Days after being named among the Top 25 Women on the Web, Mari Matsunaga, designer of the i-mode phone, is still nowhere to be found.
On Tuesday, the nonprofit San Francisco Women on the Web (SFWoW) held its fourth annual awards ceremony honoring 25 women -- including Matsunaga -- who had distinguished themselves in business, technology and community on the Internet.
But Matsunaga, who lives in Japan, did not respond to repeated e-mails and phone calls from SFWoW, which had even enlisted the help of a translator to contact her through her former company, NTT DoCoMo, which produces i-mode.
Where is she? And an equally provocative question is why were so many of the purportedly wired winners so difficult to reach?
In the weeks leading up to the highly publicized gala, SFWoW volunteers scrambled with varying success to contact the winners to give them the good news and coordinate their arrivals in San Francisco.
On the night of the event, a black box was projected onto the screen where Matsunaga's photo should have been, as master of ceremonies Moira Gunn, the National Public Radio commentator, read her bio. The absent Matsunaga was roundly applauded anyway.
Still, the irony was hard to miss. Considering that the wireless communications device she designed provides always-on Internet access to more than 14 million subscribers throughout Asia, it was hard to believe that -- as busy as she is as the co-founder of the Internet start-up E-Woman --Matsunaga was unreachable.
In the days following the event, the mystery i-mode designer, whose legendary status has spread beyond Japan, could not be tracked down.
Adding to Matsunaga's mystique is the fact that she is a self-described technophobe and didn't even own a mobile phone before joining NTT DoCoMo.
And what of the other winners?
Bonnie Bracey, recognized as a pioneer in technology in education and a presidential adviser on that issue, was present at the ceremony, but her website for the Bracey-Pearl Software Project was down that day.
Meanwhile, e-mails to Roberta Furgur, tech advisor, author, and educator at Oakland, California's Julia Morgan School for Girls bounced back because SFWoW provided the media with the wrong e-mail address.
But hard-to-contact award winners were the least of SFWoW's technical problems. On the day of the ceremony, the organization's website was down for hours.
Taken together, these administrative glitches created some curiosity regarding exactly how connected the Top 25 Women on the Web really are.
Indeed, in contrast to previous years' winners -- including Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and Pets.com CEO Julie Wainright -- this year's nominees represented women behind the scenes of technology, academics and non-profit activists, as well as programmers and designers.
Akimbo Design co-founder Ardith Ibanez Rigby, author of three Web design books, accepted her award in absentia. She was vacationing in the Bahamas.
But her bio in the SFWoW program filled in the gaps. "She keeps happy by drawing, taking hip-hop dance classes, training in capoeira, and traveling," it said.
SFWoW's presenters, as well as several of the award winners, remarked that the fact they were women had little to do with their success. They also said they resented the media's often-condescending attitude toward successful women, highlighting their gender above their accomplishments.
Jean Chen, a Santa Monica-based writer who hadn't been aware of the SFWoW awards before reading about them on Wired News, expressed her concern that the event was garnering so much media attention.
"It's sad that this is the one main thing representing female accomplishments that you're hearing about today," Chen said.
"Men may see the Hollywood headshot of the woman with the leather glove smoking a cigarette on the SFWoW website (winner Netochka Nezvanova) and say to themselves, 'And we're supposed to take these women seriously?'"
Nevertheless, many of the honorees told touching stories about how they beat the odds to succeed in high tech, striking a chord with the mostly female audience.
Ann Navarro, president of WebGeek Inc., got hearty laughter from the audience when she said that -- before launching her career as an XML expert -- she "used to spend (her) time telling men where to go all night," as part of her job as a small-town police dispatcher.
Even without a college degree or a background in technology, Navarro became the best-selling author of books including "XML by Example" and "Mastering Web Design."
She said she was encouraged by her husband all along.
"We sat all night wondering, 'What can Ann do?" she said.
It didn't take them long to reach the conclusion. "Ann can do anything she wants to do -- because she's GREAT!" Navarro said in her speech.
The audience -- applauding enthusiastically -- thought so too.
