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Lots of retweets and links to this morning’s IDC report on the PC industry falling off a cliff in the first quarter — sales are down some 13% from the previous year. Stowe Boyd blogs that the analysts need to get over it, stop using words like “worrisome”  and embrace the better world of cheap touch devices in this “Post-PC Era” that happens to coincide with the third birthday of the iPad.

“Personally, I think we should be cheering the transition to more convenient, lower-cost, gesture-based tablets. It’s not regrettable. But the IDC analysts are obviously rooting for the past, and we’re zooming into a future they don’t like much. I think they should side with the people shifting to tablets.”

Windows 8 and its lukewarm welcome is taking some of the blame. Not having upgraded myself I can’t bring myself to trash an OS that I haven’t played with, but I hear over and over that the upgrade is particularly frustrating on older, non-touch enabled PCs. In a talk I gave to the Cape Cod Technology Council last Friday morning, I led off with the obvious observation that the PC paradigm shift is the most massive upheaval the tech world has seen in thirty years, comparing the disruption of tablets on PCs to what Wikipedia did to the Encyclopedia Britannica ….. an analogy Stowe cites as well.

It’s not an all-or-nothing transition. PCs are not going to become the typewriters of tomorrow. The advantages of large screen/awesome keyboard composition will prevail. My microprocessor and storage might one day live in my phone which I’ll snap into a desktop cradle and wirelessly connect to a bluetooth full size keyboard/mouse and a big flat panel display, but as far as I’m concerned the PC experience comes down to the size of the screen and the awesomeness of the keyboard. The box itself — whether it is a clamshell laptop, a Yoga multidevice like the Surface, an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard or a big tower I built myself from parts bought off of Newegg — is irrelevant. Not to the companies that make them of course, but the “paradigm” of sitting in front of a monitor and banging on keys will remain the same for all professionals. Touch is nice for consuming, but hell on creating.

My daughter gave me a Duracell Powermat for Christmas and I’m loving it so much I bought a second one for my New York office. The system consists of a sleek base unit that can accommodate two devices, a case for my Samsung Galaxy S3, and a portable battery unit that can charge a fading phone away from the base. This is cordless charging, the same inductive technology used to recharge electric toothbrushes. I first saw it demonstrated in 2009 at Qualcomm, but it was a bit clunky and didn’t seem all that interesting at the time.

But in practice the system is awesome with a couple irritations. After fitting the case over the phone and plugging it’s male connector into the phone’s female micro-USB port (tight fit, which makes changing cases a bit of a hassle — more on that in a second) the phone can be placed on the charging base where it magnetically slips into the proper position with an audible confirmation that charging has started. I set the phone to go into “bedside” mode when its docked on the Powermat. Only two phones are supported — the Galaxy and the iPhone 4s — but the iPhone 5 case is expected sometime soon. The base units come in three, two and single device configurations. I thought the spare battery brick was a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, but on a recent vacation it was pressed into use.

The hard plastic case isn’t as rugged as an Otterbox and has to be removed if I want to dock the phone in the car cradle. I imagine Duracell has a car unit in the works, but for now I have to peel off the Duracell case to use the phone in the car for the usual GPS/handsfree/Audible/music stuff.

Duracell is pushing the technology hard, painting a picture where charging bases will be available in coffee shops, nightclubs, airport lounges, stadiums, etc.. and apparently truly wireless charging is over the horizon.

Here’s the obligatory YouTube vision of Millenial bliss:

The double-device mat is $90 at Amazon and includes the portable battery pack and a case for a single phone.. A one-device mat is $32.

In the 1980s and 90s during the early years of the PC industry, there was alot of discussion of the economic impact of slow computers on user productivity.  This was driven by some IBM research out of its Thomas Watson center in 1982: The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time by Walter Doherty and Ahrvind Thadani.

“When a computer and its users interact at a pace that ensures that neither has to wait on the other, productivity soars, the cost of the work done on the computer tumbles, employees get more satisfaction from their work, and its quality tends to improve. Few online computer systems are this well balanced; few executives are aware that such a balance is economically and technically feasible.

In fact, at one time it was thought that a relatively slow response, up to two seconds, was acceptable because the person was thinking about the next task. Research on rapid response time now indicates that this earlier theory is not borne out by the facts: productivity increases in more than direct proportion to a decrease in response time. This brief describes some of this research and the implications for increasing productivity and cutting costs that are among the chief challenges of business today.”

Then ten years ago Eric Horvitz at Microsoft started looking at the impact of interruptions on PC users and how long it took them to get back on task. The entire science of interruption is interesting,. especially for the lifehacker movement that tries to deliver great productivity via various hacks and techniques to reduce interruption.

Delays and interruptions are arguably related. While you wait for a slow site to load in your browser your mind seeks something to do rather than stare at the screen, a buffering warning, or some icon of an hourglass. You switch tabs, change screens, or just give up on the poky site or service and move on to the next thing, subconsciously annoyed at your old laptop, bad internet connection, or the general crumminess of the pipe between you and your destination.

My partner Ben shared this interesting fact buried in a five-year old presentation by Amazon’s Greg Linden on the economic impact of “latency” on ecommerce. This blew me away. In a presentation he claimed “Every 100ms delay costs 1% of revenue.”

