After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Admittedly, he makes some great points later in the article about electronic interaction not completely replacing human interaction, which is true but not as true as it appears he thought.   The entire article is worth a reading and can be found by clicking here.

I received one as a gift for Christmas, and while I am still awaiting its arrival, I’ve done a good bit of reading about the device.  Overall, it sounds like a great device but like any 1st/2nd generation product, the nook should be expected to have its share of imperfections and unfinished features.

One of these unfinished features is the nook’s ability to lend out books, but only temporarily, to other Nook users.  According to the clarification from B&N as stated on the nook blog nookTalk (on Twitter as @nookTalk, “the books you buy for your nook can only be loaned out ONCE for fourteen days.”  This “one-lend-only-and-just-for-14-days” feature, in my mind, makes this feature more hype than substance.  How often do you borrow a book from a friend and return it 14 days later?  And how often have you lent out a book multiple times to various friends you have who you think should read the book, or read enough of it to be interested in purchasing it themselves?  How frustrating would it be to only have the ability to lend the book out one time, and never again?

Admittedly, the nook’s ability to lend books at all is better than the Amazon Kindle’s lack of a lending feature.  And I imagine there’s plenty of business, partner/copyright, and technology issues at play here that prevented a more relaxed lending feature at this time, but here is my question: why not allow the process of lending an e-book to occur in essentially the same way as the lending of physical books works?

Here are my specific suggestions on how to loosen up the technology to better emulate real-life book lending, while also (somewhat) protecting content creators’ copyrights, their royalties, and the publisher’s/distributors’ revenues.  These suggestions could be implemented by any of the e-book / e-reader companies:

1. Extend the time limit of lending. This is an obvious problem; I would propose they extend the time limit at least to 60 or 90 days, but preferably to something closer to 6 months.  This only makes sense, as a physical book lent out can sometimes stay gone for a while.
2. Do not allow the owner of the e-book to read it while it is “lent out”. This may be disappointing to e-book users, but it does accurately match what happens with physical books and thereby provides some protection to content providers’ copyright and distribution concerns.
3. Implement automatic reversion of the reading rights. As a way of preventing the scenario we have all experienced where you lend a book to someone, but it turns out to be a gift to them (because they never return it!), the devices would ideally revoke reading rights to the book on the lender’s device/account after the lending time limit is up, and return those reading rights to the e-book owner.  Update: I heard from @nookTalk shortly after publishing this post that this feature “should work” currently.  Thanks for the info!
4. Allow for upgrades / “full license” purchase of ebooks to remove or relax restrictions – Apple has already done a similar thing with their music, often offering a non-protected version of songs on iTunes for $1.29 instead of the standard $0.99 per song price, for example.  So, an e-book that normally sells for $9.99 could sell for, say, $14.99 in an unprotected format that might have relaxed lending restrictions (even longer lending, lending to more than 2 or 3 people and simultaneous access to the book yourself, etc.)  This would calm the critics and ensure that people could have more flexibility if they paid more for the e-book– probably something closer to the cost of what the physical book would cost in the store.
5. Implement a “lending friends” list – Thankfully, my understanding is that the nook does allow multiple  accounts (I’m not sure of how many, but I am sure it’s comparable to the Kindle’s 6 account limit) to have access to the same books.  This should assuage any concerns about members of the same household being able to access each other’s books.  But my LENDING friends list that I suggest essentially works the same way, except that the list of accounts can be larger and is used for the lending feature only, not for unlimited normal access to your library.  This again would somewhat of a limiting feature to users, but would be a mitigating protection for B&N and publishers.  If you, for example, can only lend any of your books to someone on a list of 10 different for example, this will limit the odds that lending will be so easy as for some to avoid purchasing books altogether.

I am hopeful — and confident — that as the e-book technology improves and technology creators, authors, and publishers come to grips with the radical changes that will be coming to their industry with the rise of e-books, there will also be an eventual improvement and standardization of features such as e-book lending across all devices.  Hopefully these suggestions here will help to kick-start the discussion.

