I remember the days when gender option was between male or female. Those days are long over. News articles in the West are talking about ‘agender’, ‘two spirit’, ‘neither’, ‘other’ and tens of other options that are as valid as the choice a technology consumer has in choosing a storage option from portable hard drives to cloud computing. The point that I am making is that clarifying gender is still necessary… in fact, with the choices going up to even 90, many of us could well be gender challenged soon, because this obsession is not limited to classifying humans. It extends to even gadgets, devices, and machines and I foresee a day when even I shall be holding a masculine smartphone in one hand and talking about two-spirit file transfer and sharing application!
You think this is too far-fetched? Come on, loosen your head wrap a bit and peer into the truth. Classifications are all about characteristics, features, appearances, geographies, landscapes, skins, crusts, coatings, layers or use whatever other term is dear to you. Let us try and assign a gender to a non-human and see if it is possible.
As an example, let me talk about Xender, a file transfer and sharing application that has reached 50% market share in India in the crowded file transfer market, clocked in 170 million Indian users over the last three years alone with an annual growth rate of over 100%, and maintained a leading position in mobile sharing tool market. Something tells me that the ability to strategically penetrate markets is a male trait but winning over 1 million Indian users in such a short time is genetically feminine. So Xender is certainly neither a male nor a female… but then ‘neither’ sounds too distant and ‘other’ is non-committal.
You see, these file transfer and sharing applications are spirited things with quite a lot of characteristics that women look for in men, for instance, being faithful, sexy, kind, full of humour, intelligent, passionate, dependable, and confidant. The application that we are talking about must be dependable if so many users have accepted it, and capturing a large market share fast also means that confidence, intelligence, and passion are seamlessly merging with it. The sort of sensitive task that it is doing implies faithfulness, and because the kind of operations it enables will last for a limited period only, there is humour built into it. This app definitely has a lot of male traits… moreover, it transfers files at a speed that 200 times faster than when you do it through Bluetooth.
A few of the top female traits include thoughtfulness, beauty, sensuality, intuition, radiance, patience, and empathy. Let us see if Xender has any of them or not. Well, because it offers seamless transmission between Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Windows PC and Apple MAC system it must surely have beauty, sensuality, and radiance embedded in its work-norms or this wouldn’t be possible at all. I am guessing, but programming that is intuitive and has a lot of empathy could also be the reasons for this. Xender transfers files speedily and this focus on the task at hand is definitely a feminine characteristic. It also supports over 22 languages including English, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai and Bengali. For its Indian users, XENDER has added a choice of 12 kinds of India dialect. So come on, pick up statistics from language learning institutes and colleges and you’ll know how this characteristic is inherently feminine.
The convenience of usage and zero cost are features that fly Xender way beyond conventional gender classifications as they make it too spirited for being just a male or a female. And, therefore, I’d prefer to call it ‘two-spirited’ as it merges traits from both genders rather effectively. And, by the way, according to Peter Jiang, Founder of XENDER, ‘India is an extremely critical market for us with file transfer volume scaling 1.7 million. With maximum user base in in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata, XENDER is extremely popular in metro cities and northern India. With over 500 million cumulative global users, we target to attain 800 million global users over the next 3 years’. Only a truly two-spirited application or technology innovation would be able to achieve this.
Assigning a gender to inanimate objects, pulsating tech applications, and everything that isn’t a human is an interesting game that I sometimes play. The example that I have chosen follows a logo that says: Let’s XENDER it! Let me twist it a bit and say: Let’s gender it!
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Addition to the above post…
The most heartening news now is that the cost-effective Tizen phones from Samsung and Xender Digital have decided to go public with their relationship as Xender Tizen. For users this simply means that the Tizen version of Xender will make near-distance file transfers so much easier. Not surprisingly, Xender Tizen, that was released on the 8th of May this year already has over 150,000 downloads which is also a direct reflection of the upswing in the sales stats of Samsung devices. By the way, for those who might be confused by this new term, Xender Tizen supports cross-platform transfer and file sharing between Tizen, Android and iOS systems at a speed 200 times that of Bluetooth. It allows sharing of any type of file, any time, without any data usage.
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Let’s gender it! – Let’s Xender it!
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Download Xender from Google Play. Let’s XENDER it!
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Arvind Passey
25 November 2016
