Only a handful of us are able to speak with regular people being respected as equals. Some are media whores, you can recognize them because they have thousands of followers on Twitter. There are some real scientists and engineers that enjoy explaining technical concepts but most of us suffer when we are speaking about technical stuff to people that lacks basic technical background.

Dilbert

Why do we need to speak with them?

You may need to explain your sales drones the magic that make your product different. It’s amazing that sales people know all the trendy buzzwords but they don’t have a clue of what they meant at a technical level.

You may need to explain your C-level people why your coders have been the last 3 months rewriting the entire architecture of the product without any visible improvement.

It’s clear that eventually you will need to speak with them.

The problems

There are three problems when discussing technology with regular people. The first one is that we can’t use our acronym based jargon but just plain language. The second problem is that we need to picture complex abstract concepts with something easy to understand. The third problem is the short attention span regular people have when listening technology.

There is no point in using acronyms the people doesn’t know about. There are lots of new ones created every day. For similar reasons you can’t use buzzwords, even the ones that have been forever on the web.

As everything is interconnected you may feel tempted to explain how something works explaining the related technology it’s based on. This is a double edge sword, people may understand you better but you will may need to explain the big bang theory and progress from there. By the time you reach your main topic everybody will be dreaming of donuts and you will be preaching in the desert.

The solution: Imagination land.

What you need to do is create a magic world where there aren’t acronyms and the technology is simple and accessible.

In this world, Internet works like the road system. Cars are Internet packets. Each car has a driver that knows their destination. There are two car brands, TCP and UDP. Both cars can go elsewhere on the Internet. They can even go off road to reach obscure destinations like this blog.

TCP cars are women’s favourites. Women always plan in advance their routes. They often get lost on the road but when they finally arrive at the destination the rest of the family is still waiting for them because they are only ones that know how to cook.

UDP cars are normally driven by males. Men don’t like planning. They get into the car and reach their destinations following traffic signals. Lots of drivers get lost but it doesn’t matter because nobody is really waiting for them at home.

On the other hand VPNs are intercity trains. There are already fixed established paths and you are not expected to go off road. Trains are streams of information. Train cars contain data, and on the locomotive is the driver, who knows where the train is headed and has the special key to open each train car.

A web server is a bakery where customers wait in line. Some years ago the bakeries had only a few cakes to choose but now all of the bakeries accept personalized orders. Behind the bakery there are big factories where lots of machines are cooking those cakes following personalized recipes. The factories are often interconnected so the product of one factory can be an ingredient on the next one. There are also giant storage places managed by third companies where all the ingredients (information) of the world is logically stored.

A firewall is the muscular guy at the entrance of popular spots. People in line are the network packets. If a network packet look suspicious the big guy will not let him in because he is not wearing today’s correct shoes. Once the disco is full the big guy act as traffic container and don’t let anybody to pass unless it’s a VoIP packet.

Spread the fun

Using this imaginary world make our world accessible to anybody. It’s easier and fun to explain, the people don’t lose their attention span, they don’t get lost under thousands of mysterious acronyms and they leave the room with an smile and a general picture of how things work.

If they are interested in the topic they will ask questions. That’s the moment in which you can switch to technical jargon language. You will saturate their attention span in minutes, they will get lost and they will not ask again. You ego will be intact.

The maximum technical-related aspiration of the people is living in an apartment fully stock of all kind of gadgets like automatic doors, automatic lights, voice controled washing machines, internet conected fridges and huge flat televisions.

Korean Internet Connection

Korean Internet penetration is probably the largest of all countries. 60% of families enjoy internet conection in their homes and 87% of them (compare that with US 19%) is using broadband.

Broadband is some form of high speed internet, for example a high speed and high quality fibre line, ADSL line, cable or mobile internet. In my case we are paying around 30K wons (20 EUR) for an ADSL line but in general, DSL lines are falling steadily and FFT (fiber to the home) is growing

Cell technology

Korea had made a huge investment in CDMA technology, which was great at that time but a real problem now that all providers are switching to GSM. Korean cells are a bit old-fashioned to my eyes because I’m used to see the last mobile gadgets in Spain. In Korea there are not Iphones (Iphones are GSM) but there are also cells with huge touch screens althouth nobody seems to have one (Maybe they are too high end, maybe having a huge touch screen is not atractive to Koreans)

All modern cells support Digital TV, and Koreans use it as entertainment while conmutting to work or school in bus and subway where by the way there is perfect voice and data service.

Mobile internet

Korea is leader regarding mobile internet. They made their own cool technology (Wibro) to prevent korean companies from paying royalties to american/european ones. Wibro has been a huge success and now it’s part of the Wimax specification: Mobile Wimax = Wibro.

Wibro is based on CDMA designs and for that reason I think Koreans are going to jump over the 3G cell technology and use 4G directly. Actually they are now already using 4G with Wibro, which must be popular because it’s so cheap. Wibro cost around 20K wons per month (13,5 EUR) for a reliable ubiquitous wireless internet connectivity. I’m pretty sure Wibro works way better than our UMTS-based HSPDA wireless connection back in Spain.

Operative systems

Korea is Microsoft’s best client. I’ve seen Ipods but almost no Apple computers. Furthermore there is no Linux presence.

Korean websites usually only work with Explorer and frecuently they need to install plugins in the form of special ActiveX controls so if you are living in Korea you need to use Windows or a least have a Windows computer close to you.

¿What are the reasons for this love? Having a uniform environment helped the country to reach a incredible technological level faster. Nowadays it seems they have a huge problem because it’s a very bad experience to use a korean computer: korean Windows computers tend to have lots and lots of crappy extra software installed that makes computers slow to a crawl.

There are also other problems, for example I would like to use a USB Wibro dongle so I can have internet conection everywhere, but It doesn’t work on linux so I’m not going to apply for the service.