Rich Mintz  

So I got a quasi-spam this week from a potential vendor. (I say “quasi-spam” because it’s a service that, based on my publicly available professional affiliations and so forth, someone might plausibly claim to believe I might want to buy.) The vendor, apparently with a straight face, sells something called Transparent Billing, which claims to help you manage your remote workforce more cost-effectively — and it’s horrifying.

Read their page and at first it just seems like the typical boring web-service copy, until you come to the words “screenshots of work performed.” This is where you swallow hard, and click for more information. You learn that for “only a dollar a day per employee,” you can have comprehensive automated reports on what your employees are doing, including automated screenshots from their computers and reports of their keystroke activity.

If this is what we’ve come to — already, in 2012, not in The Dystopian Future, but now — well, f*ck me, I’m moving to the moon colony. What sort of company would say to itself, “hey, we’ve got to figure out a way to build a loyal and productive workforce,” and would then pick this way?

Mobile devices (our cyber-appendages) are here to stay, but pay-by-the-minute mobile calling is on the way out. We all know this, but it’s still surprising each time I find myself doing something baldly irrational in order to avoid making a mobile phone call with minutes I’ve already paid for.

Here’s the latest: I’m sitting at my desk at work, on my computer, with an all-you-can-eat VoIP phone (which someone else paid for) sitting in front of me, and an iPhone at hand with a gazillion minutes. I have to make a quick call. What do I do?

If you chose “(c) I open Skype, because it’s just less of a pain in the ass, and pay 5 cents a minute out of my own pocket,” you win!

Well, Carmageddon is here, and in honor of the gigantic metrowide disruption caused by this project to add one (!) carpool lane to the 405, here’s “Magic Highway USA,” Disney’s apparently serious look at a future where tubular highways, solar cars, RVs that drive themselves while you play checkers in the back, and parking in the sky are all part of our everyday experience. More than 50 years later, most of this hasn’t happened, although you have to admit they were right about GPS. Enjoy.

Suppose you were at home in New York, but about to leave for DC.  Now suppose you needed 50 copies of your presentation printed. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to upload a file, then get in the car and drive to DC, and then pick up your printouts 6 hours later in a tidy little box with a cute little ribbon on it when you got there?

Well, guess what? You can, and I just did! (Minus the cute little ribbon, but I bet if you typed “PLEASE TIE BOX WITH CUTE LITTLE RIBBON” in the Special Instructions box, they would.)

I’ve written before about the transformational value of Amazon Prime — Amazon’s pay-once-per-year, get-free-shipping-on-almost-everything upgrade program.  It turns out (not surprisingly if you think about it, but most of us don’t) that the emotional pain associated with paying extra for shipping is so high for many of us, that it impedes us from buying things that (on a strict dollars-per-unit-of-utility basis) it would be rational for us to buy. (Extreme case, drawn from my own recent life: I obsessed over paying $3.99 for shipping on an item that I then had to pay $23 to schlep home from the office in a taxi once it got delivered.  The taxi fare didn’t bother me, as I experienced it as background noise; but the much smaller shipping add-on rankled.)

Amazon Prime is one of those brilliant ideas that you aren’t sure will work until you try it — and four days after you sign up, you’ve already forgotten what your life was like before it. (Netflix is another.) In fact, Amazon Prime (combined with Kindle e-books, and Amazon and Half.com used book inventory) has been such an emotional plus for me that I decided a few months ago that I’d adopt two new policies for a while and see how they worked out:

1. Anytime I have an impulse to purchase something of relatively nominal value that Amazon carries (e.g., I see a review for a book I’d like to read), I order it immediately, either for Kindle, new via Amazon Prime, or used, depending on price and how I feel.
2. Anytime I need anything (dishes, toothpaste cat food, barbecue sauce) that is small enough to carry home from work on the bus, if I can wait until the day after tomorrow to hold it in my hands, I check Amazon for it before making a store trip.

I haven’t been scrupulous about number two, but I’ve been quite scrupulous about number one.  And guess what? I’ve spent a little bit more money on books (enough to notice, not enough to be concerned about). But in return, I find I’m vastly happier.  The increase in happiness associated with not having to agonize over whether I care about such-and-such book “enough” to spend the money, not having to schlep to the store, not having to keep track of pending purchases, turns out to be worth much more to me than the (modest) incremental money I’m spending. And, on the whole, I’m getting the things I want into my hands sooner.

Quantum computing, like quarks, black holes, and pretty much everything Steven Hawking has an opinion on, is one of those half-physical, half-philosophical subjects that are always hard for me to stomach.  Half of what’s written on it is impenetrable, and half (including most of the popular stuff) has a smug and sophomoric tone that I cannot endure.

