Cellular phone service is a hotly competitive commodity these days, and companies try to outdo each other with offers of free minutes and free add-on services.
One of the perks offered by Air Touch Cellular, a company trying to make inroads in western Washington state, was a free call-forwarding service designed to send calls to an office phone when, say, a construction foreman is at his desk and not in the field. The customer-friendly idea is that the subscriber shouldn’t have to pay for a cellular call when he is next to his wire-line phone.
Imagine how pleased Air Touch executives were when usage of their service went through the roof. And imagine how puzzled they were when they found that revenue didn’t go up at all.
Turns out that as many as 50 small Internet service providers in Washington figured out a cheap way to get bigger themselves. Because Internet customers don’t want to pay for a toll call to connect to their providers, just about the only way providers can grow is to spend money setting up several phone numbers throughout the target area.
Or, simply get an Air Touch account, set the phone to forward every call to their dial-in number, and let Air Touch pay the bill.
Needless to say, free call forwarding is no longer an automatic perk.
ROMANCE
FREE FALL
Psychiatrist Esther Gwinnel has written an ink-on-paper guidebook to cyberlove called “Online Seductions: Falling in Love with Strangers on the Internet” (Kodansha International, Tokyo). Gwinnel draws on her own experience as an inveterate on-line chatter as well as her private psychiatric practice in such chapters as “Is It Real Love?” “Obsession and Addiction” and “Electronic Adultery.”
But in an author’s note up front, Gwinnel gives us a hint that as a chronicler of the age, she may have already spent too much time on-line: “The participants in the e-mail vignettes in this book are composites. Their handles and biographical information have been invented.”
That’s the main problem with on-line romance, all right.
INNOVATION
FREE-FOR-ALL
How does Silicon Valley maintain its big lead in developing new technology while the Silicon Prairies and Silicon Alleys of America have to play catch-up? A professor at the University of California in Berkeley thinks California’s employment laws have a lot to do with it.
“In Silicon Valley,” said AnnaLee Saxenian, “Skills and technology can be recombined more frequently because of the greater mobility of labor. That means you have more opportunities for experimentation.”
The key reason is that California, unlike nearly every other state, doesn’t allow employers to ask for agreements that forbid departing employees from competing against them in the future.
So a promising high-tech corridor like Massachusetts’ Route 128 simply can’t maintain high growth because “skills and technology get trapped within the companies,” she said.
