Untangled

It wasn't that long ago that I worked for a big company, and not that long before that I worked for a HUGE company. As this week's discussion focuses on intrapreneurship, I find myself thinking about how those large companies were structured, and what made it possible or impossible for people to make change happen.

How huge a company did I work for? We had cafeterias that would have been right at home on the Vegas strip. We had a convenience store and a post office. Dry cleaners. We had offices and facilities around the country and around the world. And we were just a subsidiary of a much larger entity.

In reality, though, we were a bunch of loosely gathered groups of people working on individual parts of the whole. Humans are like that. We work together in small teams and intersect with other small teams until next thing you know, conglomerate!

So what enabled and empowered people to make change happen in the midst of so many people trying to get so many disparate things done? Two things: ignorance and bliss. And you thought they were the same thing - au contraire! They just go hand in hand to create situations where good people do good things.

Bliss is easy to define and understand. People who love what they do get things done in spite of micromanagers, bean counters, corporate mission statements and all the other claptrap that comes from working in an environment where neckties are cutting off too much bloodflow to too many brains that would know better otherwise.

So how about ignorance? Well, the best kind of ignorance is when you don't know that you can't do something, or that you're not supposed to. A lot of great innovation takes place in the gap between what we can do and what is supposedly impossible.

A less positive kind of ignorance is when you do things because your management is ignorant and you take advantage of their thickness. All too common in behemoth companies. Easy to pull off if your manager is looking to climb the corporate ladder, but usually in order for innovation to work, people need to know about it. Eventually. And the thick ladder climbers among us are never too keen on things that they didn't know about. You had best hope that your innovation is grand enough for them to take credit for and get promotoed out of your way.

Better is when management is willfully ignorant, giving you direction with as little as possible to constrain your efforts to get stuff done. These are the folks that don't just talk about hiring people who are smarter than they are, they do it and then expend their energy in clearing obstacles from their paths. It would seem to be a much better situation for all, except that the manager in question rarely gets promoted out. As a matter of fact, this kind of manager is usually despised by other silo heads, and gets sacrificed rather quickly to the gods of mediocrity.

Usually to then go and become an entrepreneur, and be more successful than all, save for the truly craven ladder climbers.

Of course, if you can enjoy your bliss in the shadow of an empowering manager while they last, the results can be truly redefining for you and for your company. If you're really good, you can expand a company's reach to do good outside the corporation's ivory towers, achieving true bliss as you find a way to transform the company that keeps your wallet from having cobwebs into one that helps create a better community and world.

Yes, I'm about to go off on another tangent about books and movies and music and how we bring them home. What does this have to do with social entrepreneurship? Well, bear with me, we'll see if we get there by the end. At any rate, this space is free, you haven't paid a thing for it, so if I don't circle back around and make this relevant, you haven't wasted any money, only your time.

I bought a CD and a book last week from two of my favorite 'artists,' John Mellencamp and Larry McMurtry. Quotes are because These two probably don't really see themselves as artists so much as storytellers. Regardless, their own valuation of their artistry aside, each has a new product on the market in both digital and analog formats.

So, which format did I choose to buy them in? Sue me, lousy geek that I am, I went the analog route. I didn't go out and buy them at a store, I had them shipped, meaning I waited for three days while they made their way circuitously across the interstates to my front door. And I paid more for the physical format than I would have if I had simply downloaded them the minute they were available on iTunes or Amazon. Why?

I mean, the book would have been marvelous in digital format. I would be able to read it late at night while trying to get my newborn to sleep, allowing Mom to sleep without the lights on. And the Mellencamp album isn't exactly the most pristine recording that requires the higher bitrate of a CD. It was recorded via a single mic onto a 55 year old tape recorder. And I just ripped it onto my Mac to listen to on my iPhone anyway.

Well, as for the book, I plead collector's insanity. I have all of McMurtry's books in old school analog format, plus one he wrote as Ophelia Ray. Seemed a shame to break up the set. He's 73 and keeps threatening that his next book will be his last. The CD? Pushed the order total over the free shipping mark.

That said, I am slowly making the digital book transition. I have a couple of e-books now, though I have yet to finish reading one. By the end of the year, one of my favorite trashy thriller authors, Steve Berry, will put out two new books, one in hardback (and I assume eBook as well) and one exclusively as an eBook. So perhaps my hand will be forced, and I will filling my walls with dead trees and migrate over to this new fangled world.

When I started this blog, YouTube was just getting started. iTunes is a very different beast than it was, and the iPhone/iPad have created whole new categories of content and functionality. A lot has changed over the past four+ years. It is easier everyday to put your content out in various formats via various channels. In our space, the question isn't one about how to protect intellectual capital and guard against pirates. It is about how to get your message into as many hands as possible.

