After watching the Oscars last night, I had a thought: what would these stars' cell phone address books look like? Imagine having names like Nicholson or Spielberg or Streep in your phone, and having your number in theirs. But then I realized: there must be other numbers in those phones -- normal peoples' numbers. Hair stylists. Agents. Casting staff. Assistants. Many of them probably have your number, too. That seems risky when you're a celebrity; how can you control who ends up with your number? As it turns out, I am not the first person to think of this problem, which perhaps is why I am not a successful entrepreneur instead of a lowly FC blogger.
The folks behind Vumber.com have already created a surprisingly flexible telephony tool that can allow users to create a 2-way disposable phone number for about $5 a month. Of course, other services like GrandCentral and Gizmo already create virtual phone numbers, but Vumber does a few tricks that make it particularly useful for business folks, movie stars, and even chat room users (Vumber has recently partnered with Paltalk, an online chat site.)
Like other telephony services, it gives you web access to voicemail and allows you to chose how incoming calls are handled if you don't answer them: some can be sent straight to voicemail, others can be given a "number disconnected" message (ouch!), and still others can be given a special recording that you set. Lo, how many ways to avoid people!
But Vumber's distinctive feature is this: the site is quite clear that it allows you -- perhaps even expects you -- to change your Vumber an unlimited number of times, as if Vumber-changing were a metric for celebrity (and it likely could be.) This is representative of a patently different idea about virtual phone numbers than espoused by, say, GrandCentral, which aims to centralize calling between several phones and/or reinvent voicemail. The "disposable" nature of Vumbers mean that you can give them out with relative impunity, whether it's to an online store or a other sketchy character you might otherwise think twice about. (Some other software, like Gizmo, requires users to buy numbers.) You can also call out using your Vumber, though it's a chore (you have to punch in your own Vumber, then the number to dial), thereby maintaining the illusion. Presumably this would allow a salesperson, for example, to give out his Vumber freely at trade conferences without having to have a dedicated "work" cell phone to protect his privacy.
There's no doubt in my mind that there are more perfectly-suited uses for Vumber than my non-celebrity brain can generate as examples. However, what's most interesting about Vumber isn't even the freedom it provides its users, or the multifarious ways it could be used, but in the anonymity that it endows telephones for the first time since Bell's invention. It's likely that part of the explosion in the utility of email has to do with its inherent anonymity and ease of control, and Vumber poses the question: what if phone numbers could be used similarly? Were these features -- the ability to pre-screen calls, jump numbers and set privacy restrictions -- popularized, would some of the communication that has now been relegated to email move back into the realm of the telephone? I, personally, hope it does; my fears of carpal tunnel grow at every 1,000 word email I draft.
If you had to guess what type of site could grow its visitor base by 349% in 2007, what would it be? Some fashionable social network? Some free Web 2.0 app? I would have guessed ICanHasCheezburger.com, but then, I only know my own browsing habits.
Of course, we'd all be wrong. The fastest growing web property, according to comScore, is EverydayHealth.com: a health-oriented community site moderated by a group of 20 physicians. The company that operates it, Waterfront Media, is no stranger to runaway hits; it was the progenitor of the South Beach Diet, the Sonoma Diet, and a handful of other health and wellness franchises. But EverydayHealth is different: it serves as a kind of experiment, seeking to socialize the the old support system -- friends, family, doctors -- in the online space. It doesn't mean to replace these people; when posts or discussions indicate that a user needs real medical attention, the site has ways of flagging them for trained healthcare moderators to respond. But it's a supplement to the old support system, and as such, it's an interesting phenomenon.
The site's approach eschews the role of health encyclopedia -- a role amply filled by WebMD, Drugs.com, Yahoo Health and others -- and concentrates on various kinds of interpersonal support. Ben Wolin, the co-founder and CEO of Waterfront Media, told me that EverydayHealth "is not a space that users visit to simply look up information... but an organic and active place for users to proactively manage their conditions and find ways to live better, healthier lives." Of course, "managing" your health isn't quite like managing your portfolio, so what does this mean?
That depends on whether you're looking for hard facts or just a forum to voice your concerns. The site does have a dossier on the symptoms, treatments and prognoses of a host of common and not-so-common ailments, but its unique contribution to the online health realm is the team of doctors that write for the site. They're concise and informative without being digressive or preachy, and while they can't respond to every question the millions of users pose, they do address the most common ones and digest new information on a litany of diseases and conditions.
