I’ve got a bit of a running gag with my little brother. (OK, he’s taller than me, and officially old, but still my little brother.) We both spend a lot of time in airports. Airports are boring. Cell minutes are cheap. Often one of us will get a call from ‘tother, which always begins: “You’ll never guess where I am”. The answer is, 80% of the time, just off the corridor in the domestic lounges at Heathrow Terminal 1.
Incidentally, growing up two miles from Heathrow gives you a totally distorted view of the world. Your isochrone map looks different to everyone else’s. Twelve hours’ journey from your front door lets you visit half of humanity, give or take. Allow me a day, and where in the world did you say you wanted to meet? (OK, it took 30 hours to here, and two weeks’ walk to there, but you get the idea.) I can only imagine folk who grew up in other “crossroads of the world” like Dubai or New York quite understanding what I’m on about, and what a shock it is to have to get one of these strange “connecting flight” thingies. (Seriously, I’d been flying for two decades before experiencing one.)
Anyhow, one day a few years back my brother was picking me up at LHR. Arrangements were deliberately fuzzy — I think I was in fact arriving by land. Ignore the planes — Heathrow has all the bus and tube connections you need, too, for local transport. (Look, you might think Heathrow is a random mess of soulless buildings accumulated over 5 decades, but to us Staines folk, there’s No Place Like Home). So I’m standing there, under the yellow “Arrivals” sign, yakking to him on my mobile.
“Where are you?”.
“Under the yellow Arrivals sign.”
“Well, I can’t see you!”
“At the far end of the terminal — same end as the BA Domestic Check-In, right?”
“Yes — outside the lifts down to the Heathrow Express.”
“Well, I still can’t see you.”
The reason? I’m upstairs, outside domestic arrivals. He’s 5 metres below me, downstairs in international arrivals.
Naturally, there’s a lesson out of all this for telcoland. People use their mobile phones to rendezvous. A lot. I used to walk around the vast Sprint campus, huffing and puffing and always calling ahead so say I’d be a wee bit late to the next meeting, owing to having left my hyperspace kit at home.
Yet our mobile phones are locked into the “phones” mindset. They aren’t adapting to the things that people are actually doing: the user’s actual goal. I’m not phoning my brother, I’m meeting him.
One thing that struck me when at Sprint was that phone calls made up the vasy bulk of the company’s revenue. Yet getting people to make more and better calls wasn’t on the strategic radar. We didn’t even have any idea as to what people were really calling each other about! Everything was focused on Java downloads and minor stuff. Yet I suspect a huge proportion of “calls” are actually one of two things: manually-exchanged presence messages, and physical rendezvous.
“I’ll be home in about three hours, honey!”
Which, if you live close to Heathrow, means you’re somewhere within about 1000 miles.
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I’ve got a bit of a running gag with my little brother. (OK, he’s taller than me, and officially old, but still my little brother.) We both spend a lot of time in airports. Airports are boring. Cell minutes are...
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"He’s 5 metres below me, downstairs in international arrivals."
I remember it well. At the time I mentioned that what I want in that situation is to be able to locate you on the screen of my phone. The ability to temporailiry grant location information to each other. The display would not have to be particularly sophisticated, I'm not talking 3d pictures or googlemap. Even something as crude as the 'motion sensor' from Aliens would be an improvement in most circumstances or the location display from Elite (http://elite.acornarcade.com/ims/logo.gif) would be better than the current method. A direction and a distance.
Of course a picture of what the person I'm trying to meet is seeing (e.g. landmarks) is available these days too.
R.
"...getting people to make more and better calls wasn’t on the strategic radar."
Ah, but if not revenue generating they'll just lower margins. That's why voice mail became important - more call completions, which triggers (message rate) billing. Flat rate billing means you want to discourage calls, i.e. costs. Also, just introducing mobile phones did create more billable MOU/person/day since it promoted impulse buying/calling ('oh look, I have a phone and I have a few spare minutes.'). To create more billable MOU either (as you say) create more uses for the phone, or, more nefariously, discourage other media that compete with phones, like email. Say (for you conspiracy theorists) start flooding inboxes with spam so that email is useless and you use the phone more.
Posted by: at February 17, 2006 06:28 PM