Connecting the Dots

Google, Amex & Your Business or Non-Profit

October 31, 2011 By 1 Comment

Google and American Express have announced a new contest that has several things you can take advantage of: You can win $5k in advertising; get press by a feature on YouTube; learn how to tell your story in 20 seconds (a discipline we ALL need to learn!); and learn how to use the new YouTube video editing feature.

The contest details state, “Google and American Express want you to share your business story. So we’re offering you the opportunity to win one of 36 online ad campaigns worth $5,000 and be featured on the YouTube homepage on November 25th in honor of Small Business Saturday.” The full rules are here.

Of course, we believe that every small business, non-profit and startup needs a strong web presence, especially before you embark on a campaign which may likely get you A LOT of online attention. To show you how widespread the lack of an online presence is, Google’s Minnesota representative, Ben Theis, dropped a startling statistic on us during this Minnov8 podcast: 58% of Minnesota’s small businesses have ZERO WEB PRESENCE!

So make certain you have a good website and that you take advantage of highly visible contests and offers like this one. We are…

Filed Under: Web/Tech

Elderly Need Super-Simple, Phone-like Skype

October 26, 2011 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

By now many of you have probably seen, and chuckled about, this delightful video that went viral of a senior couple goofin’ around with their webcam. These two are trying to figure out how to use it (and having fun in the process) but the humor obscures the reality: Using a computer, using Skype, and making certain Skype’s audio/video inputs are set correctly is befuddling to most senior citizens!

Let me tell you a story that may mirror many of your own to illustrate why we need a brain-dead-simple Skype phone that is as cheap, super-simple to operate, and as powerful as a landline phone.

It’s a few years ago and I’m in my home office on a Saturday, facing the street and my neighbors house across it. I bear witness to my elderly neighbors — he a fairly tech-savvy retired Fortune 100 executive and she a loving mother and grandmother — saying a very emotional farewell to their son, daughter-in-law, and two toddler grandsons.

The son is an executive at a different Fortune 100 company and the family was headed to Europe for two years to open a new line of business. My elderly neighbors would have only one visit during that time and I immediately thought, “Oh geez…those two boys will grow up so fast and forget them” so I had to do something.

I sent my neighbor and email clearly laying out all of the power of Skype, that it was free, that if he and his son each had a webcam that they could see one another and talk often. The biggest reason to do it was to maintain (and continue to build) grandpa and grandma’s relationship with those two little boys.

Not hearing anything for two weeks, I feared that I’d stepped WAY out of bounds as a neighbor. But what happened next surprised even me. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Innovation, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

The Second It’s Possible, I’ll Cut the Cord

October 23, 2011 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

The 'new', and still inadequate, Comcast DVR channel guide

Like so many others, I’m fed up with Comcast/Xfinity and am constantly seeking developments that will allow me to cut-the-cord and do away with cable TV.

Comcast in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul acquired TimeWarner’s Roadrunner service. Here in my hometown of Eden Prairie, Comcast claims a “legacy millstone” hangs around their necks and that’s why their HD DVR interface is so horrifically bad. I’ve talked to Comcast technicians, VPs in the business group, and cable analysts and all say that, “It will change at some point soon.” I’ve been hearing that now for three years.

I’ve been looking at my bill and decided to go out and buy my own DOCSIS 3 modem for the Comcast internet service. Instead of paying $7/month, I bought it for $109 and my connection is about 25% faster! Think Comcast would’ve notified me and encouraged me to upgrade months ago? Nope.

Besides the HD DVR interface being so horrible, the ‘Comcast On Demand” service is a joke (from an interface standpoint…the content play fine once you get to it). Turns out that HD TV content is buried within nested categories which means it’s tough to find and tougher to find again once you want to watch something. Since Comcast has invested heavily in three new data centers for this service, one would think they’d spend some time in the human interface that THEIR CUSTOMERS TOUCH, wouldn’t you? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Web/Tech

Huh? Pine Cones Point Toward a Brighter Future?

October 23, 2011 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Pine cones near a pond by Red Rock Lake in Eden Prairie, MN

Snagged this photo with my new iPhone 4S (and its 8 megapixel camera) on my morning walk with my dog. The light was nice at that hour and I stopped to snap a photo of these pine cones…but I came away with A LOT more than just a picture!

After I took the photo I closely examined this spruce and the bunches of pine cones all over it. I was suddenly struck with the thought about how fascinating it is that pine cones like this on another form of pine, the Bishop, which require fire to drop and open up…thus spilling their seeds so a new generation can grow. I immediately thought, “What a metaphor for what we all are going through right now in the U.S. and globally.“

The global economy has “burned” and, like so many of you who stay up on current events, know that many people around the world have seen their lives “scorched” with jobs lost, homes foreclosed upon, benefits reduced, and governments toppled. But ALL THE TRENDS point toward new growth and I fundamentally believe that, as the world continues to accelerate toward an internet-connected future, we will see unprecedented innovation and an increase in value created.