If you have questions or you're looking for someone to commiserate with, the message boards are the place. They're very active -- several million people are registered users of the site -- and supplemented by a start-your-own-blog feature. Most people seem to opt for the message boards over the blogs, since it's the feedback that is helpful, and blogs are, by nature, somewhat declarative and lonely. Reading the message boards is alternately inspiring and heartbreaking. One thread in the "Emotional Health" category began with a user who was curious if anyone else was suffering both depression and major anxiety, and how they were dealing with the treatments. The first response was heartening, and began: "I have been going through both for several years, although a bit different than your story." But the second post was moribund: "I have been battling depression and anxiety for my whole life... I just don't know what to do anymore. I just want to be able to work and not feel so exhausted and doomed all the time." Does writing that on anonymous message board help?
Many health concerns are, for many Americans, still taboo and tough to discuss. For that very reason, the anonymity and camaraderie of online message boards may be a strangely ideal match for the average health-site user. The user that wrote that sad reply about depression also mentions in her post that "my husband and I don't have a good marriage." Maybe she feels like her problems burden him, or maybe she's embarrassed. What's more important is that she felt compelled to tell her story on a message board, and that doing so obviously provided her some comfort that she can't get from the prescription drugs she mentions, or the people in her life. Viewed in that light, it's no surprise that EverydayHealth has been growing in leaps and bounds; it's a poultice for the social soreness -- maybe loneliness, maybe embarrassment, maybe confusion -- that often surrounds sickness. Obviously, many users are there just out of curiosity, or concern for their general health. But it's heartening to think that the internet might be a tool not only for entertainment, or information, but also some kind of authentic human interaction. As an online culture, we may be heading for collectivism -- but that doesn't have to mean the Web has to be impersonal.
iPhones aren't the only Internet-surfing phones that have gaping security weaknesses waiting to be exploited. In fact, all smartphones -- that includes Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry devices -- can be easily commandeered by malevolent nerds with a little bit of code and a dose of trickery. In the interest of fairness, we've gotten some security folks from Bluefire Security Technologies to show us what kind of mischief can be made on a regular Windows smartphone, just as we did with the iPhone in November. Or is mischief the wrong word? Perhaps "data and identify theft" are more accurate terms.
Check out the video below:
First things first: who are these guys?
Bluefire provides the tech behind Symantec's mobile security software, and also works with carriers and phone manufacturers to bake in better security to off-the-shelf phones. Of course, this means that they know more about the mobile OS than the average Russian teenager who writes viruses, but it's worth mentioning that the malware they've written for demonstration in the video is actually an exceedingly simple piece of software: only a few lines of code that require a paltry 1K of memory. That's why it's so easily injected into the phone; all it takes is one vague e-mail attachment or malicious website to spread the contagion to your beloved device, and it can embed itself in milliseconds. That's what I call Kelly Clarkson-level contagious -- all it takes is a second of exposure, a few notes of "Since You've Been Gone," and you're hooked.
Unlike Kelly Clarkson, however, this simple piece of code can take control of your mobile phone for whatever ends its designers like. (Kelly, by contrast, can merely take control of your heart. But I digress.) The first trick seems harmless enough: changing your preferred homepage. But as Mark Komisky, Bluefire's CEO, notes in the video, forcing your browser to hit a certain malicious site has tremendous potential, especially for hackers intending to impersonate your carrier and ask you for personal information. Same goes for the error message he has the virus generate on the sample phone -- another opportunity for carrier impersonation.
While it's not comforting to think about your vitals being purloined -- account numbers, addresses, phone and internet contact information -- it's perhaps even more unnerving that this bit of malware (and code like it) can spy on your communications, manipulate them, and steal your documents. I'll avoid summarizing every hacking movie ever made, and choose not to enumerate the perverse amount of control this can surrender to a malicious coder. You know and I know: it would be bad. Really bad.
So what is a smartphone owner to do? I have an iPhone and a Blackberry; is someone going to commandeer them both, steal my bank information, dump my girlfriend via text message, and steal my top secret files? Probably not; a comparative few of all cell phones are smart ones, meaning that it's not yet worth most hackers' time to target them. However, it's probably smart to set definitive rules for your phone usage, and delineate what needs to be done via mobile device and what can (and should) be left to the computer. Online banking is one of those tasks; rarely should you find yourself in a position where you must login via phone, when you can just as easily call.
As with all things bad, it's easiest to avoid them if you know how they work, and can identify when you might be getting bamboozled. Keep your vital information close to the vest, monitor your cell statements for unusual data or voice activity, and watch our video again. You'll be glad you did.
This week I became the roughly one billionth person to buy one of those diminutive, happy little things called Asus Eee PCs. Mine is the low-end $299 version, and it came in a color I've taken to calling Confident Man Green.
