loose wire blog

The Alarm Clock is Dead, Long Live the Cellphone

Gadgets, like software and services, often end up being used in ways the creator didn't intend. But how many companies make the most of this opportunity?

Take the cellphone. More than a third of Brits use their mobile phone as an alarm clock, according to a survey by British hotel chain Travelodge (thanks textually.org):

Budget hotel chain Travelodge quizzed 3,000 respondents on waking up habits and 71% of UK adults claimed that alarm clocks are now obsolete. The faithful bedside companion has been cast off in favour of the modern must-have, a mobile phone. Sixteen million Brits (36%) now prefer using the latest ring tone to rouse them from sleep rather than the shrill bleeping of an alarm clock.

Why? The article doesn't say, but the answers are pretty obvious:

• Who wants to take an extra device with you when you travel?
• Ever come across an alarm clock with a dozen different ring tones?
• Ever tried to program an alarm clock you're not familiar with?
• Ever tried to rely on wake up services?
• Most alarm clocks are badly designed.

This might even reveal itself in the Alarm Clock Law: if another device can handle the task of a dumber gadget, it will replace it. So does that mean that the alarm clock is dead?

Not exactly. The alarm clock performs a single function: wake the person up. But that has turned out not to be as easy as it looks. While the design of most alarm clocks have been outsourced to the brain-dead, other designers have recognised the potential of alarm clocks that don't merely wake up the owner, but keep them awake long enough to get up.

This list, for example, illustrates the thriving world of alarm clock design (think Clocky, that has wheels and has wheels and . And in this post about Seth Godin last September there was a bunch of responses suggesting that in fact alarm clock designers have tried to add features to make the alarm clock relevant. As one of the commenters pointed out, the problem is that we're just not ready to pay more for those features because alarm clocks have become a commodity.

I suspect it's a bit more complicated than this. There may be other factors:

• the decline of radio, and therefore the decline of alarm-clock-radios (34% of respondents wake up to the radio in the Travelodge survey);
• We travel more and carry more gadgets with us, so something had to stay behind;
• As home alarm clocks became more sophisticated (music, radio, mains-powered) so we were less likely to take them on the road with us;
• Then there's security: I know I stopped bringing an old-style ticking alarm clock with me because it made airport security professionals nervous.

Perhaps most important, we have developed a comfort level with our cellphone's inner workings, and few of us would like to entrust a morning alarm to something or someone we don't know.

Cellphone manufacturers, to their credit, seem to have acknowledged this new role: I tried to find the alarm function on a Nokia 6120 and did so in five seconds. I bet it would take me longer on any digital alarm clock. The process is quick and painless, and a little bell logo on the home screen reassuringly indicates it's set. The alarm itself is cute and starts out unobtrusively but then gets louder until you're up and about.

Or, more ominously, have thrown the phone across the room where it now sits in pieces. Maybe there is something to be said for keeping the alarm clock separate.

del.icio.us Tags: alarm clock,design,travel,sleep

When Technology Lets Us Down

(from tcbuzz's flickr collection)

Two recent events from the UK underlined how dangerous our dependence on technology can be.

The soccer UEFA Cup final in Manchester was overshadowed by riots when one of the massive screens installed in the city for fans who didn't have tickets broke down.

And more recently, the inquest into the death of a former BBC editor found that she committed suicide after failing to find support among her colleagues. Her line manager, the inquest heard, tried to find her counselling:

However, her manager sent an email to the wrong address and his request was never acted on.

Technology is passive, and doesn't take into account the implications of failure. In the first case the technology either didn't work, or those setting it up didn't know how to work (or fix) it. In the second case, the error was more obviously human: the sender of an email did not enter the correct address, or did not enter the address correctly.

This is more about our failure to anticipate failure in technology, and our blind dependence on it working.

Obviously, it would have been smart of the organizers in Manchester to have had a back-up plan in place for an eventuality like a screen breaking down. And the line manager's apparent failure to see whether the email arrived at its destination or even to have picked up a phone and tried to reach the counsellor directly.

But perhaps there are ways for technology to further help us by providing a layer of redundancy? In the case of the screen, could there be some sort of diagnostics test which would alert the technicians that something was amiss, or about to be amiss?

And, in the case of email, the answer is perhaps simpler. There are tools out there to determine whether an email has arrived safely and been opened. The one I use is MessageTag, which will inform me whether an email I have tagged with the service has been opened. (The advanced service will give me a list of emails I have tagged and show me which ones have been opened, and which havent--a very useful checklist to show me which emails I need to follow up on.)

(There are privacy implications with services like MessageTag/MSGTAG, which I've gone into before. But sparing use of the service, I believe, is acceptable, so long as you give recipients the option of opting out of future tagging. Other people use the receipt acknowledgement option in Microsoft Outlook and some other email programs.)

We perhaps need to be reminded that technology, as it stands, won't save us from ourselves.

Technorati Tags: failure,bbc,uefa,manchester,technology,suicide,email

My Technology-free Lunch

At lunch today, it took me some time to realise what was different. It wasn't just that my four lunch partners were all quite a bit older than me--15 years, at least, and I'm not as young as you think I am. It was, I realised, that in more than two hours of eating not one of us had answered a phone--or even received a phone call, or text message, or furtively checked our email. I'm not sure any of us were packing a BlackBerry. Maybe my companions weren't even carrying cellphones. It was extraordinary.

I was going to ask, but I didn't want to ruin the moment. Here were five men sitting around a table talking about stuff for about 120 minutes, and not one single interruption by technology or modern communications. They weren't even in sight: Not one of us had put a phone on the table in the usual custom of staking out one's corner of the table. It felt like a flashback to the early 1990s. And it was great.