THE OBVIOUS ALTERNATIVE TO FAXING

With Internet access and Internet use now more ubiquitous than a nearby fax machine, one would think the simple act of scanning and emailing a document would have replaced faxing years ago.  The idea of emailing a scanned image, and more importantly the idea of receiving a scanned image attached to your email (as opposed to pages falling off of a fax machine in the next room) is extremely attractive.  The electronic, scan/email approach is so much easier (in my opinion) that at one point when I worked at an office without a scanner but that had a fax machine down the hall, I would fax a document to my e-fax number on my computer, walk back to my computer and then forward the email I received from that fax machine on to the intended recipient via e-mail.  I did both myself AND the eventual recipient of my fax a big favor by keeping our correspondence digital by converting the hardcopy document into digital format.  This would allow us both to access and view the document then and in the future from anywhere and at any time.

REASONS WHY FAXING ISN’T DEAD

All this having been said, why is it then that fax numbers still exist, and fax transmissions continue?  I would propose that the jump has not yet happened for 3 reasons:

Reason #1: Scanner manufacturers (i.e. Brother, Canon, HP, etc.) and computer manufacturers (Dell, HP, Apple, etc.) have not done a good enough job of simplifying the act of sending an image to someone else, thus making it as easy for everyone to throw out the fax machine for good.

Despite my obvious preference for scanning as described above, even I must admit that sitting down at a computer, finding the scanning software, and making it all happen together with the device at hand is not as easy as it should be, with different processes, software, and things to consider.  Less-comfortable computer users will often find it easier and quicker to use a dedicated device – a fax machine – to send several pages of images.

Even if the Windows and Apple operating systems got their act together, you still have the issue of the scanning device itself.  Until the recent popping up of The Neat Company kiosks in airports all over the country, I haven’t seen one vendor get the device small enough, simple enough, and integrated with scanning/filing software well enough to really push scanning into the mainstream.  Again, The Neat Company has done a pretty good job with this, although my impression is that their filing system is still proprietary, but their flagship desktop scanning device and system is listed at $399 on the first page of their website — a price too step for most people to consider a dedicated device.  Instead most people will stick with a Brother multi-function device or similar (great machines, by the way) and that would be fine, except many of them will never figure out the scanning technology and system well enough to use it smoothly and productively.

Reason #2: Services rose up to fill in the fax -> technology gap, thus prolonging the total death of faxing technology.  Efax.com, a leading online fax service provider, gives people free fax numbers and lets them receive a limited number of faxed pages per month at no cost (I use this service, in fact, as some people still want to fax me documents from time to time).  For a monthly fee, Efax.com provides outbound faxing, a local phone number of your choice, etc. etc.  Within corporations, IT departments have long been acquainted with fax server software made by companies such as GFI which allows for the routing of incoming faxes straight into employee e-mail boxes.

These services have kept people tolerant of the old fax-to-a-phone number approach, largely because people often send and/or receive faxes through these systems without ever touching a fax machine.  The tragedy here is that money is spent on fax server software and phone lines are tied up in the transmission and receiving of faxes with this technology.  Despite the obvious benefits to these services, over the long haul they will become unnecessary.

Reason #3: The move from transmitting hardcopy documents over the phone lines via faxing to the outright irrelevance of paper documents in many of our homes and companies has created something of a “leap frog” affect. Ironically, I believe one reason few companies have ever gotten serious about giving the average personal/home user an easy, consistent, and inexpensive way to scan, email, and organize paper documents on their computer is that very few things even come to us in hard copy form any more. Bank statements, newsletters, daily news, and correspondence all come to us and are available for later retrieval by us in a web browser. As a result, there almost wasn’t enough time and profit incentive for hardware and software companies to kick out fax machines for good by creating an inexpensive, easy-to-use device that could be successfully sold and marketed to millions.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, this is what I believe:  faxing will “die” once and for all when desktop scanners become cheap, small, and easy to use– AND when paper document flow slows to such a crawl that an email address will be more than sufficient on a business card for all professionals — even attorneys.