How? Where are all of these trends pointing to a future like that one? Like any other innovation or invention, one cannot look backwards (like many conservatives and MBAs do) or look side-to-side to see what other countries or companies are doing and then do what they’re doing only slightly better (e.g., trying to knock-off iPod with Zune; deliver ho-hum tablets to compete with iPad). The key is to strategically anticipate the future and look ahead to make the best, educated and calculated guesses you can and then go make the future happen.

In our core business (The Trend Curve™) we track trends globally for the home furnishings industry. Since so many other factors influence what happens within the home, we analyze industries like fashion, technology, manufacturing and what is happening with color, since color equals emotion and, surprisingly, echoes the mood of consumers. Color is becoming more vibrant, brighter, and dare I say, “optimistic?”

In some general trend areas as well as all of the foundational home-related industries we track, optimism abounds:

Small Business Optimism Picks Up: “The National Federation of Independent Business reported that it’s Small Business Optimism Index gained eight-tenths of a point to rise to 88.9. The gain snapped a six-month string of declines.”
The Expectation Economy (note #3 that “Copying competitors is a race to the bottom“) expects a brighter future: One site we follow is TrendWatching and their new business types site called Springwise since the latter, especially, delights us often with some of the new, disruptive and radical businesses being created around the world
Manufacturing is quickly embracing trends like 3D printing (great blog by Howard Smith, a U.K. technologist). 3D printing promises to accelerate the time from idea-to-prototype-to-manufacturing; at some point relatively soon to buy, as a consumer, plans online that will enable one to simply print-out an object at home; and much more.
Technology gadgets, the internet’s impact, ubiquitous wireless and more are transforming the world. To get up to speed quickly on what’s going on globally, look at former Morgan Stanley analyst, and now venture capitalist, Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet at Web 2.0 Summit or read this article & watch the video of her presentation.

Yep…you can argue every one of these points and counter them with a pessimistic and dark analysis that the sky is falling, the world is tumbling toward oblivion, and the only way to compete with the Chinese is to drive the American workforce toward subsistence living and a 3rd world country wage structure. So if you’re inclined to comment and tell me why everything is horrible and bad, don’t bother since I’m not placing my energy on the negative.

Filed Under: Innovation, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

Boxcar: Aggregating Your Social & More

October 20, 2011 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Like many, I’m constantly trying to optimize any time invested in social media lest it suck up more than it already does. One of the more useful apps for aggregating my social is one I have on my iPhone, iPad and now Mac (Mac version is in beta but you can download it here) is called Boxcar.

Once you download the app you can configure your accounts (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, email, and many others) and receive instant notifications in one place, the app itself. It’s incredibly efficient since it enables one to respond in a timely fashion without having to launch and respond within multiple apps or on multiple websites.

That’s the upside and I use it often for just those purposes. The downsides?

1) Notifications still appear within each app and you have to deal with them when you open ‘em up. Even though I view, for example, a DM in Twitter within Boxcar, the Twitter app on my iPhone and iPad (and now Mac) each show a “non-viewed notification”. So I have to tediously open the app, view the notification, and close the app to make that specific notification go away. What a pain.

I wish for an API from all of these social services that allow a notification service to toggle-off a notification once it’s been dealt with by a user. I suspect no services do that since they want you to login to them and use them directly.

2) Credentials, and their security, are another issue. Since the key to my digital life is my email repository within Gmail — everything from site passwords to application licenses to sweet somethings between my wife and I — I’m using Google’s 2-Step Verification to harden the security surrounding my Google related accounts (especially email). Though it was a pain to setup (especially to authorize all the apps that require Google logins like RSS reader apps) the peace-of-mind I have knowing there’s one more layer of security to protect it is an imperative so I can sleep at night.

So do I want to login to any aggregator and authorize their app to with my Google credentials? Nope. I don’t care what they say about their use of OAUTH, that they “pass-through” credentials, or anything of the sort. It’s too valuable and, of course, if someone attempts to change a password on Facebook, Twitter or any other social site, I’ll get email notification unless that’s been hacked too!

If you want to enjoy a one-stop-shop for all your social media interactions, give Boxcar a try but (in my opinion) don’t aggregate your email in there too.

Filed Under: Web/Tech

Don’t Just “Allow” Permissions for Cloud Apps

September 22, 2011 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

You have to think before you click “Allow” and grant permission for your Facebook, Twitter, iPad, iPhone, Android or any other apps. If you “Allow” without at least some consideration, it is like you are allowing someone to knock on your front door at home and letting them come in to go through your drawers, open your mail, poke through your address book, look at your private photos, and turn on your computer to browse through your history and files.

