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Quick. How many old cell phones do you have lying around the house? I must have four or five. Some are stuffed in drawers, while my daughter uses others as toys. The reality is that most phones don’t get recycled. In fact only 3 per cent of mobile phones worldwide get recycled. That’s a lot of landfill and digital waste. It’s also a business opportunity for a company called ecoATM. They have built a nifty kiosk that takes in your old cellphone and gives you money for it.

The ecoATM kiosk has visual recognition technology and other sensors to check the type of phone as well as inspecting it for damage. With over 4,000 phones in its database, the ecoATM matches and inspects your phone, and then determines how much it’s worth (the average payout is about $9 per phone). EcoATM has already recycled over 33,000 handsets and they are deploying their kiosks in malls, electronic store and college campuses across the US.

Look for many more ecoATMs to spring up, since Coinstar has invested an undisclosed amount of money in the company. Coinstar, as you might now, puts out those convenient kiosks that take your spare change, counts it, and converts it to cash and store credit. However, it’s Coinstar’s other kiosk endeavor that has really taken hold. Coinstar is behind Redbox, the popular DVD kiosks that all but doomed Blockbuster and the local DVD rental stores.

To further sweeten the pot, ecoATM is expanding its business model to accept a wide variety of electronics, including video games and iPods. If they get around to selling electronics in their Kiosks, RadioShack better watch out.

Another Green Idea

While on the topic of going green, Stanford University students have come up with a laptop that you can break down into recyclable parts in about 30 seconds. Called the Bloom laptop, it’s designed to take the hassle out of reducing e-waste. Today, the process for recycling computers either does not happen or is pretty inefficient. Aaron Engel-Hall, one of Bloom’s designers, states “They spend 90% of their time prying 250 screws out of every device that comes in the door–it’s very expensive and time-consuming.” With the Bloom laptop,  you just turn a couple of knobs to pop out the parts not easily recycled (e.g., motherboard, battery, mixed materials) and toss the rest into the recycling bin. It even comes with a postage-paid envelope behind the screen to send in the parts you can’t put in your recycling bin.

The Bloom laptop has one other very cool feature that’s very handy while you are still using your computer. Its modular design allows users pop out the keyboard and use it remotely. Why didn’t someone think of that before!

The New Window to the World

One day soon you might be able to peer out your window and have it tell you the temperature, traffic and latest news. Samsung has developed a see through flat-panel screen that can be used as a high tech window. Samsung demonstrated this new screen at FPD (Flat Panel Display) International exhibition in Japan, touting it as innovation for the commercial storefronts as well as offices.

Built on OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diodes) technology, the screens could project almost any information you like, while allowing you to see what’s happening on the other side. Samsung’s mock-up featured storefront displays in which a window played videos of models who wore clothes available inside the store. These displays also come with fully functioning touchscreen capability, meaning you can interact with the window displays. This would be particularly handy in a business environment where you could use a window as a large display for your presentations. You needn’t worry about displaying your company financial secrets to the world outside. Samsung claims that the information projected on one side cannot be seen from the other.

Currently the size of the displays are limited to the largest LCD screens in production (about 83 inches X 95 inches or 2.1 Meters X 2.4 Meters). Still, the technology is impressive and when you combine it with other emerging technologies, you could get some amazing applications. For example:

• Integrate it with database information and an operations manager could see real-time inventory statistics while looking out on the production floor.
• These windows could go mobile. Put them in cars, boats, trains and planes, and even sun glasses.
• Integrate sensors, and the window display could give you all sorts of information about the environment before you step outside. This could be particularly useful for first responders.
• Put it on your aquarium and it could tell you when you need to change the water.
• Add a point-of-purchase and you could buy a product before you walking into the store.
• Combined with Augmented Reality and facial recognition to provide you even more information about the people and places around you. Pizza place down the street having a sale? Your window could give you an icon alert.

No matter what the applications, these displays will impact everything from architecture and home design, to computer development, to even transportation and car manufacturing. Sure might make holiday decorating a lot easier (could you imagine the haunted house!)…

Tattoos are so last decade. The new wave of body art might come from miniature LED displays that are placed under your skin. LED, or light-emitting diodes, are commonly used in everything from street signs to toys. Until now, they’ve been too bulky and brittle to go into your skin. Researchers at the University of Illinois have changed that by developing a new type of flexible, waterproof led technology that can be placed in everything from a rubber glove to under your epidermis.

