Tech thoughts on Venice
I just got back from a week in Italy; specifically Venice. In addition to admiring the beauty of the city and eating my way through squid ink risotto,gnocchi and gallons of gelato, I turned my professional eye onto how people use technology. I can't help it--it's what I do.
I've traveled to Italy once a year for the last few years and have been to many of the big cities in both the South and the North.
Conventional Internet access seems to always be more difficult to find in Italy than in most of the rest of Europe. In Venice, it's expensive--much more so than Rome, for instance. My hotel charged 15 Euro per HOUR for access (about $19 USD) to their wi-fi network. When I ordered an hour a bellboy brought up a silver tray holding a printed slip with an access password. Internet cafes in Venice were a better solution, but were still 7.50 Euros ($10 USD) per hour. Interestingly enough, my Lufthansa flight on the way over had a wi-fi hotspot on it.
Everyone that I met had cell phones. Many Venetians were not even bothering to get landlines, because of the excessive cost and because they had to buy a cell phone anyway.
Several of the professionals that I met had sophisticated smart phones from Samsung and LG that gave them crisp web browsing and email access. Several of the young business types that I ran into had full Internet presences, websites, email addresses, etc. all flowing down into the phones.
To generalize, the difference between casual usage of the Internet in Europe and America (also Canada) is striking.
Americans that have full mobile connective generally use expensive piggy gadgets like Crackberries or Treos that not only cost hundreds and hundreds of bucks, but realistically need a good support system (read: IT staff) to make work. Most of us think of the Internet as being a stationary thing, tied to a desk somewhere. Europeans seem to have gotten into the mobility thing easier than many Americans.
Posted on September 05, 2006
