Ever since Virgin America launched, I’ve been eagerly waiting for the opportunity to fly with them. I’m a frequent traveler and while living in London, was exposed to a lot of Richard Branson and Virgin’s antics and marketing. They’re a fun company with a lot of character and personality. They’re irreverent, they buck trends, providing quality where none used to be expected.

Today, a simple error has caused us a lot of pain and cost VA a lot of good will.

It all started last week when Coley was booking flights for us for a trip we’re taking to LA. She went to virginamerica.com, looked up appropriate times, and booked the flights. However, when she was done, neither of us received a confirmation e-mail even though she’d entered both of our email addresses.

Two days later, we still hadn’t received any confirmation emails. We checked our spam folders to no avail. Coley logged into her VA account and the website said “no pending flights”. No charges had been made to the credit card, either.

As it was two weeks from when we needed to fly we needed to get tickets soon. We assumed the booking hadn’t completed and proceeded to book another set of flights. However, the original itinerary was no longer available as they were booked so we booked slightly different times to fly (but kept the same days).

Another two days pass, and we discover that Virgin America has charged us for both sets of flights. “No big deal,” we thought, “we didn’t receive any confirmations at all and the flight still doesn’t show up on the website. We’ll just call them up and they’ll fix it.”

As you might have guessed, it turns out that even Virgin America with all its irreverance and snarky humour has a Big Corporation side. Coley was on the customer service line for 2 hours, during which time she was subjected to two disconnections and multiple attempts to charge us $150 cancellation fee — again for a flight which we didn’t even know existed.

After the first 2 hours, Coley finally got through to a manager, David, who was reasonable but unable to give us a refund on the flight. Instead, he offered to waive the $150 but the ticket cost would have to stay as airline credit. We reminded him that they were keeping our money for a website error but after an additional hour of back and forth, it was clear he wasn’t empowered to do much else.

His proposed solution? Use the “contact us” link on the website—the website that broke and charged us $300 without telling us we had any flights booked.

This episode shows how a business must invest in more than just its core service. Virgin America may have created a stellar flying experience that outclasses most but that doesn’t mean they can compromise in their online experience and their customer service.

The most frustrating part of this entire episode is how it feels like we’ve been blamed and then penalized for an error on their part. All the good will garnered through their savvy multi-million dollar marketing, fancy mood lighting and in-air WiFi was washed away because of one website error they wouldn’t take responsibility for.

Update 11:00AM 18 May 2009: @VirginAmerica responded to our Twitters. It probably helped that others also retweeted us (thanks!). I’ve given them my email address and we’ll see where it goes from here. I’ll be happy to have this resolved but it really shouldn’t have needed this much of a fuss in the first place.

Update 02:41PM 03 June 2009: @VirginAmerica told us we should expect a refund within a week of the last update but it didn’t come through. It turns out that this may have been due to our end because the credit card we booked with was lost and replaced in that time. They have been incredibly quick and responsive in their Twitter responses. Our friend @ang also ran into the same issue yesterday where she booked a flight but it didn’t show any confirmation, didn’t send her an email, didn’t show up on her Elevate account and didn’t show any charge on her credit card. She’s also been in touch with VA because she Twittered about the issue.

I’m really glad Virgin America is coming through so well with the social media tools and customer service but I really hope they fix that web issues that are plaguing them. I also sincerely hope the phone support staff will be empowered and educated on not putting the blame on the customer when the company’s technology fails. I’ll give a final update when we do sort this out but it looks like it’s under control.

Update 05:38PM 07 June 2009: The money has been refunded to our account! Hooray for Twitter and companies using social media!

I lived in Austin, Texas from 1999-2003 and have attended SxSW Interactive every year since 2004. Each year, I attended SxSW each year with a different role:

• 2004: Tom Chi and I were nominated for the Web Awards for our design webcomic, OK/Cancel (we won but that was just gravy)
• 2005: Also on behalf of OK/Cancel, we attended as press
• 2006: I organized and spoke on a panel about learning to monetize blogs from webcomics and moderated a panel on the future of mapping
• 2007: I moderated a panel on mobile design
• 2008: Coley and I facilitated a Core Conversation about the implications of social media tools in relationships and dubbed it Breakups 2.0
• 2009: I have the privilege of helping out behind the scenes as a Panel Liaison.

