TG2009 Archives - Page 6 of 7

Backstage Pass- Real Customer Service

15 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

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.

Backstage Pass- WDYDWYD

14 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Susan Bratton is doing a meme — WDYDWYD — Why Do You Do What You Do during the Traveling Geeks’ week in London and Cambridge. She asks interesting people to put their name and URL on a piece of paper, and then give a short statement of “why I do what I do” and she photographs the person with their paper. Susan has been doing this all week and you will find her WDYDWYD memes interspersed throughout the blog.

Backstage Pass- Login, login, login

9 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I estimated last night that I spend 1/3 of my time trying to debug and solve connectivity issues^[1] both at home and on the road. Though perhaps when I’m at home, more of that 1/3 goes toward updating software^[2].

Please note – This video isn’t intended to put anybody on the spot, but when Susan was having so much trouble on Monday getting connected to wi-fi at the Reboot Britain meeting, it just seemed like old times to me! At big meetings like this (several hundred people) the wi-fi is frequently the crunch. Just getting an IP address, and then being able to stay connected 30 minutes or more, can be a challenge. To their credit, the venue did have really good wi-fi signals in all of the rooms at the conference center! However, I stayed on my BT Mobile Broadband connection the entire time (the little illustration is their USB modem device), and though the bandwidth was challenged (inside a brick, steel, concrete building) it was reliable.

[1] Connectivity includes finding wi-fi, dealing with “blocking” problems (more on that later), spam overload, and helping others get connected (which is major).
[2] I probably update a program every 2 days. This isn’t just Microsoft Office, but dozens of other programs I use. I use MacUpdate as a paid service to notify me of updates, although I’d say that 1/2 of the programs I use will automatically alert me when updates are available.

Backstage Pass- London taxis

8 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Twelve traveling geeks and one cameraperson. Going hither and yon. How do we get around? Well, it’s a combination of cab and walking. London is remarkably compact and I was surprised at how easy it was to get from one spot to another – which on the map looked like it would take an hour, ended up taking 15 minutes. (Last time I was in London was a long time ago, and I walked and took the tube, but I had forgotten how close things were.) So we pack 5 geeks into the first cab, 5 into the next, and then a third, until we are off to the next engagement. Here’s the first cab out of the hotel on Monday morning, with Robert Scoble presiding.