You can get the presentation at Strangeloop, a vendor in the site optimization space. Here are some other impacts of site speed on key performance indicators:

I’ll take the liberty of extrapolating that from Amazon’s most recent reported revenue of $48 billion in 2012 to mean that 100ms of performance is equivalent to half a billion dollars a year.

In my experience CTOs and  CIOs at web-centric companies have tended to give more weight to availability than performance, stressing fault-tolerance and uptime over site performance.  While they may be driven by how many “nines” their infrastructure is rated at, I wonder how many are making the investment in monitoring services and tools to determine their site load times. For ecommerce operations focused on converting browsers to checked out carts, I would argue response time as valid a function of success as A/B testing and strong content marketing and audience development.

The performance of a computer degrades over time and most experts will advise re-installing the operating system and restoring the machine to its factory settings as a matter of habit. They also tell us to backup regularly and floss our teeth, but who has time?

My 2010 Thinkpad is a perfectly nice run of the mill T410s with a Intel i5 3450s 2.8 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM, a 128 GB harddisk, and built in Intel graphics. It’s rugged, it’s black, it has a trackpoint, and it does what it is supposed to be, albeit more slowly lately and with all the lethargic signs of a laptop that either needs to be replaced or revived.

The machine had some issues over the course of its life. A known defect in the display required a return to the service depot, and last summer I was so sick of constant overheating issues and black screen reboots that I sent it back with a week remaining on the warranty to have the motherboard and keyboard replaced.

Now it is just slow and sucky and needs a second life. The new keyboard means it is in top form physically, it’s just anemic and needs a cheap set of upgrades.

So the plan was:

1. Install a solid state harddrive – SDD — because that will probably deliver the biggest performance increase, especially for fast booting and application launches.
2. Re-install Windows 7 — but install a 64-bit version  because …
3. I can get 8 GB of cheap memory from Crucial for $38 and only 64-bit Windows can take advantage of any ram over 4 GB.

Here’s the problem:

1. The machine only accepts a 1.8″ SDD and prices for that weird form factor are almost as much as a new laptop in some cases. I am scouring the usual suspects — Newegg, Crucial, Amazon, eBay — but so far can’t find a cheap 64 GB SDD in the 1.8″ size other than a $117 64GB drive from Kingston. (Other option is a Thinkpad UltraBay HDD tray that will permit a standard 2.5″ drive, but that does away with my extra battery and/or DVD optical. 64 GB is fine given my complete embrace of Dropbox for my document storage and Amazon MP3s for my music storage up there in the cumulus.
2. Microsoft won’t permit a 32-bit to 64-bit Windows upgrade online.  In the end I need to pay $70 for the retail version of the Windows 8 Professional Upgrade as that contains both versions. Thanks to Paul Thurrott I found that answer. Microsoft makes it nigh impossible to figure out with their overengineered “update” wizard tool that drives a $40 download of the 32-bit version.
3. The RAM was ordered, installed, and sits awaiting some more headroom from the 64-bit Win8.

I once vowed that the original iPad I purchased in the spring of 2009 would be my last Apple tablet, and a couple weeks ago that indeed was proven true when I bought Google’s 7″ tablet, the Nexus 7, running Android’s Jellybean operating system. Sure I was tempted by the subsequent releases of Apple’s groundbreaking tablet, but … in the end, I object to it on the basis of cost, and most importantly, the “velvet cage” feeling I have whenever I try to live in the Apple world of iTunes, iCloud, and disabled commerce functions by any app that dares to circumvent Apple’s deathgrip (Kindle, Amazon music, etc.)

I went with the 16 GB version for $250 and in the week I’ve been using it I can declare it to be the most ergonomically lovable device I’ve ever owned.  The difference between a seven-inch device and a ten-inch one is significant given that the former can be clamped in one hand and the other is a constant juggling act. There’s a reason Amazon stuck to the dimensions of trade-paperback with the Kindle, and the Nexus followed, avoiding the big pane of glass that Apple and the early Android tablet makers favored. Yes, Apple is likely to introduce a smaller tablet soon — probably a bit over 7 inches, and it remains to be seen if such a pocket-sized tablet will be priced anywhere down below $300, where Amazon is obviously subsidizing the cost of its Fire, and Google with the Nexus.

Jobs apparently “detested” the smaller form factor, but I have to disagree with the maestro on this one. As a “tweener” device between a smart phone and full screen tablet or laptop, the Nexus 7 is definitely a “Goldilocks device” that feels just right.

Asus manufactures the device and does a surprisingly good job for a Taiwanese brand I used to associate with cheap products with poor fit and finish. What advantage Asus has in being Google’s manufacturer of choice remains to be see. It certainly helped HTC when the first Google phone was released, but hasn’t done much for the Chromebook manufacturers.

The Jellybean experience is far and away smoother and more functional than any preceding Android build. The user interface is optimized for the larger screen and indeed, as I installed my preferred apps, I saw most have been updated to take advantage of Jellybean’s look and feel.

This thing goes with me everywhere. Literally in the side pocket of my suit coat. I tether it to my Galaxy S III’s hotspot when I need a data connection, use it as a bluetooth music remote driving a set of Jawbone speakers, and am tempted to dash mount it in the car.

Show me the word “analytics” in an ad and I instantly grow cynical for word feels like the refuge of the desperate trying to sell the great white whale of ROI to the tight-fisted.

Dan Lyons calls out a very very interesting technology coming out of the MIT Media Lab for correlating social chatter and user utterances with television programming. This company, Bluefin Labs, strikes a strong chord given my past interest into the role of the “back channel” among fans during televised real-time events: Red Sox games, State of the Union Addresses, the Academy Awards.

