Posts Tagged ‘fail’

Unsolicited But Targeted Email That Fails In So Many Ways

Like most people, my email Inbox gets hit with a lot of spam on a daily basis. Most of this is caught by my email client’s junk mail filtering, but some gets through. Most of it is, at face value, auto generated; phishing attempts for bank accounts I don’t have or solicitations for advance fee fraud.

But there’s also been a recent spike in people wanting me to embed infographics or links into one of my sites that the sender thinks my readers might like. Most of these are so off target as to be ignored, but sometimes there’s a mail that seems to have come from a human and might even be relevant to what I write about, but that just fails on so many levels. This is one such email, redacted to save the originating sender and company from any embarrassment.

Subject: Question about garygale.com

Hello,

I was wondering if it would be possible to suggest a link for your website at;

http://www.garygale.com/

Our site [name redacted] ([URL redacted]) is a road travel reporting website, that provides our users with the most up-to-date road traffic information. Our data is updated every 5 minutes using sensors placed on motorways and common A / B roads.

I feel it might be a useful resource for your readers.

Many thanks for your consideration.

Kind Regards,
[name redacted]

[name redacted]
[email address redacted]
[URL redacted]

The email looks like it’s been written by a human and it’s even grammatically correct and without the usual spelling howlers that characterise spam emails. But deconstruct the email and you can start to see how it just won’t achieve its purpose.

Hello,

Hello to you too. I do have a name. It’s Gary. It’s the name in the email address you’ve just sent this to and it’s also the name in the domain name and in the text of the site you’re recommending I put your service’s link on. So why not use my name? No matter, let’s move on.

I was wondering if it would be possible to suggest a link for your website at; http://www.garygale.com/

This is definitely one of my sites; so suggest away.

Our site [name redacted] ([URL redacted]) is a road travel reporting website, that provides our users with the most up-to-date road traffic information. Our data is updated every 5 minutes using sensors placed on motorways and common A / B roads.

Now the fun starts. The site at www.garygale.com is a personal vanity page; it contains information about me and links to other stuff about me, such as this blog, my Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn profiles. There’s not a single link on the site that isn’t either directly about me and maintained by me or that I haven’t had a personal involvement in. Why would I put a link to a product or service on this site? If anything, this blog might be a better target.

But even then, I might write about things I find interesting, which are usually geographical or map related, but I’ve never once, as far as I know, written about road traffic data or services.

So I go and look at the site I’m being recommended to link to. It’s got a map on it and it looks like it does what it says … provides live road traffic information in the UK. It links to the UK Highways Agency, which gives it a sheen of authenticity.

There’s a Twitter account too. It only has 4 Tweets and two of those are saying the service is down.

But the rest of the website is covered with links to online betting sites, euphemistically referred to as gaming sites as well as car insurance reselling sites. This is looking less and less like something I’d want to be associated with.

I feel it might be a useful resource for your readers.

Why? I’ve never written about road traffic data. If my readers want to gamble online, surely they can find sites which offer this? Why not a single reason as to why this might be a useful resource?

The simple answer is that this isn’t a useful resource. The spam email looks authentic but even if there is a real human behind this, then they haven’t even bothered to see whether what is being promoted is a good fit with what I write about or whether it’s relevant or not.

Many thanks for your consideration.

Congratulations are in order. You’ve piqued my attention for about 2 minutes, but then, as is the fate of spam messages, I moved the mouse pointer to the button Mark Selected Message As Junk and just … clicked.

Photo Credits: AJ Cann on Flickr.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Gary’s Law Of Conference Failure

I wasn’t at WhereCamp EU in Amsterdam recently. At least, I wasn’t there in person, but according to Mark Iliffe and Giuseppe Sollazzo I was certainly there in spirit. You see, at WhereCamp EU in Berlin last year I was doing what I usually do at conferences; watching a talk, laptop on lap, live Tweeting furiously. This particular talk contained a live demo and a backing track of Arthur Conley’s Sweet Soul Music. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, a live demo can go wrong and did go wrong, which prompted me to say

Never work with children, animals, sweet soul music or live code demos. You have been warned

Although I’m sure someone might have said something similar before. That was last year’s WhereCamp EU. This year’s WhereCamp EU, thanks to Messrs Iliffe and Sollazzo, seemed to have elevated that random Tweet to a law. A law which happened again at WhereCamp EU in Berlin. More than once. And then again at Mark’s PhD presentation.

