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BumpTop woos DemoCamp Montreal crowd
Mar 31st
This post was originally going to be a round up of this past Thursday’s DemoCamp Montreal, but others beat me to it, so I decided instead to focus on one presentation in particular.
[For those of you who don't know, DemoCamp is an informal gathering of people who have interesting technology or products to showcase and which have not yet reached the mainstream. Of course some of them never will, but part of the fun is getting to see things that are still "raw" before they either make it or sink into oblivion.
Kudos go to Austin Hill for helping organize this event and for the significant increase in the quality of the presentations this event (not to mention for throwing a cool party, which he's always excelled at).]
By far the most impressive presentation of the night was BumpTop from UofT Master’s student Anand Agarawala. BumpTop is a user interface which renders your PC’s workspace as 3-D desktop where you can push, throw, flip, pile and even crumple documents, just as you would in the physical world. Here’s a demo.
Different people have different ways of organizing their workspace. Some people a virtually naked desk with everything neatly labelled and stored away in alphabetically sorted folders. I, on the other hand, have a somewhat more cluttered desk and work area (at times refered to by epithets such as messy or disorganized). There’s no right or wrong organizational system, just different ones for different people.
A BumpTop desktop would let me organize my computer the way I think and work, rather than the other way around. Judging from the reaction from the audience – which burst into spontaneous applause at several points in the presentation – I’m not alone.
Bell Canada sucks (or, how NOT to practice permission marketing)
Jan 23rd
Few people I know would disagree that Bell Canada has just about the worse customer service they have ever encountered.
As a subscriber to their DSL service several years ago, I tried to return a defective DSL modem they had supplied me with. She went through insisted her little decision tree, which eventually concluded that the problem was either with their modem or my network card.
The only way to exonerate my network card was by running a utility she supplied, but which was not compatible with my system’s configuration. I knew the modem was the problem, because I tried a friend’s and it worked perfectly with my setup. I told the Bell customer support agent this.
It was to no avail. I tried to explain to her the logic of what I was telling her, but she wouldn’t sway from her script and pre-planned decision steps, before finally getting angry and me, blurting out:
- Sir, do you want me to get fired for helping you?
Suddenly, it all made sense. If you work for Bell Canada, you shouldn’t help your customers, lest you risk getting fired.
So figure how surprised I was when my mother received a card from Bell after dumping them as her local telco. How thoughtful that a company the size of Bell Canada would take the time to send a cute little card to tell their customers “it was better with you here.” This, after she made it very clear to their telemarketers that she was not interested in returning to their service. Here’s a scan of the front and inside of the card:
In case some of you don’t get the message Bell is trying to send, here’s a rewrite, in plainer English, of their text:
It was better before deregulation.
Dear [xxx],
I’m writing to say that we are sorry to have lost our monopoly position in the market. Even though greater choice, lower prices and better service are driving millions of Canadians away from us, there’s still a sucker born every minute.
Unfortunately, since you asked not to be contacted again, we have to wait three months before resuming our harassing calls to you. We’re counting down the days because we’d rather spend time harassing disatisfied customers than figuring out how to actually provide a service that people want.
Tags: Bell Canada, Bell, marketing, telemarketing, permission marketing