This TedTalk from 2011, by Bluefin’s founder Deb Roy, is interesting on several levels. First, it exhibits an amazing demo of data collection and analysis — in this case video footage and audio clips shot throughout his home and then processed to track the progress of his baby learning how to speak the word “water,” mapped against the context of where and when the word was learned (bathroom, near the kitchen sink, etc.). This capture model has amazing implications in terms of building an amazing “life record” and brought to mind the efforts of people like Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project at Microsoft and Stephen Wolfram’s personal analytics analysis of his email history. I freak out when I see an old Super 8 movie of myself waddling around in sagging diaper circa 1959 at Cotuit Rope’s Beach. Imagine being able to see myself take my first steps, say “water”, etc.?

The interesting kicker to Roy’s personal experiment is the commercial application and the ability to map the Twitterverse and Social Graph to mass media events. If I was a media planner or TV stats wonk, I’d be freaking over this stuff from Bluefin.

So I have a new phone. The sleek Samsung Galaxy IIIS. It is a nice phone. It runs the latest public version of Google’s Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich. The phone is fast, very functional, and a joy to use after my prior junkware laden HTC Evo.

The mobile carrier is Sprint. I like Sprint for the most part. The attraction was their unlimited data plan, but that’s another discussion for another day. I did a jailbreak on the Evo to get rid of Sprint’s asshatted Nascar app and other memory hogging, undeletable pieces of junk inflicted by the marketing morons, and from then on was on my own with Cyanogen. I was happy to see the new Sprint install was basically unjunked and as close to pure ICS as one could get.

Yesterday my Google News page had a link to a story that Sprint was sending out a software update to Galaxy IIIS owners which would disable the “universal search” functionality delivered through the Google search widget on the home screen. This means a search doesn’t hit just the Web, but also looks locally on the phone at contacts, documents, etc. I like this feature very much.  It spare me from going to two functions to perform searches and makes things a lot more convenient.

So why is Sprint disabling the function? Because Apple is suing Samsung and Google for patent infringement, claiming the universal search function on a phone is its idea and its alone. While the parties duke it out in court, Google or Samsung or Sprint — who knows and who cares — decided to remove the function, which means if I accept and install the pending “software update” sitting on my phone, I’ll basically make it less of a phone.

What pisses me off is the complete lack of communication from Sprint, Samsung or Google that they are going to croak a function on my phone. There’s no email. There’s no warning or explanation. Instead I get this bullshit, mislabeled as a “fix” which does nothing to reveal the surprise inside. Indeed, according to a story at the Android Authority, which refers to the disabling code as an “easter egg”, the software update is being sent out to unsuspecting Galaxy owners at Samsung’s request. The “fix” comes with absolutely no description of what it purports to fix.

My feelings about Apple? Jobs did vowed to kill Android so the Samsung lawsuit is a big one. This latest move is what I expect from Apple, along with, high prices, DRM, irrational fans, discrimination against Persians, design porn, multiple failures in the cloud …..

Two years ago, when freed from the corporate tyranny of a mandatory Blackberry, I rushed to Best Buy and put my money down on the then-sexy HTC 4G EVO, Sprint’s flagship phone and the first Android smartphone to build any sort of geek-cred.

Last fall, sick and tired of the Sprint and HTC combined crapware, I jailbroke the phone and remade it in my own image with CyanogenMod. After a week or so of fiddling to restore the GPS and hotspot functions, I’ve been more than happy with the hardware as my primary mobile device, pushing its limits with many gigabytes of Amazon music stored locally on the 32 gb microSD, and loving its multi-functions on the dashboard of my car.

But two years are up and it’s time to upgrade to a new phone. iPhones are not an option. The screens are too small for my aging eyes (So go buy a Cricket you may say), and I continue to harbor a genetic allergy to Apple products, or rather, Apple operating systems and Apple prices and Apple attitudes towards DRM.

Android has been very good to me, so off I went looking for the hot new phone that would be most faithful to Google’s reference platform while at the same time giving me access to Ice Cream Sandwich, the ability to tether other devices to its WiFi hub, and unlimited data.

That of course meant continuing on with Sprint, even if they boned me to the tune of a $500 surcharge in March 2011 for daring to use it in Canada.  Sprint’s old claims of “4G” speeds was a quaint fiction predicated on finding a WiMax signal depending on whether or not ClearWire had rigged one up. As for 4G on Cape Cod — I’ll get it about as soon as I get fiber to the old house — but I do spend enough time in midtown Manhattan to expect a fast signal should I need one.

The phone I pre-ordered this week was the Samsung Galaxy S III – a well-reviewed phone that looks fresh enough to carry me another two years without any regrets. It should arrive before July (if Apple’s attempt at an injunction fails) and will doubtlessly take a little while to set up just the way I want it.

I wanted to keep this to myself –if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all — but here is my contribution to the pile of B.S. spreading today on the occasion of Facebook going public.

Facebook is over, about to topple over under the weight of a spectacular overvaluation, mass indifference to financial fundamentals, and most importantly my sense of the growing indifference of the generation it was supposed to serve — college students.  Facebook was famously founded as a digital replacement to the printed freshman directories of the Ivy League but has become obese with the inane status updates and vacation bragging of those same students’ parents. My generation. The one’s who pored over the original class directories in the 1970s and “posted updates” on whiteboards glued to our dorm room doors.

