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http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...id=970599119419
Technology ate our StarPhone
Dial-up `Internet' will be missed
JOE FIORITO
I note with some sadness the passing of StarPhone.
Torstar's simple but efficient telephonic news and information service shuffled off its coil at midnight on Dec. 31, 2004.
"I used it for the weather," said the woman on the Star switchboard when I called to ask what had happened.
In a voice tinged with longing and regret, she said she did not know why the service disappeared, but she fondly recalled dialling the StarPhone number every morning to get accurate weather information instantly.
"It was the Internet before there was an Internet," said the youthful news veteran Chris Carter from his seat at the City Desk. His voice, too, seemed tinged, with what I am not sure.
Sic transit gloria.
StarPhone is remembered as a useful way to get a snippet of information — a sports score, a lottery number, a bit of trivia — in a hurry over the phone. It was wildly successful, logging 5 million calls within the first six months of operation; that tally had jumped to 35 million calls a mere three years later.
You get the idea that people liked it.
There were at least 600 categories of information available to callers. At one time, you might even have heard Martin Luther King talking about a dream he'd had or Pierre Trudeau invoking the nightmare of the War Measures Act. But most people called for bread-and-butter stuff — the time of day, stock quotes, horoscopes, trivia.
Gary Wright of Malton was a regular StarPhone user. He's the one who alerted me to the demise of the service. He expressed rue and dismay, emotions many StarPhone users are feeling right now.
"First of all," he said, "I used it for the weather but the old colonial habits die hard. I liked to use it for the cricket scores. I used it daily, as cricket got more daily in scope — at any given time, there are seven or eight different countries playing somewhere in the world. Funny, the first few cricket results published in the paper in '05 were incomplete." He did not mean funny ha-ha.
"It's okay if you have the Internet, you can get the scores whenever you want. I don't have Internet," said Wright. He went on to say, "My parents are from Jamaica. They used StarPhone for immigration advice, basic procedures, how to renew your passport, how to bring someone over, and so on." In other words, it was a family thing.
Pat Collins is Torstar's executive vice-president of newspapers. Of StarPhone he said, "It ran its useful life." I raised a metaphoric eyebrow. He replied, "To a large extent, it has been superseded by the Internet. Call volumes were declining. It was losing $100,000 a year. You couldn't derive much ad volume — maybe $10-15,000 a year, with around $120,000 in costs." I see, I said. Although I didn't, not really. There are columnists around here who earn more and do less, not to mention any names. (Why are you looking at me?)
Claire Wollen is the manager of Torstar Syndication Services. It was her job to wind the service down. I asked her the usual questions.
She said, "In January of 2000 there were more than a million calls a month — not callers but calls, because some people called several times a month." But she added that, by December of 2003, the number of callers was down to 400,000 and by November of 2004, the calls had dropped to roughly 300,000 each month.
Wollen added, "The equipment was obsolete. If it broke down, we were in trouble. We did put a note on the service. It was there since the beginning of November. I think we had five calls. I expected more." She paused.
"I realize there are people who don't use the Internet, or who choose not to, but. ..." She let it hang. I did, too.
But not before calling Phil Bingley, a deputy managing editor of the Star. He said, with puzzled fondness, "There were things you wouldn't expect. Wrestling was getting 50,000 calls a week. And the contests. We'd offer movie tickets and get 10,000 or 20,000 calls." I said that was a lot of calls. He said, "We finally figured out it was speed-dialling. But what killed StarPhone in the end was our Web service." And here I do not mean to marshal any McLuhans, but it seems the new technology has eaten the entrails of the old.
You do have a computer, don't you?
Interestingly, the old StarPhone number is still in service. If you dial it now, you will hear a message recorded by some cheery fellow who is offering callers — get this — a telephone information service for $10 a month; sign up for three months now, and get one month free.
Yeah, I hope he makes a million.
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"In a world of illusion you only see what you feel"
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Star Phone was owned by the Toronto Star so they had to have a lot of money and backing from that alone. The Talking Yellow Pages used to rock too and that service is dead too! WTF!!!!
"THE GAME" MAXPAIN
