Social Technologies

is trying to do some of what we looked at last year with CultureVenture.

An interesting new report from Ernst & Young found that there continues to be enormous enthusiasm among investment firms around the world for initiatives and investments in the BRIC markets, “but that only about 29% of deals are completed because executives are not visiting the countries and learning about the local cultures,” according to a recent article in the New Yorker.

We urge our clients to educate themselves about and immerse themselves in the markets they are trying to understand. To help with this, Social Technologies will host a series of Futures Expeditions to Brazil, Russia, India, and China over the next two years.

They’ve taken a bigger risk by committing to the research before they’ve got the clients signed up, but they are also offering a one-size fits all solution. I am sure there will be learning, but I’d still prefer to offer (and participate in) a custom venture.

Andrew points out that Kyoto and Osaka are near each other and that was probably behind the offers from Expedia that I had complained about. Helpful info that I didn’t have, but unfortunately, it got worse.

A few days later I received email from Expedia

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: Steve, here is your itinerary confirmation for your 01/02/08 Osaka trip
[deletia that makes reference to our Osaka trip multiple times]

Even more concerned than before, I wrote them and received this message

Dear Expedia Customer,
Thank you for contacting us.

We regret that your experience with Expedia.com was not satisfying. Comments such as yours are read by numerous people within Expedia and help shape our policies and practices as we learn and grow.
If you have further questions, feel free to reply to this e-mail or contact Expedia customer services at 1-800-397-3342 and reference case ID 36793797.

In other words, I submitted a complaint and they aren’t going to act on it, unless I submit it AGAIN. Okay, I do that.

The next message is even worse.

Dear Expedia Customer,

Thank you for contacting us.

Kyoto, Kyoto-fu (Change name) Expedia.com itinerary number: 121380781812

If you have further questions, feel free to reply to this e-mail…

No actual communication. Is anyone out there? I try again.

Dear Expedia Customer,

Thank you for your immediate response.

Please accept our apologies for the misunderstanding with your hotel reservation. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Your itinerary serves as a confirmation of your purchase, and we’ve sent an updated copy of it in a separate e-mail. You can also access your itinerary online at any time. Here’s how:
…

Again, no one is addressing my key question: why does my Kyoto reservation keep getting referred to as my trip to Osaka? Once more into the breach…

Dear Steve,

Thank you for your reply.

Please accept our apologies in regards to the misunderstanding with your reservation. We regret any inconvenience that may have occurred and would like to assure you that every reservation is important to us.

Your problem may stem from incompatibility between your browser and our system. We have already escalated this technical issue to the appropriate department.

In the interim, your hotel reservation at the Hotel Monterey Kyoto is confirmed while the “OSAKA” tag line have caused you such inconvenience, the printed itinerary of your reservation is still binding and a confirmed reservation for a hotel in Kyoto, Japan and not in Osaka.
…

So somehow my browser is causing them to send me email messages about a different city? The crucial piece of info (thanks, Andrew), that these are nearby cities, never appeared, and a spurious technical issue was blamed (it’s not a browser issue; perhaps they want to blame the model of car I’m driving for the emails they are sending?) but at least a human being intervened and confirmed that what I thought I bought was indeed what I bought.

Great job, Expedia people! Ridiculously poor support to go with a rather silly system! Let’s hope we don’t have an actual problem at any point.

One of the fun yet challenging aspects of spending two weeks in another country was stumbling over all the little things that I know how to do back home but didn’t work. I paid for a snack using pocket change, and eventually had to hold the pile of coins out to the counter dude so he could take the right amount. The coins say their value, in English, but in order to complete a transaction in the normal amount of time, you have to be familiar. It was an interesting feeling, to be such a foreigner.

At another point, I was riding the DLR (train) with my Oyster (smart card). A conductor comes along to swipe the card and there’s a small interaction where the passenger holds out the card and the conductor holds out the wand (yes, it was a wand, not the usual credit-card-swipey-slot thing). I wanted to put my card on top of his wand, but he wanted to put his wand on top of my card. I was just supposed to know the gesture. Sounds like a bit of a dominance issues, actually.

In using the self-check at Tesco (a grocery store), I realized the software was the same as what I’ve seen here at Home Depot, etc. but when it came time to pay, the voice prompt told me to insert my card into the chippenpin device. Turns out this was Chip-and-PIN, where credit cards and/or ATM cards have extra security via an embedded chip, and an associated PIN. These readers use a different swipe gesture, with the card going in the bottom of the keypad. Anyway, I stood there with my non-chipped credit card, putting it in and out of this bottom slot, to no avail. After I surrendered and paid cash, I realized there was the familiar vertical swipe slot along the bezel of the monitor, a different piece of hardware than the chippenpin.