Combine this with some of the emerging nano and sensor technologies, and you can get some pretty interesting applications:

• Body art could be taken to a whole new level; easily re-sculpted, removed or “turned off.” Heck, you might be able to make yourself a human Lite-Brite (fun at parties!).
• Low on blood sugars? Having a heart episode? Potential seizure coming on? Pregnant? Your body could flash you a warning sign before it’s too late.
• If you pass out, your body could give your rescuers valuable information about what happened, what to do, or who to call.
• Proximity sensors could detect if a compatible person is sitting close to you. You could just load up your interests on a central site and download a code in your LED device. Someone with a compatible code sits nearby and you both light up like one of those pagers at restaurants. You could then spend the next several hours finding out why you’re so well matched.
• Wirelessly connect it to your mobile device and let developers come up with a whole world of apps.

Then again, maybe the whole idea just makes your skin crawl…

Nokia's Hot New Phone

Every time I need to make an important call, I always seem to be low on battery. When I had my old Blackberry, I used to carry around a couple of extra batteries in my bag. Now that I have an iPhone, I lug around an external battery.  I keep wondering, “why can’t they come up with a better way.” Now they have…

Nokia has come up with a concept phone called the E-Cu that comes with a built-in thermogenerator that converts any heat source into electrical energy to power the phone. According to Concept Phones.com (a great website for future-looking mobile devices), the Nokia E-CU can be charged while in your hand on even in your pocket. Although the idea sounds a little too much like “The Matrix,” the idea of using your body heat to power your phone falls under the “why didn’t we think of that earlier” category. The E-CU gets its name from “E” for environment and Cu, symbol for copper. This is because the casing for the phone is made of copper “heat sinks” that collect the thermal energy.

Sunny outlook for solar powered phones

Although thermal energy is relatively new to the phone industry, companies have been playing with solar powered phones for a while. For example, in 2009, Samsung released its Blue Earth phone, which was the first solar powered full-touch screen phone. It has solar panels on the back that recharge the battery and Samsung even went the extra “green” mile by making the Blue Earth phone out of recycled plastic bottles. More recently, Dutch technology company Intivation, released its V206, which sports a SunBoost chip that makes it practical and cost effective to market solar powered phones.

Some companies are even experimenting with kinetic energy for cell phones. Companies are playing with phones that recharge when you run, yo-yo and even swing a golf club.

Dark Silicon and GreenDroid to power the future?

One of the core challenges with alternative energy phones is that they do not offer the massive number of features to which we have all become accustomed; all that brain power in our smart phones sucks too much energy.

University of California is working on an answer. They have developed a smart phone chip that requires much less energy than the ones we use today. Called a GreenDroid, the chip uses a technology called Dark Silicon that uses about 11 times less energy than a typical processor.

Aside from being more convenient, these alternative power promise to make a big impact on conservation. Currently, unwanted phone chargers produce 51,000 tons of waste a year. In India alone, solar powered cell phone towers could all but eliminate the use of 530 million gallons of diesel per year.

No matter how they do it, I can’t wait to say goodbye to my “low battery” light.

Google is testing cars that drive themselves. Why? Who else is doing this, and how close are we to kicking back and letting my “Chevy Google” do all the work?

It didn’t make sense at first. Google announced that they have been testing cars that drive themselves. This sent the tech world abuzz and, fittingly, the search engines ablaze. Everyone from New York Times to Computer World were writing about it. But…why?

Not “why have automated cars?” People have been dreaming bout that since the 1950′s.  Self-driving cars promise drastically reduced fatalities, increased convenience and mobility to many who would not otherwise easily have it. Why Google? Also, how close are we to really having automated vehicles? First, Let’s look at Google.

Google has been testing fully automated cars in California that do not require human interaction to drive. They modified a Toyota Prius with an array of cameras, radar and lasers to to enable the car to “see” and react to traffic and road conditions. They have mounted a rotating sensor on top of the car that generates a 3 dimensional map for 200 feet in all directions. According to their blog, they have logged over 140,000 miles with these cars. Don’t worry (too much). These cars are not left completely to their own devices. During the tests, they have a trained driver behind the wheel, ready to take over at a moments notice.

