Sometimes, caught at the coffee dock, a man will lower his voice and ask me: Why do YOU think there are so few women in IT? In my 15 years of working in IT, I am still usually the only woman on the team.

It's very much in its infancy, but the ability to create a sophisticated ICT solution without compromise, eliminating painful and slow IT projects and instead being able to react with fast IT solutions may yet convince your CEO to let you carrying on playing Angry Birds. After all,l if you're smart it's simply ALT TAB and no one will everknow.

Nowhere do the hopes and fears associated with consumerisation of IT come into clearer focus than in the app store. Apps make the world go 'round. "There's an app for that" has become the motto for every aspect of waking and sleeping life. And enterprise apps run our businesses.

Entrepreneurs can turn great ideas into even greater businesses with a good understanding of this iteration driven philosophy, however when combined with latest management thinking - the combination is explosive!

It's time for women to reclaim the word 'geek'. Let's make our young women feel proud when they look at the phones in their pockets, the tablets on their tables and realise that hey, they might be just that little bit geeky too.

Many people still don't believe that women are equipped to understand tech. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are all considered natural 'boys'' subjects. Women break computers, men fix them. Women use technology, men create technology.

For Lady Geek, Ada Lovelace day is a bit like Christmas. Lady Geek was set up in 2010 with the aim of bringing women and technology closer together, and our most recent campaign 'Little Miss Geek' is working to inspire the next generation of women to join the technology industry.

Dr Black visited Brazil recently and toured the country lecturing on Bletchley Park and Alan Turing - 2012 being the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Turing.

Four big pressures are top-of-mind among CIOs and IT departments around the world today: the cloud, big data, mobile, and social.

It is crazy to think that just five years ago no-one had heard of Dropbox. I struggle to think of anyone, either friend or colleague, that doesn't use the service - or one of its equivalents - for sharing files.

This is a pivotal time for the UK. Economic growth and a strong technology sector demand that business and UK education work towards the same goals in order to create highly skilled young people that have the ability to strengthen UK industry. Universities need to be flexible and address the needs of students.

BlackBerry used to set the trends, then they tried to follow them with the launch of touchscreen phones and tablet computers, now they're trying to fight them. I'm not sure they'll succeed.

Everybody I speak to in the IT industry agrees that the lack of job-focused IT skills in UK school leavers and graduates is causing recruitment problems in the technology sector at a time when we wrestle with unemployment across the country.

Tthe reasons for any foreign ICT organisation to enter Brazil are compelling. Brazil is presently the seventh largest market in the world, with $165.7bn spent on ICT in 2010, and expected to become the fourth largest before long. The domestic market for IT is the eighth largest in the world, and only $2.4bn of IT services were exported.

Let's take a recent headline from popular tech blog TechCrunch - 'No Boys Allowed: Women Innovate Mobile Accelerator Is Just for Women' - and then switch some of the words around.

Over two years ago now I started the Ealing Tweetup in London. It's a regular social media get-together in west London that has always been marked out from the usual social media fan-boy events by involving people who are not involved in the IT industry. It is true, real people do use Twitter.

As the Chief Operating Officer of a leading IT services supplier I have long been an advocate of mentoring for women and strongly believe that the method is especially relevant for women working within the field of IT.

I start imagining...has it spontaneously turned into toasted marshmallows? When you open up a spreadsheet, is there an animated photo of John Cleese doing his Silly Walk slap-bang in the middle of the screen? And then, I look at their face and it's clear they're not dealing with anything remotely humourous or entertaining.