And this one was subtle but confounding:

This is the TV remote from my Paris hotel room but the London hotel had a similar issue. In my experience, the red power button turns the TV on and turns the TV off. But in both these hotel rooms (and maybe this was a hotel issue more than a Euro issue) the way to turn it was to press the channel buttons. Enter a channel and the TV would go on and display that channel. The power button was actually on “off” button. You can imagine me sitting in front of the TV with a remote and trying to turn it on, in vain, until frustrated random button press gave me the result I wanted.

I often look around at local transit and marvel at how much the cues and other information in those systems are designed for people who already know how to use them; but I was able to plan for and learn about transit enough to be come a fairly comfortable user. It was these small interactions without cues, and under time pressure, where I found myself bemusedly incompetent.

We’re sorting out the accommodations for our Dec/Jan trip to Japan, and I noticed this distressing bit of interaction with Expedia.

After booking our hotel in Kyoto, we get an itinerary named (loosely) Kyoto, and details of the hotel (including its name, which has the word Kyoto in it), and just generally good confirmatory feedback.

Further on down the page comes the upsell.

Osaka? But we’re not going to Osaka?! This caused a definite brief panic verifying the rest of the information in the itinerary to be sure that Expedia didn’t just put us in some other hotel in some other city.

Tip: if you provide automated upsell information that appears to reflect some contextual understanding of your customer, make sure it’s right, or you will cause them distress and extra work, reducing confidence

Looks like I’ll be in London for the first half of September; my first trip there in 17 years. I’ll be mostly focused on the work I’m doing but do hope to meet up with readers of this blog/folks I know. Drop me a line and let’s see if we can set it up.

Steve in London, 1990 (I still have that shirt!)

These are the controls for reclining the new first-class seats on American Airlines. Luxury

equals complexity, apparently.

I’m here in Richmond, VA for another few days of fieldwork. I haven’t quite processed the time in Seattle (and let alone the photos from KC) and here I am on the road again, turn the page. Our hotel is in a combination of industrial and motel strip, directly across from the economy lot for the airport. The main floor of the hotel smells like humid flatulence.

And here’s a closed 7-11, as I pulled in, the local cops were there flashing lights and getting out to talk to someone in another car. There are two Waffle Houses within sight of each other. Interesting area.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a free day tomorrow, so I’ll be off to explore the city. I am entirely unprepared for that, of course, since I planned to be busy minute by minute. We’ll see how it goes.

We met some great folks during our two-day odyssey from San Francisco to Kansas City.

Right after I took the picture, a group of guys who work at the airport were talking to me about how I probably made the guy’s day by paying attention to him. They didn’t understand that I truly thought his look was awesome. I love that some people pay such close attention to their personal branding.

At the end of a long day of canceled flights and insanely long lines, I was reminded by this display at the Denver airport of the things that really matter.

It’s hard to believe I’ve lived so long in California without ever making a pilgrimage to the Tower of Pallets.

The Chateau Avalon in Kansas City: in the words of the fellow who built the place, the 64 suites are not rooms; they’re “experiences.”

It was hard to fully capture the grandeur of the Serengeti Room, where I stayed, but I will say that the rhino head made an excellent place to hang my clothes.

I’ll be on the road a fair amount over the next few weeks:
Colorado Springs
Kansas City
Seattle
Richmond, VA

I’m not sure I’ve done so many trips back-to-back before. It’ll be an interesting challenge keeping my brain alert, my clothes clean, myself rested and healthily fed.

These trips also inaugurate a new collaborative relationship and I’m very excited about the other players and the work and seeing where it all goes!

A couple of weeks ago there was some concern over the SF Indian Consulate getting rid of old visa applications in a very insecure manner:

Thousands of visa applications and other sensitive documents, including paperwork submitted by top executives and political figures, sat for more than a month in the open yard of a San Francisco recycling center after they were dumped there by the city’s Indian Consulate.

The documents, which security experts say represented a potential treasure trove for identity thieves or terrorists, finally were hauled away Wednesday after The Chronicle inspected the site and questioned officials at the consulate and the recycling facility.

The article goes on to detail what data about what types of people they found in their examination of the site and the expected quotes from security experts about what type of risk this creates.

Having gone through the visa application process ourselves for our trip to India last January, it’s a little disturbing to read that

a sampling of documents obtained by The Chronicle indicate that the boxes contained confidential paperwork for virtually everyone in California and other Western states who applied for visas to travel to India between 2002 and 2005.

But I was sadly amused by the response from the consulate

Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.

“In India, I would not be alarmed,” he said. “We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number.”

Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they’re no longer able to store.

“In America, you cannot do that,” he said.

You can just hear the bristling bureaucratic response, colored with that cliched “no-problem”!