Naturally my first inclination was to hop on the Intertubes and figure out how I could hack and update this thing with quick-and-easy mods, so it might be ever so much more than I'd hoped. Here's what I found.
Basically: that I can't. The low-end $299 2G Surf model, which ships with 512MB of RAM, an underclocked 900MHz Celeron processor and a 2GB flash hard drive, is cursed with soldered memory and little recourse for the upgrade-hungry. It does, however, have an SD slot, so its 2GB hard drive (1.7GB of which is consumed by the custom Xandros Linux OS) isn't as claustrophobic as it sounds.
If you were prescient enough to buy one of the other models (the 4G Surf, 4G or 8G), replacing the RAM is relatively easy, using the RAM access port built into the bottom of the machine. You can see how to upgrade the RAM on one of these bad boys here.
So what else can you do to an Eee PC, if you have the time and guts? A lot, as it turns out.
With some minimal tech know-how, you can install Mac OS X Leopard on it (although, be forewarned, you may lose functionality like WiFi if you don't tinker with the drivers correctly). You can also put XP on there, which is more kosher, according to Asus. Ubuntu is also an option for Linux fans who aren't keen on the Eee's moronically simple interface.
Hardware-wise, there's even more you can do, though much of it defies reason and frugality. For example, if you're unimpressed by the Celeron chip, which is underclocked from 900MHz to an effective 600MHz to save battery and keep heat down, you can perform soft overclocks like this one by upping the frontside bus. This is something that will probably tempt a great many Eee users (after they've already upped their RAM), because the notion of unused speed trapped inside a computer is a compelling and frustrating one for any bona fide computer enthusiast.
More cool stuff: upgrading the flash hard drive from 2, 4 or 8GB to a whopping 32GB using a simple USB power modification and a stock 32GB flash drive. Or, adding an internal 3G mobile internet card. You can also add a touchscreen with this rather in-depth installation tutorial:
All in all, most of these hacks involve spending money or time that could otherwise have been invested in a more expensive and capable UMPC. But if you're buying the Eee as a project computer, you could end up with a pretty tricked-out little machine for under $800. I, for one, like my Confident Man Green Eee just the way it is -- even if the keyboard can feel infuriating, the OS lags like crazy, and it forgets my WiFi network every time I turn it off. It's still the happiest little machine $300 can buy, and it edits Word documents and gets GMail. That's enough for me.
McDonald's has nearly 14,000 stores nationwide, all of which will be equipped with full-fledged coffee bars and baristas by year's end. Having already begun adding plush seating, gentler lighting and subtler colors to their franchises, the big M is looking to steamroll the limping Starbucks on its own turf. Starbucks, however, isn't going anywhere; rather, it's McDonald's that will be maimed most by its own campaign to destroy the Seattle super-brand.
Admittedly, McDonald's is one of those monolithic brands that will likely have a longer half-life than radium -- but that hardly makes it invulnerable. By adding the "theatre" of a coffee bar (as one McDonald's VP has phrased it), the company has gained little more than the potential to alienate customers, confuse its menu and open up a black hole for capital.
If you haven't gotten the scoop on McDonald's big move, here's a useful summary from the Wall Street Journal:
Before I go on to detail the three ineluctable barriers to McDonald's success with coffee, let's first agree on a few things about the average coffee-buying American.
- When they go out for a coffee, they are going out simply to buy coffee. It's only recently that Starbucks has decided to upgrade its (over-priced and under-flavored) food menu, because frankly, they haven't had to. [Edit: Indeed, some people buy coffee with their breakfasts at McDonald's. But most coffee drinkers are not also McMuffin eaters. McDonald's new attempt is to capture the coffee-only customer, not its captive audience of breakfast customers.]
- Customers expect buying coffee to happen even more quickly than buying fast food, because, hey, it's a beverage and not a meal.
- Most aren't fiercely loyal to one brand of coffee or another. Some think Starbucks is too strong, and some think McDonald's is too watery, but most just want a caffeine fix that's brown and hot.
These principles given, here are the factors that will make McCoffee bomb.
The Carefully Proven McMenu
McDonald's has spent decades refining its menu and its accompanying drink selection. When you go to McDonald's, you step in the door knowing that the company's ubiquity was built on its reputation for hamburgers and fries. With hamburgers and fries, you drink cold soda. So it is written, and so it will stay.
