Context and feminism differs

Fortunately the surreal Dubai experience was balanced with real life of the same weight. There were eleven very real women telling us their very real stories. It was just as inspiring to discover how we were just alike, our meeting-points, as to be bewildered by the differences. As women, or even just ambitious social entrepreneurs, there are no discrepancies. The contexts are widely separated.

The Iranians rest in my mind with their listlessness. I felt they didn't have much hope for any changes and I'm not sure that they knew what changes they wanted. They seem to often rely upon medical and scientific proofs and it was clear that our countries don't present the same facts. In Sweden we believe homosexuality proven not to be a contaminating disease and women are not yet proved to be better fitted in sense of orientation than men.

Our participants confirmed a sense of that not much has changed after the revolution, but when digging a little deeper it turned out that she was now allowed to talk about what ever she wanted to talk about in public and people are performing and letting their messages out loudly on the streets. The remaining frustration is not to disrespect though. It requires lots of energy, dreams and high goals to succeed with the performance of this people - they have still far to go to reach the goals they were breaking the ice for.

The Palestinian girls could have been my Stockholm neighbours and yet they and their parents have been living in contingency for all of their lives. Revolutionized news can never touch them as they have never had a stable state. These entrepreneurs have huge will to make change and even though they found it hard to register a company targeting a good cause, they had found their own ways to deal with it - slow but concrete. Both them and the Jordanian girl had run into system problems with their projects when trying to create job opportunities for unprivileged women. Women who are not allowed to work in a house where there is a man present or carry the garbages outside the house are not easy to engage and when succeeding their salary goes directly to her husband anyway. But clearly the failures only create new ideas to move forward.

The Syrian was a chapter of her own - a woman in the middle of a revolution. Every piece of her and her story felt invaluable, and I am just happy that there are people like her. It's those who make changes come true. She had it in her finger tips. I feel certain that we will read about her and her friends in the history books in the future - that I've met a historic person.

We also met three outstanding Dubai located women volunteering for the Acumen Fund. They had all changed their banker careers in New York for the same in Dubai. I have never ever dreamt of beeing an investor but they made me envy their skills in making big money and investing them in huge long term beneficence projects around the world. I'd like to put them on tour inspiring all hungry economy students to become rich and beneficent.

I guess the only subject we never touched during these three days was feminism. Some of the projects in the group aim to spread women's rights to those who don't know them, and I'm sure we all had the same base in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but feminism is much more complex than that. While someone believes that wearing hijab is the only right way to live life even though she by that is forbidden to enter night clubs or even take a job, someone else believes that the color of pink by itself will turn girls to limited helpless souls. These are sensitive matters - true to one and false to another.

We had a engilded tea at the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi after having been rejected to enter the night club due to wearing hijab. By respect for the religion they said - unsexy and conciously excludingly I suspect.

Soledad Pinero Misa och Malin Speace

Dubai starting it's own new culture

Dubai is hot as a sauna. And humid. When being in Sweden it’s completely impossible to imagine what it feels like to always be surrounded with such heat and the first day you’re just amazed by it. This state of amazement strikes me again and again the following three days. Most of the impressions from Dubai are impossible to imagine before you experience them.

Dress code attitude
Already at the airport I get amazed by the tricky attitude of 10 customs officers in kanduras in their saunter in front of the passport check. Kandura is the classic arab style white ankle-length white shirt that at least half of the men you see in Dubai wear. These guys are holding a show of power in front of us. Only when they want to they will staff a counter to speed the service of the squiggeling queues of dead tired travelers. It is 6 in the morning and we’ve been stuck on a plane at Qatar airport for hours.

The mixed dress code of the airport is remaining also when going in to Dubai. Many women wear an abaya, a black over-garment covering most parts of the body. Just as many are covering their head with an hijab. Again as many cover only their hair with a shawl, but I would say that the biggest part are western styled – not provocative, but proper and stylish. The total overview reminds me of New York.