Not Exactly KITT, but getting close

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Help Me Obi-Wan...Win This Game

Ever since we saw Princess Leia pleading for Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, we’ve been entranced with the idea of mobile holographic communications. Samsung’s new B710 phone does its best R2D2 impression, by bring 3D to mobile devices. The best part? No funny glasses required.

While it’s not a full hologram, the B710 does make image appear to be popping out of the phone (Samsung is also releasing W960 3D Smart Phone, but the B710 was first to market, so we’ll give it credit). Software created by Dynamic Digital Depth, converts 2D content to 3D in real time. According to MIT’s Technology Review, you simply tilt the phone and it “creates pairs of slightly different images that the viewer’s brain combines to produce the sensation of depth.” It even automatically interprets depth by synthesizing visual cues. For example, if it recognizes a image of the sky it will put that in the back ground. more »

Dial By Hand (Photo: Lynn Barry)

MIT sees information as our sixth sense, and their goal is to integrate information with the real world in a much more effortless way than we do today. The SixthSense project at MIT Media Lab has developed wearable mobile technology that recognizes hand gestures and then projects information on to real objects. For example, if you want to call someone, you make a gesture and the device projects a phone number pad onto a wall, your hand, or whatever is close by. You then “touch” the number pad image to start dialing.

Sure, we carry around the entire Internet with our smart phones, laptops and tablets. But we still need to interrupt the flow of our interactions to go search for information. The SixthSense project looks to eliminate the phrase “hold on and let me look that up.” They are doing this by combining several emerging technologies:

• The device has a camera suped up with advanced recognition technology. The device takes in the world around you and recognizes words, objects and even faces.
• A mobile processor linked into the Internet so that it can search, analyze, upload and download the information you need.
• A projector to display anything from search results to pictures, movies and generated graphics onto object in front of you.
• The ability to understand your hand gestures. It does this by tracking different color caps on your fingers. In their demo, they use pen caps, but they also say you could just paint your fingernails different colors. more »

There are three steps to disaster preparedness. We’ve talked about the first two…Make a Plan and Get a Kit. The last one is Be Informed. It is essential to know what disasters are likely for your area and prepare accordingly. Your preparations may be different depending on the disaster. For hurricanes, you may need to plan for an evacuation. Snowstorms? You’ll need to be ready for days without power. Understanding the likely events in your area will make your plan better and easier to implement.

Before, during and after a disaster, you need to know how to get information. How will you know if a disaster is coming and how serious it’s likely to be? How will you know what help is available? Where to go if you need a shelter? Luckily, many locales now have alert systems set up, including e-mail, text and other technology to get the word out quickly. You’ll need to do some poking around because the information isn’t always heavily publicized, but start by checking with the emergency management resources in your state. You can find state emergency management information on ready.gov/america.

For example, residents of the Washington DC area can sign up for capitalert.gov, a messaging service that covers the entire national capital region and taps into state and local information in the same stream. Likewise, the San Francisco area offers the AlertSF notification system offering text and e-mail messages with emergency related traffic and weather warnings. more »

Gone (Digital) Native?

If you get more “wall posts” than post cards on your birthday…you might be a digital native. If you use acronyms like OMG and LOL, even when you are talking to someone…you might be a digital native. If you have ever checked to see if you’re in a relationship by looking at someone’s Facebook status….you might be a digital native.

Digital native. Marc Prensky coined the term, referring to the generations of “wired” people who have grown up knowing only modern communications technology and the Internet. He sets the demarcation at roughly 1980; if you’re born after that, you are a “digital native,” born before that makes you a “digital immigrant” who is finding your way through a new cyber-driven world.

There’s a lot of controversy around the concept. Does the brain work differently for digital natives? Why the 1980 demarcation? Why not 1990? Why not 2004 (the year Facebook launched)?  What about all those super-users over the age of 30, or the technophobic twenty-year-olds?I find it hard to place myself in one of those categories – maybe I am more of a digital “naturalized citizen.”