This morning I received an email from a PR person pimping the new Wall Street Journal (WSJ) “social” app and encouraging me to watch their “film”. Thinking, “Hey…it’s the Wall Street Journal after all” I went to take a peek at the app, thinking it might be a new iPad or iPhone app.

It was a Facebook app. Sigh.

While many are all excited about the Facebook f8 Developers Conference starting today and articles like this one on Mashable that believes we should Prepare Yourselves: Facebook to be Profoundly Changed are coming out in droves, I still have an extremely high degree of resistance to arbitrarily opening up my accounts to any organization, even Dow Jones (parent of the WSJ).

I don’t think so.

Believe me, I’m no Luddite. In fact, as part of my work I’m constantly trolling the app space, signing up for dozens per month so as to try them out, and many I stick with for the long term (e.g., Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, Delicious, et al). It’s just that I cannot, in good conscience, willingly grant permission to all of these apps, especially now that seemingly every app (especially those running on smartphones and tablets) ask for interconnected permissions.

Many provide these connections since they’re easy for the user. Take an iPhone pic with Instagram and tweet it and send the photo to Flickr. That’s convenient and powerful and I don’t worry much about Instagram. But do I really know if they can “see” my username/password in transit? Nope. It’s that way with so many other apps too.

Same thing with Google Chrome extensions. I’m often blown away when I see how many developers, many of whom are outside the U.S., deliver NPAPI extensions. Google says on that page that developers should strongly consider these security considerations with NPAPI:

Including an NPAPI plugin in your extension is dangerous because plugins have unrestricted access to the local machine. If your plugin contains a vulnerability, an attacker might be able to exploit that vulnerability to install malicious software on the user’s machine. Instead, avoid including an NPAPI plugin whenever possible.

Filed Under: Internet

Our 2011 Family Trip

August 30, 2011 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

We had an amazing trip to Germany, Austria and Poland and yes, if the internet access had been easy to obtain and ubiquitous, it would’ve made the trip A LOT easier and more enjoyable. Here are a few photos of our adventure:

Filed Under: Travel

Germany Internet Access is a Joke

August 30, 2011 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

My family and I spent the last 10 days primarily in Germany. We’d each brought our iPhones, my wife and I our iPads, and my daughter her Macbook Air. Besides the fact that our service Boingo Bombed, what was most bothersome was how German hotels, coffee shops, rail stations and the airport are laughingly behind other countries with wireless internet access and everyone charges for access.

Services like Boingo, that aggregate hotspots, are often forced to charge an $0.18/minute “roaming” fee for services. In the same way the European Union was supposed to make doing business in Europe easier and more like the seamless commerce within the United States, we’ve seen how that has failed in today’s economy and wireless internet access is too.

If you live in Germany and have a wireless provider like Orange or Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile, you can pay them a fee and have both mobile wireless and Wifi (or what Europeans call “WLAN”) access. If you’re a traveler, you’re out of luck. It was unbelievably difficult to find wireless access anywhere we went unless we were prepared to be nickel-n-dimed to death paying their stupid little fees.

It’s no wonder that we saw an amazingly small number of either iPhone or Android smartphone users while on the road. People in train stations, the airport, within hotels, and on the street, people there used mobile internet devices far less than what I’ve seen anywhere within North America (or Japan, for that matter).

When I was in Germany with my Dad in 1997 I built this website on the fly with a Powerbook, acoustic coupler and modem, an Apple Quicktake camera and a copy of Adobe Pagemill (web software). Deutsche Telekom placed a “pulse” signal on the phone lines of hotels and in phone booths in order to manage the toll charges on the call. While bothersome with voice calls, it was horrendous with a data connection since, each time the pulse occurred (about every 20 seconds), the modem would have to re-handshake and it would interrupt the data stream. God it was frustrating!

It’s just about as frustrating today trying to find access while traveling in Germany. Yes, it’s better than it was in 1997 but even within hotels it’s not much better. The only hotel where we could log on regardless of our device (an iPhone, iPad or laptop) was at the Marriott Berlin. The Marriott property in Munich was a joke (cable in room only so no wireless devices could be used).

My wife is in Germany 3-4 times per year and only uses the internet at her hotel. I’ve researched, called people in Germany, talked to various providers, and all tell me the same story: She either needs to buy a SIM card and switch out her iPhone card (fat chance) or get an account on a German mobile network (Huh? Who the hell would signup for a mobile subscription when in the country a few times per year?).

Of course, roaming on mobile networks outside the U.S. is not an option and horror stories abound of people who have had $1,000s to pay upon their return from an international trip. Our U.S. carrier, AT&T, has international plans but they offer download amounts one would go over in an hour of solid use. They’re a joke too but it’s because of the inflexibility of mobile providers in Europe.

As the world continues to accelerate toward one where the masses have wireless devices and expect to gain access wherever they go, Germany better get their act together and quit protecting their telecom companies and open it up.

