An eerily quiet Terminal 5 - picture taken by my life-saving mobile phone
Managed to get myself trapped in Prague last week as the apocalyptic ash cloud drifted into Western Europe’s air corridors and grounded what felt like every plane in the world. Thanks to my client’s staff back in the UK, I was quickly booked an escape route out of travel chaos via plane to Frankfurt, train to Brussels and then Eurostar back to London. The thing that struck me as I and a small but intrepid group of insurance underwriters fought our way through the ticket offices and station concourses of Germany and Belgium, was how vital our mobile electronic devices were to our journey.
Without our Blackberries and Windows phones, we simply wouldn’t have been able to escape as quickly as we did. When we left Prague for the airport, we did so without any tickets or paperwork at al- or indeed much sense of where we were going. Everything was emailed to us enroute. Hotel bookings were emailed as we flew and we simply showed the addres on our phones to the taxi driver for him to take us to it. When we reached the Eurostar terminal in Brussels, our bookings were on our phones and we passed these to the staff to locate and print off our tickets.
With four hours to kill in Brussels, I located a decent restaurant using Google on my laptop, then saved the details to an application called Evernote – a sort-of online memory. We made reservations using our mobiles and then, as my phone can also access Evernote, I just showed my taxi driver the details of the restaurant on the phone screen and off we went.
Throughout this trans-European odyssey, a stream of emails and messages on LinkedIn and Facebook kept me in touch with colleagues, family and friends – some of whom were in similar predicaments.
It’s going to be very interesting to see what the roaming charges are for my little escapade using dongle and phone through four countries!
At the end of the trip, I had to return to Heathrow to collect my car from the Terminal Five car park, which is when I took the photos is this post – on my mobile.
All in all, a very useful testing ground for mobile technology.
Just me on the Heathrow Express, then. Very 28 Days Later.
Information: gosh, it’s powerful stuff. In today’s high tech, high speed world, it’s data that drives the wheels of commerce; data that lets airlines discover that the single most reliable signal that a passenger is actually going to turn up for the flight they’ve bought is the booking of a vegetarian in-flight meal! Well, at least it is according to a special report in last week’s Economist.
But data is getting big – too big to even get your head around in some cases. So, dear reader, here’s the Economist’s guide to units of data, which I found most intriguing. Have a look, familiarise yourself with them and then try dropping the term ‘zetabyte’ into your next management meeting and seeing the look on your colleagues’ faces. For more information (see what I did there?) you can read the full article here.
Here’s very intriguing graphic I came across which gives a range of stats on web usage and users. One of the great undervalued skills in communication is being able to present complex data in an engaging and comprehensible manner. This is a great example of that. Fill yer boots - speaking metaphorically, of course!
Will Google's Fast Flip change your news reading habits?
The experience of reading news online is something that tends to split the generations. For those people who’ve grown up alongside the net and and the home computing phenomenon, reading the headlines on news sites is a perfectly natural thing to do. It’s quick, it’s got the added advantages of multi-media, and you can skip right around the globe in a matter of seconds, checking out Kanye West making a plonker of himself at the MTV awards and then coming back to our own Gordon Brown. (See what I did there?) There are even mutterings now of US journalism students who’ve taken their entire course without once picking up a hard copy paper.
For the older among us, the web’s news coverage can be found lacking compared with flipping through a copy of the Daily Telegraph. A newspaper allows you to turn pages at your own speed, read what you wish, discard those stories that don’t attract your attention – and do all of this while slumped over the breakfast table consuming poached eggs and coffee and listening to Planet Rock…or perhaps that’s just me. A paper presents you with the news – albeit an editor’s choice of it; a website can only present you with a limited amount of current affairs, the rest you must seek out by clicking links and searching through navigation bars.
Don’t get me wrong, though: I enjoy online news and find the immediacy and range of coverage a big step forward. If there’s a significant event in the world, the web is the first place I go to find out about it. And today, newspapers can take an awfully long time to get around to covering a story – particularly an international one – that was on the web the previous evening.
But now word reaches us that web giant and all-round do-gooder Google is trying to address the problem. Today, it’s launched a new way of reading the news online called Fast Flip – a different type of interface designed to mimic more of the experience of flicking through piles and magazines and newspapers Fast Flip also promises more revenue for newspaper publishers by running advertising against their content, something the hard-pressed publishers have been crying out for.
If you’d like to take a look at Google Fast Flip, take a look here. Personally, having gotten used to the new experience of online news consumption, I’m not sure I want to take a retrograde step. And if you want to read the news over your bacon and eggs, try buying a cheap netbook and using that.
If you are lucky enough to be en vogue, the one thing you can guarantee is that you’ll soon be out of fashion – and that’s the whole point, really: fashion is a fad. If something is highly fashionable today – be it clothing, a new way of communicating, a website, an individual, or a market research technique – it will have a short shelf life in today’s disposable and fickle society. This, I think, is a real shame.
Usually things are fashionable because they are good. One can assume that yesterday’s icons don’t stop being good people; we just get bored with them. Advances in all discourses should be embraced, but ultimately it is the suitability or quality of something which should determine its usage, not the fact that it is new and exciting.
I guess working in research we very rarely get labelled new and exciting. Frankly, I don’t think we will ever be fashionable, but that means we will also never fall out of fashion. Businesses will always need to understand why their new sales campaign is not working; why retention rates are dropping; how satisfied their customers are and how fairly they treat their customers (Ok, well you might not need to know the last one!) Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for new technological advances or ways to look at things and I’m happy to adopt them – but only if they offer tangible benefits.
I’m not having a go at fashion here but at a societyin which something has to be new, unique or underground to be fashionable. Throughout the 64 year reign of Queen Victoria taste varied but fundamentally the fashion for bright colours and corseted waists remained. Something or someone which is good or talented deserves to be highly celebrated and therefore fashionable. This phenomenon of fashions changing so rapidly is stifling. New Music can only be fashionable (and therefore very successful) for one or two albums before people want the next big thing. MySpace was superseded by Facebook; blogs are being usurped by Twitter; Katy Perry sells more records than Kate Bush.
The positive to come out of this is that quality does thankfully shine through in the long run. Katy Perry’s last CD may have sold more than Kate Bush’s but history will reveal who sold more music in total and who is remembered as the greatest talent. Classic literature will continue to be taught in schools but will the Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter?
So what is the point of this rant? I guess I’m just wishing that society would be seduced less by the shiny and new and look at all great things present and past and allow them to be fashionable. That way fashion would be a benchmark of quality, not a fad.
Tech website mashable.com has just published a fascinating article examining the ways in which traditional newspapers in the US are tapping into social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc) to, well…save themselves.
Newspaper circulations across the board have been dropping for years – a source of much concern to their publishers. As a new generation of web-savvy Generation X-ers is swapping online news and content for hard-copy papers and magazines, the old media have been hunting frantically for new business models that will allow them to tap into the emerging culture.
You can read here how they’re trying to do it in the US.
Want to know what the future of personal banking looks like? Here’s Microsoft’s vision – and very nice it seems too. Lots of touch sensitive devices you don’t want to spill your coffee on. And the soul-destroyingly long queue for the bank tellers seems to have been done away with, so that’s one giant leap for mankind!
