Dangers of Paper in an iPhone world

Had a phone briefing today with NewsGator, who I've met for briefings several times over the last 2-3 years. They continue to do interesting things on both the individual/consumer side of the coin, and on my "normal" beat, on the enterprise and particularly the "management" side of the coin. This is the RSS reading/aggregating coin incidentally, a key component of the Enterprise 2.0 story.

Continuing to hear that MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007) is making traction, and given what NewsGator is working on with their NewsGator Social Sites offering (in beta), interesting to hear their feedback on a MOSS-based portal world, versus the "traditional" portal world of BEA, Oracle, IBM, et al. Incidentally my colleagues at AIIM are running a multi-city roadshow on "Sharepoint Meets ECM" - I'll be at the Boston version, for anyone interested in meeting in person AND receiving a free near day long education on this topic.

I'll jump back to a MOSS thread in a later post, and the role of MOSS in Enterprise 2.0, RSS as glue/plumbing, but...

The point of this post is that in reading through some of the blog entries of CTO/Co-founder Greg Reinacker while chatting with the team from NewsGator, I happened across a post from Greg mentioning a 300-page bill a recent iPhone user received from AT&T (the sole carrier for telco services for the iPhone). That's right, a literal 300 page box arrived for this user. Whoops!

In the age of 'e' or 'i' or whatever you personally choose to call it, there are plenty of reasons to produce paper output, but particularly in the case of the iPhone (the most successful consumer product launch in history), you would expect that the full customer service experience would be as slick and modern as the device and it's services. As you may recall from my colleague Carl Frappaolo's description of my online user experience when searching for a new stove, even the most modern of e-commerce or search interfaces can, in the end, fall short of the user's needs (I wanted faceted search, and they didn't happen to provide 2 of the facets I wanted, even though the data was there). Honestly, customer services is the first and last step in innovation - something I'm going to be picking up over and over again moving forward.

So, I'm sure someone in the legal department or billing department at AT&T thought it was a good idea to line item ever byte of data sent, and to make the default billing method to be paper-based, but if ever there was a reason to proactively switch your business model, and the upfront and downstream expenses, this is it!

See embedded video clip below... or visit the original post on Tasty Blog snack, written/produced by up and coming new media star Justine Ezarik, out of Pittsburgh, PA, where I seem to be constantly pulled via my contacts at Vivisimo, talkshoe, and Davison Inventegration (a horrible name, but quite an interesting innovation/manufacturing firm that I plan on circling back with shortly).