Delays, more delays and marketing...

I was actually at the desk when this occurred. After about 20 minutes, I asked the official behind the desk if this happened often. He shrugged: “It goes down, they repair it, it comes back up, it goes down again.”

I must admit I was a little unimpressed with this, thinking, this does not happen at UK airports. Well, the total delay was about 30 minutes, which is not bad compared with British Airways, which cancelled all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick for what was – at the time of writing – being described as a ‘power supply issue’.

Passengers at Gatwick though should at least have been able to find their way around as I hear the airport has installed 2,000 beacons to create Augmented Reality (AR) wayfinding. So I want to fly from Gatwick to try this out. It may become my first check when looking to book my next flight despite me living all the way up in Nottingham.

Anyway, back to the Jakarta passport control delay. This prepared me for the general lack of concern about time in the city. Everyone seemed to take a rather chilled attitude to delays. The opening ceremony of the show, for example, was 40 minutes late starting, with obvious knock-on effects.

At the show, my eye was caught by Zhongshan Pengjie Lighting’s stand. It had a lighting range called IPad because of its shape. “Do Apple know about this,” I asked a woman called Cherry. She laughed, and smiled, and shook her head. OK, I won’t tell them if you won’t.

Meanwhile, my award for the worst written press release of the month goes to Swedish company H&D Wireless. Distributed by PR Newswire, who should know better, the opening sentence was a staggering 69 words long and had so many clauses that, even after reading it three times, I still don’t know what it’s about. However, clever marketing move of the month goes to Texas Instruments at the London press launch of its mm-wave sensors. Note the ‘mm’ in mm-wave, and yes we all got a small bag of M&Ms. Lovely.