Technology Lessons From My Chicago Trip

I have spent the last week in the Chicago metro area.  From the northwest suburbs of Schaumburg and Elk Grove Village to Grant Park on the Lake Michigan shoreline downtown.  This urban immersion has provided some valuable lessons.

• iPhone battery life is kind of bad!

Living in the isolated and desolate state known as Wisconsin, it is not often my iPhone use is ‘heavy’.  I know most places I go so I don’t use battery-sucking GPS Google maps, I know the good places to eat so no need for Yelp. No long commutes to listen to my iPod.  I thought my iPhone battery life was ‘okay’ but certainly could be better.  I would plug it in nightly with 30%-40% of battery life remaining after light to moderate use.  Being in Chicago I had to consciously think, ‘do I really need to look this up or should I save my battery?’  Leaving for downtown in late morning my battery would dead by 6 or 7 p.m.  Between Twitter, Google Maps (w/ GPS), Yelp! (to eat), Photos (snap, snap!) and iPod (1 hr commute in downtown via train), my battery was taking a real pounding.

• The AT&T network really does suck!

You’ve read all the grumblings from other metros, New York, San Fran, L.A. and Miami.  AT&T’s network is terrible.  Do we need to rehash the SXSW incident where all the tech geeks converging caused the AT&T network to crash with the convention in town?  I think not.  I use the SpeedTest.net app on my iPhone to measure bandwidth.  I only got one good result of 2.3 mbps down and 280 kbps up.  That was in the fringe suburbs of the metro though.  When downtown I was getting varying results between 250kbps-700kbps down and 40kbps-170kbps up.  Needless to say I wasn’t very impressed.  Yes the speed varied with the time of day, but overall I was unimpressed with the networks ability to handle the data. That is a teaser for my next point!

• Digital spread is thick in metropolitan areas.

I had a realization moment while riding the Metra train back to Elk Grove Village this afternoon during rush hour.  I was crammed like sardines with business professionals commuting home from work.  Everyone around me had ear phones in and either an iPhone or MP3 player in their hands.  With about 50-60 people in my car, well over 75% were holding a portable media device.  The other 25% were reading the paper, book or using their laptop.  During down time, consumers of digital media simply ‘graze’ news, tweets, music, podcasts etc. as they cruise their way to home or work.  Many companies want to know how to reach a large mass on social media platforms like Twitter.  The truth is because so much information fly’s through our networks, we can’t take it all in.  If you tried, you’d burn out before you knew what hit you.  Many are ‘grazing’.  During proper times they digest what is active in their network at that time and simply turn it off when they need to.  I would argue some of the best times to reach those in your network is commute times and lunch.  However, peak times to reach your network varies with your networks ‘lifestyle’.