A recent survey in the UK highlights how mad we've become:

Our liking for modern technology may be disrupting our sleep - and even our relationships, claims a UK survey.

The poll, by The Sleep Council, found that many people admitted checking texts, surfing the internet, or playing games in bed.

It suggests one in four people now regularly sleeps in a different bed from their partner, and many often go to bed at different times.

God I miss the old days.

(And no, it wasn't a boozy lunch. No alcohol in sight.)

BBC NEWS | Health | Gadgets may cause lonely bedtimes

Technorati Tags: technology free, luddism, cellphones

Dark Age Messengers

Maybe I'm missing something, of I've been taken in by those TV ads of guys walking across stepping stones made out of frogmens' skulls, but I expect the big couriers to be somewhat snappier and higher-tech these days. Not based on today's experience:

• Call their hotline to get a guy in either Mexico or the Philippines (based on accent, and he wasn't saying) who scolded me for giving the second line of the address first, and then refused to accept the package as documents when I told him it was a book (it's actually a pile of edited pages, so I guess it could be either.) Stoopid that I am, I didn't realise the huge difference (commercial invoice in triplicate and duties for one, nothing for the other) and should have said "documents" when he asked me. So that session was a bust.
• My colleague, the recipient and courier account holder tried the other end, and we got somewhere, though both of us still had to give the details twice, including something called a "control number" (I've just been watching Terry Gilliams's Brazil so I'm on the lookout for things like this) to "smoothen things out".
• Of course when the guy came there were no documents, no smoothing things out, so we had to do everything by hand. All nine sections. Good luck to whoever has to decipher my atrocious handwriting. We'll be lucky if the package makes it before Christmas.

So, questions:

What happened to those handheld computers that couriers were using a few years ago to do all this? Wouldn't it be easier? Just type out the details or input them from Central Service -- the guy with the van already has my address, presumably, unless he just drove around knocking on everyone's doors, and as the recipient is the one being billed, presumably all they need is his account number for all those details to pop into the appropriate fields.

And then don't get me started on the whole "give-me-your-details-over-the-phone-and-can-you-spell-your-name-again-is-it-German-no-it's-not-it's-English-like-Shakespeare" (not that I have anything against German names) thing. Why can't we do this any better?

Off the top of my head, type "Fedex" or "UPS" into Skype and you're instantly connected to customer service where you can type your details in so they won't be misheard, and you don't have to sit on the line listening to "Rhinestone Cowboy" on a loop (actually it was worse; I think it was "Honey" by Bobby Goldsboro).

I'd be up for a USB dongle that the guy carries, and the customer slips into their computer (who doesn't have one sitting around these days?) and a little courier program pops up so the user can fill in the details from their laptop or desktop. He just plugs it into his handheld device and the data zips across and self-checks. Courier guys could carry round free branded ones and hand them out as promotional items and so customers can fill out the fields in advance.

Or if that's too complicated, going to the website and opening up a chat box with a customer representative. (I've just checked Fedex's customer support page and it involves filling out 14 different fields. And don't try to sidestep any:

Yeah, I'm going to fill all those in.

Maybe these courier firms are smarter in other parts of the world, but I didn't come away feeling impressed. I'm sure their package tracking systems are second to none -- i.e. once the atoms are in the system. But it seems that the burden is still being passed to the customer, when it could be so much less painful for both parties if it was electronic.

Technorati Tags: couriers, shipping, dhl, fedex, ups, tnt

Heathrow's Old Windows

Snapped this on my way to Gate 1 at Heathrow's Terminal 3. I know the London hub has its problems, but I didn't realise one of them was that its passenger information system -- or at least part of it -- was running on Windows 95, a 12-year old operating system that has not been supported by Microsoft since 2001.

Does it matter that flight information is being run on a system that Microsoft not only no longer sells, but it no longer supports?

I guess not, in some ways. Who cares, if it's still working? (Well, in the case above, where one screen is in permanent 'shutdown' mode, and the other seems to be in permanent 'boot' mode, leaving me waiting patiently in the hope of getting some flight information, I guess I do.)

But how about security? If a software manufacturer no longer supports a product, it doesn't just mean their helpdesk is no longer taking calls from baffled customers. It also means they're not pushing out updates to the software that solve problems like the one above, or security patches to cover holes bad guys have found in the software.

This bit is more worrying. If a bad guy knows that Heathrow is using Windows 95 for some of its operations (and I guess he does now) it should be pretty easy to find a way in. While not many people use the software anymore (I couldn't find any surveys on this, but anecdotally there don't seem to be many folk out there using it), new vulnerabilities are appearing that affect both newer and older versions of Windows. So while XP users might get a patch, Windows 95, 98 and Me users won't.

Anyway, I caught my flight OK. So maybe there's nothing to worry about. Apart from realising that an airport I entrust my life to a few times a year is relying on software that, when first launched, didn't even support Internet access.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, windows 95, win95, operating systems, OS, heathrow, airports

My Favorite Christmas Present

  My favorite Christmas present 
  Originally uploaded by Loose Wire.

It's been a quiet but happy Christmas and I must confess I actually bought this for myself, but I love it: a small wind-up radio/torch. There's not much call for the torch around here, but I love the sound, the feel and the low carbon footprint this little gizmo brings. Can there be anything more satisfying than cranking a handle to listen to the radio?  Plus, there's nothing quite like listening to BBC Radio 4 at breakfast.