Rich Mintz  

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.

From today’s NYT Real Estate section:

A few months ago, Michael Bolla gave up his independent brokerage, Luxury Lofts & Homes, to join Prudential Douglas Elliman because he was about to handle some large developments and was not willing to invest the money to upgrade the servers for his Web site to handle the increased volume in his listings.

“If you have a 120-unit development on a small guy’s Web site,” Mr. Bolla said, “it will crash.”

Um, excuse me? For $50 a month, Pair Networks (for instance) will give you 240 monthly gigabytes of transfer on a redundant network that I bet you is more reliable than whatever Prudential Douglas Elliman is using. You can sign up with Pair online right now, and it’ll be ready for you in an hour! And capacity and reliability in the marketplace scale up very quickly from there, much faster than cost.

If the brokerage you’re about to list your house with runs its own servers,you’ve picked the wrong broker — they’re spending money on in-house infrastructure they should be spending on marketing your house.

I’m not surprised to hear people blaming their business decisions on technology, but I am surprised to see the Times passing it along unevaluated, even in a vanity story about New York real estate.

It reminds me of this gem, which I see every time I log into AT&T’s website:

Excuse me? My “connection speed” has nothing to do with why I’m sitting here waiting for your (apparently) underdesigned, underpowered authentication infrastructure to log me in. Didn’t your granny teach you not to lie?

3/12: James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

Most of the buzz this year is all about the device (iPad, Galaxy Tab, Android, netbook, MacBook Air) and how it’s used (Facebook, Twitter, “liking,” “poking,” etc.). But I think the infrastructure story — the Cloud story — is more meaningful.

I’m not talking about the business story (how companies, including mine, are gradually moving their data storage and management offsite, and outsourcing their application provision). I’m talking about the individual story: how, for more and more people, access to the data they use in their personal and professional lives has become not only a platform-agnostic affair, but a device-independent one.

Consider:

• Almost all the information I need to use to conduct my life now lives “on the Internet.” That includes not just email, contacts, and appointments; I’m also talking about documents I produce and share professionally, reference material, entertainment content, etc.
• The few exceptions (e.g., the photos I took last week, which are sitting on the hard drive of my laptop) are, more often than not, a matter of me not taking advantage of existing channels to the Cloud, rather than such channels not existing.
• Google knows everybody. At some point about two years ago — and note that this is after I started my current job — I stopped keeping people’s contact information, because I realized that every new person I met who was 70 or younger could be found on the Internet if I remembered their name. Technically, if I meet them through work, I may not even remember their name, because most people I meet professionally can be found again online with a smart Google search using a few snippets of descriptive information (employer, job title, etc.)
• Google knows everything. By analogy to the preceding: I no longer keep factual or business information around because I “might need it later.” The nature of research has largely changed: now it’s a matter of asking the body of Internet de facto public record for what I need, rather than consulting a formal compilation (directory, etc.) and/or (re-)finding information that I (personally) squirreled away in the past.

I now live in a world in which I can potentially reach for almost any computing device that happens to be at hand (whether it belongs to me or not) and conduct almost any information transaction that I wish. In my daily life I use an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook largely interchangeably, choosing one over another based mostly on convenience in the moment and on form factor, rather than on suitability. Sure, at the margins, one device will be “better” than the others for certain transactions or in certain settings; but in the main, they all do most of the same things acceptably well.

And this is the beginning of the transformation, not its end state.

In the context of all this, it’s important to note that I didn’t really have to do anything special to make all this happen. I just lived my life, making choices (e.g., following or not following my employer’s recommendations, buying or not buying devices, signing up or not signing up for online services) as they were presented to me in the course of my ordinary affairs. Sure, I work for a technology company, and I’m an early-ish adopter; but I don’t live on the bleeding edge, and don’t have time to waste on unproven technologies or tactics. I don’t try something new until I’ve seen evidence, from others, that it works. And all this stuff works more or less as advertised.

Just a quick mention: I’ve been reading James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood this week. I was skeptical (I don’t usually do well with broad surveys of really fluffy topics), but after about the first 10% or so, I can say with confidence that the book is awesome. Great anecdotes, insights coming fast and furious, confident authorial voice without being preachy. Very readable, and substantive, too. More when I finish.

