Unless you’ve not looked out of a window for the past two weeks, you can’t have failed to notice that the UK is in the midst of the worst snow and ice to hit the island for almost 30 years.
(You could of course also be from another country, so welcome to our little corner of digital Britain).
I remember the winter of 1981 extremely-well because that December in the middle of the peak of the worst weather, my family and I moved house, into a nice new home at the top of a rather steep hill.
Automotive technology not being where it is now (and my father’s pockets for such ‘luxuries’ as quality cars being rather shallow), the only way we could make it up the hill was for my brother and I to bounce for all we were worth on the back seat to improve grip in the rear-wheel drive car. Or, at least, that’s what Dad told us. :-)
So, fast-forward almost three decades and what’s changed? The snow’s falling, the roads are getting gridlocked and the number of no-shows at companies up and down the country isn’t helping us climb out of recession.
But one thing that has changed – for us at least – is the role of technology in our everyday working lives and how it’s made the snow less of a pain to deal with and geography much less relevant than it was even two years ago.
Client meeting to demonstrate a new piece of technology? Face to face is great but screen sharing using a technology such as GoTo Meeting makes the process of demonstrating simplicity itself.
And for in-house conferencing, Skype frankly cannot be beaten.
Quick, simple, lean over the shoulder and ask questions? Everybody in the team uses Macs, so we utilise Adium which allows us to connect to MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger or any of a dozen or so instant messaging systems through one single application (for the PC users amongst you, Trillian does the same thing).
At one point following a lengthy conference call with client, we even left the Skype connection open for a bit after the client disconnected to occasionally exchange typical office conversation… the silence occasionally peppered with “it’s still snowing over here” or “did you see the football last night?”.
So – what’s next? How about the virtual reality conference call or office, where everybody present is represented by some kind of avatar? If the human interaction element can be ’synthesised’, who needs to spend an hour or more in a metal box to simply share a post code?
