If it can be said...

There used to be an advert on TV for good ol' British Telecom staring Sir Bob Hoskins in which he told us “its good to talk.  And before this we had the “If it can be said, phone instead” campaign.

Back then, Sir Bob and BT were railing against such non-spoken communications technology as the telex, the electronic facsimile machine and the telegram service.  Pretty much all of these technologies have fallen by the wayside now (can you remember the last time you sent or received a fax?) but the good old telephone is still with us and people are still looking for alternatives to speaking on it.

OK, that makes you feel old doesn't it?

See while the hottest tech out there on the high street (and to an extent in business) is the cellular mobile telephone the big noise is in Smartphones, Andorid iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Phone duking it out for a rapidly expanding market.  Or a rapidly expanding niche in an existing market if you prefer.  The ability of the modern handset to make and receive voice calls is way down the list of valuable features now in this SMS, MMS, GPS, HSDPA, 3G, 4G, always on, fully connected world.  Its about app stores and about data.  Last mobile phone contract I signed I was comparing data tariff not voice minutes or SMS inclusive bundles.

Now its all Web2.0 and social media, collaboration tools, user generated content.

So I have been waiting on a new premium web domain for my latest business venture.  I have been using my registrar's website, I have been using their submission forms, I have been on forums, I have sent emails.  I have been getting nowhere.  I have been getting increasingly frustrated.  So in an act of desperation I picked up the telephone and I called them.  Admittedly I had been avoiding this method of communication because its not free, and the registrar is in the USA and I am averse to paying for international phone calls unless I really, really, have to...

Guess what, the whole matter seems to have been sorted out in like 2 minutes.  On the phone.  Sometimes it pays to go oldskool, the irony that a 100+ year old wired 1 to 1 system was necessary to sort out problems on my latest high tech system is not lost on me.