Sales talk
Talking to a salesperson about a product or service is as old as the hills. 'Can you find it all?' or 'We also have it in blue!' are not crazy comments when you are shopping in a physical store. Digitally, we still have a few steps to take. Although the first practical examples are promising. Think of eBay's Shopbot and - closer to home - the integration of KLM's services with Facebook Messenger .
And whether it's a plane ticket, a pair of socks or a pair of swimming trunks, the same adage applies: the friendlier and better prepared the salesperson, the better the customer experience and the conversion.
Column – The internet as a nervous system. Of course you can see it that way. A fine-meshed network with sensory cells that give impulses, noticed and unnoticed. Impulses in the form of texts, images, sounds. And a connection of text, image and sound is interpreted by humans, and perhaps even becomes an opinion. The Russians had already discovered this long ago, and the Republicans were only too happy to make use of it.
And now literally, the internet as a nervous system, as a large organ system that provides external stimuli. Suppose you are blind. And you ask a sighted person standing next to you to tell you denmark telegram data what color a building is. Or what the name of the street you are walking into is. Or where the key is that just fell out of your hands on the carpet. The blind person lends a pair of eyes and the sighted person provides stimuli by using his voice and telling what he sees.
Now suppose that the blind person is not only blind, but also alone. And now suppose that the blind person has a smartphone with him. And therefore a camera. Then he can call a friend, try to point the camera where he would point his eyes, and ask his friend what the camera sees. The friend tells him what the camera sees and has become a remote sense. Remote eyes . And one step further. The blind person has a whole network of eyes that is prepared to respond to the blind person's request to see.
It's called Be My Eyes . It's an app that you can download on your smartphone, iOS or Android. At the time of writing, 91,518 blind people worldwide have done this. And 1,555,241 sighted people too. The blind person submits a request to the network, and one of the one and a half million sighted people may pick up the request. The sighted people have indicated which time zone they are in, and which language they speak. For me, that's Amsterdam as a time zone. And I have indicated that I want to fulfill requests from visually impaired people in Dutch, English and French. So I don't get a call in the middle of the night from someone who only speaks Armenian.