Wall Street is selling scale today when the trigger is pulled on Facebook at 11 AM EST — that’s dot.com hyperbole for “lots of traffic” — and while your local investment club may be all atwitter with the prospect of buying some shares, and it’s fun to count the herd of new Facebook gazillionaires now shopping for new Colnagos and bespoke skinny jeans — the smart money has been cashing out for a long time in the private market and will continue cashing out quickly at the top.  This is not Microsoft in 1984 nor Amazon in 1996. This is not a long term bet on a significant new way of doing business or even communicating. This is an investment in the 2012 edition of CompuServe and MySpace: yet another walled garden ripe to get creatively destroyed by the next big technical thing lurking over that hill known as the future.

Future performance of Facebook’s stock depends on the company delivering profitable revenue and like Google, Facebook gets all of its money from advertising. Google builds semi-useful stuff and search is everything. Facebook advertising does not work. I managed Facebook campaigns for a Fortune Global 100 company and have first hand experience that … Facebook …. Advertising …. Does….. Not ….. Work.

General Motors figured this out, and picking the week of the IPO to announce Facebook ads aren’t working was simply perfect. Of course the counter argument from the social media douche bags is that “Facebook is all about authentic relationships and transparent conversations between brands and customers.” Consider the source, given that the SMDB’s make their bones selling their Facebook Unique Customer Karma and Emerging Digital services (you can figure out the forced acronym) to breathless CMOs who want audience, damn it, and the bigger the better.  And consider that the public relations/digital agency world is always first on any shiny object bandwagon (can you say SecondLife) and their current solemn obsession is reporting “Social ROI” as the rest of the faddish get obsessed with big data and analytics. (If you want to watch some fun navel gazing, play pissed-off CEO and ask a Digital PR person “How much is a Facebook Fan worth?”)

Companies, aka “brands,” obsess and fret about how many fans and likes they have; spend money on third-party tools like BuddyMedia to manage their presence, and set aside a slice of their digital advertising budget to buy good old display ads to run alongside the torrent of notifications and shared links that make up Facebook’s river of content. As I read elsewhere this morning, quoting Seth Godin (whom I never quote), “The Internet wasn’t invented for advertisers.”

Neither was Facebook.

Yet, in lieu of subscriptions or some twist on Warren Buffett’s theory of a toll booth on the only bridge over the river, where is Facebook’s money going to come from to sustain a valuation in the thin, thin air of $100+ billion ? If you know, then buy some stock. Me, I’m deactivating my Facebook account in honor of the TimeWarner-AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe/Groupon/Pets.com/WebVan of 2012.

Two weeks ago I began dinging every over-sharer on my timeline or wall or whatever the Zuckerborg called it this month. Goodbye pictures of glasses of beer, notifications that Ed was at LAX, weird R-rated bikini videos from people in Turkey and India I have never met and will never meet. Goodbye SocialCam. Goodbye Tweets. Goodbye to All That. Now …..

Goodbye Facebook and hello to less noise in my life.

I marvel at the art of visually representing quantitative data. There have been some excellent examples over the time. I used to be particularly obsessed with Smartmoney’s heat map of the stock market which blew a lot of minds in the late 1990s, and went out of my way to try to recruit the genius who came up with it into Forbes.com (with no success). Today it seems so static and Web 1.0, but still, cavemen used to be freaked out by fire, imagine what they would do with a Bic lighter?

Uncle Fester, the collector of all that is interesting, sent me a link to a very cool wind map.  Meteorological maps are generally fairly dull and impenetrable, with their own symbolic language of isobars, beaufort scales, and occluded fronts. Indeed, weather has long been considered one of the greatest data challenges. Consider that for decades the standard was something like this:

 Not very friendly to the layman, more the sort of thing a pilot or professional could read and derive some sense of the future from. Wind is personally the single most interesting element of a weather forecast. As a former sailboat racer, I’d obsess over the probability of a wind shift occurring during a race, or, plan ahead on whether or not to take a crew to help hold the boat down if the breeze increased in velocity. Too much weight and I’d lose. Too little weight and I’d be screwed trying to keep the boat flat in the gusts.

Here’s what wind maps used to look like:

And here is what they look like today. This is beautiful and very addictive to play with. I highly recommend clicking through to see this in all of its animated glory.

And sorry, but I can’t forget this classic:

Voice recognition software has been around for at least 20 years. I first played with the technology in the 1980s but was very unimpressed by its abilities, horrible set up a process, and general applicability as a technology of last resort for the handicapped were truly keyboard allergic.

I’ve tried to use the technology transcribe dictation made during long car commutes, but that never worked either. A combination of too much background noise, a lack of discipline on my part to stick with the process of correcting and training the software to recognize my voice and my peculiar way of dictation, and voice-recognition software joined they heap of otherwise optimistic stuff that science fiction promised would be useful but practice proved otherwise.

This post is being dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 11 running on a ThinkPad T410s and using a phone headset as a microphone. Since my arm surgery on Tuesday, I’ve dictated about 2000 words and so far am pretty impressed.