Whether you are a digital native by birth, or you simply have adapted and adopted your way to the forefront of our technology-driven world, the impact is essentially the same – there is a digital divide between high technology users and the low ones. Actually, there are multiple divides. Technology innovations periodically leap into radically new directions. All technology adopters don’t cleanly make the leap into the next direction. There are plenty of people who are very comfortable with e-mail and Word, but do not “get” social networks, smart phones, texting and Foursquare.  More on this in another blog. For now, we will concentrate on the high and low technology users. more »

As you’ve read in some of my posts here, I believe the return for business investment in social media is the deepening of relationships. As a CEO, I can appreciate how the challenge of calculating that ROI keeps some of my peers (not to mention CFOs, CMOs and COOs) awake at night. But a recent encounter at a small restaurant gave me even greater faith in my belief.

I walked in to the Yesterday Café looking for a light lunch as I passed through the small town of Greensboro, Georgia. As I settled into a booth, I noticed a journal on the table near the ketchup and other condiments. Thinking someone had left it by accident, I showed it to our waitress as she took my drink order.  To my very pleasant surprise, she said it was not there by accident, but by design—the café put them at all the tables to give customers a way to share their thoughts with the staff and other customers. Cool.

As I waited for my cold beer (it was your typical hot day in middle Georgia), I read about meals that went well, service that was less than sterling, how much management appreciated the suggestion for a new sandwich and how the buttermilk pie was the greatest dessert ever created.  Every entry was in each person’s hand writing giving me a sense of originality and authenticity I haven’t felt in quite a while.

When my beer arrived, I asked the waitress about the journal and she shared how customers, staff and management all loved them. Yes, there were the occasional stings—a bad meal, regretful service, an incorrect tab—but there were also inspiring jewels…like a sketch of a staff member or a crayon drawing by a child of chicken tenders.  She went on to say the owners took the information and feedback very seriously often taking the journals home so they could write a reply or digest the suggestions in a personal setting.  Cool.

I also noticed something else–there weren’t any “ads” in the journal. Nothing from the management telling me to try an entree or if I showed up on Tuesday, my kids could eat free. The journal was about customer thoughts and, where appropriate, management appreciation. Way cool.

There are a thousand reasons why today’s social media tools might be a better means for that customer-business connection and quite a few arguments for why a simple journal at a table might be as worthwhile as all our digital investments. But there is a very important commonality—a business connecting and looking to inspire and use customer generated content to build a powerful relationship.  As a CEO, that keeps me up more than the ROI of social media investment: are we connecting and actually building meaningful relationships.

My lunch at the Yesterday Café was super. And, I topped it off with what is arguably the best buttermilk pie in the universe. To see how much I gushed over the flaky crust and amazing filling, you can read my entry in the journal…it has a blue cover and I signed it ”Nunndog.”

What if the Earth could Twitter you? HP is lacing the earth with over 1 trillion advanced sensor nodes and interconnecting them into an immense environmental network. Called Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) project, HP Labs plans to cover cities, towns and key environmental sites with specialized, very small sensors that collect a myriad information ranging from vibrations, movement, light, sound to air quality. Each of these bundles of sensors (nodes) are connected to each other, casting a virtual net over the earth.

The applications for an environmental sensor network are almost endless. Imagine a system that could identify structural damage on buildings before they fall, find pathogens in the air, warn of earthquakes or track outbreaks in real-time across the globe. HP says it could put about 10,000 of these nodes on the Golden Gate Bridge to monitor its integrity and warn of any potential disasters. HP is already partnering with Shell Oil to create a wireless sensor network to measure high-resolution seismic data that will more effectively map the subterranean topography and search for pockets of oil. “This project is designed to gain a competitive advantage for us onshore.” said Wim Walk, manager of novel geophysical technologies for Shell.

Peter Hartwell from HP labs puts it best, by stating “With a trillion sensors embedded in the environment – all connected by computing systems, software and services – it will be possible to hear the heartbeat of the Earth, impacting human interaction with the globe as profoundly as the Internet has re more »

The Real Cookie Monsters

Your computer needs a diet. It used to just load up on cookies every time you hit a website. Now it’s gobbling up super-cookies and “PIE,” allowing companies to track your web movements and making you more vulnerable to cyber threats. What the heck is a super-cookie? How could anything named PIE be bad? Let’s start at the beginning…

Cookies have been around a while. They are small text files automatically put on your computer that contain tags (string of code) to identify you as a unique user. Inside these files, all sorts of information is stored, such as which pages you visited, when you last visited, and any voluntary information you gave the site. The site that gave you the cookie has complimentary file with the same tag ID.  That way, it knows who you are when you come back. There is a nice write up about cookies on WiseGEEK, if you want to know more.