The land before Mad Max
In the taxi my company asks the driver if he is originally from Dubai and yes, he answers… Later I am thinking that we must have met the only native driver in all of Dubai. Who can be from here? There seems to be no original town, no history, nothing before these skyscrapers. I learn that there have been people living there since early 1800 and it was formally established in 1833. The modern Dubai was created after the UK left the area in 1971. I am almost right though – this taxi driver is a rarity. 84% of the population of metropolitan Dubai was foreign-born, about half of them from India. I still guess that most of the city has risen from the desert as a strange construction of concrete, shiny facades and futuristic lush designs. Entering the Sheik Zayed road makes me pretend I’m in the world before it turned to the apocalyptic set of the Mad Max movie.

A country of free, well educated, wealthy men and women
The next morning I learn at the School of Government that there are 22% women in the Dubai Government, 59% women in the work force and 70% women at the university. These are interesting figures considering that the population is 1,7 million, of which 24% are women.

Later I am taking a photo of one of many walls decorated with the current ruler, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, also the Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE. I find it amazing that his family has been the constitutional monarchy since 1833, but an Egyptian friend working in Abu Dhabi informs me that the people love him. This Sheikh sees to that everyone in this country is wealthy. The people building and falling down the skyscrapes are all guest workers – free to go home if they want to.

A fictive reality
I had a coke at the top of my hotel, enjoying the view of Burj Khalifa- structure in the world (321 meters), but only that height 40 floors up is enough to make me dizzy. I was wandering about in the redoubtable Mall for an hour, thought I would never get out and get some fresh air again, passing an ice rink, an enormous water fall and a gigantic aquarium. I felt dizzy all the time from constantly changing temperature from outside 40 degrees to inside 18. At night time the city is fully illuminated, shimmering, sparkling, glimmering. It’s beautiful but you just keep wondering how much energy is used to make this fictive city become real. I also start to hunger for the real people, the real Dubai, the real air. But there is nothing else. The air in Dubai is air condition, the habitans are bankers making money and the culture is futuristic buildings and concrete floors. This is a new culture, in it's very beginning.

In Dubai with Swedish Institute

The Swedish Institute (SI) is a public agency that promotes interest and confidence in Sweden around the world. SI seeks to establish cooperation and lasting relations with other countries through strategic communication and exchange in the fields of culture, education, science and business.

I'd say that lasting relations were built last week in Dubai when fifteen swedish social entrereneurs rejoined their protegees from different arabic countries. I got an irretrievable gift in the form of an invitation to join this group to coach them further in the power of social media. Thank you Javeria Rizvi Kabani for that. I feel like I owe you one.

She Entrepreneurs is a program for dialogue, mutual understanding and knowledge sharing between young women social entrepreneurs from the Middle East, North Africa and Sweden. The program, She Entrepreneurs, includes participants from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, West Bank/Gaza and Iran. Its aim is to inspire, provide tools to work for sustainable change, and to develop a network of women social entrepreneurs in the region. She Entrepreneurs is a pilot program that was introduced in Stockholm in February this year.

I will make three following posts from this journey. The first will be about Dubai - the most screwy place on earth. The second will be about the meeting with these amazing women - so alike but in such different contexts, and finally I must probably put down some thoughts on some new discoveries about the power of social media.

Read about the Swedish Institute and the She-entrepreneur program and check out theTwitterfeed on #sheent11

It doesn't have to be broken to need a change

Luke Williams talked about how to be and not to be disruptive. I use to avoid people who have written a book because they tend to market it with a catchy and quotable summerization presented with an attitude and a big sapient smile. Maybe I didn't think that the concept of distruptiveness was possible to summerize well, but I guess Luke proved me wrong.

In a business world of nonstop change, there's only one way to win the game: transform it entirely. This requires a revolution in thinking—a steady stream of disruptive strategies and unexpected solutions. In Disrupt, Luke Williams shows exactly how to generate those strategies and deliver those solutions.

He kept his promise. I feel I can use some of his catchy quotable summerization as a checklist more or less.

- Don’t build what people want, build what they don’t know they want. (Ford said it and Steve Jobs is a master of it.)

- It’s hard to be disruptive because we want people to like us, we don’t want to separate from the flock.

- Disruptive is the opposite of control and stagnation.

- We tend to like and favor ideas we already know - those that fit in to what we know from before.

- Being intentional unreasonable prohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifvoke new ideas.

- Identify clichés and make a contradictory to find something that nobody else does, something surprising and disruptive.