This post isn’t about the best food in Austin (Rudy’s BBQ and Amy’s Ice Cream) or the best parties to attend. There are plenty of resources out there about those. Instead, you might consider this a beginner’s guide for how to get the most out of SxSW.

They’re Not Cliques

You’re at the conference, excited to meet all the people you’ve been reading online. You see them, gathered outside Room 18ABC in a circle chatting with each other and greeting their internet famous peers passing by.

Without fail, every person first timer at SxSWi has the same feedback: they have the sense that there’s an “in” crowd or that there are the “cool” kids and then there’s everyone else outside of that circle. I had the same impressions on my first trip.

What people don’t realize until they go a second or third time is that SxSWi is not just a conference — it’s a reunion. It’s the one time a year that I see some of my peers that live in cities or countries I don’t frequent. So there’s a lot of catching up with old friends that happens. Personally, I love meeting new and interesting people.

The lesson is to know that, for the most part, everyone is welcoming but you have to make the effort and break the ice. Recognize that few are being deliberately exclusionary.

Provide Context

On one of my earlier SxSW outings, I lamented about the “double handshake” where people shake your hand a second time when they recognize your work or who you are. The fact is, there are hundreds upon hundreds of people. I hate asking the question, “what do you do?” especially since it often is construed as “where do you work?” Instead, I try to understand who they are and what they care about. A friend of mine goes so far as to ask, “what are you passionate about?”

Conversations are a lot more memorable when you provide context of who you are and what projects you work on. Maybe it’s a blog about potato chips shaped like famous people. Maybe you’re a gal that draws on index cards. Maybe you are giving stickers to tag people. Whatever the case, giving some additional context goes a long way.

The first year I went, we had trading cards of famous HCI and usability practitioners dressed as superheroes. It was a fantastic icebreaker and helped people remember us or recognize that we were associated with a site they read.

Also, context doesn’t end with the introductions. We all collect dozens of business cards at conferences. Try to provide context there, too. I’ve found I remember the cards with photos more and some people leave room on their cards specifically to write in the context of your meeting.

It’s the Geek Spring Break. Be a Geek.

Use whatever the tools du jour are. Two years ago, it was Dodgeball. Last year, it was Twitter. This year, it will likely be a combination of Twitter, Brightkite and the newly launched Dodgeball replacement, foursquare. Get an unlimited SMS plan (even if it’s just for the month) and stay on the pulse.

I like to use the tech to be aware of what’s going on so I can bypass stupid lines, boring panels, or join a much smaller gathering where I’m guaranteed higher quality conversations.

Just remember what you’re using the tools for. They serve you, not the other way around. Being physically present at an awesome party means nothing if you’re mentally in your phone.

Fight the FOMO

This lesson was probably the hardest to learn. You can’t go to every panel and you can’t go to every party. Get over it now.

No, really. You can’t. Get over it.

Be willing to skip some panels if you’re having fascinating conversations in the hallway because you may not run into that person for the rest of the time there. Be willing to skip the big party that everyone’s talking to if there’s a great dinner group forming and you can talk one on one with some attendees without fighting the alcohol blur and the loud music. Be willing to skip everything to go to the Austin City Limits soundstage for a free show of a great band, or to go to Spider House Coffee and Toy Joy — just to enjoy Austin for what it is.

But just so you know what and how much there is to do:

• Tantek’s SxSW packing list
• Free SxSW Parties
• SxSW Baby Unofficial Blog
• Laughing Squid’s SxSW Resources
• SCHED.org scheduling tool
• Glenda’s introductory panel tomorrow on How to RAWK SxSW

I will be arriving Saturday, Mar 14 and staying through Music until Sun Mar 22. Find me on Twitter as @k if you want to meet up. While I have a published SxSW schedule, I fully expect to deviate completely from the plans. You should expect the same.

I’m not particularly active in the local Asian (North) American scene nor do I keep up much with local or national issues related to Asian Americans. But one pet peeve of mine has always been the role of Asians in Hollywood.

