Tomorrow night will be the premier of their new show "Penn and Teller Tell a Lie" on the Discovery Channel at 10:00pm eastern.  I’m sure it will be awesome.  The preview that I saw has flamethrowers and all kinds of coolness.  The idea is that they put forward 7 pretty unlikely scenarios, one of which is a lie.  The others while hard to believe are true.  The challenge for the viewer is to figure out which one of the bunch is the fake.

As you can see from the app screenshot above, the first episode involves steering a plane with its doors instead of the rudders.  The concept of the show is that they take The iphone app allow you to vote real time while watching the show. 

I had been indirectly involved in the text messaging for American Idol, and I have always wondered why more interactive TV has not been more widely adopted.  I guess American Idol wasn’t successful enough. People talk about "engagement", but tend to actually just broadcast. 

All of it has got my attention.  I’m really looking forward to watching it tomorrow.

I hadn’t really given much thought to having my bank account tied to Paypal. The incident got me concerned about the lack of consumer protections that you would normally have with a credit card.    I got quite a bit more concerned when PayPal refused to remove my bank account from being associated with my Paypal account.  We knew my account had been compromised, but there was nothing they would do other than tell me to wait for the dispute process to work.  I was told to wait for 10 days.

As it turned out, Paypal did credit back the $200 (about a week later) and restored my account.  They also sent me an “RSA like” token credit card, which I thought was pretty slick.

In my mind, that wasn’t enough, the support issues trying to protect my account scared the pants off of me. 

My only recourse was to remove my bank account from Paypal, change the passwords, and never use it again.  What a shame.  I have also instructed my bank to not authorize funding from PayPal.

Fast forward to today.  I just read a post about researchers that have been able to crack SSL technology.  The example that they used was hacking into Paypal. So we now have a situation where a great deal of ecommerce is based upon vulnerable technology with very little recourse for consumers to protect themselves against fraudulent attacks.

One of the projects that I worked on was to create a map of customer value transactions across multiple communications channels.  Let me give you an example. 

A customer browses something on a company website, and puts a call into his rep with a technical question. The rep lets the customer know that it will need to be researched and someone else will get back to them. The rep opens up a trouble ticket, which a technician then opens, answers the question and sends an email to the customer.  Simple enough if it works, but is an example of multiple communications channels (web, voice, and email) all being used to process a single question.  Multiply that times thousands of customers, reps, and there is quite a bit of room for gaps.  While common sense recognizes that all of those things are related, most IT systems cannot. 

Our idea was to run correlations across web, voice, and email to make sure that each of the value transactions was a closed loop.  Doing that kind of analysis should help identify trouble spots.  It is really as simple as matching the customer to each of these transactions.  Most IT systems generate the raw transaction logs to do this kind of analysis.

Google recently announced the ability to download Google Voice data as part of the Google Takeout initiative.  Extremely cool, and should work for the kinds of value analysis that I’m talking about. 

Later on, I kind of lost the HTML plot a bit.  I remember getting some warnings on a couple of my websites that I was failing some type of strict compliance, but frankly it wasn’t really that big of a deal.  Like a lot of standards, there was a pretty fair amount of wiggle room for interpretation of the HTML standards.  You needed to test all of your code against different browsers.  It was an economic decision to decide how much time and resources to invest in different browser platforms.

From what I was gathering from the Apple HTML5 buzz, it was definitely worth poking into.  I have been active with mobile platforms which have presented an increasingly fragmented bunch of display options.  Tablets have only made that an even bigger challenge.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the line between web applications and native device applications is getting increasingly blurry. 

HTML5 is intended to bring the web standards up to date and provide a framework for dealing with these issues.  It provides viewpoints as a means of supporting multiple devices.  It addresses video and local databases for offline storage. 

I was intrigued when O’Reilly published HTML5 Mobile Web Development, a video series on HTML5 targeted at web professionals.  My hope was that a tutorial video would address some of the problems in trying to learn from books and provide more dynamic examples.  I really liked the content being presented, such as real life examples of how to structure pages, create a twitter app, add geolocation, and creating databases.

In practice, the videos didn’t quite work out as well as I had hoped.  I found some of the same challenges as I did when I took some pre-recorded graduate classes.  I found that even though Jake Carter was clearly an expert and had structured his ideas well, I had a really hard time keeping focused.  I have come to expect five minute “bite sized” chunks of information, which provide me with the ability to skip over the sections that I understand and go straight to the parts that I don’t.  I frankly don’t have the patience to sit still through hours of video. 

The series would really benefit from even some rudimentary interactivity such as putting a section at the front end describing what the learning objectives for each section were with a test at the end to see whether you had mastered the material or not. 

When videos are structured that way, I can start by reading the objectives, then take the test to find out whether or not I actually needed to watch the entire video.  That was much the same approach that I used with college text books.  If I knew the material and could pass the test at the end, I didn’t watch.  The fact was, I could figure out which of the 12 hours of video that I needed to watch, and which I didn’t.

