Do Business Well

As I write this at the beginning of the year, there are ten taxicabs in San Francisco that are painted bright purple and yellow and sport a big Yahoo! logo. Each has a computer onboard that offers customers wireless Internet access. For no extra charge you can browse the Web, check your email, trade stocks, order your groceries, look up directions to a restaurant or bar you’ll be patronizing that evening, and so on. Within a couple of years, every cab in San Francisco will have Internet access.

Otis Elevators recently announced that it would begin equipping elevators with Internet access. As passengers ride up and down to their offices, hotel rooms, or meetings, they will be able to read the latest news, check the stock market, or take a quick look at the web- site of the company they’re about to visit.

With the rapid industry adoption of standards such as wireless access protocol (WAP) and wireless markup language (WML), cellular telephones will soon all have built-in Internet access. Some already do: The Neopoint cell phone uses a built-in microbrowser to allow users to surf to their heart’s content. Imagine that you’ve got a retail store and someone comes in with a Neopoint phone and starts looking up ‘products on the Web using a price comparison service. If he finds what he’s looking for but doesn’t like your price or service, he’ll just order it online from someone else—right from your store. Even cooler, this device greatly improves the way you access your voice mail and email services. When combined with a service from Onebox.com (a Phone.com company, which provides free voice mail, email, and fax through a Web-based universal mailbox), Neopoint becomes your wireless communications center.

And whether you’re in the back seat of a San Francisco cab, in an Otis elevator, or talking on the phone, you can take advantage of a service offered by LastMinuteTravel.com. If you’ve told them you’re interested in last-minute weekend getaways, they’ll send messages directly to your Internet-connected wireless phone with time-sensitive offers for hotel rooms, airline tickets, and more. Who knows, you might just want to send an email from the elevator canceling your appointment and take that cab right to the airport.

Sound extreme? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The Internet is going to have a less obvious and possibly even more powerful effect as it starts to connect the devices we rely on every day of our lives, such as dishwashers, sprinkler systems, and automobiles. You can already buy a car that has a wireless connection or a satellite link to the Internet. General Motors has established a partnership with Qualcom and America Online to build 400,000 cars with Web access this year. In Japan, you can buy a car that will read your email for you as you drive to work in the morning.

Imagine that it’s late spring and you’re driving up to a ski resort for the weekend. The snow is melting and by the time you get home Sunday night, your car is a mess—covered with mud and a thin layer of salt. When you check your email the next morning, there is a message from your local car dealer with an offer for a complete detailing job, including a special underbody rinse designed to remove salt and protect your car from corrosion. The email also asks if you are planning any more ski trips this season. If not, the dealer would be happy to remove and wash your ski rack as part of the detailing job. Was the timing of this offer a coincidence? Absolutely not.

When you bought the car, the dealer asked for your email address and whether you would like to sign your new car up for a service that would monitor its performance, notify you when it was ready for service, and alert you about additional features. It won’t be long until global positioning system (GPS) devices in your car will keep track of where you go for the weekend and relay this information to your local dealer’s customer database (with your permission, of course). Knowing that the mountains had spring weather conditions, dealers could run a program that automatically sends an email offer to anyone who drives to the mountains. Since they would know that your car has a ski rack, the offer to help remove it would be automatically added to the email.

If your dishwasher or garden sprinkler system is on the Internet, they can “notify” their manufacturers if they break or need maintenance. And just to cover all the bases, as a service to customers, manufacturers will monitor their appliances and send instant email if they need repair or maintenance. If your sprinkler system is set to go off every day during the rainy season, the manufacturer might even send you an email suggesting that you change your watering schedule and offering simple instructions for how to do it. The company might even be able to do it for you by remote, using its Internet connection to control your system. As devices and products of all kinds become linked to the network, manufacturers gain a powerful new way to connect with their customers. Successful organizations will use these additional connections as opportunities to provide new services and establish dialogue with their customers.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Expect the Internet to be everywhere

• The Genie mobile Internet portal
• Mobile commerce & Internal communications
• Web Business Network Marketing in a world of new customer expectations
• Five Predictions for trends in Internet Marketing : WEBPROMOTE
• The Digital Divide
• The future of E-Marketing
• Categorizing Internet Direct Marketing Players continue...
• Applications of Mobile Marketing Part 2
• Internet / Electronic/ Web and Business Transformation (No 1)
• Does Advertising have a Future?

4 Comments »