So it’s official. Gary’s law of conference failures is now codified as never work with children, animals, sweet soul music or live demos. And before you ask, I’ve learnt the hard way, never, ever, to do a live demo, because what can go wrong, will go wrong.

Photo Credits: Uncle Zirky on FailBlog.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Smart Phone. Clumsy User

I have learnt four things over the past year or so.

One. The iPhone 3′s glass was scratch resistant but not dropping-onto-a-stone-floor resistant.

Two. I am clumsy.

Three. The iPhone 4′s glass was scratch resistant but not dropping-onto-a-pavement resistant.

Four. I am still clumsy.

Written and posted from the Nokia gate5 office in Schönhauser Allee, Berlin (52.5308072, 13.4108176)

GPS Lock Fail Rage

Isn’t GPS a wonderful invention? In the space of a few seconds, your GPS enabled handset can give you your precise location on the face of the Earth, allowing mobile maps to work, routing and navigation to get you to where you want to be or earning you another Mayor badge on a well known location based social networking site.

Except when it doesn’t … you’re in an urban canyon, you’re deep in a building or underground where you just can’t get a GPS lock and you stand there watching the “waiting for GPS” message to disappear. GPS lock fail rage.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal seems to sum up the rage and frustration rather neatly. We’ve all been there …

Written and posted from the Hotel Mercure An Der Charite in Berlin (52.530429, 13.381361)

Sometimes the Hardware is Willing but the Software is Weak

I’ve had an HP DeskJet F-something-or-other for a couple of years now. It’s a small grey thing, around the size of a shoe box that prints, scans and photocopies. At least that’s what it said in the brochure and on HP’s web site. It used to sit plugged into the USB port on my AirPort Express for easy wireless printing. Not that it actually printed mind you.

I viewed this piece of hardware’s role in life as rendering documents from one of the Macs we have in the house, in full colour or black and while, onto sheets of A4 paper.

The DeskJet had other ideas.

It viewed its role in life as a source of revenue for HP to get me to keep buying ever more expensive replacement inkjet refills, by the cunning ruse of reporting the cartridge was empty when it was brand new, by refusing to print colour or black and white consistently and in the end, by just refusing to print, unless it was using invisible ink that it secreted somewhere in that grey shoe box.

The scanner was OK though but the photocopier functionality was somewhat hampered by the lack of being actually able to print what had just been scanned. The printer continued to not endear itself by refusing to be installed on my faithful and ageing PowerPC based iBook G4 running Leopard. Intel MacBook Pros running Leopard and Snow Leopard seemed to be fine but the iBook insisted the printer was actually another model entirely and just sulked.

So based on the premise that we wanted to print far more often than we wanted to scan, the HP DeskJet F-whatever-the-model-number-is has been retired and replaced with a gleaming, black, colour laser printer from Samsung. It’s a CLP-315W for those of you who like model numbers.

The hardware is very capable. It works and prints in black and white and in colour which is more than the HP DeskJet ever seemed to do. You can connect it via a USB cable, set it up as its own ad-hoc wifi network or add it to your own network where, for Macs at least, it broadcasts itself as a Bonjour printer and is perfectly happy to accept print jobs from my iBook and from my MacBook Pros. It’s now sitting on a shelf in the cupboard under the stairs minding it’s own business and in a state of slumber until one of my Macs sends it the right network incantation, it wakes up, prints and then goes back to sleep again. It just works.

Now granted, the supplied user guide said it supports Mac OS X 10.3 through 10.5, but a quick check on Samsung’s UK support site (before purchasing I might add), yielded a native set of 10.6 Snow Leopard drivers. And they work. But as I’ve mentioned before, applications which think they have a right to take over one of my machines and do things the way they want to do them without asking permission are one of the things that … irk me.

No drag and drop installation here. Not even a native Mac format mpkg installer. No, after some waiting and authentication I see the words “Installation powered by VISE X”; I’ve found in the past that VISE X installers, or rather the authors of VISE X installers, tend to see my machine as their property, to install and configure stuff with impunity. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Wait. What? You want me to shut down every single app just to install a printer driver? Oh, no, actually you want me to shut down every single app to install the printer driver, which then starts up Safari, gets me to configure the printer via a Java application which needs my firewall turned off in order to work and then you refuse to install the Smart Panel app because Safari, the one the installer started up in the first, is running.