Dictation is a foreign mode of writing for me. I’ve used a keyboard in one form or another since I was about 10 years old and my atrocious handwriting condemned me to a typewriter. I never learned how to touch type, but over the years got up to what about 100 words per minute using a frantic index finger/thumb method that over the years as developed a sort of muscle memory of the keyboard which permits me to type without looking at the keys. When word processing technology first emerged in the late 1970s, some writers complained that the electronic ease of deletion, cut and paste, and general speed of composition reduced the value of the word put on the page, and led to a certain compositional laziness that had been moderated by the penalties of working with paper, white out, carbon paper, and the other manual vestiges of writing in the early 20th century. One can writers said the same thing about the typewriter in the 19th century, claiming it made writing “too easy” compared to pen and ink on paper.

Voice technology has come a long way in recent years, especially on android phones where Google’s voice-recognition technology in its maps and search tools are excellent. In the pre-android era, if I wanted to set a destination on the cars GPS, I needed to tediously punch in numbers, cities and states before I could put the car in motion. Attempting to set an address while underway was a recipe for a head-on collision. Now, if I want to get to my office, I simply press the microphone icon and say “go to W. 39th St., New York, NY” and Google does the rest. Voice-recognition is a lifesaver, literally, when I need to respond to a text message while driving, yet my son is fond of a pending the word “bitch” to my dictation.

My biggest complaint with voice-recognition is it forces me to enunciate and be choppy and my diction, where as when typing, I am able to pound away with relatively fluid ease and no concern over misunderstandings and goofy transcriptions. That said, I am a terrible typist and spend a huge amount of time on the backspace key correcting typos and mess ups. Another drawback of dictation is lack of privacy. I hate it when someone looks over my shoulder while I’m writing, and now my voice bellows through the house making me very self-conscious of whether or not I could be overheard by my wife or son. If I were in a cubicle in a typical office I would literally be dumbstruck.

I have no choice but to continue dictating for the foreseeable future, until my doctor gives me the all clear to start typing again.

But at least I can blog and work on memos and have some productivity that otherwise would be completely lost due to surgery.

(This entire post was dictated straight through with nothing corrected)

I’ve got about six months to go on my HTC EVO, a Sprint “4G” Android phone that was quite advanced back in the summer of 2010 when I chucked my Blackberry and Lotus Notes shackles and went off on my own.

It’s a nice phone, has a battery life on a par with the life span of some hyperkinetic gnat that hatches, mates and dies before lunch, a big screen, and the occasional ability in the right city to get some fast connectivity via Clearwire’s WiMax technology. I can tether my iPad and Thinkpad to it, thereby sticking it to the paid-WiFi thugs at the hotel and airport, and I can get rid of my digital camera, dashboard GPS, and assorted other electronic bricks in my bag.

The biggest bitch I had with the phone wasn’t with the hardware as much as Sprint’s ass-hatted insistence that I would have their stupid NASCAR app whether I liked it or not. The amount of bloatware junk that was burnt into the phone was staggering, and sure enough, after a couple months, the phone started bleating that it was out of storage space, forcing me to pick away and delete photos, videos, and assorted apps, all the while being unable to kill NASCAR, the NFL, and Blockbuster (aren’t they dead and gone?) from the phone all because Sprint’s CMO paid a big check to sponsor the Redneck Eternal Left Turn known as stock car racing.

So I rooted the sucker. Jailbreak. Got medieval on its ass and followed the handy instructions on how to capture the phone for me and only me (while voiding the warranty). In the process I realized that playing around with Android phones at the command line/super user level is just like those wonderful days of exploration in the early 198os when I got my hands on my first IBM-PC and a copy of Norton Utilities.

I followed the magic step-by-step instructions, mindful that I could “brick” or toast the phone if I messed up. A weird volume-button-power-button-rubber-chicken reboot and I had Root, that exalted state of hack bliss where the hardware and me are one, and not kept apart by the evil carrier.

I installed Cyanogen, the aftermarket Android ROM based on Honeycomb, then overlaid that with ADW Ex, a launcher that let me mess with my icons and other GUI goodness. The result, combined with a minimalist icon set, is a wide open phone that is a lot slicker than the factory model, has tons of room, and still has all the functionality it used to.

Sure, there were moments of debugging — the GPS wouldn’t work until I patched it — but there’s something about getting intimate with one’s hardware to restore my faith in the technical world. Don’t be afraid. Stick it to the man.

After reading John McCarthy’s obituary this morning (by John Markoff), I was prompted to re-read Stewart Brand’s legendary tale of early computer scientists and hackers that was published in Rolling Stone in 1972.

Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.

I highly recommend it. The photo of Alan Kay and the Dynabook is priceless. Keep in mind this is a glimpse of the state of the art in Silicon Valley from 40 years ago. Pre-personal computer. Pre-Steve Jobs. Then take those four decades that intervene and add in the microprocessor, bountiful memory, graphics, the Internet, wireless, cell phones, smartphones, tablets …… No one, not even the most stoned futurist, could have predicted the technical bounty we take for granted today. Brand’s story puts it all in perspective for me. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

I generally avoid editorializing about business. Too many years writing “objectively” about the technology industries has me gun shy about taking an un-reported stand. But since I covered Hewlett Packard closely when I was a tech reporter in the 80s and the company was nearing the pinnacle of its reputation as one of the keystone companies in technology, the news this morning that its board didn’t have the gumption to even interview its latest, and apparently lameduck CEO, Leo Apotheker, feels like the last straw in a decline of Sheenesque proportions and I have to say something.