Remember McPizza? Me neither. I've read it was neither better nor worse than Pizza Hut or Domino's Pizza, but it was a miserable failure. Why? Because when you go into a McDonald's, you're going to be bullied out of your pizza-eating mood (assuming you entered with one in the first place) by the sweet stink of the flagship fare. The place reeks of fries and beef. McDonald's has spent millions of dollars developing chemical aromas for its fries, burgers and chicken, and they are every bit as intoxicating as they were meant to be. You know that frustration you experience when you try to hum one song while another is playing on the radio? That very dissonance was the demise of the McPizza, and will claim McCoffee next.
When you step into a Starbucks, however, you probably begin to anticipate your coffee even more than you did on your way over. The place smells of beans, frothing milk, and pastries. That visceral impression will stay with you the next time you want coffee, but the visuo-olfactory confusion of getting coffee in a McDonald's probably won't initiate the same kind of conditioning in your coffee-loving brain.
The Drive-Thru Factor
Both Starbucks and McDonald's make their bread-and-butter on drive-thru and to-go sales -- Aha! The workaround for the last argument, right? Wrong. Even if customers step into McDonald's and don't experience the sensory dissonance I discuss above, they will be subject to another mental quiddity that will be bad news for McCoffee.
When you're opting for a drive-thru, you're opting to "save time." We all know, rational as we are, that human beings will go to incredibly illogical lengths to shave even 5 seconds off a trip or task; run a red light, apply lipstick on the highway, and so on.
That very compulsion to be as efficient as possible, the very one that brought you to use the drive-thru in the first place, will tell you that a popular place that serves food will have a slower drive-thru than one that serves only coffee. I don't have any statistical evidence to back that up, but then again, statistical evidence is impotent in the face of what consumers perceive to be their common sense. More people use McDonald's drive-thru's than Starbucks, and the products coming out of the window take more time to prepare. The savvy driver will almost always opt for the specialty store when time is of the essence, particularly if they're in search of a single product.
Think of an analogous situation in retail: Home Depot vs. Sherwin Williams. You know you need two cans of paint, and you know you can get them at either place. Home Depot will definitely be cheaper than the specialty Sherwin Williams paint store. However, you also know that parking at Home Depot is a nightmare, the store is large and time-consuming to navigate, and the lines are often interminably long. Maybe if you have all day, you'll opt to save money and go to the Home Depot. But if time is the least bit of a concern, most consumers will go to the specialty store every time -- even if they know they'll pay a couple dollars more. Likewise with Starbucks, where the drinks will inevitably cost more than those at Mickey D's; actual price matters little when the customer perceives that they'll get their desired product with less time spent and less stress suffered.
The Dunkin Factor
For some reason, the media coverage of the new McDonald's strategy (which McDonald's is calling, redundantly, the "Strategy to Win") has largely overlooked Dunkin Donuts as a competitor in the Coffee Wars. While they lack the branding sex appeal of SBUX and the sheer might of MCD, Dunkin Donuts is not to be overlooked, because it is likely to be the Perot to McDonald's George H.W. Bush.
Here's the problem, if you're a certain red-shoed clown: Dunkin Donuts is entirely too much like your franchise. Both stores are low on quality and nutrition as well as being low on cost. Both have serviceable, sometimes downright lackluster eating areas. They're the same class of competitor, even if their niches and products are slightly different. The worst part: they already have a terrific reputation for good, inexpensive coffee. Dunkin also benefits from a bit of the specialty-store image that Starbucks does, and offers about as much food as a coffee customer probably wants (donuts, bagels, muffins and breakfast sandwiches.)
Where McDonald's sees its market isn't entirely clear to me, especially with two good players already in the fold. That said, McDonald's does have a fighting chance at selling coffee if it can persuade existing customers -- ones who wouldn't normally buy coffee while at Mickey D's -- to replace cheaper sodas for more expensive coffees as their meal-side beverage. Considering the scale of the McDonald's experiment, that could have a broader effect on the way Americans think about the harmony of food and drink. I'll wait and see -- Venti Macchiato in hand.
Nerds everywhere are lapping up the news coming out of the annual Consumer Electronics Show, and, being a nerd, I've been hard at work consuming it all. Permit me tasteless puns as I regurgitate the news of the coolest gadgets until I'm blue in the tooth.
So here they are: the hi-def, low-priced, pocket-sized, mondo-screened, battery-powered, eco-friendly doohickeys that will make me glad I'm not Amish in 2008.
Skype For PSP
The Sony circles have been buzzing with Skypish rumors for months, and hey! they're true. Skype will be available under the "Network" menu on models of the PSP-2000, but not the original PSP. Some bloggers think they may have found an image of what the Skype microphone adapter for the gaming device might look like, but it's as yet unconfirmed.