So eventually we get there. The printer is installed, it’s printing over the network and all is well with the world. I can see the Smart Panel app is running in the menu bar and it’s only a glorified status monitor, which I can get through the printer driver anyway so I close it down. Meanwhile, Software Update is telling me there’s a security update waiting for me, so I install it, reboot and login again.

Smart Panel is back with me.

Sure enough, a quick glance through my Login Items shows me that the installer has, without my permission, made a decision on my behalf that I’ll always want to run this app and has inserted itself into my list of Login Items. This is not a well behaved app. Well behaved apps, ask permission before doing stuff like this.

At least it’s not as bad as iPass Connect though, which reinserts itself into the Login Items every single time you run it regardless.

So, the Samsung CLP-315W; a great printer with weak software that just can’t be bothered to be good and takes the easy way out. Very poor as Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer used to say. But at least it prints.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

The Theory of Stuff

Once again, this is not the post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was called “In Search of Location’s Sweet Spot” and it’s sitting in draft and not yet posted. That’s because before I can submit that post I need to write this one as a warm up act.

Just like Anne Elk (Miss), I have a theory. I call it my Theory of Stuff. I’m sure that other people, far more learned and erudite than I, have articulated such a theory but I’ve yet to come across any evidence for this and for now at least, it remains mine and it contains three buckets, looking something like this:

On the far left hand side we have the stuff bucket. Whilst stuff may sound vague, it’s entirely intentional. Stuff is defined as a collection or set of items, things or matter. Though I was focussing primarily on location data and location based mobile services, this applies equally well to other businesses and markets. It could be stock, inventory, left handed widgets or a plethora of other things.

On the far right hand side we have people bucket. The exact number of people doesn’t matter, for small businesses the number will probably be small and for large businesses the number will be, err, larger. These people are your customers, your audience. Hopefully they have money as well.

And then in the middle we have the secret sauce bucket. Again, it doesn’t matter what this is but it’s very important to look at what the secret sauce actually does.

The secret sauce is a bidirectional pipe that connects stuff to people.
It allows you to expose your business’s stuff to the people who are your customers, hopefully adding value along the way.
It also allows you to extract money from the people in exchange for access to your business’s stuff. In the Internet industry we call this monetizing your audience.

In order for your business to succeed, you need to have all three of these buckets in place. Have people and secret sauce but no stuff? Fail. Have stuff and secret sauce but no people? Fail. You get the idea.

Take a look at every business that is succeeding, especially those that are online and where the stuff bucket contains data, and you’ll see that they have all three buckets in place. Take a look at those businesses which have failed or are failing, especially those that are online, and you either see one bucket missing or there’s just not enough of it.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

iPass Connect on the Mac; great service, appallingly designed app

I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain subscriptions to The Cloud, T-Mobile Hotspots, BT OpenZone and so on and so on, but fortunately Yahoo! provides me with an iPass subscription.

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I’ve been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven’t been able to get a connection. I’m using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin’s Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.

So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.

1. Quit iPassConnect? I see no Quit menu option.

From the Mac OS X GUI you can’t stop iPass running. The app lives in your menu bar and scans and rescans for wireless networks (which I’m sure reduces battery life) even when it’s connected to a wireless network. If I’m connected to a wireless network why would I want to look for another network, all the time, constantly? There’s a red and white animation going on in the menu bar which I’m sure someone thought was cute but which is incredibly distracting. But let’s overlook that for a moment. To quit an app, you simply select the menu bar and select Quit or press Cmd-Q.

Not that I’ve ever been able to find the mythical Quit command for iPassConnect. The only way to kill the damn thing is from within Activity Monitor or by the killall command from the shell within Terminal.

Simple resolution: Let the user choose when they want to run your app and when they don’t. Add a Quit command.

2. Install as a Login Item? Every single time?

It’s a simple, plain fact that the more apps you have in your account’s Login Items, the slower your login time will be. Like most people, I keep the number of Login Items down to a bare minimum and then start apps up as I need them. If I don’t use something all day, every day, it’s very unlikely that I want to make it a Login Item. Most apps are well behaved and ask your permission before inserting themselves as a Login Item but not iPassConnect. Run the app and hey presto you get a Login Item. Mildly annoying but at least you can remove it from your list of Login Items. Run the app again though and hey presto you get a Login Item. Each and every single time. It’s frustrating the first time it happens and induces psychosis after the hundredth such occurrence.