In the movie 21 based on the novel “Bringing Down the House” which, in turn, was based on a true story from MIT, the main character was converted from Asian to Caucasian. What was particularly irksome about this casting was that the story clearly states that most members of the blackjack team were minorities. In fact, they needed to be minorities because it was much more convincing for minorities to act like rich heirs playing their parents’ money at the high stakes tables.

The MIT team thrived by choosing BPs [Big Players] who fit the casino mold of the young, foolish, and wealthy. Primarily nonwhite, either Asian or Middle Eastern, these were the kids the casinos were accustomed to seeing bet a thousand bucks a hand.

I vented about that so much that my friend Ernie wrote about it on his group blog, 8 Asians.

Now, they can’t even seem to feel comfortable casting an Asian as a lead on a Japanese animation adaptation about martial arts.

In this regard, I am frequently disappointed about the role of Asians in North America and sometimes wonder if more needs to be done. More disturbing than the answer to questions like, “will we ever see an Asian play a lead role in a movie without having to play an Asian?”, “when will we see an Asian winning an Academy Award for Best Actor or Actress?” or “how long before an Asian President seems likely?” is how infrequently these questions ever seems to be asked.

Stupid, minor, seemingly inconsequential decisions like this casting serve to remind me how narrow minded mainstream Hollywood and its audience can still be — and make me wonder how far out I can extrapolate that generalization.

• My brother’s getting married
• Our apartment got a notice to vacate
• One of my best friends got engaged

Phew.

Three things happened in quick succession this past week:

• Flickr limited number of tags to 75 and number of contacts to 3,000
• They also announced a date when the users who aren’t using Yahoo! accounts would have to merge their accounts with a Yahoo! ID
• Yahoo! launched a branded Wii site which includes a Flickr stream of all photos tagged Wii.

And what a reaction there was. People in an uproar over so many things it’s hard to enumerate. But as someone who is an old skooler and am inside Yahoo!, I really gotta say a few things to the whiners:

• Flickr has the best interest of the users in mind but it can’t make every last individual happy. Seriously, I know a lot of the people in there and they give a shit. You on the other hand, don’t seem to care enough to give the benefit of the doubt any time something doesn’t go EXACTLY your way.
• Get a grip. There is no conspiracy. You guys have talked about the doom and gloom and how Flickr was going to suck since the acquisition TWO YEARS AGO and guess what? It just kept getting better. Geo-tagging, guest passes, machine tags, printing of photos, half priced subscription … what the heck do you need as proof that Flickr is doing fine while in Yahoo!?
• Grow up. Tag bombing the Wii site by putting up “Yahoo! is Poo” images? Yahoo!, and many many many other sites, have been using tag streams of Flickr photos well before the Wii branded site. Sorry you were too clueless to notice that and it’s not because of Yahoo!’s Terms of Service vs. Flickr’s. Remember that whole Web 2.0 thing you guys love to be a part of? This is what it’s about. They’re public photos with creative commons license.
• There’s no point in lying about technological challenges. Flickr has some really smart people working on that plumbing and hey, when you build for millions of users and more photos than just about every other photo site out there, with real time ties in relationships, THEN say, “unlimited contacts should be easy.” Scalability is a hard problem. I don’t presume to know how you do your job.
• Does anyone actually know/remember 19,000 people? That’s not social networking. That’s playing MySpace Pokemon.
• Have they actually given you a reason to distrust them? Aside from “well I hate all things Yahoo!” which is completely irrational and devoid of logic, I mean. Yes, few of us are blind to the fact that Yahoo! has done some pretty crappy things with Geocities and numerous other things and we all know there’s a reputation issue but there aren’t many people around now that were around 5+ years ago. Leaving without even seeing it through seems kind of premature.
• Flickr has an API for you to go elsewhere. If that’s not a sign of caring about your data, I don’t know what is.
• Yahoo!’s sign in sucks. The namespace is polluted and it’s hard to get a good ID. The registration sucks. We know these things. We’re working on it. Having said that, the Yahoo! ID you use isn’t exposed on Flickr so having an unpretty name is actually not that relevant.
• Oh and, Thomas Hawk. Love your photos. Hate the way you continually troll Flickr forums while running a clone with a bad name (were two o’s and no e taken?) and an interface so similar it took me awhile to realize I wasn’t in Flickr.