As with video, pictures and short content (think blogs), there is now a logical venue for longer text as well, eBooks. Sure, you could always put up a PDF before, but this is about putting it out into the marketplace where it can be findable amongst the rest of the stuff out there to people of like minds and like hearts. You could put video on a site way back in the oh so distant nineties, but it took YouTube for anybody to see them. Now the same is true for books in the iBookstore and Kindle.

Why wait for a publisher to get your book printed, stacked in a warehouse and ready to be trucked across the highways to bookstores and homes? Why pay to have your book self-published and make people wait for it to arrive via snail mail when ebook publishing is free? If you have someone's attention, and they want to read a longer treatise on why you are about what you do, let them get it as fast as possible.

I'll wait the extra couple of days to enjoy the tactile sensation of reading one of my favorite authors, but you had better put a trashy thriller in my hands ASAP, before I forget about it and move on. Same goes for your words of wisdom. Make it easy, make it digital. Don't waste your readers' time.

I've seen the future and it will be... something else by the time we get there, and will have unintended consequences.

Computers and other electronic devices? Wicked. I love my iPad, I love being able to touch and pinch and zoom. I love being able to video chat from here to China, or from London back to here via Skype on my MacBook. But what if today's gleaming wundertoyinfotainmentdevice ends up here?

I want a jet pack just like every other geek out there, and I want a flying car - but the last thing I want is to be able to check the traffic report by looking out my window - and up.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks? Great for keeping me in touch with old friends and finding out new information. The drive to monetize? Reminds me a bit too much of the dotcom era, when (almost) any geek with a text editor could get funded to build a business that did exactly... well, it was digital anyway.

The best thing about a newspaperless word? All of that paper and ink that was used to justify advertising prices by oversubscribing to people who never read the thing anyway? Or all those pages that were never read? I mean, really, have you ever read a newspaper cover to cover? The death of newspapers and magazines will be a story for a while still - in newspapers and magazines. But those stories will be read online, and a few trees can be left standing where they are as a result.

And yes, I still miss my Sunday morning LA Times. I miss sitting out in the backyard eating breakfast and reading the paper. Now I can do it on the iPad, and instead of having to clean newsprint off my fingers before picking up a muffin, I have to clean muffin bits off my fingers before touching my iPad. And it takes more than a persistent gust to blow the iPad into the neighbor's hydrangeas.

A bigger, better, brighter future is going to require a lot more than wishing that clean coal exists. It is going to take a lot more than declaring that the U.S. is addicted to oil, or lamenting that poor people in the third world are picking apart ewaste from the so called first world in order to survive. It is going to take more than being able to scream last and loudest.

It's going to take brains, persistence and enduring a heck of a lot of people screaming about how you're trying to take something away from them instead of giving them and future generations something better.

Back to the Future day is still more than 5 years away, and I'm still waiting for my hoverboard and selflacing Nike's. I'm okay with waiting a bit longer for these and other future relics from the last century - as long as we continue towards using technology to eliminate waste and brighten young minds.

Then, five years from now, I want a flying Delorean so I can go back in time to 1985 and tell myself the bad news about the future. No jetpacks.

Tech devices get wet. I have yet to have this be a problem myself, but it seems inevitable that it will happen to me someday. I have rescued someone else's laptop from a coffee spill, but was unsuccessful in bringing a MacBook back from an encounter with orange juice. Seems that Apples and orange juice are a bad combination. (ha cha cha... I'm here all week, don't forget to tip your wait staff.)

So, what do you do when you spill your soda on your netbook? Or drop your smart phone into a... puddle? Hopefully, you have some rice available when you do it.

There are, thankfully, other things you can do to save your wet tech if no rice is handy. And if you wet is of the saltwater variety, you'll want to make sure and do the counterintuitive and rinse it in water before dropping it in rice.

Oh, and I don't care what this guy says, iPhones aren't immune to the plunge. Someday I'm sure that all tech out of Cupertino wil be airtight and waterproof, but until then, best to avoid snorkeling with your iPhone.

Of course, I can't wait for the day when there's a dryerbox next to a Dyson Airblade in every men's room in the world. Rice is fine and dandy, but 2 to three days waiting for my phone to dry out woud seem like an eternity, and a few bucks to get it dried out in a half hour would seem worth the cost. Especially if it meant not having to tell people why your phone was in an air tight container of rice.

