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HEWLETT PACKARD WANTS to get its hands on your kids’ pocket money, or so it seems, as the company unveils plans to aggressively target what it calls the "teen" market.
At SD Forum's Teens and Tech conference, director of HP's future and innovations group, Ameer Karim, let on that the company had hired a bunch of spotty adolescents to design new HP products that their geeky friends would be sure to find cool.
“We've used this teen council to help us with everything from the design of the products, the user interface and the box design, even including how the Web site will look," gushed Karim, in a totally un-cool fashion. He declined to mention how much Pizza the company had to provide the yoofs in payment.
Apparently HP is trying to put both the H and the P in “Hip”, a word the company probably still thinks teens use. The company’s cunning plan? Not entirely clear, but probably something to do with gaming and the games company Voodoo, which was snapped up by the computer giant two years ago.
CNET reports that HP spokesperson Ann Finnie, had no idea what Karim was on about, but did say that, overall, the company was trying to pull in younger customers.
HP aren’t the only ones who want to get down with the kids. Sun Microsystems is also keen on showing off how in tune it is with today’s yoof and, according to Matt Thompson, director of Sun’s technology outreach and open-source programs office, the company knows just the way to do it. Give stuff to teens for free. Apparently teens, unlike any other age group, love free stuff, so this is really the way to go.
The Vole, however, which also attended the conference, was apparently as befuddled about the mysterious ways of teens as most parents are, with an exec grumbling that the company hadn’t the faintest about how to market to teens. So there.