2006

The conference on Managing Directories took place in Rome on 1st and 2nd June.   The participants numbered 240 and 80% of them said they were satisfied or even very satisfied with the content. Almost all said that the conference had come up to their expectations and they appreciated the location and the networking. 

The best rated speaker was Lars Runov of Krak, DK with 100% of positive feedback. He was closely followed by Matthew Snyder of Nokia and Erik Jorgensen of MSN Search.  The top-rated session was Sales and Marketing where the speakers were Rabin Yaghoubi, Google ; Jean-Pascal Lion, Yellow Pages Canada; Dany Meadows-Klue, Digital Strategy Consulting and Donat Rétif, Promedia.  The four of them had an 85% positive appreciation rating.  It was followed by the "Mobile Search in Action" session, a bold new venture this year. 

Already at the end of the 90s our electronic directory conferences had indicated that the directory future would be on the mobile phone.  Since then our members have invested time, effort and substantial budgets in the development of products for mobile equipment. Some fine products have been created, partnerships have been set up with mapping businesses, mobile phone manufacturers,... So it was decided to find out how the businessmen from our own sector would cope with these applications in an unknown environment.  It might have been simpler to invite one or other speaker to give a talk on the state of the art, but curiosity pushed us to place our participants in a real-life situation and we observed their peregrinations in the centre of Rome with great interest.  It also gave us the opportunity to evaluate the limits of the system. 

In practical terms, 16 groups of ten people were dropped off at different places in Rome. Four different itineraries had been planned.  Each group was provided by Nokia with two 3rd generation N70 mobile phones, in which an application had been installed enabling them to consult easily Paginegialle and Yahoo. The telephone number of Pronto Paginegialle (telephone enquiries) was coded in.  Each person was also given the compact version of Inzona, the Yellow Pages directory for the centre of Rome. Participants received an SMS message telling them where to go and they had to reply by SMS to a question, before receiving a further SMS indicating the next point to which they had to go. At the end of the session they had to state for each of the twelve stops (a journey of the cross for some of them) how they had found it.  With only some rare exceptions, all could be found on paginegialle online. Despite that, many resorted to accosting passers-by in the street or went into shops to ask for information.  It's comforting that people are still prepared to  talk to each other face to face. We tried to make use of as many of the available functions of the Nokia N70 as possible.  Some indications on the itinerary were hidden in Word or Powerpoint documents, others in "Notes" or even in "To do", in "Voice Message", in "Calendar".  There were photos and also a film.  Vouchers to make purchases from shops along the route were also pre-loaded in the mobile phones or inserted in the "Inzona" directory.

To conclude, just two of the 16 teams gave up and opened their S.O.S envelope which enabled them to telephone and ask for the final address. The other fourteen arrived safely at the appointed destination.  Some had found the exercise very easy and arrived very quickly.  Some had had a lot of trouble to find the stopover points or to organize themselves within their groups.  However, more than 80% of the participants had assessed the concept as good or even excellent.  We were surprised to note, however, that 38% of the participants failed to see what professional interest there was in the session.  The best results were recorded with the networking aspect, for which 85% gave a positive evaluation; naturally, a "Lost in Rome" trial is apt to forge bonds...