KEY POINTS:
A past career as a farm consultant has given Telecom's Neil Forster what he believes is the perfect grounding for bringing innovations to the phone company's customers.
Forster, now Telecom's research and prototype manager, said dealing with sheep and beef farmers helped hone his skills in working out
what is really important to customers.
"If you've ever sat in front of a farm discussion group and start talking about stuff they're not interested in you find out very quickly because they're quite brutal," he said.
Despite a job that requires him to continually scope out the latest and greatest in technology trends, Forster said he needed to ensure developments will be useful for customers and not just aimed at geeks.
"My wife's a great sounding board for some stuff," he said. "I'll go home all excited and she'll start yawning in 30 seconds."
Ideas that survive the spousal scrutiny generally have legs, he said.
However, this has to be balanced with not marginalising the tech-savvy who are "hacking stuff ahead of the game", said Forster.
After more than a decade in the IT industry Forster is in a job that he claims keeps his short attention span busy. It involves keeping an eye on trends, developing prototypes and trying them out on customers - often Telecom staff.
Project time frames are kept short - generally only four weeks - to ensure ideas aren't "over-engineered".
Examples of recent projects include testing out applications for radio frequency identification tags - tiny devices which can be attached to any item that needs to be tracked, from a tin of baked beans in a supermarket to a runner completing a marathon.
The technology is not new, having been around in one form or another since World War II, but manufacturing costs have come down.
One of Forster's projects "tagged" Telecom sales staff, allowing their location to display on a map.
In another project, Telecom staff placed an online order for their favourite caffeine fix at the in-house cafe and completed the transaction by swiping their tagged mobile phone when they went to pick-up the order.
"It's more 'how do you take that idea and apply it to other scenarios?' rather than 'ooh, Telecom's looking at replacing Eftpos' because it's not," said Forster.
Forster knows he is on to a winner when a prototype gets the "wow factor" reaction.
He said a successful idea has people asking why it hasn't always been that way, followed by "what about . . ?" and "can you ... ?".
But as with all research and development work there is a high casualty rate.
Forster, who describes himself as an inherent optimist, doesn't consider ideas that don't make the cut as flops.
"Even when you have a failure, particularly in the areas of prototyping, you get a lot of learning out of that," Forster said.
"At present I haven't walked into that brick wall that says 'just leave it alone'."
So what trends for 2008 have piqued Forster's interest?
He said he was watching the development of voiceover IP (VoIP) calling - phone calls delivered over the broadband network.
"There's a lot of people talking about them," said Forster. "I think most consumers have switched off and going 'I actually don't know what they're talking about'."
He said telcos needed to start thinking about providing services that were meaningful to regular consumers, giving examples of using a modified home phone to text, send and receive images, and using a ringtone to identify calls from the mother-in-law.
Forster said computer storage would become more important.
"It's the old adage of when the house burned down everyone grabbed the family photos, got out of the house and said 'whew, my history is safe!'," said Forster. "Today, it was actually the computer that caused the fire and it's got all my digital photos on it and now I'm really upset."
He predicts a greater understanding of the need for better storage, particularly as the number of computers in the house rises and more people use broadband and Wi-Fi connections.