There’s no question that there are problems with Yahoo! and a lot of the products. Flickr is not one of them and that hasn’t changed just because your sign-in is different. If you old skoolers find something better, let me know. I’m gonna bet you don’t.

The iPhone was announced amidst much hoo-hah last week at MacWorld. Those who know me know that I’m a gadget person but have been surprised to find I’m still using a Nokia 6100 phone – the same phone I’ve had for three years. Make no mistake, I’ve been shopping for a good integrated phone for a long time, checking out the latest and greatest every time I am in Hong Kong to visit my family (which I failed to do this past Christmas due to circumstances).

What I found would inevitably be disappointing. Too big. Too clunky. Too ugly. Too expensive. Too little memory. Too unusable. I wanted a phone that had mp3 playback, at least a 2MP camera so I wouldn’t have to lug a compact camera, some level of web and/or email capability, and a decent product and interface design. Apparently, this was too much to ask. The only ones that were close were priced far higher than the value I perceived, and required the additional cost of memory cards to make them even close to useful for some of the functions I mentioned.

When I last looked, it was actually cheaper, smaller, more flexible, and better usability and design for me to buy an iPod Nano and velcro it to the Nokia I had of similar dimensions than to buy any of these bricks. So I bought a Nano.

The iPhone is exactly the kind of integration with almost the form factor I desired and a price tag that was comparable when you compared apples to apples. However, I probably won’t be getting one. Why?

First, Apple has a track record for releasing rather buggy first generation products. The iPod had battery issues, the Nano had scratching issues, the MacBooks had a number of problems reported, etc. So a brand new product line and new market seems ripe for bugs that need to be sorted out.

Second, Apple has a track record for quickly releasing a second generation product that’s not just an upgrade, but usually a complete annihilation of the previous generation. Look at the iPod Mini, which became a bit of a joke to own when the Nano was announced. Besides, there’s rumors that an iPhone Nano may be in the works.

Finally, there’s the deliberate crippling of the technology that seems to be going on. EDGE instead of 3G connectivity is almost certainly a deliberate oversight that will be fixed in the future. The MacWorld live demos showed just how long it took for any given webpage to load. In addition, there’s a noticeable absence of GPS capability in a device that’s begging for it.

So I won’t be getting an iPhone, at least not yet.

Drawing much less attention was Axiotron’s ModBook, an after market conversion of a MacBook to a tablet laptop. A friend of mine once messaged me after the announcement of BootCamp and Parallels:

Now you have no excuse not to switch to Mac!

He was referring to the fact that I stated the lack of videogames on Macs as a primary reason for not switching. I responded:

One word: Tablet

Well now that reason is gone as well – or so it would seem. However, the ModBook lacks some key features which I think will ultimately prevent me from getting one. It’s not the huge price tag, I was willing to pay similar prices for my Toshiba M200 when it first came out. It’s not the overall technology – a built-in GPS and WACOM Pen-abled technology gives it a ton of potential. However, two major pieces are missing: a decent video card, and a keyboard.

Because the ModBook uses a MacBook as its base, it usese the Intel built in graphics card instead of an ATI card, thus failing to fulfill my videogame requirement (not to mention any other intensive graphical usage like SketchUp). How can it be missing a keyboard, you ask? Well, the ModBook is what’s called a slate tablet (as opposed to a hybrid swivel like the M200). Keyboard usage is limited to connecting a USB or bluetooth keyboard separately to the laptop. The whole point of a laptop is portability and carrying two separate pieces of hardware is just unacceptable to me.

I still don’t understand tablet manufacturers and marketers to be honest. They primarily seem to target the “doctor” use case where a doctor does his rounds in a hospital and is taking notes on a tablet PC. Maybe I’m clueless to the level of demand in that market but it strikes me that professional artists, CAD users, designers and such could really make use of affordable tablets and yet, they never seem to cater to that market.

Hey, Axiotron, if you’re paying attention, I’m interested, but I’m typing this blog entry, not writing it by hand.

Hey, I get it, everyone’s experienced that to some degree and I travel a lot so I can take a lot of punishment but see, I’ve got a screaming baby girl in front of me, too and she’s knocking the seat down so much I think my laptop might crack a second time soon. Not to mention, while yours is uttering cute words, she’s just bawling and here’s me without my Shure earphones. They’re in San Francisco somewhere.

