This weekend I’m embarking on the Brit Butt 1200+ mile 36 hour endurance motorcycle ride. It’s somewhat like a treasure hunt. Riders are given a list of destinations, each worth points, just before the start. Each rider must then plan his/her own route around the UK trying to get as many points as possible. The winner is the person with the most points and the highest mileage after getting back to base. 

In order that family and friends can track progress, I’ll be using phonelocator an application developed by my team mate. It links the GPS capability of our phones to send coordinates via the mobile internet to a website which plots our position on Google Maps. We also have intercoms in our helmets to communicate and these are blue-toothed to the SatNav and our phones…you might say that as well as being consummate geeks we’re hyperconnected. 

So what and who is hyperconnected….IDC recently published a white paper on Hyperconnectivity in which they describe the hyperconnected as:  

“Those who have fully embraced the brave new world, with more devices per capita than the other clusters and more intense use of new communications applications. They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.” 

The modern business and personal world is full of hyperconnectivity, wireless laptops, web enabled phones, Blackberries, Skype, LinkedIn, Bluetooth, Second Life, online gaming, social networks and blogs. The modern world sees us networking our personal and business lives as well as our gadgets. News is travelling further faster, both simple personal news via updates on Twitter, Facebook and business news, read online, on the move, commented on, Dugg ranked and rated.  

When an issue breaks that effects your corporate reputation the proliferation of publicly available communication may seem scary, but it also provides more avenues to evaluate the situation and guage public opinion which can be used to help refine the right approach. Aren’t us hyperconnected geeks great?