Not to belabor the topic of SAS Global Forum, but it is still on the minds -- and feet, judging from my blisters -- of many of us who attended last week. What I find most invigorating about the experience is the opportunity to put faces and voices with the otherwise enigmatic customers that we work to support (mostly virtually) throughout the year.
One such customer lingers in my mind, and my inbox, as we've continued our conversation via e-mail this week. His name is Van Rhodes, he works with Spiegel Brands and Newport News, and is a longtime, loyal customer of SAS for CRM and campaign management. I first met Van in 1998 when he graciously agreed to appear on the cover of one of our magazines, patient with our kitschy design idea to photograph him peering through a mailbox (get it?). This year, he was again gracious to participate in a focus group we held to learn more about how our customers are getting their information on the Internet, as SAS continues to find its place in the world of Web 2.0. Are our customers using RSS feeds? Reading blogs? Participating in online communities? (Stay tuned, we'll share the results with you in a future post.)
What I didn't expect was a lesson in far-out, way-cool technologies to come out of it for me. In the focus group session, Van casually mentioned he visits sites like CNet to research new things like surface computing -- a term that was new to me, but now, wow! the "ubiquitous computing" concept of Web 4.0 finally makes sense.
Here's a recap of my e-mail exchange with Van after I watched a video about surface computing.
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me: Too cool! Very futuristic, I'm glad you mentioned it.
Van: Three others that I’m watching now:
Augmented reality – eg: your car’s windshield being a giant GPS map, like Garvin can do now on a tiny screen. Military has been doing things like this for years, now showing up in consumer area. Someone is testing contact lenses that have chips embedded and can do a heads up display such as one sees in the Terminator movies.
Pico Projector – tiny DLP projectors/mirrors in your cell phone to project a screen onto a wall to overcome tiny cell phone screens
Lifesize video – the new video conferencing applications from Cisco and HP. They use large screen, HDTV and their refresh rate over the web is faster than the human eye can detect. This one finally gets it right and will change everything regarding how people meet and work together. You folks at SAS probably already have one. I was talking to one of the “futurists"? at your SAS Executive conference and he says he’s participated in a conference using this. Agreed that it truly is revolutionary – after 5 minutes one forgets one is talking to remote people.
me: I've heard of the windshield GPS thing! I tried explaining that one the other day and people looked at me like I had 2 heads.
Van: I get that a lot, too. Especially from my wife.
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Supports the obvious: We have a lot to learn from our customers, especially the ones whose spouses look at them funny from time to time. And while my team and I are all about finding new ways to connect with our audiences online, nothing will ever replace the warm, friendly handshake of a longtime customer.
What new technologies are you watching/researching? How might the technologies I mentioned here influence BI products in the future?
