Rahul Gaitonde

For a brief couple of weeks last months, I was very active on Facebook – reading my news feed, commenting on status updates, viewing photo albums, like-ing items, accepting friend requests – all the normal stuff Facebook-ers do. And now again, I’m hardly ‘on Facebook’. What changed?

It turns out that during that time, I used my Blackberry Curve 8900 instead of my Nokia E71. And, by extension, a clever little Twitter & Facebook app named Socialscope. It’s the best app I’ve used for either Twitter or Facebook. It made ‘Facebook-ing’ on my phone a delight. When I went back to Nokia-land, there was no Socialscope – or any half-decent Facebook app for that matter – and I stopped using Facebook altogether. It turns out that even though I use a computer well over 8 hours a day, I rarely use the Facebook – or Twitter – PC website.

If it doesn’t have a great mobile site or app, I won’t use it. Whatever ‘it’ is.

I rarely checked/wrote email on Gmail until I bought Profimail for my Nokia. Or listened to much music until I purchased a 16GB microSD card for the phone and dumped all my music there. Or used Google Maps until I used it to find my way around Bombay’s western suburbs and Hyderabad’s chaos while driving.  Or read anything online regularly (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic) until I bookmarked all of them on Opera Mini.

Jean-Louis Gassée: The smartphone isn’t just a new genre, it’s nothing less than a reboot of personal computing.

It’s true. I have no “computer time” anymore in my daily routine. Any little sliver of time can be computer time now (I just linked to the flip side of this yesterday). And it’s also helped stop hour upon wasted hour of desultory browsing.

This is a big change, but it’s crept up on me these past years – it’s only when someone asked me about my short-lived flurry of activity on Facebook that I noticed. If you have a decent smartphone with a GPRS/3G connection, look back and see if your online habits have changed. You might just be surprised.

Today, we’re reading how bite-sized pieces of entertainment (cell-phone games, quick news articles on mobile phones, podcasts while working out) are tiring our brains. Also see the New York Times’ excellent series on our age of information overload and what it’s doing to us.

Then, the city of Philadelphia now wants all bloggers in the city who enable advertising on their website to register as a business – and pay for a $300 license (also, a roundup of views on this). 

Finally, how a candidate for Florida Attorney General is using Google mobile ads to influence voters as they’re in the voting queue. (“…it’s really just the last ad people will see when they’re getting ready to vote…. It’s the last way some voters will look for info”).

In non-tech news, we’re looking at what’s become of the state of California’s finances. First, a Bloomberg report on how the state is ready to hand out IOUs instead of currency. The state’s revenues have been hammered by the downturn (especially the collapse of the real estate market and home foreclosures), but state Republicans have stubbornly refused to accede to Schwarzenegger’s proposal to increase taxes.

In anger, a professor of public policy at Berkeley writes to his students (from California) about how their generation has been swindled by the generation before them. (“..your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph”).

Today, ‘Why Free Plans Don’t Work‘ examines why removing the free part of your freemium strategy can actually improve paid signups. Ironic, coming in the week that Skype’s IPO filing revealed that all its massive revenues come from less than 7% of paying customers. By the way, how do you grow a social (“user generated content”) startup without… well, any user generated content in the first place? Here’s how.

In non-tech, Vanity Fair chronicles a day in the life of President Obama (‘Washington, we have a problem‘) in the context of a partisan, corrupt and shortsighted polity. In ‘China Swallows Obama Stimulus‘ on Bloomberg, we read how corporations will merely direct resources (in this case, resources via stimulus packages) to where they can be most efficiently deployed – fast-growing developing countries – and therefore will ultimately benefit people in these countries instead of America. Arbitrage in boomtime is, after all, the same as arbitrage in recessiontime. Finally, Dick Cavett in the New York Times wonders, angrily, how, in the Cordoba House case, Americans displayed the same religious bigotry they waged war against.

Today, we’re reading Chris Anderson’s flame-bait lead article in Wired (‘The Web is Dead’) on how the proliferation of apps and streaming services is on the Internet is making the Web obsolete (i.e. the World Wide Web of HTML pages we view through the browser). Ironic, coming in the same week as when Facebook, one of the world’s most popular websites, announced location sharing with Places. I jumped immediately to Lifehacker’s guide to disabling Places (including preventing friends from disclosing your location). Entertaining but irrelvant, TechCrunch noticed the Facebook Places logo is a ‘4 in a square.

We also read this fascinating analysis of how Apple and RIM have upended the mobile market in the last 3 years (they went from a total of 7% share of industry profits in 2007 to 65% this year.) Astounding: Apple makes 48% of all industry profits with a 3% market share. And earlier this week, we read about Stephen Wolfram’s computer setup (although I’d love to know more about his actual workflow). As an aside, one of the emails in this screenshot of the new ‘stacked cards’ interface in Gmail for iPad is hilarious. Spot why.

In non-tech, James Fallows from the Atlantic returns to Japan, where he lived in the 80s, and laments that it seems content with itself, no longer ambitious. (but what, in any case, is wrong with that?). The New York Times describes, in a lengthy article, the realization that there’s a new, distinct life stage (’emerging adulthood’?), using this to explain why so many of today’s American 20-somethings are moving back in with their parents, putting off marriage, taking much longer to find a job or ‘start a career’. And the Wall Street Journal writes about some investment avenues that are open only to the very rich in India.