Vonage Not Yet Dead
Vonage, famous for kicking its investors and customers in the shins, is doing something different for 2008-9. They're releasing something called a "digital voice adapter and single port router with a built-in LCD." The way it's described, it will function the way your cell phone screen does, logging calls, holding contacts, and hopefully playing Brick Out. The device is called the V-Portal, and it's part of a new strategy called MyVonage that the company hopes will revamp the viability of their service.
Toshiba Notebooks Adopt the Intel Penryn Chip
Toshiba is updating its line of U350 notebooks, and the top model will sport a 2.1GHz Penryn T8100 Core 2 Duo. The lesser models (which are Core 2 Duo-powered) will have a 1280x800 13.3-inch screen, 160GB hard disks and 2GB of RAM, but there's no word on the official spec of the Penryn-equipped model.
The Sony W350i
Sony's new super-light flip phone should have its Walkman functionality and a svelte feel. Some who've held the phone says it feels flimsy, but then again, those might be the same people that think BlackBerrys are actually convenient to carry.
Panasonic's Mobile DVR
And here you thought there would be no way to catch up on old seasons of The Wire from your toilet. Well, now you can, thanks to the Comcast co-branded AnyPlay DVR, which can function like a normal DVR at home, and also be taken on the road with the detachable AnyPlay 8.5 inch LCD screen. It carries 60GB.
Viewsonic Releases Way Too Much Stuff
In a brilliant effort to confuse me, Viewsonic has released a littany of HD LDC televisions, monitors, and even a 1080p projector. They all sound good to me. Oh, and there are also some digital picture frames, too.
Bang & Olufsen Uber-Fancy HDTV
B&O was showing off two plasma TVs and one 32-inch LCD at the show, the former of which are meant to be paired with a giant triangular speaker that costs $4,000 and supposedly sounds equally awesome from every angle. The 50 inch plasma is $7,500.
The First UMPC With WiMAX for Sprint
Taking a cue from auto companies and their concept vehicles, OQO demoed an ultra-mobile PC with built in WiMAX support for the Sprint network. They say it'll be available... someday. In fact, we'll be reviewing one in coming weeks.
Dell's 16-inch Laptop
Speaking of concepts, Dell was exhibiting a massive-faced laptop with a 16-inch screen and 16:9 aspect ratio. They were also showing off a "compact" desktop design that looks like the bastard offspring of a Dimension tower and an Alienware gaming station.
The 12GB MicroSDHC Card
In the event you're interested in losing the entire Rocky DVD series in your Cheerios, you can now pack 12GB of whatever on a MicroSD card. Not much to say except "cool."
Awesome
This miniature Sanyo projector only needs 3 inches of space from a wall to project an 80 inch image. It has VGA in/out, audio in/out and even a built-in speaker. Think about that for a second -- an 80 inch image on your cubicle wall. Excited? Well don't be. It costs $3,300.
11 Foot Long Plasma TV
Panasonic is releasing a 150-inch plasma TV next year that will probably be able to give your dachshund a heart attack. Here's a video from the folks at Engadget.
Britney Spears' 16 year old sister, a Nickelodeon actress named Jamie-Lynn, is pregnant. Here's why you should care: the sisters, and their mother (who was slated for a book deal) are a textbook case of How To Ruin Your Personal Brand, and watching their deconstruction has become a fascinating look at a case study in mismanagement.
Photo: Michael Buckner/Getty Images
The three Spears women are, doubtless, entrepreneurs of an unusual stripe; all entertainers are. But no matter the niche, startup owners have to be almost myopic about preserving the integrity and reliability of their brand. Lose the trust and regard of your customers, and any further efforts your business makes will be laughably disregarded. Here's how the Louisianan Ladies have royally screwed up a multi-million dollar franchise.
The Pregnancy: For Jamie-Lynn alone, getting pregnant was probably an unwise decision (or mistake, depending on the circumstances). The producers of the network show she starts on, "Zoey 101," won't be too amenable to writing in a teen pregnancy to the kid-oriented script. The show was set to resume filming in February, but since Hollywood waits for no one, you can bet Jamie-Lynn is out of a job.
But consider her pregnancy in the context of her mother and her sister, and the bigger picture of brand bone-headedness comes into view. The Spears matriarch, Lynne, had been in the midst of negotiating a book deal about the challenge of raising two successful, high-profile girls. It was supposed to come out on Mother's Day under the title "Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World." According to Us Magazine, it was summarized as a parenting book with a number of "faith elements to it." Unsurprisingly, the book deal has been indefinitely delayed.
