Thursday News: Amazon drops price of 4G Kindle Fire; Ladies – too dumb to operate a Fire – offered alternative; HC sued over ditched book
Amazon slashes price of 4G Kindle Fire HD by $100, expands tablet to Europe & Japan – I don’t think this signals new models, but perhaps a slow down of sales or a price cut in anticipation to new Apple products likely to be announced in early April.
“Amazon announced Wednesday that it’s dropping the price of the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD in the United States, and is also rolling out the tablet in Europe and Japan. The biggest price cut is for the 4G LTE Kindle Fire HD. The 32 GB version, which had been $499, gets a price drop to $399. The Wi-Fi-only version of the same tablet gets a price cut of $30 — to $269 for the 16 GB version and $299 for the 32 GB version.” GigaOM
The “first tablet for women” is as awful as it sounds – Apparently, not only does your vagina cause you to like pink and sparkly things whereas the penis loves CNET, your vagina also makes you too dumb to load an app. THANK GOD THERE ARE ENTREPRENEURS TO HELP US enfeebled lady bit owners.
Helper #1 is Brit whose crafting empire is being called tech for women. Shaping cookie dough into hearts and putting them on a stick is hacking and tech oriented. “Girls don’t necessarily want to read Cnet,” she said. “We want something a little pinker and sparklier.” Never mind, of course, that the originators of computers and computer code were women like Ada Lovelace (developed the first computer algorithm) and Admiral Grace Hopper (developed first computer language which led to COBOL for which she developed standards and compiler for COBOL, the mother of computer programming).
Helper #2 Eurostar is selling the ePad Femme. It comes preloaded with about 12 apps so you can cook, do yoga, and lose weight. The background is just as Brit would order, pink and sparkly. Daily Dot
“The Tablet comes preloaded with applications so you can just turn it on and log in to cooking recipes or yoga,” Mani Nair, Associate Vice President for Marketing at Eurostar Group, told the Jerusalem Post. “It makes a perfect gadget for a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications and it is a quick reference.””
HarperCollins sued by former death row prisoner over ditched book – Nick Yarris was arrested in 1981 while high on meth. While imprisoned, Yarris read about the rape and murder of a woman. He concocted a big scheme to plead his way out of the charges by accusing a dead man of the crime and offering testimony against the dead man. Only the man he accused of wrongdoing wasn’t dead and had a solid alibi. Yarris was then convicted.
Later DNA evidence showed him to be innocent. He sold his a book of his life story to HarperCollins but before the book went on sale, he was arrested and charged with growing weed. HC stopped production of the book and now Yarris suing HC for the lost opportunity. That’s a tough case for him to win – proving that his book would be a success. Media | guardian.co.uk
Told husband about the “womens tablet”. He wants to know when they plan on following up with a men’s tablet that has online shopping for beer, streaming football, and the ability to create smelly farts.
I told him he could only have it if it also came pre-loaded with an app that will teach him to be more blindly sexist than the creators.
Major credit for mentioning Lovelace and Hopper. Everyone forgets!
To a different extent, I had the same reaction when they released the Kinder Suprise for Girls a couple of weeks ago. Pink foil and sparkles because everyone knows that’s all we care about, ffs. Of course, no word on a Kinder Suprise for Boys wrapped in blue foil. *rolls eyes*
I have the same face-flaming rage every time I see a commercial for those stupid girly Legos.
Because why would anyone with a vagina want to construct an AT-AT that walks across the freaking living room when she could snap together a 5-piece totes adorb pet shop instead?
A women’s tablet that’s more pink and sparkly. Lord save us. It’s like someone didn’t catch on that Ellen Degeneres’ “pens for women” video and the Brighton University “women in science” video were PARODIES.
Don’t forget Hedy Lamarr who showed you could be beautiful and brainy. She co- developed something so techie it’s hard to understand, but it made the modern computer possible. A movie star and a brilliant mathematician.
I think, to save my blood pressure, I’m going to pretend that tablet for women doesn’t exist. Nope, can’t see it, nothing there to see. A pink sparkly tablet, I like. People who choose my apps for me and presume to know what I want, they can go and jump in the lake.
@Ren:
Well… I gotta be upfront… I’ve got a girl who both adores the girly legos and making AT-ATs… as far as legos go, there’s kind of room for both. She also wants a lego castle with princesses and she got all excited when she saw the Avengers lego set.
Some girls just are into the girly thing and if the legos appeal to them, more power to them. It’s not our place to say that’s wrong, especially considering that the girly legos kind of open doors to all the cool science and stuff behind them.
However, the precious little tablet that of course has to have yoga and perfume and grocery shopping….eh, maybe that will appeal to some women (and it will, I guarantee it), but me? I find it laughable.
I. I just. I just have no words for this. Maybe it’s true? Maybe it’s true that that’s what girls want and women (including the very young ones) want something totally different?