- It doesn’t have to be broken to need a change.

(Socks are sold in pairs of two - no at LittleMissMatched who sell socks in three for mixing and for the one you always loose.)

FourSquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai prolonged the list with
- The more unexpected the higher outcome.
- The more predictive the easier for competitors to copy.

When building Stardoll we have been stuck in and practiced each and everyone of these problems. I just wich that I had had these tweetable oneliners to lean on by then. It never worked very well just saying 'Girls will like it'. On the other hand, it will always be hard to convince everyone, or even anyone, that you are not crazy but the rest of the world is.

Read about crazy genius Steve Mann and Dave Asprey.

What is the most disruptive - full time conntected or fully disconnected?

Keynote speaker Amber Case (@casorganic) turned out to be the most charming personality ever. She is that sort of person replying every question with a smile and a ‘thank you’ before answering. Telling her story she laughs over and over again, enjoying the world and the people in it.

Amber showed us the story of Steve Mann, an amazing half maniac creative genius from the 80s still active today. We laugh at him because he was so out of the box but he was really ahead of everything – so far in front of us we couldn’t realize it, crazy enough to try out things before they were possible. This made me think of who is that Steve Mann character of today. Who is considered full feathered crazy but will be recognized as genius in 20 years?

Maybe we soon after met that person in Dave Asprey. Dave himself challenged Amber already at her speech asking her if she was only passively talking or if she was actually doing any cyborg practicing herself, which she replied that she did. She, just as Dave himself, measure everything she does. Statistics about you and your body seems to be interesting to the scientists and you can’t avoide the sense of elitism as often with cyborgs. There is always a fine line between health and support and superhumanpowers.

I interpreted Dave’s story about going from a super clever 150 kg computer addicted guy in his 20s to an (almost) normal functional family man with the help of happiness data as a story of healing – a remedy. He has found a way to control his mind and not let it do unhealthy choices, but on the contrary, only do what makes him feel good. You get a little scared by this man and yet I’m wondering if he’s not the Steve Mann of our times. Will we in 20 years look at him and see that he was right even though his practice will seem disruptive even in the future?

Susan Maushart discovered just as Dave that the fulltime connected life can have bad impact on the health of a family, and so she disconnected the entire family for a year – including 3 teenage kids. I wanted to ask her what she believed that the kids will say about it when they are 40... My mom experimented with our lives...or My mom did a real good move back then... To be completely disconnected today means that you put your kids outside both communication with school and moreover with their friends. Again this might have been the only remedy for this family, but I feel that I will not try it at home.

The success of the GameBoy

I held a very short session in a composition of three today, filling in Björn Jeffery's talk on the Toca Boca research on bluckbusters. Here is an even shorter version of my preso:

There are lots of lessons to learn from blockbusters and I’ve been looking into the success of the Nintendo GameBoy.

I started by asking all my game savvy friends about it and they all answered short and direct in one word – Tetris.

Tetris was included in the GameBoy per default from the release in 1989. Nintendo run a long struggle for the rights with both the Russians and other parts, so the game was strategically important for them. But why were Tetris and Gameboy the perfect match when everyone else were doing cooler stuff? Tetris was and is considered a game for girls.

Other gaming consoles of different brands were all cool looking black as something to steer a spaceship with. The Atari Lynx was released right after the GameBoy with mediocre success. They all offered the latest technology at the time, the coolest games and design - the kind of features that appeal to any hard core gamer. The target group was by that limited to primarily boys 16-30 years old, at most 10% of the population.

The Nintendo style was completely different. I’ve urged for everyone of their devices and I own them all. It's clear that they recognized a potential market much bigger than those 10%.

They made a toy that most people could possess and play. It could be carried in a pocket. It was cheap, easy to start and end and had long lasting batteries.
A tech device has wires and ports, a toy has batteries.

Long life time batteries are also important to let people bring it along to school, handle it to others and to get hooked to play for hours.

A toy has easy interaction for the inexperienced. No pre-skills demanded. It’s easy to get started. But to get that quick start you also need a fun short session game that is easy to get into.

The low price was prioritized to let everyone be able to own it. Cheaper weak processors didn't offer complex graphics and action games and Tetris was required to create the perfect match.

