Using female intuition at male-dominated trade shows

It’s CES 2009, and the Venetian ballroom in Vegas at CES Unveiled is swarming with male reporters with bad hair. Truly, it’s a boy’s show. But I have travelled there on behalf of my female-oriented content company Crazyfunbabe determined to see if glamour can meet technology even when the products are being touted by a sea of suits. 

The only criteria: products with a glam factor that fulfill a need and come with no instructions.

Thankfully, we found a few.

The Zivio Boom Bluetooth headset was a good start. Set up is easy and functional, design is sleek and sexy. The telescopic boom made me look like a Rock Star and I like that a lot.

Then there was the HP digital ‘clutch netbook’ with a Vivienne Tam design. What intrigued us most here was the Makeup Color Matcher: you snap a picture of yourself with your mobile, send it to a virtual beauty adviser, and by text message you are told the best shade for your skin tone.

Diskeeper Undelete 2009 is a good product for the party girl that accidentally deletes her pics from the night before. The software recovers data from your phone hard drive or SD card.

However, the most wanted of all were the video eyewear products. Nearing their tipping point, every girl on this planet will consider them a “must-have” accessory. We took the MyVu Crystal’s onto the Vegas strip to find out what women thought about them, and got a great response.

Clearly, there are cool electronic products out there if you look hard enough. But there’s still plenty of work to be done to fully engage females at the cutting edge of digital and mobile life.

Crazyfunbabe has been promoting deeper brand-to-female engagement since 2002. Our mobile apps and fashmob.mobi site link bricks and mortar beauty and fashion retailers to the MySpace generation through events, alerts and, oh yeah, shopping. And now our lifestyle channel, cfbme.mobi, will let women purchase indie beauty and fashion brands via the mobile channel.

We’re very confident this is an upwardly mobile trend. In Japan, women been 20 and 40 years old do 40 per cent of their shopping over the mobile. Here in the West, as the masses start owning and using smartphones, and web browsing plans get cheaper, the mobile phone will continue its inexorable march toward becoming “the connection to all that I am and want”.