I looked at three services in detail. Each of these services consistently showed up at the top of search results for me when I searched Google using a number of phrases such as “cd to mp3 conversion” and “cd to digital audio conversion”.

Musicshifter.com boasted “as low as 69 cents per cd”, but after visiting their site one learns that the 69 cents price only applies to archive, “lossless” quality cd backups.  As helpful as that service is, most people will want their cd’s converted into formats that result in file sizes small enough to load onto portable music devices, such as the Apple/iTunes proprietary AAC format, or the popular MP3 format.  To get that type of STANDARD conversion done, their pricing starts at 99 cents per CD and goes up from there, depending on how quickly you want the digital files back in your hands.

RipDigital.com, another top site in Google search results, also prices their standard service at 99 cents per CD.  A big negative, however, is that their 99 cent service only provides you with 192 bit audio quality, and in order to get your converted digital audio files created at a higher bit rate, you will have to pay a total of $1.19 per CD.  Sadly, their “lossless” quality backup service is very pricey at $1.39 a CD.  This makes it fairly expensive to order a standard digital version AND a lossless, archive version of each CD for those that might wish to do that.

PickledProductions.com was the third site that I closely evaluated.  Their product offering is excellent.  Although all of the services make it easy to ship your CDs to them with containers they send you, and although all of them offer insurance for the CDs you ship to them, Pickled Productions actually does all of this at the lowest price of all of them — only a 89 cents per CD conversion price, and for that price you can get the songs recorded digitally at a quality level as high as bit rate of 320!  Additionally, you can have them also create a second digital copy of each CD with a second format for only 15 to 25 cents, depending on the format.  This is perfect for those wanting to also secure a digital “lossless format” copy of each CD without spending twice the conversion cost as the other sites would appear to require.

So, we are moving forward with using the PickledProductions.com service as its service appears as good as the others, and its pricing clearly the lowest!  (10 to 20 cents per CD savings adds up when you have several hundred CDs).

I will let you know how it turns out!

NOTE:  I have found a great online converter app that shows you how many CD’s you can convert, given a certain amount of hard drive space.  Click here for the link.

UPDATE, 1/5/2010: Today I placed an order on the PickledProductions.com website after briefly speaking with a sales rep on the phone.  I also found out they are offering 10% off orders right now with the promo code NEW YEAR.

UPDATE, 3/4/2010: After receiving the Pickled Productions “welcome packet” about a week after my phone order, I put off organizing my cd collection for a few weeks, then finally decided to get things in order and place them on the spindles that Pickled Productions sent to me.  Before sending them back, I called them and asked if I could add a second format (for only 15 cents more per cd) on my collection conversion, and they said “of course!”.  After mailing them in, it took about 3-4 weeks before receiving a confirmation e-mail that the conversion was done; within a week of receiving that email the whole package– my cd’s along with the data dvd’s filled with the music, returned.  I was happy to find the data dvd’s excellently organized, labeled with the artist name range on the label of each dvd, and on the dvd itself I found separate folders for each artist, and within them subfolders for each album.  The song files themselves were named by the name of the song, with the artist in parentheses at the end of the song name.  A very clean, organized, format to be sure.  To top it all off, I received a printed, bound, printed music catalog detailing my collection, complete with color-printed cd covers along with track lists beside each one.  Because I sent in my collection in alphabetical order, I am not sure whether the music data dvd’s and the printed music catalog also came alphabetical because of how I had organized them, or if Pickled Productions would have re-sorted them alphabetically anyhow.  All in all, I was VERY pleased with the service and the price!

Mint.com was the brainchild of a 20-something named Aaron Patzer who was frustrated with the lack of a good online money management solution.  The company took off, and two years and 1.7 million users later was purchased by Intuit in early November 2009.

