Jennifer Geacone-Cruz

Mental health is an ignored corner of the tech world for far too many of us. We know it’s an essential part of our personal and working lives, yet so little attention is paid to it due to stigma or lack of awareness. We all have some level of personal experience with it, whether we realise it or not. This session will be addressing the changing place that mental health occupies in tech. We will discuss the past and current state of mental health and emotional wellness, factors that exist that affect it, and ways that we can change views and create a more supportive space for the growth of mental health in our community. Personal, cultural, political, economic and technological influences will be examined and combined in discussion and exercises to facilitate ideas about how to hack mental health in tech.

What does it take to get my fashion brand on the Japanese radar? How important is a research trip, really? Why won't they buy even after they spent so much time at my tradeshow booth? How important is social media and what's the deal there?

These are just some of the common questions designers and brands end up asking when they decide to make their way into the Japanese market. This talk will clue you into some key concepts that shape the Japanese fashion industry and their reception of brands from the West, and how to deal with them.

Today's development environment is heavily focussed on "mobile first", but the long-term transition to this framework has been a challenging one. From mobile technology's first forays into web connectivity, user-friendliness, and market shaping, Japanese mobile culture has without a doubt had a lasting influence on how we make our development and design decisions. This talk traces the advent of the mobile first paradigm from its roots in the Japanese mobile revolution, through to the power within the country's changing topography of market end-users, and some of the current issues that face mobile development and design in both Japan and the West. How did Japan's early mobile connectivity set the pace and priorities for not only burgeoning technology, but also the incipient business models that would grow to dominate our tech culture? Has the advent of smartphones really evened the playing field? Through the lens of cultural psychology, technological history, and market analytics we'll take a closer look at how and why our mobile web is inextricably linked to Japan.

Today’s development environment is heavily focussed on “mobile first”, but the long-term transition to this framework has been a challenging one. From mobile technology’s first forays into web connectivity, user-friendliness, and market shaping, Japanese mobile culture has without a doubt had a lasting influence on how we make our development and design decisions.

This talk traces the advent of the mobile first paradigm from its roots in the Japanese mobile revolution, through to the power within the country’s changing topography of market end-users, and some of the current issues that face mobile development and design in both Japan and the West. How did Japan’s early mobile connectivity set the pace and priorities for not only burgeoning technology, but also the incipient business models that would grow to dominate our tech culture? Has the advent of smartphones really evened the playing field?

Through the lens of cultural psychology, technological history, and market analytics we’ll take a closer look at how and why our mobile web is inextricably linked to Japan.

Today's development environment is heavily focussed on "mobile first", but the long-term transition to this framework has been a challenging one. From mobile technology's first forays into web connectivity, user-friendliness and market shaping, Japanese mobile culture has without a doubt had a lasting influence on how we make our development and design decisions.

This talk traces the advent of the mobile first paradigm from its roots in the Japanese mobile revolution, through to the power within the country's changing topography of market end-users, and some of the current issues that face mobile development and design in both Japan and the West. How did Japan's early mobile connectivity set the pace and priorities for not only burgeoning technology, but also the incipient business models that would grow to dominate our tech culture? Has the advent of smartphones really evened the playing field?

Through the lens of cultural psychology, technological history, and market analytics we'll take a closer look at how and why our mobile web is inextricably linked to Japan.

In her last talk, Jennifer presented some basic concepts that affect the current state of Japanese front-end and web concept presentation. This talk will expand on one topic that got a lot of response: keitai, Japanese mobile phone culture and its heavy influence on front-end.

Oceans of text, long load times; Japanese websites are hardly minimal and often not user-friendly. But why are Japanese websites, so, well... Japanese? The answer is very much cultural and only a little bit technical. This talk will provide a foot in the sliding shoji door of the sometimes frustrating, but fascinating world of Japanese websites and frontend.