December 01, 2005
London calling
Was down at the NextGen Services & Networks event today next to Heathrow Airport. More on this later when it’s not gone midnight.
Anyhow, trekked up to London on the train this evening for a business meeting. Just a few snippets of the joyous journey. I’ll spare you harrowing images of packed commuter trains.
Firstly, as good telecom and internet folk, you know you’re in good company when you start seeing stickers like this around on the trains:
Lawsuits, taxed to death, reviled by many? Telecom or tobacco, you choose.
Naturally, one lady was having a loud and boring conference call.
Next up was an example of innovation in the finance of a product, rather than a product itself. You can now buy fractional ownership of a hotel, with a timeshare-like claim on stays in the room you notionally own:
Any chance of similar innovation in telecom? Let me know!
The stairs at Staines railway station have turned into attention-sapping adverts:
Hmm. How many billions of phones have cellcos distributed? At what subsidy and cost per gross add? And what have they managed to fill up those little screens with by default? Nothing. In fact, it’s so bad they’ll try to sell you some $2 wallpaper to cover over the embarassing lack of ideas. Clue to telcos: you’re attention brokers whether you like it or not. Please build business model.
Lastly, I can’t help but think this’ll make its way into one of my presentations some day:
PS - Annoyance of the day. I went to send a text message whilst at the conference today, but there was no coverage. It ended up stuck in my outbox, and I forgot to send it when back in coverage. The result was some confusion and embarassment when later business arrangements failed to sync. Why doesn’t my phone automatically offer me the choice to “send whenever possible”? Does it think I just compose these messages for the sake of my triple-tap expertise?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:41 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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You did not blog about this event so I assume it was not that good? I had thought of going to it. So how come you mentioned so little about it in your blog?
Posted by: at December 9, 2005 12:41 AM