Intuit purchased Mint.com for $170 million, which is an incredible sum — and yet, it was probably worth it for Intuit to stay the top-dog in personal financial management for the indefinite future, particularly given Microsoft’s recent announcement that they were ceasing development and future sales of MS Money.   Mint.com’s momentum in the online money management space was simply too quick for Intuit’s new Quicken Online offering to compete with.

In the future, I will blog more extensively about some of the strengths and weaknesses of Mint.com’s product, as well as review the other players in the online personal money management world.

But as I have followed these recent developments with the sale of Mint.com in a variety of news sources and technology blogs, I must say that one of the most impressive aspects of the story has been the level-headedness maintained by 29-year old Aaron Patzer after selling his business for a huge amount of money–Patzer now heads up the personal finance division at Intuit.  A good example of his attitude is found in his response to a question posed by a reporter in a recent NY Times article about any changes that may have occurred in his life since the sale of Mint.com and the resulting financial windfall:

Q. Have you relaxed it any since the sale?

A. My personal rule is I’m not touching anything I got from the acquisition. I’m just going to continue to live off of my income. I’ve relaxed my budget on travel and hotels just so I can do a little more exotic travel. I’m going to New Zealand this Christmas and I’m very excited about that. I relaxed my grocery budget so I can shop at Whole Foods instead of Safeway.

His maturity and humility are no doubt the same characteristics that led to the growth of Mint.com to start with.

Popular technology blog TechCrunch published Aaron’s account of the building of Mint.com, and the article included this description, by Aaron, of the early days:

Mint was built in the Silicon Valley way. It started in my apartment, with Matt Snider and Poornima Vijayashanker. We interviewed the first real “professional,” our VP of Engineering, David Michaels in our kitchen.

Most astounding of all is the fact that this was only 2 short years ago!  Surely these humble beginnings, and the quick and rapid rise of his company with little time for him to get comfortable and relax, has aided in the preservation of his humility today.

Instead, in his new role now at Intuit he “wants to keep pushing online, as well as mobile, desktop apps, and international (which is hard to do in finance with a 38-person startup)”, according to another TechCrunch article.

ALL of us can learn from the lack of emphasis he is putting on his new-found wealth and his focus instead on continued excellence and leadership in his work.

Most people do not realize that by default, Facebook shows a decent amount of information to individuals who search for, and find your profile on Facebook.  By default, this includes your profile picture, your friend list, links to add you as a friend or send a message, and pages of which you are a fan.

To change these settings, hover over the “Settings” label on right side of the blue banner at the top of the screen in Facebook, and choose “Privacy Settings” from the dropdown menu under settings.  THEN click on “Search” to tweak search-related settings.  That will take you to the screen as partially shown below, where you can make changes as you wish.

You can also limit your search visibility altogether with the dropdown field labeled accordingly.

Many people sign up on Facebook without realizing anyone visiting the website can search for them and see some information about them.  The idea that all information in Facebook is visible only to your friends is not entirely accurate; some information is visible to non-”friends” who search for your proile, as controlled by the settings on this screen.

I hope this is helpful to those Facebook users out there, like me, who prefer for the site to be a private community for friends and doesn’t want most of their information publicly visible to individuals on the Internet who may find me.

But today I wanted to point out that popular technology site TechCrunch currently lists TWENTY-THREE, yes that’s 23 different phones either currently available, to be available soon, or rumored to be revealed soon, all which will operate on the Google Android operating system. Note also that all of the major carriers (T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T) are represented by this list of phones, and some of them tied to multiple of these devices.

Imagine your choice of cell carrier and choosing between several phones, all which run the same applications! This is truly going to be a significant threat to Apple’s iPhone… and of course to AT&T which as you know is currently the only carrier which sells the iPhone. But you will also notice that at least one of these Android phones will work on the AT&T network as well.

Click here to read the TechCrunch article I reference here.

Apparently, this is a Motorola device running the Google Android operating system– many people believe devices that run the Android system are the biggest threat on the horizon for the otherwise-dominant iPhone.

