Of course by now we should all be sitting in our little pods, wearing our wearable technology and operating our telepathic computers by thought control - and when, pray, are they going to release a DVD of unintentionally hilarious moments from Tomorrow's World in the 1960s and 1970s? The ideas were fanciful in the extreme - and nobody mentioned the internet.
Not that the claims made by manufacturers of the numerous wireless gadgets designed to help run your business are any less improbable. Wireless hotspots in McDonald's; the death of the laptop because we'll all be using handheld computers; wireless technology in Starbucks; connecting to the net at the airport - was it really such a short time ago that we were connecting one computer to another and thinking that was really nifty?
The answer is yes, it was, and a lot of small organisations are still very much at that stage in their use of technology. In real life, a lot of this hi-tech stuff isn't actually happening. Bailey Telecom recently commissioned research which asked 100 senior managers and 100 employees of various sizes of business how likely they were to use wireless hotspots in public. 16% said they were unlikely and 54% said they were very unlikely, with security being uppermost in people's minds as an inhibitor. Those who would use one would prefer doing so in an airport or railway station to a coffee shop or fast food restaurant, and the only ones who wanted to use it in coffee shops were people who were extremely comfortable with the technology.
In fact, the idea of sitting down in an internet environment to pick up your emails may not be the thing that brings business to wireless technology in the end.
Nigel Derrett, an independent consultant for the Mobile Bristol project, suggests the idea is "not all that compelling". The Bristol project is instead trying a number of different ideas that will work wirelessly, all at the experimental stage. "Our view is that you can't sit around in a research lab or marketing department and decide what people are going to use mobile technology for," he says. "It's like SMS, nobody predicted that, and it will be the same with this mobile technology. We're doing a whole load of experiments, some of which in five or six years' time will seem to have been very stupid things to do and some of which will seem to have been incredibly prescient."
Mobile Bristol has allowed a coffee bar to offer its customers games through PDAs, which increased takings when everyone thought it would be a conversation-killer. It's also put sensitive mini-hotspots in tourist areas so you can walk up to them with your PDA and hear about Bristol's history for that particular area, and a school's project has allowed children to use their playing field as a "jungle" - they pretend to be lions and can see the jungle environment through their handheld computers.
It's far removed from what people are doing at the moment and makes boring old emails look a bit pedestrian, to be honest. But there are people doing things that could be described as innovative.
First Tyre Plus in Cheshire is a small organisation offering tyre and air conditioning repairs to cars. Its managing director Ivor Watson wanted to do things a little differently from the traditional three-depot company. It has been possible for years to get the big guys - the ATS people or whoever - to come out and do a repair, but to get something done by a smaller local business has meant hawking your vehicle around from garage to garage, and people haven't got the time.
"I want to move away from workshops and employing people and franchise the business," says Watson. "We're putting vans on the road that can sell tyres, do tracking and air conditioning for you when you're at work or at home." To do this he is using Handspring Treo handsets, which are combined phone/handheld computers. "We needed some sort of technology so that I could monitor all the different people and vans."
Watson's motivation comes from being tired of employing unmotivated staff. "We have three depots now and we used to have four. It got to the stage where if I wasn't at one depot, nobody was looking after the customers ... I was getting more and more depressed by employing people."
The new business model is one he believes will restore the personal touch as his franchisees become self-employed. "I wanted people around 25-35 who'd done things, who wanted their own business and who'd have their own customers to look after." So eight months ago he got in touch with Demopad Software, which demonstrated the benefits of the Treo 600 with Demopad's sales software loaded onto it and a small Brother MPrint printer. This effectively gives every franchisee an office to take around with them.
"We were looking round for a system that would suit our needs," says Watson. "I need to back up the people who run the vans, I need to advertise for them and to notify their customers there's a new product on the market or there's a special offer." A sales and marketing system that could take input through a Palm screen was available. "The lads download their information at the end of the week or the month, I get the customers on my mainframe and I notify them - if someone has had their tracking done six months ago I'll notify them by email or text that we recommend they have it checked again."
Printing invoices could have been problematic. "We wanted to make it look professional but I didn't want a laptop on the van," says Watson. "Basically they use them with dirty hands, they get knocked around - I just wanted something small that encompassed the whole lot."
Having remote clients naturally dictates that a company will need to use mobile technology. David Horwood, director of iHotDesk, offers technical support to businesses and although the organisation has a small office "hub" it is out on the road more often than it is on its premises. "We use smartphones, and we've implemented the Treo Orange smartphone, which we use for picking up our email, but also for our helpdesk system which tells our engineers when there's a support call. We can use our smartphone to get to our helpdesk systems to get calls closed down quickly." This is done through the phone's screen rather than by calling in.
"We use hotspots as well," adds Horwood. "We had a mixed experience with Starbucks - when T-Mobile and Starbucks had their free opening offer we were in there all the time and we even introduced a "Starbucks allowance" for our staff, so they could order their lattes and surf the net. Then the price went up and it suddenly cost a lot more."
GPRS is the means by which data is transferred over mobile networks. It can also be done by a standard mobile connection but it's deadly slow.
Tony Miles heads up Milestone, a consultancy that offers accounting and other advisory services to small businesses. He is the only really mobile person of the six but has chosen to stick with a mobile GPRS card, to which he upgraded after being able to communicate with the office only late in the evening or early in the morning with his computer. "To an extent that was no faster than the post," he comments. He could upgrade to a faster Wi-Fi connection now but chooses not to. "I've got a piece of technology that works and is extremely useful for me," he says.
The "not broke so I won't fix it" ethos is probably a healthy one, and it will continue to hold in check the more fanciful elements of what could be done until some sort of genuinely useful application can be found. If Derrett is right, it won't be sitting around in a cafe drinking lattes while you try to cram your intranet site on to your PDA.
That's if it's a PDA - Derrett believes mobile phones will emerge as the medium of choice but it will be the next-but-one generation of smartphone rather than the things we carry around at the moment. They will all have decent cameras on them, he says, and you could use them as barcode readers - so you see a product you want advertised in a magazine and you scan the barcode so that next time you pass a Wi-Fi-enabled shop your phone tells you your product can be bought inside. Retailers will be delighted if it happens. Derrett is keen to stress that it's all at the experimental stage so far.
"If I wanted the new Harry Potter and WH Smith told me it had a copy that would be nice; if every shop I passed told me it had clothes it wouldn't. We're going to have to do a whole set of experiments about how people want to use mobile technology and what they see as useful ... in the long term, doing your email in Starbucks will be interesting, but it's not where it's at."