So hats off to Rivka Galchen, whose story on quantum computing in the May 2 issue of The New Yorker is the first article on the topic that I haven’t put down after paragraph six and never picked up again. Far from it — this story is lively, it’s full of illustrative anecdotes I want to quote (somehow I never realized that Dr. House and Wilson are based on Sherlock Homes and Watson, but of course they are), and it’s got me excited enough to seek out more reading on the topic.

To give credit where credit is due, I got softened up by James Gleick’s The Information, which I should write about more. It’s a very readable and yet appealingly dense history of the origins and growth of information theory, the kind of book that has me mining the bibliography when I get to the end.

I’m sure these Brooklyn hipsters are perfectly nice in person, but when I read about them in the paper, it kind of makes me wish I had a sack of bedbugs to let loose in their coworking sanctuary in the middle of the night.

Don’t kids just, you know, “do things” anymore, without it being a Statement about What They Stand For?

I know the answer: “of course they don’t, and they never did.”  Every generation is intolerably self-important in its own special unique curated-and-encoded way.  (Remember, mine invented the Web the first time around.  And my parents’ generation? Don’t get me started.)  Not to mention that the company I work for isn’t exactly Dunder Mifflin (for my British friends: that’s “Wernham Hogg” in American).

But still… there’s artisanal coworking, and then there’s artisanal coworking. Just saying.

Some recent tweets from my work colleagues (kicked off by Yahel Carmon) have reminded me that I, too, have a love for Dropbox that verges on the profane. More than any of the other cloud services I use (except for Google Apps, about which more below), Dropbox has transformed my life.

If you’re one of the few people within the sound of my voice who doesn’t know Dropbox, here’s how it works: You sign up online for a free account. A Dropbox folder is created on your computer. It behaves just like a normal folder, except that anything you put in it gets automatically copied into the cloud, where you can also download it using a web browser on any computer in the world. (Hello, automatic backup!)

What makes this really powerful is that if you then install your personal Dropbox folder on another computer, a process that takes about 30 seconds, the contents automatically sync to that computer, too. So for the first time in my experience, it’s possible to have home and work computers (for instance) with data that magically stays synchronized, using a tool that Just Works.

You can share your Dropbox folder or any folder within it with anyone in the world, so that (for example) a team of people can have an automatically synchronized collection of files. And so forth.

There’s a Dropbox client for your iPhone (which maintains a directory, not the actual files) so that you can download any file you need to your phone on demand.

The last time I bought a new computer, moving all my files, folders, and settings was a time-consuming process that required some thought. (I used the Apple Migration Assistant, which does work, but I didn’t just want to move everything wholesale.). This time, because most of my data lives in Dropbox, the first thing I did to get started was set up Dropbox on my new computer and then GO AWAY while my most important data magically moved itself. You can’t argue with that kind of ease of use.

And while we’re on the subject — having Google Apps (email, calendar, Google Docs, and RSS) at the center of my work life has slashed the amount of time I spend worrying about where my stuff is. Wherever I am, if I can get my hands on a device, I can get at my stuff.

I know I sound a little like the sad old uncles from my childhood who went on and on about whatever routine technology of the moment (programmable VCR, anyone?) they had just discovered. But this stuff is amazing!

I had lunch last week with a friend of mine who works for a U.S. executive-branch agency on cultural and mentorship programs in a dozen countries in Africa, where she spends most of her time. As you might expect, the time passed pleasantly and quickly: someone in a job like that can make interesting conversation on a variety of topics I don’t ordinarily hear much about. One topic in particular came up over and over: the remarkable transformation in African civil society wrought by mobile phone technology. For the most part, this doesn’t mean smartphones; it means ordinary voice communications, and especially SMS.

My friend said she has personally witnessed surprisingly deep societal change just in the past five years, directly driven by the availability of basic mobile technology.

In many countries in Africa, landline infrastructure is almost nonexistent, or prohibitively expensive; but in every country nowadays, cellphones are widely available, coverage is quite good, and service is cheap (thanks to the nonexistence of the oligopolistic pricing and service controls that prevail in the United States). As a result, business can be done, people can live away from their families without being isolated, and a wide range of transactions can be conducted via the SMS network.

This transformation hasn’t been twenty years in the making, or fifteen years; virtually all of it has happened in the last decade, with the bulk taking place just in the past seven years or so. Telecom entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim (profiled here by Ken Auletta) has had as much to do with this as anyone, investing in infrastructure around the region (and profiting handsomely).

In my line of work most of our focus is on the newest technologies — the smartest smartphones, the most innovative location-based services — and I often forget that for over a billion people, just managing to get access to reliable voice service and the most basic data service — i.e., SMS — is enough to vastly increase opportunity.

Josh Roseman has made a detailed comparison between his HTC Evo phone (running Android) and a Star Trek communicator. And as always with these device-on-device smackdowns, it depends which features are most important to you. If “being beamed up to the Enterprise” is not at the top of your list, it looks like Android comes out ahead.