Just checked out the streaming Amazon Instant Video offerings that are now available to me free as a benefit of my Amazon Prime membership. There’s some watchable content there, and I was all ready to watch some vintage Doctor Who — but alas, the damn thing runs on Flash, so it’s not iPad-compatible. Advantage: Netflix. (Not to mention that the Netflix content reserve is quite a bit deeper than Amazon’s Prime-eligible content.)

I will say that Amazon’s search-and-browse interface is more lightweight than Netflix’s, which I’ve never particularly liked. But I won’t be canceling my Netflix membership quite yet.

So I invested in this iPad (original model, for now) about a year ago. It got a lot of use when it was a new toy, but then the iPhone 4 came out, and I upgraded, and with the speed improvement and fast app-switching, I now find the iPhone faster for a lot of the things I was doing on the iPad. Plus it’s right there in my pocket anyway. So I find myself reaching for the phone incrementally more, and for the pad incrementally less.

Besides, the iPad has some undeniable drawbacks. It’s a little too heavy; it’s awkward to hold at reading distance for long periods; the backlight eventually gives me a headache. And (surprisingly) for short bursts, anyway, it’s easier to type accurately on the phone.

But I’ve paid for this thing, and there are a lot of things it does well, even elegantly. And given that my alternative for heavy computing is a 17-inch MacBook (which I love, but it’s an awkward hunk of metal that I hate taking out at home), I’m trying to practice using the iPad more seriously as an intermediate computing tool rather than just as a consumption channel.

Much has been made of the decline in netbook sales over the past year, but (in contrast to some others) I don’t really think you can blame the iPad for that. If netbooks were better made, and faster, and easier to use, and less limited by what has to be left out of them to make them that small, more of them would sell. As things are, they have a nice chunk of the market, and it will grow as they get better — and as the gap between big, heavy, feature-rich smartphones and small, light, streamlined computers continues to narrow.

I like what I’ve seen of the new feather-light mini MacBooks, and perhaps I’ll experiment with one the next time I have a thousand bucks to blow. But first I’m going to try to get better value out of the iPad for a while.

I have one of those folding cases (the Macally) that turns into a triangular support for the iPad, so that you can put it in typing position or stand it up on a table. I’ve become fairly good as an accurate iPad typist — the problem is that I’m so fast on a real keyboard that extensive data entry on the iPad still feels too slow.

So except when I’m actually sitting on a train while trying to power-use the iPad — which, to be honest, is relatively rare — I’m experimenting with a solution that’s right at hand: the aluminum-cased Bluetooth Apple Wireless Keyboard. I already have one at home and one at work, so I just have to get in the habit of reaching for it, and also of throwing it in my briefcase (packed in a little jersey bag I happened to have around the house) when I go out of town.

The iPad-plus-keyboard combination works great on a table; to get the angle correct on my lap, I need to set a big heavy book on my knees and lean the keyboard against it. Here you see this tactic demonstrated with a copy of Egypt: Gods, Myths and Religion which happened to be at hand.

I’m going to test out using the iPad-plus-keyboard combination in various ways over the next few weeks — as a high-volume Gmail processor, as a simple document production machine, as a blogging platform — and I’ll keep you posted.

A few things I already wish this combination had:

• The keyboard support on the iPad is fairly good (this WordPress application fully supports the arrow keys in edit mode, for instance), but I wish the keyboard had an equivalent to the iPad Home button! I know Apple sells an iPad keyboard dock, but I already own this one.
• I wish the iPad would support a Bluetooth mouse (without jailbreaking, I mean). That’s so obvious a need that I imagine it’s on its way.

More to come as the experiment plays itself out.

Today the end of the World As We Know It came a little nearer, as Google announced that voice calling to telephones is available for free via Gmail.

If you’re an Honorary Old, as I am, I know you’re thinking “what? Don’t I need a microphone and a headset and etc. etc.?” But no. Here’s what you do:

You open your Gmail.

In the Google Chat panel in the left rail, you click “Call phone.”

You enter the phone number.

The party answers and you hear their voice coming out of your computer, and you just, you know, talk, in the general direction of your computer. Your built-in mike is just fine. It’s not pin-drop quality, but it’s, you know, FINE.

I’ve been keeping my landline phone active for two reasons: “what if there’s an emergency and the power goes out,” and “what if I decide I hate the cable company and I need DSL.” But I’ve made a grand total of EIGHT outbound calls in EIGHT MONTHS on the landline, and received ZERO yes ZERO inbound calls. The $38 a month that I’m paying is starting to seem ridiculous. Is it time to give the thing up?