Kodak stopped making Kodachrome film last year. The last roll off of the production line was given to photographer Steve McCurry, who took the famous picture of the Afghan refugee girl with the green eyes for National Geographic. A documentary on the 36 pictures he snapped with that final roll will air later this year on the National Geographic Channel.

So why does a technology - which is essentially what Kodachrome was - merit virtual obituaries when it becomes obsolete? For the same reason I wish I still had a drawer full of Disneyland ticketbooks, all full of A & B tickets with nary an E-Ticket to be found. Yes, it's nicer to just wander the park and get on the rides without worrying if you have the right ticket left to board, but there was something magical about opening that drawer when I was a kid and rifling through the ticketbooks to see what the options were. Nostalgia is a powerful force.

My newborn daughter might never see film, or have pictures developed on film. Every picture taken of her thus far has been digital. My teenage stepson has used disposable cameras before, but mainly the underwater kind, as a decent real underwater camera is too pricey for the handful of times we've sent hime snorkeling to look at fish.

I have developed film in darkrooms, both professional and makeshift. The chemicals smelled awful, and always seemed rather messy. Still, it was fun to see the images appear on the paper. Polaroids were novel too, akin to a cameraphone picture these days in quality - though cameraphones continue to get better each year.

My first experience with a digital camera was with Apple's Quicktake 100 which they made with Kodak. It was akward to hold, sort of projector-esque in shape, and could hold a whopping 32 pictures at 320x240, or you could go high-res and get all of 8 pics at 640x480. I drooled over it. But I couldn't justify spending $750 on it. (Okay, I worked at a distributor, I could have gotten it for about $600, but still...)

Now, of course, you almost certainly have a better camera in your pocket everyday. And it makes calls, gets email, etc. I have Hipstamatic on my iPhone which lets me virtually experience the joy of taking pics and wondering what they heck they're going to look like, how they're going to fade - crappy, beautiful, elegant mistakes. I've taken some of my favorite pictures of my daughter with this app. When I get nostalgic for a darkroom, I turn to SwankoLab. The chemicals don't smell quite as bad virtually.

Technology gets better. What we carry around in our pockets ten years from now will make iPhones and Android phones look remarkably quaint. My original iPhone already is quaint. I mean, can you imagine a phone that can't even record video? Oh, the dark ages. Amazing that we survived.

What doesn't get better is us. I don't mean humantiy as a whole - that's a debate for another day. I mean us as individuals. We get older, hopefully wiser, and gain experience as we meander towards our graves. It gets tougher to get up off the floor, and more difficult to remember where we left things. We'll never be any more beautiful than we were at 17. It is hard sometimes to look in the mirror and remember what was, what used to be.

What you leave out is just as important as what you leave in. This is most products, and it is most undoubtedly true for your inbox.

Most tech media freaked out when the iMac was first introduced. Was it because it was Bondi blue? No, it was because it didn't have, among other things, a floppy drive. That was such a terrible move that this morning Apple released updated iMacs for the umpteenth time. For some reason they still refuse to put a floppy drive in it.

What do you put in your inbox that shouldn't be there? II'm not talking about SPAM, which is a different issue. I'm talking about all the other email that you have signed up for over the years.  You went to see a show years ago, and still get weekly or monthly emails telling you that you could go see another. Facebook updates every time anyone does something pointlessly annoying on Farmville, or posts another freaking picture of their kid. Email from Twitter every time someone follows you. Updates from Plaxo about what your friends are doing on other social networks - does anybody even know how the heck Plaxo ended up with their information? I can't remember, so I killed the alerts. And all of the other alerts.

Amazon has been telling me about new Blu-Ray releases every week or so, despite the fact that I have only had a Blu-Ray player for a coupleof months, have two Blu-Ray movies I bought elsewhere and really only bought it because I needed to replace my old DVD player, and it was just as cheap. (Okay, and I wanted to see Sleeping Beauty in as pristine a condition as possible. Yes, I'm a sap. I love Disney movies and will reflexively look for someone's hand to hold whenever a Hugh Grant movie comes on the tely. You've been warned.)

Go ahead, take a look at your inbox. How many emails are from Twitter, Facebook, Ticketmaster, ProFlowers, and whatever politician you thought about voting for eight years ago? How many from friends and colleagues? Yeah, that's what I thought. Judging by your inbox, nobody loves you more than Amazon and BarackObama.com.