The Disunity: When questioned about her younger daughter's indiscretions, Lynne Spears reportedly told MTV: "I didn't believe it because Jamie Lynn's always been so conscientious. She's never late for her curfew. I was in shock. I mean, this is my 16-year-old baby." This is not crisis-management language.
"Wait," you might be saying; "this is a family we're talking about, not a business." Yes, it is a family. But when you run a family business, it becomes both, and needs to be treated as such. Lynne's reaction smacks of inattentive parenting and cluelessness -- did she not know her daughter was sexually active? Did her daughter fail to inform her before the press did? That kind of dissonance between reality and illusion ("my 16-year-old baby") doesn't speak well for her aptitude as a mother or a career adviser. For those that think she shouldn't be held to the standard of the latter position, remember that she once managed both her daughters, and was the driving parent behind their entry into show business as children.
The Craziness: Taken in isolation, Jamie-Lynn's pregnancy shoots her mother's book deal in the foot. But in the scheme of Britney's two-year long descent into ostensible insanity, it reeks of the unmistakable scent of family craziness. And that is exactly the kind of nuttiness that can sink even a juggernaut business like Britney's.
Consider a nearly analogous situation: the Simpson family (Jessica and Ashlee, not Homer and Marge). Jessica Simpson's father, also her manager for a period of her career, is a bonafied lunatic who is on record with numerous lascivious comments about his own daughter's sexual appeal and breast size. He also has an infamous temper. His younger daughter, Ashlee, has made a fool of herself on at least two occasions, botching live performances with a lip-synching disaster on SNL and a boo-earning performance at the Superbowl. Even so, Jessica and Ashlee have continued to keep their professional heads above water, because their imperfections look like a product of circumstance and bad luck, not a product of familial insanity. That's mostly a product of Jessica's even keel in public, and her consistent work as an artist (even if the term "artist" is arguably misapplied).
Compare that to Lynne Spears and her daughters, and you see a different breed of disasters: the self-imposed kind. Britney's numerous quick divorces, legal battles, careless parenting, drug and alcohol addiction all made her most recent album's negative reviews a foregone conclusion. To be a successful artist, and more broadly, entrepreneur, there has to be at least the illusion of composure and confidence behind the scene. Once that disappears, the quality of the product ceases to be the issue, because no one wants to buy anything from a crazy person.
The End Result: In a perfect world, each of the Spears' indiscretions would handicap only their own careers. But they reinforce each other, compounding the knot of incompetence and rendering each of their brands' values -- and their common brand -- increasingly devoid in value. Rarely does celebrity news have too much to teach the business world, but in this case, take some heed: no one operates in a vacuum, especially a family. And personal life and business are rarely as divorced as anyone would like. Take it from Lynne Spears: keep tabs on your business partners now, and avoid disaster later.
If you are feeble of constitution, beware: the following review asks the reader to reconcile two drastically disparate technology abstracts -- mobile phones and Skype -- in a way that might cause temporary insanity. But I mean "insanity" in, like, a good way.
That's because the new 3 Skypephone, powered by a small software company called iSkoot (in partnership with British phonemaker 3), performs a remarkable little trick that could change the way cell phone service (and pricing) is understood amongst the next generation of mobile talkers.
Image courtesy of 3skypephone.com
Here's what iSkoot's software does for the Skypephone: it allows users to use a normal mobile handset to make calls as a Skype user. The idea works like this: you, the consumer, purchase the phone (which is GSM compatible) for a flat rate of 50 pounds sterling (no word yet on a US price). From there, all calls made over the Skype network (that is, from your phone to other Skype users) are free, and calls to regular phones are 12 pence per minute. The only other requirement is that you download at least 10 pounds sterling in ringtones, wallpapers, and other widgets, every month. Your Skype-to-Skype calls are unlimited.
The phone's success will rely strongly on the ubiquity of Skype, which in the US, doesn't yet exist (at least according to VP Wolli Mõtsküla of Skype, at a recent Skype developers conference I attended here in New York.) That leaves the 7 other countries in which iSkoot has released the phone to build up a user base for the phone while American users catch up. Eventually, the real magic will happen when the phones are common enough that two Skypephone users will call each other for free -- and realize they could literally talk all month for only the price of a few ringtones. That will be the moment that a lot of VOIP proponents will have awaited for years.
So how does it work? Under the hood, iSkoot's software takes a clever approach to an ineluctable problem. According to iSkoot CEO Jacob Guedalia, the natural idea would be to transmit a Skype call as data. But, as he explains, "putting the VOIP on top of the data network wouldn't work; the network isn’t there." Instead, he and his engineers decided to have the phone call a gateway via the normal cell phone network, and that gateway, in turn, ports the phone into the PC network.