Normally, I just sleep on planes but hey, the guy next to me? He’s not overweight or anything but he’s one of those guys that spreads his legs like he’s Jenna Jameson readying to break a marathon porn record and it’s really crowding me. His elbows are taking up both arm rests on each side of him and beyond that, when he sneezes, I could swear the rain I just left in Christchurch was still around.

At least the chatty Japanese tour group is far enough back that I can’t hear them. Or maybe I’m just disracted by your boy.

What are you holding out for?
What’s always in the way?
Why so damn absent-minded?
Why so scared of romance?

Over the past few years, I have become more and more accustomed to the conference scene. As OK/Cancel has gained notoriety, I’ve also had less and less trouble breaking the ice with people. That’s because the conferences I went to were always the same demographic – designers and web geeks. On one hand, these conferences are great because you can bypass things like “what’s tagging?” and go straight into discussions that explore new domains. On the other hand, it’s easy to slip into a comfort zone because you end up knowing at least half the people at the conference.

I bring up the design conferences because I found an interesting parallel to TED. The first year I went to SxSW Interactive, I felt like an outsider. I perceived a lot of cliques amongst “A-List” bloggers (as Tycho says, there’s apparently “a list” and who maintains it is a mystery). Luckily, because we were there for the web awards, and we had some trading cards to build buzz, meeting people was made easier. The next year, a SxSWi virgin I met was expressing similar sentiments that I had. By this time, I was friends with a lot of these people and realized that it wasn’t about cliques at all. These are friends for whom this is the only time in the year they see each other – of course they’re going to seek and hang out with each other. SxSWi people are actually extremely open to meeting new people but sometimes, they’re busy catching up with old friends and need the newcomers to come and say hi (remember to say hi this weekend by the way).

Which brings me back to TED. Coming to this conference, I had a sense that I would be out of my element again. The audience and presenters were a whole other caliber and their accomplishments vast. Attendees included founders of major companies, cultural icons, inventors making the future now, scientists, musicians and of course, a former Vice Presidents. Also, TED is limited to approximately a thousand attendees via invitations (and a hefty registration fee). The assumption then, is that almost everyone there is worth talking to. Time however, is still limited and I still catch myself and others doing the “badge glance”.

Badge Glance v. To quickly scan a passer-by’s conference badge and ascertain the following in sequence:
“Do I personally know this person?”
“No? Is the person famous?”
“No? Am I interested in the company this person represents?”
This act is usually performed in seconds and can be subtle or overt depending on whether the badge glancer cares about the badge owner’s feelings.

Moreover, like SxSWi, many TED attendees are returning from previous years and thus, a reunion aspect of the conference similar to SxSWi exists. The combination of TED’s character with these pre-existing social circles made for an even more challenging environment for myself and some other TED virgins I met. Just like SxSWi, it’s not that people don’t want to meet you, it’s just hard to break that ice and there’s only so much time is limited.

TED Friend

At the beach party on the last day, I had an interesting conversation with Jacques Vroom where I brought up the intimidation factor as a TED virgin. My feeling was, “the accomplishments of most of these people is mind boggling, what do I even say?” He gave an interesting counter perspective, “that guy’s a young professional at Yahoo!, he’s probably going to talk a million miles an hour about things I don’t understand.” So I guess intimidation can work both ways and both are probably less valid than they seem. So we talked about the idea of a mentor program for conference virgins. For the sake of argument, let’s call it TED Friend. Each TED virgin is assigned a volunteer return attendee (their TED Friend). Right off the bat, you’ve improved by having someone to lunch with on the first day. Furthermore, the returning attendee can introduce you to the circle of people he/she knows throughout the course of the conference. No formal responsibility is assigned – this isn’t babysitting, it’s helping break the ice.

I’m fairly certain such a loose but slightly formalized system would work. If this was instigated at SxSW, I would gladly introduce my SxSW Friend to the many great people I’ve met and invite them to all the events I plan on attending. Further, the system could be tiered such that a second year attendee (TED Sophomore?) could have a TED Friend of their own.

I know I could still use one next year.