IT Week's Sideways View

Good Week
There was at last something for the aviation industry to cheer as the IT conference season commenced in earnest last weekend. To highlight just one city, airlines bound for San Francisco will take thousands of delegates to BEAWorld and VMworld for this week’s expos, followed a week later by more crowds heading for Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce and the Intel Developer Forum. Even if it wasn’t a nigh-certainty that many of these travellers will move on to other destinations before returning home, these conferences generate a Bigfoot-size carbon impression. Companies make much of their empathy with Planet Earth and how technology will relieve the need for face-to-face meetings. Luckily for BA, Virgin and the rest, a lot of the commitment is posted off with the press release.

Bad Week
Cash is looking soiled and old again as a Google patent registration last week set off suggestions that soon we will be using our mobile phones to make payments. Over here, we seem to have preferred holding on to folding currency but ready money has been down and out for some time in the US, where the credit card has usurped the role of cash for all but small purchases. Now even the act of buying a drink is set to become a digital transaction. And if that happens, what is to become of the gazillion-dollar American industry in tipping?

Word of the Week
Schwag. The launch of Startup Schwag last week suggests some people will pay a monthly subscription to receive vendors’ promotional items. Now you don’t even have to attend the event to get the free T-shirt, cap, badge, clacker, wand, USB doobry and mouse house.