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TechLines: Email is dead, what next?

20 August 2010 in Business, Human Nature, Internet by Stilgherrian | 1 comment

Has email reached its use-by date as a business tool? If so, what next? That topic was explored in the combined ZDNet Australia / Lifehacker Australia TechLines webcast last week. Here’s the 66-minute end product.

If the embedded video doesn’t work, try over here.

Panellists were anthropologist Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow at Intel Labs; Alistair Rennie, general manager of Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal at IBM’s Software Group; futurist Mark Pesce; and Adele Beachley, who is RIM’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand i.e. from BlackBerry Land. It was hosted by the ABC’s James O’Loghlin.

I was in the audience, invited specifically so I could ask a question. Indeed, I get one in at the end. You’ll see me in the front row with a silver MacBook Pro in my lap.

I found the whole thing fascinating. O’Loghin worked well as a host too, I reckon. But I was wondering why for a webcast we needed the full six-camera broadcast production style. Freemantle Media did a good job, don’t get me wrong. But it’s an expensive way of doing things. Oh well, it wasn’t my money…

Anyway, have a squizz and let me know what you think.

Smartphones as sexual display

26 September 2009 in Human Nature, Internet by Stilgherrian | 9 comments

On one of my recent visits to NSW Parliament House on Macquarie Street the security guard who X-rayed my bag noted that while it contained plenty of Apple kit, such as my MacBook Pro, I carried a Nokia phone rather than an iPhone. “That’s because I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid,” I replied. “Plus they’re all just tools for a job.”

Many people do seem to choose their devices more through brand identity than practical value. I was going to write more about that, but that renowned bastard Stephen Fry has beaten me to it. It’s all about sexual display.

When two businessmen drop down in neighbouring aeroplane seats and each gets out a smartphone an electricity will crackle between them like that between two sexually heated adolescents whose thighs have accidentally touched in the backseat of the school bus. If one businessman fishes from his shirt pocket a BlackBerry while the other gets out an iPhone a whole range of complex thoughts will begin to boil in the brains of each: resentment, contempt, insecurity and irritation are merely the emotions bubbling closest to the surface: deep down, dark and primal forces stir. We do not possess antlers, horns or tusks, we cannot display fans of feather or manes of fur, the best we can do is express our personality, aspirations, beliefs, outlook, sexual potency, status, right to breed and place in the hierarchy through the choices we make in our possessions: and no possession, here in the early part of the twenty-first century, speaks quite so loudly as our smartphone. Once upon a time it was our motorcar and in the future it may well be a robot, a rocket-pack or a hoverpenis that defines us, but for the moment it is, for good or ill, a smartphone.

Many women reading this will detect that the foregoing is an issue almost entirely for males, who remain the prime sufferers in this kind of tribal status war. My suspicion is that women are, if not immune, far less emotionally bound up in the business than men. I may be wrong and welcome clarification either way on this point.

I do realise that quoting Stephen Fry doesn’t make up for writing an original piece, but at least it means I’m trying to keep up to date with my writing.