Guedalia says: "On the face of it, [an iSkoot call] is not that huge of an innovation, because it’s not that different from a typical calling card call. What is innovative is that you can call from a phone number to a Skype screenname, instead of just calling from a number to number." Because the gateway that does the number-to-screenname translation resides within the big cell carriers' firewalls, they're still getting traffic -- and keeping the big boys happy is all part of iSkoot's plan. "[The Skypephone] is good for carriers, which means we can, in turn, offer an aggressive price plan," says Guedalia.
iSkoot is mum about a US release date and price plan, but they were content to provide me with a test model of the Skypephone. The phone itself is a terrific little device; solidly designed and logically functioning, with a surprisingly good suite of data/internet applications and chat software. Using Skype on the phone was a breeze, even for me -- and I'm not a frequent Skype user. It's a small, well-thought-out gizmo, even for a normal mobile phone; add Skype, and the thing is truly a viable trendsetter.
If American users can grasp the potency of Skype, there is no reason to think that the 3 Skypephone won't be a success. Using Europe as their proving grounds, iSkoot should have a well-polished product by the time the phone reaches American shores. I, for one, look forward to it.
Two new-but-different ways to aggregate your online life -- social networks, email, photos, blogs -- make it easier than ever to obsess over your relationship with your computer. One is a web browser called Flock. The other is a web service called Fuser. Does using one, the other (or both) make you a loser? Or, more accurately... a Fluser?
That depends on which one you're using.
Flock is a new web browser (for Mac, Windows and Linux) that calls itself the "social" web browser. The sobriquet refers to the browser's ability to integrate a litany of web services with its interface, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google Blogger and WordPress (as well as a bunch more).
The "social" web browser
Depending on how you configure the interface, you never have to be out of eyeshot of your favorite sites and networks; Facebook, for example, can live in a sidebar next to your web browsing, ready for your spontaneous attention. What kind of attention, you ask? Well, you can actually drag and drop things to your "friends" (like pictures and links) from your web browsing (or from other things like Flickr photostreams, which can also live in a sidebar to your browsing window) the way you would on Mac OS X.
Flock in action
Here's what this is meant to accomplish: It's an attempt to streamline the web browsing you normally do by reducing the number of sites you actually have to navigate to. It's what I'll call the "strip mall" approach to web browsing: put everything you normally need in one convenient location, so that you don't have to reach far for variety. If the strip mall analogy makes you bristle, it should; strip malls are also a pain to navigate, and they end up sucking up more of your time (because there's more to see) than they save in their consolidation of stores.
The same problem afflicts Flock: there's too damn much going on. Once I loaded up all my logins (Facebook, WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, etc.), what I should have gotten was a streamlined web experience. Instead what I ended up with was a frenetic window full of potential distractors. It's nice that I can drag a photo from Flickr to a Facebook friend. But what if that potential makes me realize I haven't written that friend in a while, and I start work on an email to them? Then I read a Tweet on Flock's sidebar that inspires a blog post? The term "slippery slope" comes to mind.
Eliminating the barriers to over-using certain web sites (even if the barrier is as negligible as manually navigating to the homepage) is a sure way to breed a whole new level of computer addiction. Including my time here in the FC office, I'm on my computer 50+ hours a week without benefit of any new encouragement. Flock, while cool in concept, is a little dangerous to people (like me) who already lead computer-centric lives; it threatens their ability to concentrate when using the web for anything but entertainment purposes. That danger has the potential to turn the computer-reliant into the computer-addicted -- and no matter how many Facebook friends you have, you may never see them in real life again.
Flock Verdict: Makes You A Loser
Fuser, a web-based service, is also a product of the strip-mall mentality, but it's of a different ilk. Because Fuser takes a web-based approach, the underlying assumptions that superintend it are different. Web-based means mobile: good for people too busy to be reliably near their own machine. It also means parsimonious: too many bells and whistles, and the interface becomes slow, cluttered and frustrating.
When you first use Fuser, you put in very basic information about your email addresses and social networks. It very cleverly assumes your identity and ports those pages into itself, making it a sort of dashboard site that compiles all your email accounts (including Exchange, IMAP or POP3) and all your social network accounts. From that point on, you simply login with your Fuser password, and your other accounts get up and running simultaneously. It does this all this with a clean, minimalist interface that is customizable thanks to Ajax-like mini-applications, which serve up everything from email to wall posts to pokes.
