intertwingly

I posted my thoughts on this here:

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?date=January+2%2C+2003&title=Net+Connectivity+for+small+businesses%3F

and was inspired to think about it in the first place by Gordon Weakliem's entry on his log:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0106046/2003/01/02.html#a205

To summarize, I mostly think that the benefits to most small businesses from this sort of thing are outweighed by the costs (both monetary and time). For a business that has a regular, local clientele, I just don't see it happening. In high tourist traffic areas, it would be a different story altogether.

When I was little, phones were hardwired into walls (modular jacks had not been invented yet).

When I entered the workforce, some cars had pigtails.

Now I see husbands in grocery stores telling their wives that the store is out of the kids' favorite brand of cereal, awaiting further instructions.

My grandkids will have cell phones that are always on and the processing power of pentiums.

Ten years ago, how many of your non-technical family members had e-mail addresses?

More or less, I think we geeks often completely underestimate the relevance of the net will have in the day to day lives of most people.

Actually, strictly speaking, the tongue in cheek title (Select cofeeshop...) isn't too far off if a yellow pages provider decided to enable something like this, but for all I know, they already do. If they could integrate w/ a GPS enabled phone, you could get some really relevant results that wouldn't be just the intersection of "Select Starbucks from ..."
I still don't get Doc's specific example though, it's pretty tough to keep a cup of coffee hot if I hit all the red lights. I can definitely relate to the cell phone example though, having been in that position ;-) I would mock the form factor of cell phones and say that it's totally useless for any kind of rich user experience, except that my father probably said the same thing about televisions 30 years ago. These days, those little TVs for the back seat of the minivan seem to be pretty popular, even with the tiny picture.

The thought provoking part of the title was *supposed* to be the "from *" part... i.e., an ad hoc query addressed to no-one in particular...

*Slap forehead*

You know, I had a parse error when I looked closer at the title, but let it go.

Tee Hee Hee...

dunno. Things change, and things we thought would never happen do. Still and all, I'll be surprised if small shops in non-tourist areas take much advantage of such schemes. I just don't see enough upside.

For shops in tourist areas, sure - there's an obvious advantage in trying to use extra hooks to draw in people who don't know you exist.

Don Park's Practical Mobile Blogging caught my eye as being a really non-intuitive idea (at least to technologists) that's really pretty good. Don's idea is essentially to write something on a white board and post a picture of it on your weblog, the...