Cyber chicks strike a blow at male myth

In the dawn of the 21st century a new heroine is emerging. Her name is Technofemme, and she is the unstoppable force that will drive mobile commerce towards a bright future.

In a move that could blow away perceptions that the technological revolution is propelled by boys' lust for toys, recent research by Sweden's Linköping University of Technology has revealed that young women present the most promising target audience for providers of mobile internet services. Blessed with greater spending power and openness to new ways of communicating, the cyber-chick is set to become the centre of the industry's attention.

"We were very surprised by the survey's results, having assumed that wireless would appeal mostly to men, but they clearly indicate that services for young women are the future," says Stefan Floren of AU-System, the mobile consultancy firm that sponsored the research. "It has changed our view of m-commerce and will have a similar effect across the industry."

The Linköping study canvassed the views and habits of 300 young people in Stockholm, amongst whom 90% owned handsets and more than 50% had already tried mobile services. The respondents were then divided into four broad categories, each with its own clear characteristics and social habits.

Emerging as prime targets for m-commerce were the imaginatively labelled Girls Who Just Wanna Have Fun, defined by the researchers as teenagers aged 15-18 years and living with their parents. Already spending considerable sums on mobile telephony, these communication- loving lasses demonstrated greater enthusiasm for wireless services than any other group, expressing a willingness to pay for shopping services, entertainment and applications designed to improve contact with friends.

Next came the Connected Girls and Guys About Town, a group dominated by the gentler sex. Aged 18-25, living independently and enjoying a busy social life, members of this category already use the internet for commerce and exhibited a desire to use mobile reminder services, information about their interests and wireless email access.

Languishing in the girls' technological wake were the two male groupings. Although the Serious Young Men displayed some enthusiasm for using SMS applications to secure a lady friend, their interest in other services was lukewarm. The cruelly entitled Geeks, meanwhile, identified as individuals who spend too much time in front of their computers to see friends or movies, showed no interest at all.

Although the survey will come as a surprise to hardware misogynists, indications that IT girls are leading the digital charge have been amassing for some time. Almost two thirds of UK women aged 15-19 own a mobile phone and, as the popularity of SMS text messaging explodes, this fact has been linked to a 5.6% drop in sales of teenage lifestyle magazines over the past year.

An NOP survey published this week revealed that female Britons place higher importance upon technology than their male counterparts, with 79% regarding gadgets as being central to their lives compared to 71% among the testosterone brigade. According to a July report from Nielsen, meanwhile, more than half the net users in America are now women.

"Given that women are naturally more interested in communication than men, it should not come as a bolt from the blue to find us leading the way when it comes to finding real uses for mobile technology," says Caraline Brown, founder of one of the UK's specialist IT public relations consultancy Midnight Communications. "My only surprise is that it took the industry so long to realise this."

Consumer packages likely to emerge in the wake of the Stockholm research will initially focus on products that allow users to send digital postcards, exchange images and ring tones or distribute group SMS messages. Location-based services offering entertainment information are also expected to make an impact.

Proving popular during a trial run in Sweden is an interactive quiz game that leads participants around a series of local landmarks, sending location-specific questions as they reach each destination.

With obvious connotations for the marketing, retail and leisure industries, such services are being tipped to proliferate.

Expected to begin appearing in 2002 is a raft of new packages focused upon female mobile users that will, according to Floren, breathe new life into the spluttering spectre of mobile commerce by proving that if you accurately target smaller market segments with products tailored to their needs, people are prepared to pay for wireless services.

Even men, with the right encouragement, could rise to the occasion.

"People haven't responded to the first generation of mobile services with the enthusiasm the industry hoped for because the handset is a highly personal communic-ations tool.

"It exists at the very heart of a user's life and is not an appropriate vehicle for the kind of one-size-fits-all solutions currently available," says Edward Hempel, the chief executive of FlyingDrum, a wireless marketing company .

This article was first published in The Guardian