This is uncontrollable, un-configurable, totally unacceptable and verging on downright insulting. It’s an app designer’s way of saying to the user “I don’t care what your preferences are, I know better than you”.

Simple resolution: Act in a well behaved manner, ask the user for their preference, act on it and remember it.

3. Update? What update?

Most apps these days have a way of calling home and checking for an update. For those apps that run within a window there’s usually an Updates option in the application’s menu. For those apps that don’t run in a window there’s usually an option in their preferences pane. Note the word usually and let’s have a look at the iPassConnect preference pane.

There’s an Updates tab which is a good start. There’s an Enable automatic updates option which is also a good thing. But it only controls the hotspot dictionary that the app maintains. Want to update the app or know whether there’s an update available? Not with this app (and the iPass website is remarkably update free as well).

Simple resolution: Add an update option and ask the user if they want to check for updates.

4. Snow Leopard support. In 32-bits.

Snow Leopard continues Apple’s march towards a pure 64-bit operating system. A cursory glance at Activity Monitor shows that most apps running are Intel (64-bit) and this includes the System Preferences app. So let’s try to set some preferences for iPassConnect.

Ah yes, the iPassConnect preferences pane is 32-bit which means that you have to restart System Preferences in 32-bit mode and there it stays, running in 32-bit mode, until you manually restart System Preferences in the default 64-bit mode.

Simple resolution: If you say your app has Snow Leopard support then fully support Snow Leopard. That means 64-bitness across the board.

iPass is a great service, it deserves a great app; version 3.1 is not that app.

Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Threaten Your Customers With Legal Action; That’ll Make Them Feel Valued And Want To Renew

We’re all familiar with the scene. You’re stuck on the end of the phone, to yet another call centre, you’re on hold due to “significantly high call volume“, you’re paying premium rate for the privilege of being on hold and a disembodied voice interrupts the on hold musak to say “your call is important to us, please continue to hold“.

Well, obviously not that important, because if it was that important than there’d actually be someone to answer the phone. Add into the mix that it’s way outside of normal peak hours and you realise that “significantly high call volume” really means “we’ve only employed two people, one of them is on holiday and the other is taking their only toilet break of the day“.

So far, so familiar. The curse of the non specific, applies to everyone, on hold experience. But oddly nowhere near as bad as when the non-specific, applies to everyone approach transfers to email and a company threatens to sue you if you don’t renew.

So some background. My domain names are registered through one company, easyspace.com. They’re not the best, they’re not the cheapest, they’re a bit impersonal and corporate but they’re a case of better the devil you know and they’ve never threatened me and over reacted. My web hosting and email hosting are through another company, justhost.com. They’re not the best, they’re pretty cheap, they’ve had a few outages but overall they’ve been … OK. I should probably have shopped around a bit more but when I moved from self hosting to the cloud they fitted the bill.

And then this gem dropped into my Inbox …

To: Gary Gale
Subject: Just Host Payment Overdue
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:22:23 -0600
From: Just Host

Your Just Host account has an overdue invoice. If your invoice is for hosting services you are in danger of losing access to your site and your domain.YOUR ACCOUNT WILL AUTOMATICALLY SUSPENDED WHEN YOUR HOSTING INVOICE IS 7 DAYS OVERDUE.

Please use the link below to make the owed payment to ensure you keep your website, domain and any upgrades active:

https://billing.justhost.com/r/?c=nnnn&i=nnnnnnnnnnnn

**REMEMBER WHEN THIS INVOICE IS 7 DAYS OVERDUE YOUR ACCOUNT OR SERVICE WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY SUSPENDED.**

If your account has not been paid in full after 21 days, we will refer your account to our debt collection authority to investigate and your services will be cancelled. Please reply to this email immediately in order to avoid further charges and/or cancellation of your account.

If you are having trouble paying your account, please inform us and we will do our best to consider payment options that suit both parties.

Kind Regards,

Brooke Bryan
Co-Founder, Just Host
www.justhost.com

Introduce a Friend to Just Host and receive $60!
http://www.justhost.com/affiliates

Let’s just look at this in detail …

Your Just Host account has an overdue invoice.

