mobile geo social

We were experimenting with SMS messaging. An SMS was being sent to my phone each time someone placed an order. It was great in meetings with investors and clients, “ooh look, someone in Islington has just ordered a Barry White CD”.

Because our online shop was only active during the working week, we used a calendar system to identify weekends and other days to close the checkout.

This particular weekend, i was relaxing in the garden of my parents’ house, about 30km away from the warehouse. The calendar stuffed up.

I started to receive SMS messages of orders placed from people who were expecting their delivery within 60 minutes. D’oh! We dashed back into london, calling the customers to confess, and spent the rest of the day driving around delivering CDs and books.

Most customers were amused by the whole thing. I am now.

i met tony blair when he turned up at News Network to do the first ever online webchat by a prime minister.

he said he was a technophobe and didn’t understand all this world wide interweb thingy.

i remember my boss said not to mind because we didn’t either.

at the time that comment brought a chorus of cringe but he was probably correct.

one of the questions submitted was “will the monarchy survive?”, to which the prime minister replied something along the lines of “… but ultimately the people will decide …”

the next day The Times (yes, also a News title but not involved in the webchat and therefore jealous of The Sun) frontpage reported “Prime Minister announces Referendum on future of monarchy.”

and we were told that was also the last ever online webchat that tony blair will be doing, thank you.

In the height of the ‘Free ISP’ boom in the UK (started by some chap who worked at Dixons), we launched an ISP called The Currant Bun (slang for The Sun), and later re-branded it to ‘Bun’ so that the Times could join the party.

We pressed installation CDs and inserted them into 1 million copies of the Sunday Times newspaper.

We got a letter from a man whose phone had suddenly started ringing more than usual at odd times of the day. And when he answered his phone, all he heard was a noise like a fax machine. He couldn’t talk fax.

Eventually after much research he discovered that every Sunday Times reader in the local area was trying to connect their computer to the internet via his phone. We had listed his phone number as the local ISP number in the config file. D’oh.