Cookies can be very convenient. If you ever went back to a site where you put in a password and it “remembered” you, that happened because of a cookie. Website preferences, online shopping carts and wish lists are all possible because of cookies. Cookies, however, have other functions. Websites collect cookies to gain information about usage. They track things like traffic flow, page popularity and how long visitors stay on a site. This information is usually anonymous and aggregated. Some say the major reason for cookies is advertising. They allow websites to track how many people come to the site and click on ads, which is how they get paid.

Where things start to get scary is when the marketers start getting involved. When you visit a website, it triggers past logs of your actions and calls up information about your surfing habits. It also associates  any volunteered information about you (name, address, phone number) with that log. These “profiles” hold a lot of marketing value, since they can show what you like, where you go, and what you purchase on a site. Some advertisers place ads on many of the most popular websites and then pass your cookie information across the web. Tracking you across multiple sites provides them much more data about your preferences and habits. They then can serve you more targeted advertisements and make more money. As creepy as it sounds, this is a 100% legal business practice. However, cookie profile information can be hacked to reveal your personal data. Identity thieves and hackers can then use this information to mimic you online. more »

Digital exhaust. That’s what they call it. It is all the bits (and bytes) of information about you left across the Internet. Marketers, hackers, identity thieves, social networks, people finders and even governments scour the Internet for this exhaust to learn more about you. Put the right pieces together and they can find out where you went to school, where you lived, who your friends are, where you vacation and even where you are right now. It’s a pretty unsettling thought for most of us and we have lots of questions: How do they know so much? What can they do with it? What can I do about it?

Digital Exhaust Is a Fact of Life

We’ve always collected a lot of information, but as we began to digitize it to make it more manageable and then interconnected it to make it more convenient, we started to pump out digital exhaust. Every click of a mouse, every clack of a key creates digital exhaust. But, it goes way beyond that. Go through a tollbooth. Use an ATM. Swipe your grocery card. Make a phone call. Walk into an airport. You’ll be creating digital exhaust. It’s every electronic transaction, digital video, people counter, sensor or record about you.

You don’t even need to make your own exhaust. Your friends post pictures about you and “tag” you on Facebook. That convention you went to lists its attendees. Your Alma Mater creates an alumni page. All of these create information linked to you. In fact, you are part of the public record. Have a driver’s license? Got married? Bought property? Went to court? You have a digital trail.

Things are becoming more digital. We went from “snail mail” to e-mail in a quick click; getting an actual mailed letter today is quite a treat. GPS, Mobile Apps, Google Maps and Texts are second nature, and we’re starting to adopt facial recognition, biometrics, and even “Smart TVs.” Heck, my phone, with its accelerometers, gyroscopes, temperature gauges and cameras is more self aware than I am.

Simply put, digital exhaust is the natural byproduct of living the information age. more »

A recent study profiled by Research Brief provided some though-producing statistics. The study, done by American Express, found:

• 91% of Americans consider the level of customer service important when deciding to do business with a company, but only 24% believe companies value their business and will go the extra mile to keep it
• 81% of Consumers are far more likely to give a company repeat business after a good service experience, while 52% are unlikely to do business with a company again after a poor experience
• 48% feel companies are helpful but don’t do anything extra to keep their business

As I mentioned in my last piece, the objective of social media for business should be relationship building. The American Express study leads me to add a touch more to that opinion…social media for business should be about building a strong customer service relationship.

Think about it; isn’t social media—from social networking, to micro blogging, to chats—the perfect medium for helping a customer believe a company values their business? The investment by the company can be pretty small (it’s certainly less than a 30 second spot in prime time telling me you are all about customer service!) and the potential interaction with the customer powerfully intimate.

For example, say I buy a shiny new LCD TV from Best Buy. On check out, instead of asking me to go to Bestbuy.com to fill out an online survey on my experience today (you bet!), maybe the clerk gives me the address (or signs me up!) for a chat group where I can get real-time help during set up. Or, maybe she asks if “Sally” from Customer Service can contact me via Facebook, Twitter, Tick-it or some other forum to see how things are going. If I accept an invitation from “Sally,” the brand-customer relationship has now moved from the immeasurable to the measurable, the catalyst being my interest in customer service via digital means.  