Really? I’ve already paid for last year’s hosting and got the bank statements to prove it. So the only interpretation I have of this is that you’ve automatically created an invoice for next year and your automated system has automatically lumped me in the same bucket as everyone else so you’ve sent me this mail to remind me to renew and to pay up. Funny. I don’t actually recall asking to renew and this is the first I’ve heard of this. But let’s read on …

If your invoice is for hosting services you are in danger of losing access to your site and your domain.

Losing access to my site? Well fair enough, I’m supposed to be renewing web hosting here so let’s keep reading.

Losing access to my domain? A generous interpretation would be that web hosting and my domain are synonymous. A less generous interpretation would be that I’d lose access to the registration of my domain, which can’t be the case as it’s not registered with Just Host but this is obviously a generic, one-size-fits-all mail so I’ll just mutter “tsk tsk” under my breath and let it pass without further comment.

YOUR ACCOUNT WILL AUTOMATICALLY SUSPENDED WHEN YOUR HOSTING INVOICE IS 7 DAYS OVERDUE.

OK, I can read. Not really any need for the caps lock to be on here. I’m an existing customer, one you want to renew with you, remember?

**REMEMBER WHEN THIS INVOICE IS 7 DAYS OVERDUE YOUR ACCOUNT OR SERVICE WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY SUSPENDED.**

Now listen, you mentioned the 7 days two lines ago. My short term memory is fine, and like I said, I’m a customer, so lay off on the caps lock and the stars.

Whoah …. now hang on just a second. My account, as you term it, is at zero balance. I paid for a year’s hosting, in advance, last year. I owe you nothing. Not one single penny. So to revisit my earlier wording, a generous interpretation would be that this mail is sent out to anyone whose account is overdue and yet again, this is a generic, one-size-fits-all mail.

But a more realistic interpretation would be in the form of a question. So Just Host, do you really think that threatening a customer who’s up for renewal with legal action and with a debt collection agency is going to make me want to renew with you? Really?

But then comes the finale …

Introduce a Friend to Just Host and receive $60!
http://www.justhost.com/affiliates

So, after being shouted at in cap lock, not once but twice, after being threatened with legal action for money I can’t possible owe as I haven’t renewed and this was a renewal notice after all, after all of that you want me to refer a friend. Really?

After all of this I still can’t quite work out whether this is breathtaking arrogance or touching naivete on the part of Just Host and of Brooke Bryan, the co founder. Whichever it is, it shows just how little the customer is valued at this certain hosting establishment.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

An Open Letter to Asda and Walmart

This is an open letter to Andy Bond, Chief Executive of Asda and to Mike Duke, CEO of Wal-Mart.

As a British citizen who travels a lot in the US I understand that the “customer service” ethos which is so prevalent in the US doesn’t travel or translate particularly well in the UK. I also understand that it’s almost naive to expect that since Asda was taken over by Wal-Mart in 1999 any type of US values would transfer to the UK arm. I also understand that the UK supermarket business is highly competitive and that through Asda, Wal-Mart is competing head-to-head with Tesco, Morrison’s and Sainsbury’s. I understand and accept all of this.

What I do not understand and what I do not accept is the sheer bloody-mindedness and rudeness of your staff, especially those of your online retailer business.

Let me explain.

As a family we tried out Asda, as their prices are extremely competitive compared to those of their competitors, so on the 19th of October we booked a delivery slot for an online shop; the order wasn’t particularly large or complex but it was still in excess of £100.00. The only delivery slot available was from 8.00 PM to 10.00 PM the following day.

October 20th. 10.05 PM. No shopping. So I look online for some insight.

“We know how important it is that we deliver on time but occasionally we can run into difficulties. In the unlikely event that we will be late, we’ll always try to let you know.“

I liked the answer to the question “My delivery hasn’t arrived yet?” … “If your shopping hasn’t arrived by the end of your delivery slot, please call our Helpline on 0844 8733333 (calls will be charged at a local rate, lines are open 8am-10pm, 7 days a week.)“.

Unless, of course, your shopping is due to arrive at 10.00 PM in which case if there is a problem, anyone at Asda has gone home for the night. But not my delivery driver it would seem, who rings me at 10.20 to tell me “we’re running slightly late” and that “your shopping will be there at 35 past latest“.

October 20th. 10.40 PM. No shopping.

