COMMENTARY--Forget Internet dating, your next conference could be the pick up venue of choice. Just watch out for all those greedy executives walking around.
Ever go to a conference where you attend all the sessions, make polite conversation with the person sitting next to you, but still feel unfulfilled? Or do you attend an exhibition that you know 10,000 other people will be attending, yet you end up wandering around receiving free lollies, water, and showbags (always large but containing essentially nothing) without really connecting with anyone?
Surrounded by thousands of people with a similar interest, you would expect to walk away having made 20 new friends, and received five potential job offers. Instead you end up walking away with the consolation prize of a free keyring.
But no matter how many tips you read on how to network it doesn't really help when you are standing in the exhibition hall. You end up feeling like you are the new person in school and desperately try to find something in common with the person standing nearest you. (Oh look, we have the same notebook. Want to be my friend?)
But one company is coming to the rescue. No more desperate and dateless at your next conference! nTAG Interactive has developed nTAGs: a wearable computing device that you type your relevant info into--"Sagittarius, likes long walks on the beach, and building PCs in my spare time"--and when a like-minded person is near you, the tag will alert you, and you can seek them out and make friends. It was trialled at a US convention last month and apparently was a hit, but maybe it came with a free cheeseburger, so who really knows?
I am interested to see what happens after these tags become ubiquitious. It could end up like rental advertisements where looking for a "broadminded" individual means more than someone who owns a Mac and a PC. Who knows what euphemisms will be thought up for "servicing customers", "rebooting your mainframe", and "hard code".
I also wonder how many times Telstra Chairman Bob Mansfield's nTAG will beep at him. Would anyone else have written in "enjoys ripping off customers--the smaller the business the better--providing substandard products that are prone to not working, and charging more than market value for them".
| Much as we have become used to being screwed over by the Howard government, we also expect the same behaviour from Telstra. |
Mansfield recently said the company is the envy of many telcos around the world. This is something I wouldn't be repeating too much if I were him because it is glaringly obvious that Telstra isn't envied for its superb products, quality of service, or excellent management techniques. Instead it is that Telstra manages to get away with the exact opposite and still be the number one telco in the country.
Its ADSL service has been fraught with problems, ranging from only being available to a small segment of the population, to frequently dropping out, and its cable BigPond service is suffering a similar fate. The company has spent a lot of marketing dollars getting people to sign up to the service--particularly small businesses--yet it doesn't seem to have spent the same amount of effort getting the product ready for use. As reported by ZDNet Australia, BigPond has suffered so many problems of late that it is doing more damage than good to these businesses. And Telstra knows BigPond is unreliable, the fact that the telco doesn't have enough faith in its product to put a service level gauranteee behind it says something.
But more worrying than your next e-mail outage is the thought that what if at the next conference the nTAG hanging around Mansfield's neck beeps every time he take two steps. For sure Telstra knows how to annoy customers with its products and services, but it certainly isn't the only technology company to do so.
Can you think of someone that would be a good networking match for Mansfield? E-mail your nominations to us here.
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Does ZDNET Australia = ALP? It would certainly seem that way. Most of the "commentary" appears to blame the Howard government for anything it can.