Small Business Trends

Early this morning I was lying awake early in a perfectly dark hotel room, about 6 in the morning, my wife and daughter still asleep in the same room. I’m traveling, jetlagged, in the UK. 

Not wanting to wake them up, but unable to sleep myself, I picked up my iPhone. My hotel has free Internet, hard wired, and I travel with Linksys gadget that takes the hotel’s Ethernet cable and broadcasts a wireless signal. My iPhone was happy with that.

Browsing with the iPhone I found the New York Times site and Anne Eisenberg’s story What This Gadget Can Do Is Up to You, about the Neuros OSD, which looked really cool to me. I decided I want one. It was in the Sunday Times, and I was seeing it at 1 a.m. New York time.

So I went to amazon.com, still on my iPhone. It turns out, I discovered, that the amazon.com site recognized the iPhone and has a special interface for iPhones.

So I had the device ordered within five minutes.  It will be waiting for me in my office when I get back. And a few hours later, as I write this, Amazon’s stock is out, they’re now taking orders for one of the third-party options.

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About the Author: Tim Berry is president and founder of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, and co-founder of Borland International. He is also the author of books and software on business planning including Business Plan Pro and Hurdle: the Book on Business Planning; and a Stanford MBA. His main blogs are Planning, Startups, Stories and Up and Running.