HP’s former dominance in printers, PCs, workstations, minicomputers, medical diagnostics, even financial calculators was the culmination of a noble heritage that literally started in a modest residential garage when the founders hand built an oscilloscope they sold to Disney for post-production sound work on Snow White. HP was never the hippest company — it wasn’t a place I associate with the bearded sandal wearing characters that made Sun and Silicon Graphics and Apple and Next so colorful — but it was the most solid and mythic, a place that capitalized on smarts and research and innovation and was able, against the laws of Silicon Valley physics, to maintain its edge even as it absorbed companies like Compaq and DEC. While I believe “corporate culture” is an oxymoronic construct, “The HP Way” seems to indeed have been a good thing, one that held the massive organization together for a remarkable record of growth and innovation over five decades.

As the founders retired and faded into the philanthropic background, things became unhinged.  Lew Platt missed the Internet. Carly Fiorina over-acquired. Wire-tapping reporters and board members seemed, at the time, like an aberration (now it doesn’t). Hurd couldn’t keep it in his pants and mortgaged the company’s future by slashing R&D … and now after one remarkably weird year characterized by throwing in the towel over and over, Leo Apotheker — the CEO no one had ever heard of before — is the next to walk the plank.  The question is why was he ever even on the boat? I didn’t even know how to properly pronounce his name until yesterday at lunch when my partner corrected me and put an emphasis on the “e” with an accent (It’s “Lay-O” not “Lee-O”).

So what went well in the last year? Not much. The Palm acquisition yielded an operating system that was a lame darkhorse out of the gate. The company had a great success in tablets — once it discontinued them and slashed the price and alienated the first customers silly enough to pay full price when it launched. And the greatest bumble of all — telling the world that it is considering getting out of the vicious PC business before it had a buyer for that business —  effectively killing, in a single utterance, all corporate/enterprise demand for fleets of its PCs and future demand by whatever greater fool buys the business off of them.

The headhunters and the board that was too divisive and busy to interview its last round of CEO candidates is drawing up yet another short list of possible leaders. Whoever gets tapped, they have a major mess to muck out. The situation as I see it without looking at the balance sheet:

1. The PC is dead. It has another decade in the corporate world, but game over in PCs. Apple won and tablets are the new form factor. HP made its bid and failed there.
2. The Wintel standard is irrelevant. Microsoft and Intel no longer call the tune. Operating systems are irrelevant in the cloud. WebOS was nice looking, but too late in the Apple, Android, Windows race.
3. HP dictates few standards, has no APIs, has no developer community.
4. Printers. Printers are the last mechanical appendage. Think about it. Once hard disks stopped spinning and went solid state, the last thing with a motor is the printer.  Printers are a means to an end, not a future.
5. Crisis communications. Beginning with the CNET wiretapping, the Hurd scandal and this summer’s string of can’t-shoot-straight missteps, the once golden credibility of the company is very tarnished and tattered.
6. Marketing. Once Lenovo snagged David Roman — the marketing rock star that gave HP its awesome “The PC is Personal Again” campaign — the air went out of HP’s creative consumer balloon.
7. China and emerging markets: no where near as nimble or familiar as Lenovo and Acer.

I’m sure Malcolm Gladwell or Forrester Research has some nifty term for that type of person who discovers stuff first. You know who I am talking about; the girl in college who bought the first Talking Heads album while the rest of us were still stuck in a rut of disco or bad rock. The guy who saw The King’s Speech three months before you did. The type of person who moves on from Bikram yoga just as you’re discovering the Down Dog position. Everybody wants to be first, but why are some of us better at living on the leading edge than others?

How do trendspotters find the avant garde before it becomes mainstream? Is it intuitive or is it part of their psyche? Someone more willing to buck the norm and have the courage go out on a limb and tell their skeptical roommates, “Trust me, some day these guys are going to be huge”?

I used to have impeccable music spotting abilities, but was always the weird guy in the dorm, defending stuff like Lou Reed, The Ramones while the rest of the world was stuck on the Stones, Beatles, Allman Bros. etc.. I wasn’t super-gluing my hair into a purple mohawk or acting particularly hip — I just could, and still can, listen to very obscure music and intuitively know what’s going to be cool or not. How did I find it in the first place? By paying attention to college radio, especially late night, by reading the Village Voice, and by flipping through the milk crates of some of my more out-there acquaintances. Someone has to start playing it. My only knack was hearing it once and deciding it was worth hearing again.

Case in point. Late 90s I started listening to lots of electronica/techno because the beat rate syncopated nicely with rowing ergometer workouts. I start buying the Chemical Brothers and my teen children pick up the habit and instantly become cool in their own way. Fiction: I still press a copy of Barry Hannah’s “Geronimo Rex” into anybody’s hands who will listen. I found him in the early 70s out of complete luck and chance. Misses? The horrible Little River Band is one album I was ashamed to own.

One rainy day recently my youngest son wanted to go to a movie. Instead of relying on some direct recommendation from a pal, he just pulls out Rotten Tomatoes and looks at the score. Anything under an 80% he won’t waste his money on. Same goes for video games — he has his bible, Game Informer, and follows their recommendations slavishly. I suppose the only difference between him and me using Rolling Stone in the 1970s is media and nothing else.