As marketing staffs thrash about trying to create the perfect campaign for social media—one with a measurable ROI of course!—why not take a second to ask what your team might be able to accomplish with social media that shows current customers you value their business and demonstrates your customer service is tops among your competitors?

Augmented Reality is looking to explode into our lives and change how we experience…well…almost everything. But the real power will come when Augmented Reality converges with other emerging technologies.

If you can barely handle the reality you have, you better hang on to your id, superego, and basic hold on the world. Here comes Augmented Reality and it looks to change a how we relate to everything around us. At its core, Augmented Reality isn’t that weird of a concept. It basically means that you take a real video or image and you overlay computer generated images. We’ve seen this in movies, commercials and advertising for years. Heck, I can do this on my Mac without too much trouble.

Where it starts to resemble something that would have made Gene Roddenberry proud is when you start adding technologies like mobile, GPS and the power of the internet to give you instant, personally relevant information.  For example, a company called Layar created an application that lets you look at city streets through the view finder in your mobile phone and overlays icons of local shopping, restaurants and point of interest. So, if you’re hungry, pull out your phone, pan the street and look for the pizza and hamburger icons to lead you to lunch.

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Internet watchers, particularly business types involved in marketing, have been predicting that the Internet will become more tribal as it becomes more pervasive. The parallel might be the rise of Industrial Age cities: people left their local communities and moved to big anonymous cities, but then the cities got so big that people organically developed boroughs, gangs, neighborhoods, etc. The social internet of the old usenet days is the pre-city world; Facebook and Twitter represent the megalapolises. And now we the citizenry are self-organizing into tribes.

Tyler Newton thinks this will happen now, in 2010:

The tribal Internet–Social networking and Internet content will evolve into networks of sites and information streams focused around common interests. Whether it’s for work, hobbies or issue advocacy, interest groups will form virtual “tribes” online, sharing content, ideas, opinions, advice and information among themselves. Magazines, blogs, e-mail newsletters and video content are already interlinked and shared and promoted via RSS feeds and social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Because these tribes are built around natural affinities, in many ways they will have a more powerful hold on us than our existing groups based on schools and location. Marketers will not be successful with old-fashioned advertising that interrupts this flow of content. Successful marketers will be those that are able to join and gain the trust of the tribes, where people WANT to receive the marketing message.

You know how billboards are different depending on what part of the city you’re in? You’ll see that with tribal-based marketing. But aside from marketing, what does the tribal internet mean?

Organic Organization. Information will organize itself around the tribal centers that produce and consume it. If you want to find out about Iranian politics, you’ll go to the Iranian dissident tribe. This has been the case for a while, but it will become more explicit and become the shared understanding of the internet denizens. This should make it easier to find information and sort the wheat from the chaff; something’s going to need to.

This also means that in future internet, news finds you.  Your tribe will act as a filter and aggregator, sort of a Google Reader on steroids.  Rather than matching a search string you’ve set, actual humans who know you (at least a little) and are like you (at least a little) will throw information your way.

Working Topically. Wikipedia and the USG’s Intellipedia have long been proponents of this. Rather than organizing information by, oh, which academic institution did the study, which journal published it, or which author wrote it, the pedias organize information by its topic and let you see the sources of the data. Mainstream journalism has been opposed to this, since their bread-and-butter is getting people to go to them, the source, and take what info they provide. With the decline of that business model, a few traditional media outlets are partnering with Google on the Living Stories project, which provides the news topically, the way tribes want it.

Other tools for working topically including tags, social bookmarking, Twitter lists, and hashtags.

Metanet. The population of the internet has hit the point where we can no longer lump everything and everyone together as “the Internet.” There’s the internet of things, as more and more devices come online of their own accord, and more and more sensors are added. There’s the cloud, where data is stored and processed, there’s the commerce internet, there are the walled gardens of intranets and private instances, and there’s social media, now the main way people interact with the internet.  I’m starting to call these the metanet, the macronet, the micronet, and the me net. Just like you travel a city differently if you are considering its architecture and structure, if you are attending class or doing business, if you’re shopping, if you’re having a private club meeting, or if you are going out with friends, you’ll engage with the internet differently. Transitions from one net to another will usually be transparent, but just like going through an airport or into a government building, there will be areas where you will still have to show your creds and leave a lot of your gear behind.

