently sitting with the majority of reviews being one star.

And yet, sales exceeded our expectations. Most of the feedback we’re getting about The Australian app concerns content. There are far fewer criticisms about functionality. And people accept that it has advertisements. Although, in future there will be better and more creative ways that ads can, and will, be integrated into the app.

It’s interesting to see the shift in daily agendas for the papers, although I would have expected this to happen long ago with web rather than now with mobile - ever since the internet the idea of a morning and evening newspaper has been very blurred. 

Mobile devices offer us an opportunity to reach more people, more often and with more relevance than ever before. As I said before, they allow us to move from setting the news agenda each morning to owning it all day.

And a particularly interesting nugget of information: 

Lower-priced applications are NOT downloaded more than higher-priced apps. The number of downloads is not linked to price.

Apps that sell for 99 cents are not downloaded substantially more than apps that sell for $4.99.

Apps that people pay for are used more often and for longer periods than free apps.

And it’s heartwarming to see him say what we’ve been saying for years - Storytelling must be different on each platform. Amen to that. 

On websites it means thinking about what stories will be in front of the pay wall and what premium content will sit behind it.

On the smart phone it means snacking; headlines, sports results and snapshots of what’s happening.

On the iPad it means changing the way we tell stories and becoming more visual in our storytelling. Consumers are more visually literate than ever before. These devices maximise the visual experience

It makes me wish I was at that conference, sounds like it was a cracker of an opening speech. 

The full speech is available at Mumbrella. 

Motorola, 280 North & the Future of the Mobile Web

Earlier this week TechCrunch broke the news that startup 280 North was acquired by Motorola earlier this summer. If you are unfamiliar with 280 North, they are creators of the awesome Cappuccino framework, which allows even a non-developer to make pretty amazing mobile and web applications easily.

An email from a spokeperson is surprisingly revealing about Moto’s intentions:

I can confirm that Motorola acquired 280 North earlier this summer. The transaction provides Motorola with specialized web-app engineering talent and technology that will help facilitate the continued expansion of Motorola’s application ecosystem. We believe 280 North will be instrumental in helping us continue to foster the Android ecosystem with innovative web-based technologies and applications. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

While I’m glad to see a startup that built a pretty awesome framework reap big financial gain from their hard work, I have to admit I’m a bit sad and disappointed when frameworks like this get absorbed into larger companies to increase IP portfolios in the name of the “Web.”

Right now a lot of big mobile device makers and operators are paying a lot of lip service to web technologies, telling developers they are easy and open to develop for, but when you dig into the details they are usually asking you to just switch one proprietary framework for another, all in the name of the mobile web and openness.

Cappucino, jQTouch, SenchaTouch, webOS, Bada, Ovi and others are all different ways to build mobile applications with web technologies, however they are all incompatible with each other and the degrade poorly (or not at all).

That doesn’t just doesn’t make any sense.

Is graceful degradation not a core tenet of how the web is supposed to work? It is responsible for almost every significant leap forward in web technologies for the last 15 years. Not to mention it is the only way you can actually use the mobile web as a real cross platform solution.

Instead we should have put our muscle behind initiatives like BONDI (which by the way has been shelved in favor of more native applications). Maybe then we could have worked on solving the biggest reasons why the mobile web is being held back as a mobile platform… making money (which I talked about last weekend at iOS DevCamp Seattle)

You’ll be hard pressed to find a bigger advocate of using the web as a mobile application platform than me. However with the way things are going we just aren’t moving in that direction. In my opinion we are actually moving backwards to the old days of WAP that is as fragmented and difficult to navigate as the native application platforms of today.

The mobile web is designed to solve the problems of fragmentation, not to make it worse.

iPhone games come under scrutiny

Although I now live in Seattle, I still try to keep up with Australian news and going-ons. Australia is a funny place in that everyone I know is incredibly innovative, forward-thinking and liberal, but our government would prefer it if this were still the 1950s. First they tried to install a mandatory internet filter and now they’re trying to censor mobile games. 

