Born and Bred on the Web
An iPhone user by the name of Jay Levy took a pleasure cruise recently in the Mediterranean. When he came back to the US, he found a tome-sized, $4,800 wireless bill awaiting him from AT&T. He never used his phone, but it turns out the lovely gadget updated his e-mail even when it was turned off. He was unwittingly and unintentionally engaging in a huge amount of international wireless data usage, and now he was expected to pay for it.
An outmoded billing method clashes with a new communication paradigm. Technology promises so much, but un-hip realities routinely intervene. I am reminded of that every time I'm stuck behind a row of huge semis lining up to get onto the freeway access ramp. I think to myself, somewhat acerbically, "If packets of data continue to travel faster and faster, then why can't traffic?" It's easy to be cozened by the false positive that just because something changes online, it will necessarily change offline.
That's not just because we're bound by the physical limits of computing horsepower. It's more than that. I'm talking about all the habits, cultural baggage, and business best practices that have existed for a long period in the bricks-and-mortar world and have been ported over to the online space. In many ways, we're simply building on a complex series of networking, transactional, and information sharing behaviors that civilized humans have evolved and partaken in over the course of 10,000 years. We're taking offline memes, juicing them up, and converting them to digital format. Look at how the controversial Firefox ad-blocking plugin builds, at least conceptually, on the commercial-skip capabilities of the VCR and PVR.
iPerceptions does business in a space that benefits from an embarrassment of metric riches. But the uniqueness of the iPSI is in the fact that its gestation, birth, and growth have all occurred online. There are no portability defects here; with apologies to the lovely Scarlett Johansson, there is nothing is lost in transition.
We're using a metric that was born and bred on the web to measure online satisfaction. Nice fit, huh?