My oldest son, the auteur, is a total creature of New York’s East Village, NYU film school, and now West Hollywood. His radar is set at max detection for two things: way way out there art film from the likes of Bela Tarr and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (aka “Joe”) ((stuff that will NEVER go mainstream since no one on earth wants to watch a seven hour epic about the decline of a Hungarian farm collective after the fall of the iron curtain)) and electronica which comes in a dizzying number of subcategories from dubstep to intelligent dance music (IDM) to breakcore. His discovery models are interesting – Last.fm in particular allows him to tag music and discover related stuff tagged by other listeners, and I just need to follow his play list history to discover the same.

He was also a fan of a site called Metacritic — which compiled professional reviews and ranked music, games, TV and movies on a 1-to-1o0 score. Then he gave up after one Scandinavian techno band, The Field, inexplicably dominated the rankings.  The point of Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes is they aggregate professional critics — not amateurs like you and me — and give a modicum of authority to the rankings and recommendations.

The power of recommendation engines is very significant in the Web 2.0/Social media set of features. While a lot of pundits opine that user reviews are the most powerful factor in a purchase decision (I trust her taste, therefore I will buy the same kind of car she drives), I think the “like-this” functionality that was  pioneered by Patti Maes at the MIT Media Lab and led to the ecommerce recommendations on Amazon (“People who bought this also bought this …” is very very influential in helping us discover new opportunities in media. The risk, as some critics have said, is that recommendation engines can put us into a self-referential echo chamber where the old phenomenon of a “Top Story Today” function on a news website continues to drive traffic to the same top headline, which keeps it on top ad infinitum.  How often does a recommendation engine push us to the extreme? Exposing liberals to conservative points of view and vice versa?

The notion of using tags and a “genome” approach to music and art to push the “like-this” function we’ve seen in the last decade to a more random, surprising discovery model is what is making the discovery of new art easier and more rewarding.

Anyway, as I sit here listening to the IDM tagged station on Last.fm I find myself “loving” specific songs by hitting the heart icon. Every time I do so, the algorithm looks for tagged matches and further refines my taste for me, all the while taking me deeper and deeper into the avant garde by the hand.

With my music in the cloud and freed from the tyrannical clutches of iTunes, I next turned to the question of how to make it truly portable, especially how to get it on the boat. I juiced the memory on my HTC EVO smartphone to 32 gb with a miniSD card and find that I’m running either the Amazon Cloud Player when on the household wifi, downloading stuff locally for playback on the phone when I’m in the middle of Nantucket Sound and too far away from the cell towers, or streaming from Last.fm when I’m too lazy to deal with setlists of my own stuff.

When I was a iPod person I had one of those iPod dock things — an expensive Bose thing that required a wall socket. Battery powered portable speakers are generally terrible, but the New York Times recently reviewed a bunch of wireless Bluetooth speakers and I went with David Pogue’s recommendation for the Soundmatters FoxL unit. It’s not cheap — I paid close to $200 on Amazon — but it uses a rechargeable Li-Ion battery and cranks very loud volumes when needed. Oh, and did I say it’s wireless? This means no proprietary slot connector for the iPod/iPhone, just a discoverable Bluetooth connection that I can hit with my Thinkpad, iPad, the wife and kid’s iPhones or my Android EVO. The range is decent, but anything beyond 15 feet gives it some issues.

My favorite application for the unit is to tether it to my iPad while I’m watching Red Sox games when I’m on the road in NYC. I am tired of having ear buds jammed into my ears for hours and love the freedom to prop the iPad up and just watch it like the tiny television it was meant to be.

Three weeks and I am very happy with this portable sound solution. The unit is solid, small, and very easy to set up and use. The sound is excellent. This toy is definitely moving into the category of favorite things. Now to figure out cloud music in the car and life will be complete.

For some reason Microsoft Office 2010 has decided I need to select a “profile” every hour on the hour. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make it happy and go away forever. Not being an Exchange guy, I know it’s Outlook related, and since I am consulting to Edelman I am on their Exchange web client so I can gain access to their internal mail and directory. I suspect it may be related to Google Calendar sync or something, but I do wish it would go away.

Suggestions so appreciated.

It would appear that the International Olympic Committee bestirred itself from its antediluvian luddite position on online media and demanded that the bidders for broadcast rights cease the ass-hatted pre-Tivo practice of taping and delaying coverage for prime-time American audiences and make available the athletic events in realtime AND online.

Online was a misery of DMA takedowns during Beijing (which I lived firsthand thanks to the paranoia of the IOC that any manifestation of YouTube video would undercut the value of its crown jewel broadcast rights).

While details are sparse from the New York Times coverage today, the second paragraph of Richard Sandomir’s article stands out: “…Comcast responded with a knockout bid and a promise that it would show every event live, on television or online, a recognition of the immediacy of technology and a drastic reversal of NBC’s policy of taping sports to show them to the largest possible audience in prime time.”

If you’ve ever watched Olympic coverage in Europe on EuroSport you’re accustomed to getting complete coverage of every event,  , no matter how long-tailed, in realtime. Think hours of men skiing with rifles and you get the European viewing experience, versus the usual NBC saccharine around some perky pre-pube gymnast who overcame Demeaning Plebney while ardent fans of the 50 meter air pistol get bupkus and have to scrounge around online in hopes someone, somewhere encoded a feed of their passion.

If the Games make it truly online — and they sort of have to now that the world is 100% obsessed with video the way they want it, when they want it — then London ought to be a delight for longtail sports fans. Let’s just hope NBC gets its online act together in time, doesn’t strike a Devil’s deal with Microsoft Silverlight, and delivers a multiplatform stream (iPad, droid, PC) that kicks ass and finally delivers on the promise of a truly interactive Olympics. If I were at NBC interactive I’d be on the phone to the MLB.com guys and looking for some technical ninja help.