If, like me, you have a common name and an easily mistyped email address, you even have a lot of OTHER people's mail in your inbox. I am evidently a fan of New York minor league baseball, a supporter of PETA, a staunch Republican, a single woman in Colorado, a frequent visitor to Las Vegas, Dallas and London, an XM Radio listener, a record producer in Boston and like to vacation at South Lake and Parks in the UK. If I sent flowers to everyone that ProFlowers tells me to send flowers to, you would have received a bouquet of lovely roses or lilies from me by now. I actually just deleted an email addressed to Dear Null.

Go ahead, unsubscribe. (Except, of course, from the Social Edge newsletter. Keep the important things! Besides, it would be a shame for me to have to explain to the big cheese how my blog posting resulted in x% loss of subscribers.) Go to your social networks and disable notifications. If you want to know what's going on on Facebook or LinkedIn go there. Login. Interact. Get rid of as much nonsense email as you can.

First thing you'll figure out is that you're not as busy as you think you are. Then you can go about the business of getting things done in the newfound gaps of silence that await you.

Somehow, I missed it when Google decided to join WalMart in owning their own energy subsidiary. Google can buy and sell energy in the U.S. which just sounds weird, doesn't it? Except when you think of the gigawatts that Google's data centers require to help us find important things like what songs Glen Campbell played on with the Beach Boys. Nothing frivolous gets Googled, you know.

Google and Google.org have invested in clean energy, and haven't as far as I know made any moves that would directly pay for their data center power consumption. It is reasonable to assume that when the right deal comes along, they will do just that.

That's one way for the world to change. If a giant like Google isn't happy consuming dirty energy and can't find clean energy because the market is to nascent, they can start creating their own market for clean energy.

So is Walmart doing the same, or are they just buying cheap energy? I won't pretend to be an expert here, but they seem to be moving even faster than Google in that direction. They have projects launched, and are committed to being supplied by 100% renewable energy.

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to fear big companies and their capacity for harmful monopolistic practices. If there is going to be real, lasting change in the energy industry, it is going to be made by big companies with the purchasing power to make other huge companies stand up and take notice.

Fear is a great motivator. Unfortunately, it usually motivates us to do things that aren't in our best interests, and oftentimes, to do things we regret completely later on.

In the world of tech, the fear that people feel is the fear of the unknown, that they don't understand a technology as well as a specialist and yet they have to rely on it. They fear making the wrong choice, aligning with the wrong platform or application and end up making the safe choice rather than the right choice. And a lot of times the safe choice is simply the one that everybody else is making.

Hence, Windows was the safe choice, not Macintosh. Drupal over Plone or Joomla, PHP over Python. Data closet filled with your own servers right alongside their backup tape drives rather than migrating to the cloud. Not that the former choices were necessarily bad choices, but the reason for choosing them often has been.

Figure out your niche, what problem you need to solve via technology. Then ask around and find out how other people have solved similar problems. Ask them what the shortcomings of their solutions were. Then go and see what other solutions exist that people aren't implementing in your neighborhood, but are getting rave reviews from their customers.

Does anybody managing an Exchange server actually like it? Do users rave about it? I have never seen it happen, and yet I have dealt with Exchange for over a decade. There are better solutions but fear gets in the way. In this case, a fear of change is in play as well.

Don't make choices out of fear. Evaluate your options and find the right fit. If you're the first, don't worry. If you make the right choice for your business and are successful with your implementation, others will follow. They always do.

Hackers. They're like the blowflies on a pile of elephant dung. They think life is grand, but really, they're just full of shit.

YouTube was hacked yesterday, evidently by a bunch of Justin Bieber fans. So one must assume that this is the same group of rabid Bieber fans that click-jacked Facebook about a month ago. So, great, there's a really annoying bunch of hackers out there with terrible taste in music. What's one to do? Try to convince them to listen to Future Bible Heroes?

 We have run into plenty of problems with our comments system and hackers. You'll occasionally see some Arabic on the site, and I would advise not clicking on any links you see in those comments. Apparently, you can get Viagra in Kabul, who knew? We're fairly lucky in that we're not a terribly visible site. (Gawd, I hate saying that.) YouTube, Facebook - these are the sites you want to hit if you're an attention starved hacker delinquent upset that your favorite tween pop star isn't getting enough props.

Why are all the hackers content with just being pests? Or somehow deriving a bit o' cashflow out of tricking people into clicking on their links? Where are our movie star hackers, our digital Robin Hoods?

You want to impress me? Hack into BP's accounts and transfer all of their assets to the World Wildlife Fund. Break China's firewalls and allow free access to information in the world's most populous country. Tap into CIA computers and expose where extraordinary renditions have happened. Replace Justib Bieber's web site with one that streams Prince's 20ten album out to the U.S. so that I don't have to beg my UK friends to send me a copy.