October 20th. 10.45 PM. Shopping arrives with a giggle and a laugh; “We’re running a bit late tonight (hee hee hee)“. No apology, no contrition, no final bill so I know how much we’ve actually spent, it all seems one great big joke. Apart from the point where they knocked on the front door so hard it managed to wake both of my children up. A great joke, hilarious; only I’m the only one who doesn’t seem to find this particularly amusing.

So I look at my confirmation email … “If you have any queries about ASDA Online Shopping you can contact us on 0844 8733333“. Ah yes, this would be the helpline that closed at 10.00 PM.

So the following day at around 9.30 AM, we ring customer service; they’re open now. They promise to ring the store and the store manager would call us.

October 21st. 2.00 PM. No call. So we hold while customer services rings the store; the store manager “isn’t available and will call us back“.

October 21st. 5.00 PM. No call. So we call customer services who have, miraculously, been in touch with the store. They agree that this is appalling customer service, so appalling that as a token of their esteem they offer “Free delivery of your next order“. This assumes there will be a next order and it works out at the grand total of £4.25. Obviously not that appalling so we say that it’s not good enough.

Asda’s second, and final as it turns out, offer? £10.00 in e-vouchers, which again assumes that there will be a next order and which, by the way, needs to be redeemed in 2 months otherwise they’re invalidated. Still not that appalling so we say that it’s not good enough. So we’re put on hold … permanently as the call isn’t picked up again and after another 15 minutes we hang up in sheer frustration.

As an organisation, Asda may have had a consumer spend of almost £3.5B and a market share of 17% as of August 2008 but as of October 2009 my wallet won’t be contributing to that spend and Asda’s market share just dropped by one household’s worth, which has gone back to one of their rivals.

Photo credits: itslefty, juliebee and Tico on Flickr

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

On Conferences, Chairs, Breakfasts and Wifi Crashes

Think about the following three scenarios for a moment …

Scenario One. You go to a conference. It doesn’t matter where or what the topic is but you turn up because you’ve been invited or because you’ve paid to attend. Breakfast is included in the conference package. There’s 400 people attending the conference but when you get to the breakfast table, there’s none left because they’ve run out of food. When you ask the conference venue why there’s no breakfast they throw up their hands and say “The company who provides our food assured us there’d be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?“.

And now Scenario Two. Same conference. Same venue. But this time there’s only 200 chairs in the venue and you’ve got 400 people trying to cram into those chairs. It’s getting pretty cozy and people are ending up standing or going home. You ask the conference venue why there’s no chairs and they throw up their hands and say ”The company who provides our chairs assured us there’d be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?“.

For both of these scenarios you’d assume that the conference venue and their outsourced provider would have a very quick, very harsh, very frank exchange of views and that it wouldn’t happen again because the conference venue would quickly become a laughing stock.

So now Scenario Three. Same conference and same venue again but this time it’s internet connectivity we’re talking about and internet connectivity of the wifi flavour. Or to be more precise, lack of internet connectivity of the wifi flavour. You ask the conference venue why the wifi keeps crashing and they throw up their hands and say ”The company who provides our connectivity assured us there’d be enough for 400 connections but there’s only enough for 200 connections. What can we do?“.

But with this scenario the conference venues are still in business, the outsourced internet providers apologise and do nothing about it, the delegates complain and nothing changes.

The last three conferences I’ve attended have had this problem to varying degrees. Conference number one had workable wifi for the first 30 minutes before connectivity crashed or the access point ran out of DHCP leases. Conference number two only managed 10 minutes after registration opened before crashing. Conference number three had no problems at all but that’s only because they didn’t offer any wifi at all and left everyone reliant on their own 3G dongles or mifi’s.

People in the tech community with far more reach and standing than me have written about this; TechCrunch wrote about the problems at Le Web and Joel Spolsky wrote about it as part of Joel on Software.

When are conference organisers going to get the message? Internet connectivity, it doesn’t have to be wifi, indeed it’s probably better if it isn’t wifi, is essential at conferences these days, tech conferences or otherwise. And if it’s a tech conference you need at least two IP addresses per delegate, minimum to cope with their laptops, iPhones, BlackBerrys and so on.

Until conference organisers make conference venues understand this and start voting with their wallets, this sorry tale will keep on replaying itself.

Photo credit: Leia on Flickr.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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