A theme that came up again and again during our London/Cambridge Traveling Geeks tour was that social media, and especially those that provide “immediate” access to company representatives (such as Twitter), are really changing not only how fast a company can respond to customer questions and problems, but are relocating (dislocating?) where the control of the customer relationship resides within many companies. Twitter provides 24/7 access to company representatives (if they’re actually online), and it shifts the decision point or the point at which the company takes responsibility for a problem, outward from the PR department and “C-level” executives (CEO etc.) to the actual front lines where the company’s employees are talking with the customers! Here’s what Robert Scoble said about this in a roundtable held in Cambridge on Friday. The sponsor of this session, Omobono, also has put up a page about the Traveling Geeks visit.
Backstage Pass- Real Customer Service
Customer service takes dedication, and Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s list, takes this to a degree you won’t see many places. Every day, whether he’s at home in San Francisco or on the road in England, he attends to his half-time position as customer service rep for the institution he founded.
Each night, as we’ve been winding up or down the evening activities, Craig has bowed out at a reasonable hour to go online and attend to customer issues as they come up. Being +8 hours from San Francisco’s time zone has helped, but it’s still a remarkable thing to see this kind of dedication.
Seedcamp pointer
I’m going to just quickly mention that on Tuesday we met with some Seedcamp companies, at the 
offices in central London. Craig Newmark has put up a nice quick summary with links in case you want to check them out. Craig is a fellow Traveling Geek. I will pick my favorites later, although I liked all of them, and will let you know what each technology is going to be useful for in my professional life. You will find them all fascinating and probably will end up using one or more of them some time in the near future.
I know already that my first favorites will be technologies that help find and then aggregate information that will make your blog or web site more informative for your readers. Or that make your job as a blogger easier because they help you locate not only your own writings (which believe it or not is a problem for many bloggers) but new information from sources that you trust.
BT Openzone Wireless Broadband
I wrote about the open wi-fi network in central London – back when I was just “hoping” that it would give us coverage while in London. Indeed it looks the network is around and that there are many wireless hotspots. I don’t know yet how pervasive the outdoor coverage is, but coverage at shops (coffee shops for example) seems pretty much available.
But the service that’s saving my life here is BT Mobile Broadband, which is available for £15/month (special promotion) on a “commercial” plan. (See photo of their [new] USB plug-in device above)
Advertised as providing “up to 7.2Mb (actually I would say 7.2mbps – or megabits per second) I was getting 2.5mbps on Sunday afternoon, and through the week have been getting upwards of 640kbps almost all of the time, which isn’t as good, but is roughly equivalent to a DSL line in the US. It’s also not quite as good as wi-fi, but if you’re at a public-access wi-fi spot, you’re unlikely to get anything better than the 640kpbs speed anyway.
On Monday at Reboot Britain [see Howard Rheingold’s article on the conference, where he spoke] we were inside a steel and brick building, in an inner room, and the local wi-fi was so overloaded it couldn’t maintain a connection for longer than a few minutes [this is common for large conferences of geeks], and I stayed on the BT Mobile service the entire day and it was rock solid, though at the lower data rate. That’s why I say it “saved by life.”
If you’re in Britain, need data on the road, and can’t tether your computer through a phone, this service seems like it would be indispensable. [I don’t know whether non-British national can purchase it short term…but if so, it would be great.]
[Disclosure: BT corporate is providing the device for me and the other Traveling Geeks, along with service, for the week I’m in London. I have no obligation to write about it or promote it.]
I’m packed
If you were to survey the Traveling Geeks this morning (Thursday before travel day) you’d be unlikely to hear many of us say “I’m packed and ready to go.” But you would certainly hear all of us say “I’m excited and will really enjoy this trip!”
Yesterday a half dozen of us met up at Greens restaurant in Fort Mason (a decommissioned US Army base in SanFrancisco, used for troop/cargo ship departures during World War II, that was turned over for public use in 1974) to review the mobile internet devices (MIDs) that Intel is providing for the duration of the trip. We’ll be bringing several of these with us, and sharing them around the group, so you’ll get some reports on how well they work. [Read more…]
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