@Christine M.: I’m not sure what enrages me more, the fact that the marketting twerps actually come up with this BS or that so many women actually buy it. I loved the humourous reaction that surrounded the release of those stupid Bic pens for women and would love to see more like it (unfortunately, they haven’t discontinued the pens so someone must be buying them). The only way we will stop this type of marketting is if we collectively refuse to support the products and make our displeasure felt – strongly.
Thanks @Jane for mentioning Lovelace and Hopper – we need to celebrate them and all of the other great women science, math and tech pioneers!
The guy who lost the contract… let me see if I have this right…
He was high. Got arrested. Decided to make up a story to ruin somebody’s life and that failed…and not only did it fail, it backfired spectacularly cuz he ended up accused of the crime he tried to foist off on somebody else, even though that guy was innocent. (Imagine what that put the family of the initial victim through-the woman who was raped and murdered…did they ever find any closure through all of this? Find the real killer? I imagine the case was closed once he was arrested.)
Then it’s discovered he was innocent of that, he gets out, sells his life story… I mean, he could have had a chance to make a serious impact there. What not to do
Then he gets arrested again…
This guy sounds like the text book example of what not to do
I get that this is a marketing schtick to somehow break out of the pack and develop a niche market, but it is really insulting. Rather than motivating to listen to the message it is has all the markers of telling wimmins what you are sure they should be looking at. Why not just offer different color or bling options for a tablet or computer to appeal to those (men too!) who like a sparklier life and leave it at that. I got a bright blue iMac G3 back in the day for the simple fact that it was, well, not black.
I don’t mind pink and sparkly things. I just don’t think we need to dumbed down machines that are also pleasant to look at. I.e., having a certain design asthetic does not make you stupid.
@ Patricia E
Links for the videos, please?
I just can’t even. That tablet just enrages me. I don’t like people telling women what we should like. Some people may be into perfume and cooking and pink, but it isn’t determined by gender and thus shouldn’t be marketed as such (since it just reinforces bad ideas).
I am sure some people will like it, but it is just disappointing and sad.
@jane, that’s it in a nutshell… I like sparkles & bling. And I’m the gadget geek in my house… I can figure out the complexities of a tablet just fine, even with my boobs & love of sparkles. ;)
Have you guys seen Anita Sarkeesian’s videos on LEGO and toy ads? Her yt channel is FeministFrequency.
That ePad Femme … I looked at some photos, and I’m confused. Where is the Yogurt Diary app? You know, to help me plan and track my flavor choices. If you watch any TV at all, you know how important this is to women. Sheesh.
You can’t even download other apps to that tablet. So I guess even if you prefer knitting to yoga, you’re stuffed. I love the techradar label for it: a tablet for Stepford Wives.
Sorry, but ePad Femme sounds like a feminine hygiene product to me. Pink, sparkly pantyliners anyone?
Lynn S. beat me to it. ePad Femme has to be a feminine hygiene product for the 21st c. I always knew there’d be an app for that someday.
I was feeling a bit put-out about the whole ePad thing and the fact that there’s apparently a young new Martha Stewartish persona gaining in popularity but I just watched Makers: Women Who Make America and feel a whole lot better. Highly recommended viewing for all.
Is it hopelessly naive of me to assume that, before a company spends a bunch of money on a marketing plan, or producing all these new products targeted at girls and women, they’ve done some research? Like, is there actually a significant demographic of women who want a tablet pre-loaded with a very narrow selection of apps that tell them they’re fat? I’m confused. Enraged and confused.
I mean, I like pink, sparkly stuff as much as the next person, but the hideous, patronizing messaging is just disturbing. It’s like the marketing industry has been taken over by MRAs.
I get – sort of – the pink theme (yuck). And the sparkle (ditto).
But as women are well known – and have been for some time – to be major early adopters of new tech, why in dog’s name would any self-respecting technology company think that we would have the slightest difficulty in locating apps, if we want them?
And of the ones listed, the only one I have (sort of) is a diet app – or rather a food reference app. Which I mostly forget I own. I use the birding reference apps ten times more often than I use the food one.
Maybe we should all send these nimrods screen shots of our tablets so they can see what women are *actually* interested in. But perhaps they would be confused when the screen shots didn’t show pink backgrounds.
@Lynne Connolly: In WW2 Hedy & her business partner came up with what became the standard torpedo guidance system for radio-guided torpedoes for submarines. This eventually became a constituent part of GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.
Hedy Lamarr – actress (with a good contract) – inventor (with good business model). Note that she was a practical genius as well as beautiful and clever.
@Ann Somerville: You mean they should do research instead of resting on their own assumptions? This is men you are talking about :(
See, that’s what I don’t get. I thought Google was tracking everything we do on-line so as to customize the ads they send us, and FaceBook was supposed to be selling information on stuff people are liking to various corporations. Isn’t that a thing?
If they have access to all that data, how can they be so flipping wrong?
@Wahoo Suze: Here is a link to an article in Time Magazine by Joel Stein on datamining http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2058205,00.html.
Downloading apps is hard? Really?
I like pink and sparkly. If I want my tech to be pink and sparkly, I can get decals or cases and change the wallpaper. What I don’t like is dumb tech. Sheesh.