Failing to Connect

I went to a roundtable event last week. It was all about the WiFi rejuvenation expected for 2009, hosted by Devicescape – a company that has a nifty little application that will automatically log you on to your WiFi hotspot without having to fiddle about with inputting passwords (which is a real bugger on my Blackberry Pearl…for some reason when I’m browsing it’s not easy to change characters once I’ve typed them, and given I auto-default to predictive text, when I type a password it means I often have to change characters).

So, what the hell does this event have to do with this blog? Well the conversation turned to what subscribers want and the simple conclusion was that they didn’t really care as long as it worked, and worked well.

*Ta Da!*

What was interesting was the perspective of one of the attendees. He knows a heck of a lot about the telecoms world, but therein lay the problem. He was so caught up in his own world that he was too far removed from what Joe Bloggs on the street thought about it. Everyone else around the table agreed that Joe probably didn’t think twice about his connectivity options – as long as it works and isn’t complicated.

Of course the other thing was that there were no hidden charges! We’ve all heard the horror stories of poor ol’ Joe browsing the Internet on his mobile phone only to get slapped with a £500 bill because he went over his fair use policy that he didn’t even know he had. But that’s another story.

So maybe that’s where companies go wrong? They’re so caught up in their own experiences, that their focus group of them, Jim from marketing and Jean in accounts isn’t really a fair picture of what the rest of us, who wouldn’t know our HSDPAs from our HSUPAs and frankly wouldn’t even care, think.

This guy is smart, but is so caught up in what he does, that the concept of someone else wanting to browse the Internet for any length of time on their phone seemed like madness to him. But I love it. I love the fact that I can sit on the sofa, unlock my phone and it’s there. I don’t have to get up, get the laptop out of its case, boot it up, fanny about trying to get it to connect to the Internet… my phone is there – already on. OK, the screen isn’t that big, but for emailing, looking up details, checking out Facebook – all the things I do online – it’s perfect.

I’m sure I can’t be just one of one out there. I think Informa did some research a while back which showed that the majority of Internet access via a mobile phone was done at home, so sounds like it isn’t just me.

Think outside the box, look out of the window, and be prepared to be amazed that the rest of the world isn’t just like you.

Links: MobileIP