Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The cellular etiquette meme continues.  This latest column, from the IndyStar, has Martha Stewart giving advice on boudoir color schemes, plus appropriate cellular phone etiquette.  If you’re going to paint your walls cranberry, a “blend of dramatic reds and soothing blues”, says Martha, use bright accessories to complement the walls.  And when answering a cellphone, “Remember that it’s impolite to answer a cell phone while someone is in mid-sentence.”  … or with your mouth full of food, Martha.

Meanwhile, Karen Ali - the NewsTimesLive.com Goddess of Truth - gives advice to the annoyed boy who’s girlfriend carries on several conversations at once, some on the cellphone, and some live.  Says Wayne “Like, my girlfriend will call me on her cell phone and talk to me but then start talking to other people passing her by in the hallway or wherever she’s calling me from — without telling me, “Hold on a sec.””

Regarding business meetings and cell phones, Michelle Mitchell, associate director of career services at Michigan State College of Law and certified etiquette trainer, says “Your phone should not be on during a business meeting. There are a few exceptions - let’s say your grandmother is in surgery and you’re waiting for a call. Put the phone on vibrate and explain … that you may be getting a call. If that happens, remove yourself from the table, keep the call brief and when you come back, apologize for the interruption. Thank the person for their understanding, and that’s the end of it . If the situation is so serious you need to take another call, you shouldn’t be conducting business.”

And finally, from the Wahpeton Daily News, comes this gem on the intrusion of the cell phone onto the golf course. 

The guy in the group ahead of us IS the group ahead of us. He’s playing by himself, but he’s playing two, four or seven balls (depending on how he feels about his first, third or sixth shot). The round is moving about as quickly as John Daly sauntering away from an all-you-can-eat buffet with a bank of slot machines right next to the fried chicken.

So I stand at my ball for a while. I judge the wind. I select my club. I tell a joke that I could never repeat in this medium (but here’s the punch-line: “Sounds like my last date.”). Finally, the guy holes out his putt from 28 feet (don’t be surprised, it took him eight attempts from that very spot).

And then his cell phone rings.

He stands on the green, answers the phone and has a conversation. About what, I don’t know. Maybe it was something important. Probably it was one of his friends informing him that the jerk store called and they were running out of him.

ringelepsy n., chronic illness characterized by the inability to ignore a ringing telephone. 

May 16th, Information Week wrote about an Informa Report predicting that traditional telecoms see a worldwide decline in voice revenues of 16.7% by 2011.  That works out to $100 billion.  When compared to Adventis prediction of $50 billion by 2009, made earlier this year, it certainly seems credible.

The author of the report, Malik Saadi, noted: “After 2010, PSTN will no longer be the main revenue generator in developed countries.  There will be no justification for big operators to reserve a whole network for traditional PSTN voice traffic. This trend will increasingly push operators and network owners to gradually migrate their subscribers from traditional PSTN to VoIP.”

Some operators are already taking action.  Skype Journal’s Jim Courtney wrote just last week of data supporting the trend to a Voice 2.0 world.  In particular, he quoted numbers from Jon Arnold’s analysis of Telus’ revenue mix, and produced the following graph:

 

Telus is focusing on declining voice minutes in two ways: they are shifting customers to cellular contracts, which have an inherent lock-in, and they’re focusing on data to grow their business.  In the short term, wireless is a great strategy.  But, as I have noted previously, wireless per minute revenues continue to decline precipitously.  Contract lock-in’s only slow the eventually landslide.  The true growth area is in data, and consequent to data, Voice 2.0 applications.

I rode the train to Toronto on Monday and back yesterday.  Along the way I had a transformational experience.  For the first time, in what must be a decade, I have an empty email inbox. I didn’t delete everything, nor did I simply ignore messages that were old.  I used the Outlook 2007 beta, and it changed the way I handle mail.

Let me explain. 

Like so many people, I’ve used the inbox as a temporary holding area and to do list for years. As I finished dealing with the email, I would file it into an appropriate Outlook folder.  The task management features in Outlook were just too limited to do anything useful with.  What that meant was that mail piled up in the inbox pushing older “tasks” to the bottom of the heap as the primary task became simply dealing with email.  In a large organization, where you can afford the luxury of being a single very focused worker, or manager of a team that has a small very focused set of tasks, this can work.  In a start-up it’s a dead failure.  There are simply too many unrelated tasks, too many balls in the air at any one time, to keep track of everything.  I used to pride myself on never having more than 50 emails in my inbox needing my attention at any one time.  Lately, it’s grown to 300 and 400 at a time, with never any sign of abatement.

I’ve tried using the old Outlook task lists, but it simply became a dumping ground for stuff that I would look at later.  It wasn’t efficient because getting through the stuff in my inbox always became a higher priority.  And, I’ve tried flagging messages for follow-up, and then filing them, relying on Outlook to remind me at some point in the future that I needed to follow up.  But the Outlook reminder mechanism, more suited to meeting reminders, was too easy to ignore.

With Outlook 2007, Microsoft has made a couple of very simple changes.  All flagged items, in any folder, now appear on the Task List.  That means I can respond to a mail, flag it for follow up in a week, file it, and a week later it appears on my task list highlighted as something to do today.  The second thing they’ve done is move Tasks, with a new feature called the Task Bar, front and center.  The Task Bar is a drawer that pops out from the right hand side of the screen which shows all of the tasks you have on your plate for today.   It’s a simple and easy way to at a glance see what’s on your plate.  And the third thing they’ve done is added explicit follow up durations to the context menu.  You can now right click and select follow up today, tomorrow, this week, next week, and and so on, rather than going through the cumbersome pop-up system that used to be there.

Now Outlook tracks all my tasks and follow-ups in one place, and overdue items show up highlighted and at the top of the list. Office 2007 is still in beta, and there are still lots of warts to work out, but what I’ve seen of Outlook’s future I really really love.

SiliconBeat wrote about Jangl yesterday.  Jangl is a new service aimed at giving users privacy from stalkers (whether over-eager salespeople, or bad dates) by giving you a temporary and disposable phone number.  Similar to AIM Phoneline, except that it allows you to receive calls on ordinary telephones, and it has a cost associated with it, both are aiming to give users a familiar, albeit low tech, way of dealing with the intrusiveness of today’s phones.

The need is real, but I think the approach (temporary new identities) is a bandage fix.  How long until you’ve got so many temporary identities that you can’t reasonably manage them anymore? Moreover, new identities won’t deal with the nuisance callers using autodialers, or  the callers who already have you in their database because of a “prior relationship”.  What’s required are more robust tools for managing the identity you have.  Persona management, and sophisticated filtering tools are the answer — not more phone numbers.

John Markoff wrote about Illumio in today’s NY Times.  Illumio is software that combs networks looking for experts in particular topic areas.  Using a reverse auction algorithm, it goes from most expert to least, seeking to find an individual to answer the question being asked.  According to the Illumio blog, it works best with groups that have:

1. Formal sense of membership (e.g., an alumni association, a department within a company, etc.)
2. Inherent trust based on this membership
3. Value placed in one-one networking
4. To begin, we ask that test groups stay small first before expanding (let’s say less than 20 people)

Illumio is a new kind of social networking application.  Like all social networking applications, it is built around relationships between people.  However, unlike social networking applications to date which are designed to facilitate meeting people, or business networking, or recruiting, Illumio is designed to facitilate finding expertise. 

What a clever idea!  I’ve signed up for the test.  I’m dying to know how well it works.  Perhaps we could get a few of the VoIP bloggers out there to form a small group.