We have resisted the temptation thus far to install captchas on our site to dissuade the malevolently inclined robots from wasting your time and ours, but captchas waste everyone's time. Instead, we have tried to be diligent in cleaning it up when it appears, and some of you have been kind enough to let us know when you spot some. I've recently seen installs that are using Facebook Comments, which is interesting, and would allow people to comment without logging in to Social Edge directly while still not allowing anonymous users to muck things up.

We'll see what the future holds, but for now, we're all at the mercy of the Bieberhackers.

You're a teenager. Your big issue? Mom unthinkingly bought you an iPhone 4 when you're left-handed? You totally think Bella is slumming with either Edward or Jacob? Maybe your mother cancelled your World of Warcraft account:

If these are what qualify as big issues in your world, don't bother reading on.

I attended the What's Your Issue? 2010 awards ceremony over the weekend and was reminded that our future isn't just about leaving our kids a better planet, but about leaving the world with better kids as caretakers. What's Your Issue? is a contest that encourages kids to make a video about an issue they care about. The results were eye opening.

Shark fin soup, anyone?:

It was a refreshing and eye opening event. With cell phones being so prevalent in the developing world to where there are more cell phones than toilets in India (get to work, Jack Sim) and with more of them adding video recording technology, we're going to be seeing a lot more films like the What's Your Issue winners in the coming years.

Of course, cynic that I am, I can't wait to see a video about accessibility for left handed folks and the iPhone 4. (Seriously, Apple, are there no southpaws on your QA team? Maybe you can give a free bluetooth headset to every lefty?)

Yes, this whole post can be seen as an excuse to share another Abbott & Costello clip. But really, if Costello can convince Abbott that 13x7=28, then anything is possible, right?

Yesterday, I felt like nothing was possible. I was in a geek no man's land, where anything that plugged in was failing me. My TV wouldn't turn on, and my old TV wouldn't turn on either. (Needless to say, warranties? Expired.) My WiFi? Down, up, down, up, Dooooowwwwwwn, up. DownUp. All day long. Our server was cacheing things in ways it shouldn't cache things. Again.

So I was testing the wifi network with my iPhone and determined that it was, in fact working at that particular moment and I saw that iOS4 had come out. I had to leave for a meeting and would need my iPhone a couple hours later... and the last few times I updated the iPhone OS I was in a hurry as well, and the updates went, well, poorly. But the temptation was too great. I knew it was a mistake, especially when I was at the center of a seeming tech Bermuda Triangle.

So I set my little unsuspecting iPhone in its dock, clicked the update button and walked away. It was like saying good bye to a pet at the vet's office knowing that you'd never see ol' Sparky again. And I went back to trying to make our server behave in a matter more befitting of a modern web platform. To no avail.

So I was quite surprised when I was getting to leave for my appointment and remembered that  had left the iPhone updating. Expecting the worst, I went and took a look at the progress of the update, fully expecting to find a non-functioning iPhone, as I had when updating it on previous release days. Instead, it popped right on and showed me its yummy iOS4 features that  am sure I will get around to using at some point. (Multi-tasking? 'bout time.)

I had forgoten the golden geek rule: expect it to work, and it usually will. Expect it to fail, and it usually will.

Eventually I got back to the server and talking with our hosting provider to try and fix things. I was again expecting the worst, but another set of eyes found the problem. Simple solution, and the problem went away.

So, what am I going on about? Sometimes the answer is sitting right there in front of you, as obvious as 13x7=28. Don't try and complicate things, just go with it.

Philanthropy is largely a western man's endeavor. It is the 'developed' world's way to 'give back' to the less fortunate. Of course, giving back implies that something has been taken, but we don't need to get into geopolitical musings right now. I just want to opine on the rumblings of late that the third world is looking to help out the first world in solving some of its problems, sort of a reverse philanthropy, if you will.

And let's face it, the first world could use all the help it can find right now. Predatory lending practices in Bangladesh led Muhammad Yunus to start the Grameen bank, and predatory lending practices in the U.S. has led to the kind of economic instability last seen during the Great Depression. Hopefully, Grameen America can help bring some of that third world know how to Main St. USA.

Sure, I would like to think that superior technology is the cure to what ails us, but alas, I know better. Our superior western technology has us abandoning our computers in favor of mobile devices - and the third world skipped the whole desktop step and went right for a cell phone based infrastructure. Hopefully the rest of the world can skip over creating a combustion engine based transportation infrastructure too.