To give some back-story, Australia doesn’t have a classification system for games like they do for movies and TV.  It means any game that would generally receive a R18+ classification is banned for sale in Australia. 

So now iPhone and mobile phone games have attracted the attention of the Labour Party - there is an election this weekend so all sorts of election-friendly issues are being raised. Legally all movies, games and publications need to pass through the censorship classification board to determine the level of parental guidance required. You have to pay a fee to have your game classified - between US$450 and $2000. 

The App store bypasses this government process, and the Australian Government has just realized they’re missing out of millions of dollars of revenue. 

According to the local (Murdoch-owned) newspaper, “Australia’s smartphone providers and games developers have blithely broken the law and dodged hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.“ 

If the legal loophole allowing mobile games to be sold without classification is closed, it is bad news for Australian developers and consumers as the majority of game developers will simply stop selling their games on the Australian app store as the cost of classification will far outweigh the revenue.

Mr Edwards, 34, from Melbourne, said that, if the government made a decision to close the loophole, his company, which develops game apps for Apple products including the iPhone, would cease to release them to Australia.

He said that only 4 per cent of his company’s apps were sold to Australians. This meant that it would most likely be unsustainable to release them to the Australian market due to classification costs potentially outweighing revenue made from them.

It is in a developer’s best interest to make sure you can release in Australia but, having to go through a timely classification system, I don’t know how long it would take, but it would mean that you would have to delay the release worldwide or stagger the release and you really want to make sure you get that out all at one time.

You can’t know in advance whether you’ve got a hit on your hands or whether or not you’re going to recoup your costs. So I think with a smaller industry, particularly with my team - myself and a designer - we couldn’t say whether we were going to make $10. So I think the most likely effect that it would have on people like us would be that we would just launch it in the US, and if it seems to be a success we would just go through this trouble of getting classified in Australia.” - Matt Comi

The classification board will also potentially need to bring on hundreds more staff to classify games in the various app stores, as well as those games going through the Apple/Blackberry/Android classification process.

I suspect the government is more interested in filling its coffers with the classification fees than protecting innocent children from inadvertently downloading a racy app. Either way, it’s bad news for developers who will probably either raise prices for games sold in Australia to cover the classification fee, or will opt out of releasing to the Australian market at all. 

Seattle iOS DevCamp this weekend

This weekend we’re pleased to host the Seattle iOS DevCamp 2010—a three day event focused on iOS and the future of mobile.

The unconference style event will invite participants—made up of both designers and developers—to collaborate together to build native or web-based applications or services targeted at iOS devices over a three day period.

In addition to the unconference we will also be offering eight sessions on Saturday from a number of Northwest mobile experts. Topics will range from better understanding the mobile market, how the iPhone is changing it, and how to design and build an application for iOS and beyond.

We’re kicking things off on Friday night with a social mixer, and then on Saturday we’ll discuss a variety of topics, including:

• the future of mobile
• mobile market trend
• what role iPhone and iPad play in mobile
• the state of the iPhone market and ecosystem
• how to understand and design for the mobile context
• what are iAds and how will they impact the future of advertising
• how to build mobile applications with just HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript
• how to build mobile applications with PhoneGap
• native versus mobile web
• how to make money in mobile

The confirmed speakers for Saturday are:

• Chetan Sharma—curator of Mobile Future Forward on September 8
• Dave Shea—creator of the CSS Zen Garden and author of The Zen of CSS Design
• Joe Marini—Program Manager for Windows Phone and author of The Document Object Model
• Andrew Lunny—Developer for Nitobi creators of PhoneGap
• Kevin Stewart—Developer & Product Engineer
• Lauren Isaacson—Mobile Strategist & Market Researcher
• Brian Fling—founder of pinch/zoom and author of O’Reilly’s Mobile Design and Development

You can register for the free mixer and purchase a ticket for the rest of the DevCamp (it’s $15 to cover pizza and beer) at the Watercooler site.