Gene Frantz
TI Principal Fellow and Business Development Manager, DSP

Over the last several months, many of you have been asking if I were going to start blogging again. So here I am. Fortunately, I have a lot on my mind and look forward to re-engaging with you all. Over the last several months I’ve been traveling, including a recent trip to China. (Here is a picture of me while in China – I’m the one on the right.)

I’ve also been to Russia, Israel, Taiwan and other foreign places like Boston to visit MIT (Note that I am on a cruise in the Caribbean as I write this). But, this wasn’t my first year to extensively travel – I have traveled my whole career. One of the skills I have managed to develop is handling jetlag. I can now fly to anywhere in the world without jetlag. Actually this is not totally true. I notice that the first couple of days I am hungry at breakfast time. But after those couple of days I am back to only a cup of coffee (refilled many times) to be all I need. And, before you ask, no, it doesn’t matter which way I fly as I don’t have jetlag when I get home for the most part.

I have said all of this as I think there is a new phenomena happening to us today very similar to jetlag. That new phenomena is what I call “Net lag”. So, just as a term was created to describe the reaction of our bodies to the jet airplane, there needs to be a term to describe the problems that have been created by the Internet.

I am certain you have thought about some of them. For example, we have design teams in TI made up of people from Texas, California, Boston, Japan, India and Europe. Finding a time for weekly team meetings becomes somewhat difficult. Someone has to attend in the middle of their night while others are just awakening, and others are preparing for bed. The best I can tell no one seems to have the luck of the meeting being in the middle of their day.

Other examples

• sending and receiving email
• playing Internet games
• phone calls – we’ve gone from four digit phone numbers to seven to ten. Will we be able to remember phone numbers with more digits that we have on our hands?

This will only get worse with video phones and video conferencing. The idea of virtual teams will spread like wildfire. Employees will be able to live where they want while being an active part of the team.

What will be the casualty of this Net lag phenomena? Our health, our social life and our sense of community? But, of course, there will be great advantages.

So, I’ll stop here with this topic. But I invite you to send me other examples of Net lag and even good stories about it.