Away from the computer, we’re beginning ‘God is back‘, a chronicle about the resurgence of religion globally, ‘Imaginary Homelands‘, a collection of esasys in the 80s by Salman Rushdie, and polishing off  ‘The Lost Continent‘, Bill Bryson’s travels in small-town America and ‘Alwaleed‘, a biography (although authorized) or the Saudi wunderinvestor prince.

Last year, Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress fame) thought out loud about a bank he’d love to set up. Matt’s bank would focus on safety, ‘Google-like’ simplicity, ‘white-glove’ customer service – and be usable with the tools of today.

… At the very beginning… make it invite-only, which will create a buzz and also allow you to give amazing white-glove service to the initial customers, who will in turn tell their friends… There would be only one style of checks and debit cards and they’d need a distinctive design so if you saw one you’d say, “What’s that?” which would then start the whole conversation again about how SafeBank is different.

Also,

… old-time vintage design aesthetic combined with a Google-like simplicity and attention to speed. All logins would be two-factor, with the default being it’d SMS you a one-time code to log in… a big part of the website would be the blog… few cool saving or home tips each week, it would cover at least one financial industry story a day.

Today, Alex Payne (of Twitter fame) made it known there is just such a bank. And that he’s joining it.

BankSimple is an easy, intuitive, and social bank for people who appreciate simple online services. Unlike other banks, we don’t trap you with confusing products nor do we charge any hidden fees. No overdraft fees. We use sophisticated analytics to help you better manage your finances by providing you a individualized service, catered to your needs and goals.

Curated Computing: Fancy cynical analyst term. Here is Forrester Research declaring a new era (‘Post-iPad’, no less).

A consumer can do anything with a Windows PC or Mac… the iPad operates very differently. [It] works more like a jukebox than a desktop — consumers choose (and pay for) applications from a predetermined set list. Each of those applications is, in itself, also curated; the publisher selects content and functionality that’s appropriate to the form factor, just as a museum curator selects artworks from a larger collection…

Rubbish. ‘Curated computing’  has been Apple’s design philosophy for all this decade – that’s only now making its way into industry consciousness.

But it’s a good thing.

If anything, it indicates mobile manufacturers hitting reality. In the short years after the realization that people wanted to ‘do more’ with their phones, manufacturers packed in as many features as they could. A few really took off (cameras, music players, even email), and most others just didn’t (bluetooth, mobile office packages, bar-code readers).

In another way, it’s a sign of the industry beginning to mature. Even as hardware has gotten more capable (faster processors, storage, memory, larger displays, touch-screens) and networks have invested massively to build capacity, there’s a discernible trend to do less better. Manufacturers are (belatedly?) realizing that a mobile device isn’t a smaller personal computer, but something ‘very personal’. And that very personal is very different from personal.

Which is also why everyone in the industry wants ‘vertical integration’ – control over the hardware, operating system, software platform, applications/content, and network. It’s so that having bet on what (limited) tasks a device will perform, a manufacturer has greater control over the quality of what the customer experiences.

Expect, in the next couple of years, for all major smartphone players (in addition to Apple, RIM, Google) to create (curate?)  really great out-of-the-box experiences for the 20% of tasks that matter most – email, web browsing, facebook/twitter updating, maps, and playing music/movies (yes, better than what we’ve seen). Expect  new devices to ship with fewer radios and sensors, and very few basic applications out-of-the-box. All other features and applications will be available via an App Store, to which there will be a prominent link on the home screen.

If this sounds very much like what Apple’s been doing with iPhone all along, of course you’re right. Forrester’s just woken up, declared it a trend and slapped on an alliteration.

Footnote: also, this isn’t as global, industry-churning a movement as Forrester would have you believe: the Japanese, for the most part, like cellphones crammed with bells and whistles (TV, bar-code readers,credit cards, suchlike). And this doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon.

A US Appeals court forbade the FCC from interfering with Comcast’s decision to throttle BitTorrent traffic.

You know, this net neutrality debate will end up resembling the one over health care. We’ll reach a stage where the FCC’s powers to prevent ISPs from ‘tiering’ service quality will be significantly curbed, leaving customers worse off – they’ll have (more) choice but won’t necessarily like any of their options. Then perhaps there’ll even be calls for a net-neutral public option.

Of course, this will probably also make Google even more attractive as an ISP. (Perhaps eliciting more dramatic stunts than this.)

Anand Giridharadas in the NYT:

Not for the first time, America and much of the world are moving in different ways. America’s innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are spiraling toward fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.

Like gargantuan automobiles, like giant-size helpings, like suburban sprawl, like retail packaging. It’s the same story again. Innovation without efficiency. Comfort without conscience.

Another generation, the same folks, same finger-pointing.  You developed by being wasteful, why shouldn’t we? Either over water (for manufacturing) or minerals (for batteries) or e-waste disposal or suchlike.

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices,”

– Steve Jobs at the iPad2 launch.

At some strange level this is true. Using my iPod Touch and iTunes installation makes me feel – I don’t know – comfortable? – in a way that no Android phone I’ve tried has ever done.

Bingo:

Zong’s chief executive David Marcus said a significant hurdle stands in the way of successfully monetizing through virtual goods in these developing countries. Most gaming companies are still charging the same prices for virtual goods across the world even though local living incomes are quite different. A $1 virtual cow might be nothing to an American consumer, but it is significant in countries like India, where the GDP per capita is $1,017. One potential solution to that problem is differential pricing, but that could introduce a new problem, fraud: users could route their connections through IP addresses in emerging markets where virtual goods are cheaper.

If there is anything that will stand in the way of iTunes, Amazon, Zynga, Netflix and others from becoming mainstream companies in India, this is it.