Filed Under: Current Affairs

Boingo Bombed

August 30, 2011 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

My family and I just got back from a 10 day adventure across Germany, Austria and Poland. Since each of us had our iPhones, my wife and I are iPads, and my daughter her Macbook Air 11″ (the latter needed for homework as college started during the trip), I researched and we signed up for multiple Boingo accounts in order to access Wifi on the trip.

Boingo is a hotspot “aggregator” who apparently partners with providers all over the world. Marketed as a magic “launch app and get connected” service, it does nothing of the sort. Boingo bombed for us and was incredibly frustrating. My wife, daughter and son continually complained that, “Boingo is a total waste!“

The Boingo app itself is flawed: you first have to access a Wifi hotspot (or what Europeans refer to as a “WLAN” hotspot) before you launch the Boingo app! The Boingo app cannot seek out and connect with various hotspot providers. The only place it worked were places where we either already had access (e.g., Marriott hotels; Starbucks) or had already logged in with credentials at the hotspot (e.g., our Sheraton hotel in Krakow, Poland).

But this is what is really bizarre: in order to find other hotspots you had to be connected! It had no internal directory; didn’t have one to download to our iPhones (so we could, for example, download Munich, Berlin, Salzburg and the other places we were visiting); and the app couldn’t be placed in to “seek” mode like others I’ve used on my iPhone to find Wifi hotspots (e.g., JWire) so it was useless for locating places where Boingo could connect. Sheesh.

So what’s the point of having the Boingo service? It’s useful in the USA since we could get on at the airport for no charge. Since my wife is a Delta club member we had free wifi regardless.

The only way this service could be made worthwhile overseas is if:

1) You launched the app (or left it running in the background) and it would notify you of an “approved” Boingo hotspot

2) Performed ALL of the handshaking, credential input and negotiations so launching the Boingo app enabled one to get on instantly.

Otherwise, it’s a waste of time and money.

While I appreciate the challenges a Boingo has with all of the protectionism in Europe (and that countries like Germany, France and Poland ensuring their own, respective mobile and WLAN providers can protect their service revenues) the way Boingo is positioned, marketed and delivered means people like us—ones who’d be lifelong customers if the service worked as advertised—are instead cancelling the service today.

Filed Under: Mobile

How to Save Newspapers (But do we even care?)

August 6, 2011 By Steve Borsch 4 Comments

The soon-to-debut StarTribune iPad app

Newspapers are struggling to figure out a new business model that gets all of us to pay for news, but that’s pretty tough in a day when we all have so many free choices. My own newspaper, the Minneapolis StarTribune, is one I still receive in paper form which, unfortunately, didn’t arrive this morning. As a consequence, for the first time I actually looked at their ad online about their new iPad app which will run me “only $3/week” if I opt to get my newspaper in this way.

Here’s the thing: If I am going to get my news from our local paper, there is no more efficient means of consuming local news than one printed on paper. I can flip through the paper quickly, read what’s interesting to me, stop and look at ads that I find potentially useful, and when done toss it in my recycle bin.

Yes, there are huge downsides to a paper beyond the obvious tree wasting, truck delivering, printing-press inefficient creating, news being stale, sorts of problems. But the biggest problem in a day of social media, and an acceleration in news delivery, is that I can’t tweet articles I find interesting or relevant from a non-digital news source, save important articles for later reading or reference to my Instapaper account, or email an article I think a colleague or client might find of interest.

Early every morning, after taking the dog out and grabbing breakfast, I read the print StarTribune. I then sit down with my coffee and iPad and skim the few hundred articles which have appeared in my blog feed reader. Next I go through several of the news apps I have (see the screenshot below) as time allows.

When we talk about news, the importance of having strong news organizations and whether or not they even care if newspapers survive, many of my younger tech colleagues argue that paying for news on paper means those who do get “old news” and “only Grandpas still get the news on paper.” The biggest argument is that “if the news is important enough…it will find ME.“

That last statement is all about two things:

1) Being in an interconnected world where the important stuff bubbles up in to social networks, and is spread by friends and those whom we follow, means breaking news and stories we should read are foisted upon us by those whom we pay attention to and thus the news they spread.

2) News is now aggregated and we all have an ENORMOUS WEALTH OF NEWS available to us at our fingertips. Take a look at screenshot below from an iPad app called News360, one that aggregates news from just about every newspaper and source out there (including newswires). It’s an app I’ve come to rely upon to get multiple source perspectives on important stories.

News360 aggregates news feeds from an array of sources & categorizes them for easy discovery

I would argue that the explosion of news sources—and the instant availability of so many of them that are free—means that it is not only very difficult for a StarTribune (or any newspaper) to get people to pay for an online subscription…but do any of us even care anymore? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Media Shift