Whether it is obesity, scandalous golden parachutes, predatory banking or how to deal with a giant, foreign oil company destroying your coastline, I'm more than willing to give the 3rd world a shot a solving the problem. I drove through my beloved Los Angeles last weekend, and 1) could have walked faster, and 2) couldn't see the mountains for the smog, and thought, hey, maybe there's a better way. If you are in the third world, over thirteen and brilliant, you can help by entering the Design for the First World contest.

And of course, any excuse to post Abbott & Costello is too much of a temptation for me to resist, especially when overlaid with a "Friend BP on YouTube" advert:

I didn't attend today's Steve Jobs' keynote presentation at WWDC 2010, as other priorities (scan a few posts down to see a pic of the new arrival that has been keeping me busy) took precedence this year. I was keenly aware, along with every other geek on the planet, that the latest iPhone would (probably) be introduced this morning, and so I was not shocked to see it come to pass.

The new iPhone is quite luscious, judging from pics and not hands-on experience. Glass on both sides, elegant, higher res display, HD video recording... yum, yum, yum! But... I was also reminded of the most glaring weakness of the iPhone (and, not coincidentally, of the 3G iPad). Apple controls the hardware and software to wonderful effect - but not the network. For the second year in a row, a great new feature has been introduced and is already crippled by the network provider, AT&T in the U.S.

Finally, we get a phone that is a real video phone. We've been promised this device since... well, since before I was born. AT&T even brought one to market back in the late 1960's (at $5 a minute?!?!? In 1968? Yes, AT&T has evidently made a business out of limiting the usability of interesting technology for at least a half century!) Only this video phone requires wifi. Why? Carriers need to be convinced to allow the admittedly high bandwidth app on their network. So it isn't a video phone. It is a tiny computer that you can video chat on.

Luckily, early adopters won't be ponying up their cash for this feature alone. The phone has a ton of whiz-bang niftiness to get it into people's hands, and eventually the carriers will come along for the ride. But how long will it take? And will AT&T charge $5 a minute this time too? Seems just as ridiculous now as it must have back in 1968. They'll do the right thing, right?

Yeah, and I'll be using the feature introduced last year soon too. You know, tethering? The ability to connect my iPhone to my laptop and go online with my laptop via the iPhone's 3G connection? A year later AT&T will finally allow tethering, as long as you are willing to change your data plan from unlimited to limited with overage fees. Yes, just in time to use it on their network more by tethering.

It reminds me of a story that another Apple executive, Guy Kawasaki, gave at another Apple conference about 15 years ago. It has been 15 years, so I am paraphrasing via a serious time lag, but essentially he was talking about how CD-ROMs had made Encyclopedia Brittanica irrelevant, and that the company could have brought their encyclopedia to market via CD-ROM but their staff of sales people wouldn't hear of it. Their jobs depended on going out and selling encyclopedias, and they wouldn't be needed if it was available on CD-ROM. So others filled the void and they were all laid off anyway. He related it to the turn of the 20th century when freezers came to market and ice salesmen told people they should keep buying from them. I mean, why wouldn't you want your ice delivered instead of having to have it on hand all the time? Why would you want to make it yourself? He then said that the internet was going to create a whole lot of new ice salesmen over the next 20 years or so.

The telecomms are selling ice, they just don't know it yet.

My phone is now more useful to me on wifi than on their network, and the iPhone 4 only makes it more so. I didn't wait for the 3G version of the iPad because I didn't want to deal with AT&T (good thing too, since they already changed the terms of service in a less than customer friendly manner). I use my iPhone begrudgingly on their network and when I want to use the iPad, I find wifi.

We want 4G services that are as good as I have over wifi in my house. Until that happens, customers are going to love their devices - be they iPhones, Androids or Palms - and hate their carriers.

Of course AT&T should be aware that I can use the new Facetime video phone feature of the iPhone 4 on a 4G network already - via a MiFi on their competitors network. It'll let me use my iPad on it too, along with my MacBook - sans tethering.

At some point I think the tech companies are simply going to end up buying the telecomm carriers in order to provide the services that their devices require. Apple will get AT&T, Google will buy Verizon, HP will get Sprint and Microsoft will own T-Mobile. They'll buy them up and then fire all the ice salespeople. They'll go global so that a video conference call from San Francisco to Dubai to Tokyo is simply included in your monthly bill.

It will happen because people like Steve Jobs hate standing up in front of a crowd introducing an amazing new feature and then having to admit that it will be crippled because of their business partner. It will happen because rabid early adopter customers (like, say... me) will decide to forgo upgrading to the cool new toy until the cool new features can be supported by the network they run on.