The metanet is the overarching concept – the grid, the net, the feed of cyberpunk – while the macronet is the public world of commerce, education, and business.  The micronet is your neighborhood, your regular stomping ground.  The me net is your intimate group of trusted friends and family.  By the time content is filtered through all these layers, it will be pretty well targeted to you.

TV and the Internet have been flirting with each other for years. Yet, these two crazy kids haven’t quite been able to get together in a way that would make it worth tuning in. That’s all changing, and there are some very cool Internet powered TV (also called Smart TVs) applications coming soon to a living room near you.

Imagine sitting in your rec room, watching the big game but having to run off to the in-laws. You peel yourself off the couch, wave your mobile phone in front of the TV and “grab” the game while in mid-stride towards the door. You catch the rest of the game on your phone while riding in the car – no logging in, no special equipment. Just wave and go (also good for bathroom breaks!). When you get to the in-laws, you “flick” the phone and send the game to their TV. This is the kind of stuff you will eventually be able to do with  Smart TVs.

Think about how the Internet changed cell phones…oops, I mean “mobile devices” – they no longer like it when you call them cell phones. We now have armies of iPhones, Blackberries and Androids that scour the web and deliver us countless useful little apps. They’ve changed the way we work, play, flirt and kill time (see our post about the App-A-Lanche and how much we’ve changed). Yet, TV has been relatively untouched. Sure, there’ve been a few fledgling attempts to merge TV and the Web. Apple’s first foray into this market, a device called Apple TV, has been around since 2006. It was expensive, quirky and didn’t do anything that made people want to rush out and get it. By 2008, Steve Jobs started to refer to Apple TV as “a hobby.” Some gaming systems, such as Wii, let you do some rudimentary web surfing, but those are pretty clunky. more »

A client in the financial services sector recently asked me for my thoughts on how trends in social media will affect the way their sales force engages and closes a deal with a new customer.  After pondering the question, I offered the following scenario:

It is just as likely the customer-agent meeting will take place at a local coffee house as a traditional office. The potential customer will have done some comparative shopping of products, looked at comments or recommendations your current customers or competitors have posted on the web, and will have searched the virtual fingerprint of the agent via LinkedIn, Facebook,  Google, etc.

Sitting down to a fully-personalized beverage (I get to have it exactly as I want it, all life should be that way!), the customer will be connected to the internet via a handheld device and able to confirm, refute or clarify their own info, and the inputs or comments from the agent, within moments of the need to do so. The customer may even provide a running commentary about the meeting live to friends and family—via Twitter, Foursquare or Facebook—or record it in a public forum like Yelp.

Bottom-line: the engagement will be on neutral turf; the customer will be armed with information that may or may not be your messaging; and, the customer’s take-aways from the encounter have the potential to be shared with an un-calculable audience in seconds. more »

Three short years ago Apple changed the rules when they opened up their phones to the universe, letting third party vendors write programs. Although there were technically apps before that, developers and companies were free to develop their own, branded apps on iPhones platform (something virtually unheard of at the time). Since then, over two hundred and twenty five thousand of those handy little programs are in Apple’s App Store alone (and that’s not counting places like the Android Market and Blackberry App World). The market isn’t slowing any time soon. According to a recent Nielsen report on mobile apps, smart phones are expected to overtake feature phones in the U.S. by 2011. You can now do anything with apps from manage your bank account to put a voodoo curse on your boss. I can almost see Apple’s campaign slogan “There’s an app for that” on a Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture edition. At first, this just looks like an “App-A-Lanche” of mind boggling amounts of new programs crushing into the market. But take a closer look, and you can see that there has been a impressive evolution in the app world.

Early apps were very simple. They were like single-cell programs, letting you calculate a tip or see what time it was in China. Not many frills, and conventions were still being hammered out. Developers were like nervous teenagers on a date, not sure how far to push things. Should they charge for apps? Should they give them away for free? How complex should they be? Apple had given them they keys to the iPhone Ferrari, and they weren’t sure where to go. As developers got more comfortable with this new medium and companies and start-ups started waking up to their potential, these simple apps soon began to multiply. Apple also helped things by opening the App Store in July 2008 and allowing users to download apps directly to their iPhones (ten million apps were downloaded the first weekend the App Store was opened). From July 2008 to January 2009 the Apple App Store went from 500 apps to 15,000. more »