Don't Worry Be Happy - But We Do

The MIT AgeLab has recently completed a large scale survey to investigate concerns about retirement. They have found large differences between men and women. The area where men are more worried than women is potential for being bored during retirement - there us women don't have many worries, but virtually on every other front we are more worried, and as the article says - probably with good reason.

The 3 primary areas where worries occur are: Inflation, Health, and Longevity. The researchers say it isn't unfounded worries given women tend to outlive their spouses, and a large number of women will end up living on significantly smaller incomes than men in retirement. Health, it suggests that women have to do a better job of taking care of themselves, much of their health energy is applied to looking after aging parents and their spouse. It's important to remember to take care of yourself. The final concern is about insuring they have enough assets to last them through their final days.

Increasing women's knowledge of investment funds, retirement funds, and working with financial planners is something that needs to happen. Yes, women do manage much of the money in the home and large financial decisions I haven't read of women's knowledge in long term planning happening. Potentially an area for growth.

Finally a Quick Moment!

While going through my news alerts looking for interesting topics on women and technology I can across a posting that was talking about women's sites, although I work at a technology company I'm always behind when it comes to what's getting hot. Have you seen Cafemom? It's apparently a very hot site and has an extremely large following. It's recently been able to secure $12M in funding - now that's a decent fund.

I have just taken a peak, and while the front page of the site didn't seem overly unique or engaging I clicked around a little and then found the Thought Bubble (bottom part on this page link). It was mesmerising to watch the twitter like comments come across the Americas - comments that I might make - about family, kids, home, sleeping, being me. It really was spellbinding for a few minutes reading the comments and seeing the photos - now it is bedtime and so there were a lot of 'getting them off to sleep' comments, it kind of had a digital Walton like feel to it, 'Good night Jim-bob'.

Look Whose Watching, or Rather Creating!

An article was posted on Clickz today that shows the number of females watching Youtube videos online has risen (Pew Research).

• A 120% increase in women watching videos like Youtube videos online. 11% in 2007 from 6% in 2006.
• A 100% increase in women posting videos aged between 30 and 49 posting videos. 14% in 2007 from 7% in 2006.

Though I didn't answer the survey that number would include me. This holiday season I posted two short clips of my kids singing songs and wishing grandparents in England seasonal greetings - these are those good ideas you have, and can win excellent family credit points, if only they really are quick moments. Here are three quick insights from my experience:

1. Getting my kids to perform a 40 second holiday greeting for grandparents was tougher than I first thought, my initial clips I tried to post were too long. Trying to cut my daughter from singing all 6 verses from the school holiday song was an emotional experience. There must be ways of cutting video clips, but who has time to search during a quick moment? (if I figure it out I'll post)
2. My parents sending me email to ask that how to unblock the software on their computer or did he need to buy a new viewer as the message said he needed to install a new viewer, all this confusion because of an error message on the youtube site. Someone needs to figure out who the 30-49 year old women are posting videos for, and whether that audience will be able to easily view the videos.
3. A few days after posting receiving a message from Moldytoastervideo to ask for permission to subscribe to my video postings. Surely the mailer wasn't seriously interested in my terrible clips, but made realize that yep, I'm posting my clips out there for the world to see. Even now I'm surprised that the clip labeled 'gymnastics' has been accessed more than 200 times. I could have set permissions but that would have been more mail exchanges with my parents.

Its good to see Pew pick up on OUR generation as an up and coming audience for video clips. And I must say while posting my kid videos I also lost time in exploring youtube and finding other channels that I hadn't seen before. See, once we have a need to enter these spaces we can explore and generate click through in a different way from the Ygen. We just need a justified value proposition to enter but then once in, we can lose track of time - win for you services and implicit win for us too. (BRIT quick moment: For anyone wanting to see Michael Parkinson interview Beckham it's here).