I used to be a print designer. I called myself a graphic designer, but now that the web exists, the 'print' distinction is an important one. There are, of course, all kinds of things you can do digitally that aren't possible in print, the main one being extending the reach of your distribution cheaply and infinitely. I can read the London Evening Standard on my iPhone even if I'm not trapped in London by a giant cloud of volcanic ash.

You can include video in your web designs, and link to sources or other relevant content rather than simply providing a footnote to something that the reader wouldn't be able to find unless they happened to have access to the same library resources that you do. You can also correct errors after you publish.

But it is so much easier to make things look they way you want them to in print.

Sure, you can make things look good online via CSS, pictures, and a ton of compromises. A lot of the time, the compromise that one has to make in designing for the web is speed vs. aesthetics. This is never more apparent than when fonts come into the picture. Don't believe me? Say 'Verdana or Trebuchet MS?' to a web designer and watch their eyes roll back in their heads and threaten to stay there until the ugly goes away. Say Arial if you want them to cry like they've just been dumped by their first flame.

So it was with much glee that I read about Google's new efforts in the arena of web fonts. Sure, others have done this before, but as a paid service, not as a free open source api. And they managed to do it without stepping on the toes of one of the leaders in the field, Typekit.

Adding a font to a page is now as easy as adding a coupe of lines of CSS to your page or template. Wicked. The selection is minimal to begin with but already expands upon what was available before (the standard install Windows fonts, unless you wanted to cater to a Mac audience and then your selection opened up a smidgen) that it is hard to complain about the small number of fonts available. In the Sahara, every drop of water seems like an ocean.

Will this lead to prettier, more accessible web pages? Yes. And not just from a bandwidth perspective. Sure, the prettiness and the speed increase over images is nice, but accessibility is easier to achieve via text than images, so bonus points on that front.

Of course, this will also allow people to create some very lightweight, fast, and extraordinarily ugly web pages. Not that that has been an area with a dearth of possibilities up until this point.

The past year has been rather busy for me personally, and has been filled with a lot of firsts. The first time I went surfing, the first time I went to Africa, the first time I attended the Skoll World Forum and the first time I was ever stranded in London by a volcano. This weekend wins out, however, as it was the first time I was responsible for bringing a child into this world.

And yes, while by responsible I mean both that I am a father for the first time after years as a step father, and that I also delivered her as well. She arrived much faster than expected, and despite the fact that the 911 call resulted in more qualified people arriving at my door faster than I would have ever suspected possible, baby Darwin was even quicker. Sometimes all the planning in the world can't prepare you for what actually happens in life, and you just have to adapt.

After checking to see that she was breathing, noting the time, counting fingers and toes I checked to see what gender this new life was - which was supposed to be the big surprise -and found that she was a beautiful baby girl. Mom and daughter are both healthy and happy and are both exquisitely amazing.

I'll get back to talking about technology next time, but just had to share a little software news this time around. The iBaby is way cooler even than anything Jobs has hidden up his sleeves for WWDC.

Generally, we refer to surfing when we talk about using the internet. Perhaps we'll see it referred to as kayaking in Africa.

Kayak.com's co-founder, Paul English, is looking to cover Africa with wifi. Oh, and he'd like to have it be a sustainable model, with tiered access. Free for basic functions such as email, Wikipedia and such with fees for faster bandwidth and more services.

Wicked! I wonder if he could do the same in North America afterwards? Seriously, give me blanket wifi coverage over all of North America and I don't need AT&T or Verizon or any other telco selling their outdated, overpriced service model to me. I mean really, charging for texts? In what world does that make sense outside of some corporate balance sheet?

I love the initiative and I love the model. I hope this doesn't become one of those grandiose ideas that doesn't pan out.

Africa has only 8.7% of its population with internet access right now, and a lot of that is very expensive at that. You blanket the continent with free wifi and access to inexpensive computing - be it netbooks or tablets or wifi enabled cel phones- and the world will never be the same.

Came across this video this morning, and was reminded that I was recently stranded on another continent by a volcano:

I learned that there was a Volcano Refugee site set up while I was stranded. Learning this now was of course pointless, as I am no longer stranded, and the web site hasn't been updated in three weeks.Still, nice to see that refugees can still be high functioning members of society as long as they have broadband access to the internet.

I made many grand plans for getting out of London, only one of which came to fruition. And that one involved UK airspace opening up and me hopping on a plane out of Heathrow. Not nearly as romantic as my other plans that involved (in various and complicated combinations) the Chunnel, a ferry, a helicopter, a private plane, a train to Moscow, and driving across France in the middle of the night with a native Parisian to get to Madrid.

