Happy 16th Birthday Social Media!

SCOOP: The followng is the Behind-the-Scenes story on the Birth of Social Media

Shortly after the launch of the Internet in Australia in May 1994 when I was the media manager for ATUG, I was hired by Vodafone Australia but, at the time, I had already been contracted to work for the ABC TV's computer show "Hot Chips" as consultant researcher (given that I was also an IT&T journalist). Following this assignment with the ABC TV, I finally joined Vodafone and from then on, was thrown in the deep end to get Australia's third mobile carrier off the ground in a marketplace that was dominated by Telstra. It certainly was a challenge.
In this position, I tried to look for anything that could set the fledging company apart from its competitors. And in the space of a few months in the position, the opportunity of the possibility of creating a mobile digital data connection arose. The problem was that the telecommunications engineers were just that "telcos" and the computer guys were just that "computer guys" and the two did not really understand each other's world or language. For me, as an IT&T journalist, it was the natural progression and for this reason when, Lester Pearson (who was unique as Vodafone's UK Manager for Telecommunications and Computers at the time) approached me with this possibility I said to him that even though it was not a priority for the company I would put my job on the line and protect him and Sujeet Kumar (who was Vodafone Australia's Telecommunications Development Engineer at the time) to ensure that they had the space to work on making sure that they could get it to work.
And on that dull Monday afternoon on 26 Sept 1994, the world's first GSM mobile fax was received by me at about 4:30pm from a transmission made by Lester from his laptop computer connected to his Nokia 2110 GSM mobile phone whilst in transit on a train between North Sydney and Chatswood. This historic moment did not escape us... the three of us knew that this was the moment of the dawn of the Digital Age as we now know it and the birth of the phenomenon now known as "social media".
Two weeks later, I publicly demonstrated this service, now dubbed as "Mobile Data & Fax service", by downloading a full-colour weather map of Australia at a conference by accessing the Internet via CompuServe's online service using the same laptop computer and mobile phone. It worked. It astounded. In no time, some of Australia's most well-known CEOs switched across to Vodafone who, up until then, had not given the new entrant another look. And so the company got its first foothold in the Australian marketplace. We had beaten Telstra by at least two years (despite its army of engineers...and from memory, I think it took four years for both Telstra and Optus to get the same service into the mainstream). This certainly gave Vodafone the competitive edge...and the rest is history!