Just to be clear– the Google Android operating system can run on various devices on different cell phone networks.  This will allow people choice in devices, choice in wireless carriers, but a set of downloadable applications that will work on all of those different phones and wireless networks, assuming the phone they are using is a phone running the Google Android operating system.

Here’s a snippet from an article posted yesterday about this:

I’m not going to be foolish enough to call this an iPhone killer for the simple fact that the iPhone’s developer community is still miles ahead of Android’s regardless of how good Droid turns out to be. But don’t be surprised if you start hearing about people who quit the iPhone in favor of the Droid. After all, even if the phone doesn’t turn out to be quite as polished as the iPhone, it will be running on a network that will actually let them connect their calls consistently.

One final thing to note: given how direct an attack Verizon is making on the iPhone, it sure doesn’t sound like the iPhone will be making the leap to Verizon any time soon.

From this individual’s comments and plenty of others, it is clear that the consensus is that the iPhone market share is fairly dominant, and that eating into it will take a while.

But in the meantime, for those of us who’ve not yet taken the iPhone plunge, there may be an exciting alternative soon!

But the AT&T network has been strangled by the iPhone recently.

I’ve started a blog posting entitled “My junky phone – savings or a symbol?” that I really need to finish – but in light of all the press in recent days about iPhone’s service problems, I’m glad I waited… BUT I couldn’t wait to pass THIS on to you all out there, several of whom I know have iPhones.

Despite TechCrunch having reported on this issue months ago, the rest of the media is starting to catch on… the AT&T cellular network is being bogged down by the intense data demands of the typical iPhone user, leading to slowdowns for many users.

You’ll notice in the ZDNet article below the author blames Apple for the problem– but, I assure you that Apple is not happy about this, regardless of whether the blame is rightly theirs or not.  I also think this bad press about the iPhone’s slowness, even if it is not systemwide, pretty much assures that other carries will have the iPhone available soon.  Although, it’s a tightrope Apple and the cell companies must walk.  Making the device available to other carries will help spread out the cellular network load to other carriers, and yet it is also going to increase the total absolute load on cell networks, as people will be rushing to get the iPhone with their existing provider, that they were leery of leaving for AT&T.

Coverage of this issue the last few days includes these articles:

NY Times: Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T

Wall Street Journal: AT&T Gets a Fuzzy Signal on Apple’s iPhone

Also.. NY Times March ’09 article: 3G Phones Exposing Networks’ Last-Gen Technology

ZDNet:  iPhone users strangling the AT&T network

So instead, I have crafted a new stimulus proposal that I feel certain will be better received. The iStimulus‘ benefit was limited because, let’s face it, iPhones and most other Apple products only benefit individuals… so I now propose something that helps a broader swath of people — the WiiStimulus plan.

As it sounds and as it is spelled, the WiiStimulus is designed to help families and groups of friends purchase Nintendo Wii(TM) systems and other home video game systems.  This stimulus shuns the individual and instead favors the group approach.  In fact, the only way to receive your $100 tax credit on participating video game products will be to also provide, with your tax return, proof of purchase of at least one video game requiring two or more players.  I know, such game titles may be hard to find, but I am done with rewarding individuals!

Anything that will bring a family or groups of friends to gather around the LCD in their living room glowing the colors of Guitar Hero or Mario Kart Wii is a good thing!  Blogging?  So self-promoting.  Facebook?  So selfish and self-pitying (unless you are messaging friends or family members on the other side of the room).  Twitter?  Just noisy and distracting.  Playing games on your iPhone? — it’s just Windows Solitaire with a prettier face. Family video game playing represents a PURE use of technology that brings people together.

So, rush out today and buy a new video game system (only new systems qualify for the stimulus) and get your family off of their laptops and iPhones and get them gathered around the television once again, using entertainment tools they don’t need and may not be able to afford.  Because after all, it will be $100 less now!

Many believe that even though i don’t need or want a stimulus, but that Wii, collectively, do… but is there a difference?