This Nintendo reciepy is most relevant today – keep casual games as casual as they can get for casual people.

Musing on Gamification... Motivation... Usability... Fun

John Cook refers to PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka in GeekWire July 21

Creating a term like gamification does more harm to the business because it actually dilutes down what a game means. And, in his view, a game has one simple goal: to be fun.

On July 24 Peter Friedman suggests 'Maintainable motivation' as a new term for gamification.

The ‘science’ of maintainable motivation extends far beyond games and gamification, because it includes all aspects of persistent engagement, even when the initial intention was ‘single-action’. For instance, a sales message might be a ‘one-off’ opportunity to buy something (for instance, selling your car: ‘perfect condition, one careful owner’) but it might just as easily be sold from a dealership which will want you to only ever buy cars from them for the rest of your life.

My reflections are that
- the term Gamification feels as it is forgeting or denying that much of the knowledge of motivation powers is not deriving from games only but from sciences as pedagogy and psychology. Gamification is all about usability and goals. Previous on this >>

- the goal of gamification is to make something - anything - fun or at least without thresholds for the targetgroup, pretty much the same as a game, pretty much the same as pedagogy.

- the social games don't always have a fun core game (sow and harvest) but the game mechanics make it fun to interact, compare, invite, return, progress and even to pay pushing social or individual triggers.

- there are fun core games that get boring as game mechanics for introduction, virtual economic systems, progress and so on are bad.

- it is sometimes difficult to introduce non gaming or non social media users to the term of gamification, and easier to talk about motivations. But words such as Quests, Missions, Progress and Rewards are not foreign at all.

OMG, I chose a boyfriend in Top Girl

I've tried CrowdStars iPad app Top Girl - same graphics and shopping as in their previous facebook app It Girl, but now with focus on a boyfriend. What a sad story, and yet reckoned to be a huge success. You create your avatar from a few botoxed western Hollywood actress looking features, dress for success to find a boyfriend who will bring you all luck in the form of gifts. In my heart I hope that it is not primarily the game itself, but rather the now classic and well implemented game mechanics that make the girls get started, bring in all their friends and return.

Send your friends gifts on Facebook and maybe they will send you some back - check
Shops not available at this level, work your way up or pay to get there now - check
Return in x hours to attend your relation - check
Share every one of your steps for all your Facebook friends to see - check

But then I guess the message below is one that few girls can resist... (from Facebook Top Girl app)

Ingen nyhet att kvinnor spelar, men rosa spel är ännu ocreddiga

Expressen skriver om 'nyheten' att andelen spelande kvinnor är lika stor som andelen män - men det vet vi väl ändå nu. Stardoll och King.com har i alla fall övertygat mig för länge sen om att jag trodde rätt.

Mattias Snygg tror inte alls på principen med rosa spel.
- Det finnsspelutvecklare som med-vetet riktar sig till kvinnor och unga tjejer som målgrupp och mängder med undersökningar om vad tjejer vill ha att använda sig av, men jag tror att det enda sättet att göra riktigt bra spel på är att göra dem så som man själv vill ha dem. Likheterna är större än skillnaderna när det kommer till vad för storts spelmekanik som tilltalar män och kvinnor.

Det är däremot som alltid trist att se att 'rosa' spel alltid anses vara skit och meningslöst att utveckla alls. Hade jag trott på det hade antagligen Stardoll sett helt annorlunda ut idag.

Både vad gäller de rosa spelen och alla andra spel blir det väldigt viktigt, precis som Mattias Snygg säger - att man ska göra spel som man själv skulle vilja spela - att tjejer fattar att de ska utbilda sig till speldesigners och delta i utvecklingen av spel: Speldesigner verkar fortfarande uppfattas som en helt manligt yrke om man tittar på ansökningarna på högskoleutbildningarna - say what? För mig är det där nyheterna borde fokusera nu.

Ljuvliga Lotta Engberg

Underhållande, charmig, glad, spontan, snygg, rolig och underbar är Lotta. Och bra på att sätta ihop gäster och låtar till en massa glada människor som vill sjunga med. Hon kör Djungelboken på svenska och stjärnonas pappor på scen och alla är med.