The online rights and pay-per-view revenue should, in theory, kick the stuffing out of the old broadcast rights that typified the Dick Ebersol era when there were three networks, no Tivo, and no Interweb. My fingers are crossed.

Amazon’s brilliant decision to knock some cost off of the top of its Kindle by selling an ad-enabled “special offer” version for $25 less than a regular “ad-free” model is a good indication of where things are headed in the consumer electronic space — but not necessarily the best business model. That, I believe, lies in the original Kindle’s provision of free wireless connectivity through the Whispernet service, a necessity to enable the seamless delivery of books from Amazon’s catalogue: easing the sale of the proverbial razor blades onto Amazon’s “razor.”

There are now two hardware subsidy models available to consumers.  The first is the classic mobile/wireless carrier subsidy.  Sign up for two years with AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc. and get about half of the price knocked off your new iPhone, Droid, netbook, or Android tablet.   Device makers depend on this carrier subsidy to get the high cost of their device’s bill of materials absorbed and hidden from the consumer. Take a $500 device and use carrier subsidies to drop the price the consumer sees to $200. Not bad and smart business given the average consumer has no clue how to calculate the true cost of the device over the course of the two-year enslavement to the carrier for basically the right to connect to their network. According to Notesbooks.com, an iPhone 4 costs $1,674 over the course of a two year AT&T contract.

Amazon’s brilliance lies not only in its decision to enable a wireless connection to the Kindle with no carrier relationship (Whispernet consists of a lot of cheap Sprint 3G EVDO capacity) — who wants to sign their life away for a two-year handcuffing to a device you know you’ll want to upgrade in at least 18 months? — but now in its insight that the platform is an awesome way to deliver advertising. Given that Amazon is Google’s top customer of paid search, it makes eminent sense for the ecommerce giant to leverage its own delivery platform for its own ads.

It’s surprising Google isn’t all over advertising subsidized wireless connectivity. Afterall, this is the company that pledged to cover San Francisco with free WiFi a few years back, the company that gave travelers free airport WiFi a couple Christmases ago.  If Google, or any hardware company were to bulk purchase network capacity and enable their devices as “start-and-connect” capable, with no carrier contract, the impact on consumers would be huge. So what if I get a little advertising intrusion in my browsing experience. Sparing me the ordeal of signing that $40 monthly minimum with the carrier would be worth every irritation.

This will mean the utter defeat of the carrier’s efforts to keep themselves from becoming dumb pipes. But when you think about it, what value are they delivering beyond their connections? White-label the connections, subsidize the link through ads, and be done with them. And the resulting explosion in connect-anywhere-anytime devices will be more than significant in terms of consumer effects. If I were Google I’d be pushing Chrome netbooks with ad supported connections in a very big way. I pushed for this in a previous life while working on business development for a smartbook, citing the Whispernet model as the way to go, but I guess I was ahead of my time. Amazon gave me some satisfaction that I was right with their “special offer” model.

I sucked it up this week and hit the road with only my iPad, leaving the four-pound ThinkPad (T410s) on my desk for the first time. I resolved to be productive using my HTC EVO as a 4G (Sprint/Clear) hotspot and work out of the cloud via Google Docs and Gmail. The cloud part is easy – I’ve been there for two years. The hardware failed.

So I’d grade the experiment a C -

What worked:

• My briefcase was lighter and I didn’t have the usual worries about cracking a screen. Lighter is good as years of backpacking and shoulder strapping a laptop around has trashed my right shoulder.
• I generally had decent access to my files
• The Sprint/Clear 4G is decent as long as I’m in a major airport or urban center
• It was much easier to roam around an office with an iPad, with instant on and off and constant connectivity as long as the phone was in my pocket

What failed:

• The iPad is horrible for typing — on screen keyboards are an ergonomic disaster. I was tempted — for a few minutes — to seek out a local Apple Store and invest in an external $69 keyboard, but thought  better of it.
• Note taking on an iPad is a miserable experience and I suspect one looks like a douchebag when one tries to. See Mark Cahill’s comment regarding a wave of iPads in meetings that have reverted to good old laptops.
• Google Docs are barely usable on an iPad (see previous post on why my next tablet will be Android-based). The Google app for iPad presents a mobile, stripped down version, with none of the essential tools such as the ability to download documents to the device and then send them as attachments via Gmail, or share them through the usual Google Docs collaboration capabilities
• I was able to “free” docs and share them by resorting to the QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite, using that to access Google Docs, and then mailing stuff to people from within QuickOffice. It felt very kludgey.

Bottom line: I’m going to buy a ThinkPad X120e for $500 and go ultraportable. The first ThinkPad “netbook” — the X100 — was terribly under powered with some weak AMD Atom-like wannabe processor knock-off. I’m banking (need to check the reviews) that the processor refresh in the newly introduced X120e will make it a half-way decent cloud PC for road work. I’ll park the T410s on the home office desk, continue to love its classic ThinkPad keyboard, but use the X120e as my grab-and-go and save a pound of weight in the bag. Yes, I am tempted to go with a new MacAir — but the price tag stinks at $999 for 64 gb and I am not ready to completely bail out to the goofy but-oh-so-chic world of the Apple OS.