Fuser's Interface
Unlike Flock, there's nothing here you don't need at a glance; things like Flickr and Twitter, while fun, just aren't that crucial to most peoples lives that they need to clutter a web app as pragmatic as this one. Thankfully, they don't.
Even for a Web 2.0 application, there's an obvious economy to the features the site provides. It doesn't go far beyond the basic functionality of your webmail or social network communication tools (like messaging and wall posts), and in so doing, presents a healthy roadblock to the temptation to time-waste with Facebook or MySpace.
The site flouts its bare-bones aesthetic in only one instance: the Leaderboard. This custom aggregator, which applies itself to your social networking communication, ranks your friends in order of those you've communicated with most frequently in the past few days.
The Leaderboard
The beauty of the Leaderboard is that it's just enough of a curiosity ("who really is my best friend?") to satiate a quick thirst for distraction, but just simple enough -- you can't alter it much, or change the criteria -- that you can't spend all afternoon monkeying with it. It's like the nicotine inhaler for smokers: it satisfies the essential need of the social network addicts, without the mess of the actual habit.
Fuser Verdict: Does Not Make You A Loser (In fact, makes you smarter).
In sum, both Fuser and Flock seem, at first blush, to share a common goal: the aggregation of numerous communicatory tools. But in practice, Flock is poised to suck a user into web addiction, while Fuser is more likely to encourage healthy and productive web habits. If you're like me, and you're already constantly battling the quicksand of procrastination that is the Internet, the latter will be your virtue, and the former, your vice. Choose wisely.
I know, I know -- what part of the upward march of humanity doesn't depend on Ashlee Simpson? Well here's a bit of tech that owes her a particular nod. It's made by a new company called Vapps, and it's the first high-speed teleconferencing technology to hit the wires since Skype revolutionized the way human beings communicate long-distance.
(Photographer: Michael Caulfield/WireImage.com)
Ashley spent Wednesday, also the final day of Hanukkah, reading The Polar Express to a group of 100 hospitalized children, most of whom weren't even in the same state. The feat was a demonstration of Vapps' HighSpeed Conferencing, a broadband-based teleconferencing solution that uses Skype to deliver ultra high-quality voice conferencing to up to 500 participants. It does this, I should note, at a flat rate per month, eschewing the per-minute pricing structure of the telecom companies and saving companies bags of money in the process. Using the traditional Skype program, users are limited to group chats of 4 to 9 participants, so this is a big step up for big businesses.
Listening to Ashlee (or anyone, for that matter) over a HighSpeed teleconference connection, you begin to ask yourself one question. It's not: how did they do this? It's not: what does it mean to want to La-La**? The question is: how on earth are we still dealing with the awful sound quality of telephones, well into the age of ubiquitous internet, hybrid cars and Coke Zero?
**For the uninitiated:
Before we go on, I should make an admission. I hate conference calls. Hate them. They're boring, even if everyone in your office is terrific and interesting (which, ahem, everyone at FastCompany is.)
Even if you hate conference calls, they're a necessity. But when you talk to people on one of Vapps' teleconferences (as when you talk on Skype between two computer users), the interaction actually feels productive, because you can completely understand what people are saying. Obviously, nowhere is this more important than business conference calls, which are already notoriously difficult to make productive and efficient.
Because HighSpeed Conferencing is computer-based, you can use their software to see who is in your conference, and invite them in with your PC. (Participants can also dial into a HighSpeed conference with a regular phone and not disturb everyone else's high-def audio -- although you'll sound, to them, just as mediocre as a traditional phone call.)
The electronic invitations and visual management of the conference is almost as important as the quality of the call itself, especially as the logistics of group calls can be almost as tough as the issues they're meant to hash out. If your company doesn't do big calls, here's a dramatization of their traditional course:
Moderator: Has everyone called in? Los Angeles, are you there?
Los Angeles: [Crackle] Yeah, we're here, Jim.
Moderator: Dallas, are you here?
Dallas: Howdy [Crackle] we're here.
Moderator: Tulsa, are you here? ....
Moderator: Tulsa?
Moderator: Ah, sh*t.
When you can see who's in your conference, and actually hear more of the range and timbre of the voices on the other end of the line, you can actually have a collaborative discussion where people jump in, make comments and pose questions (because you can understand them, and tell, by voice, who's speaking). This is a great thing.
Don't get me wrong; few people will go to sleep at night thanking God for Vapps. But it's one of those crucial and long-awaited uses of technology for pragmatic, if unglamorous, purposes that could make life in the office just a little easier.