Still, just because none of the more complex plans were required didn't make pursuing them any less worthwhile. Next time I'm stuck someplace and want nothing more than to get out, I'll have experience in finding and assessing escape routes, and I'll know that eventually a solution will present itself, as they always seem to do.

It's okay. You don't get Twitter. You don't like Facebook because there was never anyone in high school that you wished you had asked out and never did. Digg is something your kids do in the back yard. Foursquare? Gowalla? You don't care what the best location based social media tool is? Don't worry, in 6 months, nobody will say location based social media tool ever again. Sort of like how you never hear anybody say Shock and Awe anymore. Really, not that shocking, not worthy of awe.

As many of you know, as you were there or read about it here, this year, the Skoll World Forum was unofficially extended by an Icelandic volcano. What happened afterward was interesting. People relied on their networks to help them out. How they kept in touch with their networks wasn't the important part, it was the fact that they have personal networks, and interact with them in a way that is comfortable to them.

For some, this meant email. Some relied on the contact list in their phones. Others leaned on Facebook and Twitter. The technology used to connect someone's network didn't matter, only that it existed and was available to them when they needed it. Watching people in my network find a place to stay with friends or friends of friends via Twitter was eye-opening.

If the people you rely on aren't on Twitter, chances are, it won't be of much use to you the next time Eyjafjallajökull blows and strands you overseas. Then again, if you're like me, maybe you could stand to get out a bit more often, and extend the reaches of your network. I'm not sure that I could have found a room to stay in via Twitter, and I kind of envy those that can.

Earth day was last Thursday, and I was ever so grateful to be celebrating the day back home from the UK, having escaped the island after mother nature blew her top in Iceland. I didn't know it was Earth Day until today. The local stores here switch right from selling Easter decorations to selling graduation themed chotchkies. Evidently, the planet is not a big themed table cloth mover for the retail sector.

I thought Earth Day was coming soon or had passed because there was a gaggle of green related iPhone Apps highlighted in the iTunes App Store. Better I guess to buy virtual Earth Day paraphernalia on a device that is destined to be eWaste someday rather than things that have a more direct path to the landfill I guess.

Of course, I knew that Earth Day had to be upon us when I read about the miracle cure for Global Warming: Whale Poop. And yes, the article does manage to squeeze in a note about Star Trek IV. Spock was right! Whales can save the planet!

I'm all for anything that promotes the preservation of whales in the wild. I mean, who isn't? And I was for this before I even knew about their miracle poop. I can't wait to hear suggestions, both serious or farcical, that what we need to do is wean people off of eating beef and replace this staple food product with whale burgers.

Maybe Sea World can move from conservation to a more agricultural breeding program at their resorts? (And no, I can't let the moment pass to mention how weird it is that they have sea food restaurants at Sea World. 'Jump through the hoop, Flipper, or... shish-ke-bob!')

It has always amazed me just how far we as a species are willing to go to avoid changing our bad habits. Why stop consuming fossil fuels when we can just create a Match.com for grey whales? Carbon offsets? Pshaw! We just need to turn Kansas into a big whale aquarium. I can't wait for the global market in whale poop to take off. Invest now before it's too late!

Here in London, I have an iPad, a Blackberry, an iPhone, a MacBook Pro a digital camera, a travel hard drive and a Flip camera. For a couple extra pounds a night, I could fire up the flat panel tv above my head here and choose from a wide array of entertainment options. There's wifi here, or if I get sentimental there's even a Cat-5 cable here that can connect me virtually to home. But there's nothing in my back of gizmos that can get me home right now.

Mother Nature, the great equalizer. But hey, I'll get home eventually, once the goddess Pele has been appeased.

Sometimes, all the tech in the world just isn't enough. Joi Ito reminded one of the sessions at Skoll World Forum last week of the power of sneakernet. Once upon a time, the fastest and best way to get a file from one place to another was via a floppy disk and a pair of Air Jordans. He was describing different ways to obscure your digital trail so that a file's origin could not be determined. Human networks, sneakers and a USB flash drive disguised as a key are the tools that make evading the prying eyes of oppressive regimes.

Sometimes technology is of little use to us in accomplishing what we need to get done. My iPhone has been in Airplane Mode for nearly two weeks now. Unless I'm near open wifi, it is a note taking device and a diversion, little more. An interconnected internation network isn't terribly useful if you have a video file that your government doesn't want the rest of the world to see and can use that interconnected tool to find you and stop you.

And if mother nature says that it is time to chill for a bit by spewing ash into the air, you might as well kick back, relax and play some tunes to try and let her know that you respect and honor her, and realize that we know that all our base are belong to her.