I like the fact that O’Reilly is pushing the envelope, but found that this format just didn’t work for me. 

It reminded me of an evening many years ago, when I was attending the NAB show and was invited to see the fabulous Susan Anton and the Rockettes with Martin Noar. 

We went to the show, hoping to sell them an in-ear monitoring rig.  They had other plans, which involved us giving them one for free.  Before we understood what was up, we were put into the seats set aside for “royalty” right dead front, dead center.  We were then subject to a full court press designed to wow us.  The only thing that I really remember was a version of “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”, which was pretty much a self evident truth.

Much of the this year’s CES show for me was related to the mobile telecom industry becoming more involved in media and entertainment. Lots of excitement around this space, new revenue streams, etc.  All I can say was that this truck brought me back some memories of what I’ve been missing.

It was a very pleasant surprise to see the Motorola Xoom, which is also in tablet form. It has some features that I think that I like better.  The product launched at the CES in Las Vegas.  Part of what I liked was that, like the Droid before it, the Xoom is a product of a collaborative effort from Motorola, Google, and Verizon. Each company leverages their unique value proposition to bring effectively a “best of breed” product to market. 

Motorola has made a very nice piece of gear.  It is designed to be upgradeable, it has good performance, and seems very well built.  Verizon is providing the always on connection, first in 3G, with the ability to upgrade to 4G as it becomes more available.   Google is contributing the next major version (version 3.0) of the Android OS, which has been nicknamed “Honeycomb”.  Honeycomb is a major revision of the Android OS designed to support tablets.  I really like that these three have figured out that users want to see the plan and understand how these things will evolve.

I don’t think that I can capture much reality about the user interface in words and pictures, but the Honeycomb interface provides a dynamic and intuitive menu and control interface that is easy to call up, and can automatically disappear and free up screen real estate.  My take was that it felt very much like how things should work. 

The interface uses a card stack kind of approach for content, which also seems pretty straightforward.  All told, it looks like a powerful OS that doesn’t intrude on what you want to accomplish. 

I liked this device a lot.  It is expected to be released in February.   I don’t personally see the need for 4G right now, but really like that I can upgrade in a while once the rest of the ecosystem is ready.

Motorola Xoom specs

* 10.1-inch 1280×800 resolution display
* Android Honeycomb 3.0 OS
* Nvidia Tegra 2 dual core processor
* Dual Cameras
* 5 MP rear-facing camera with dual LED flash
* 2 MP front-facing camera
* 1GB RAM
* 32 GB inbuilt memory
* Micro SD support
* Wi-Fi 2.4GHz & 5GHz 802.11b/g/n
* Bluetooth 2.1
* 3.5mm audio jack
* micro USB 2.0 HS
* 730 g weight
* 249.1mm (h) x 167.8mm (w) x 12.9mm (d) – dimension
* AAC, AAC+, AMR NB, AMR WB, MP3, XMF support
* 10 hour video playback – battery

It was really uncomfortable.  There had been an awful lot of buzz in the room about how exciting things were and it all got really quiet.

He then showed a video that was some pretty blatant political propaganda.  The theme was “mobilize because America is not very good anymore!”. The idea was (I’m paraphrasing) “We have to beat those foreigners and take our industry back by pushing partisan politics”.   I sat and wondered, exactly how does this help the CEA?   How does it help anyone sell anything? 

I also wondered how annoyed would I be if I was Sony, Research In Motion, or any one of hundreds of international companies that had spent their money to be here.  I thought that I would not have felt welcome. 

He then said “I will be signing copies of my book out front after the keynote”.  People laughed at that, then were surprised that it was really true.  So it got a bit more uncomfortable.

The tagline to this very long and frankly baffling US protectionism as international trade show rally was, “and of course we also have 25,000 international visitors registered here, more than ever before, we welcome them”. 

Fortunately things got much better with the Verizon kickoff.  My takeaway was that I am very glad that I don’t belong to CEA I’m not comfortable supporting this organization.

I would recommend Mobile Design and Development to any business that uses internet technology and plans to be around for a while.  This book does a good job of laying out the facts to back that up. Brian Fling’s book does an excellent job of laying out the different design elements that need to be adopted over the next few years.

The Big Picture

There are already more mobile devices connected to the internet than desktop and laptop computers combined.  Mobile devices also add cameras, location awareness, and other new capabilities to the mix.  This book provides the background and context needed in order to help avoid making short sighted decisions. 

The book is written for web designers, information architects, and other internet professionals.  It provides background on what makes the mobile web different from the traditional internet.  It then focuses on developing a mobile strategy.  I can wholeheartedly support a few of the rules provided here.  It’s hard to argue with: Focus on Context,  Goals, and Needs; You Can’t Support Everything; Don’t Convert, Create; Keep It Simple. 

Brian covers different design options that need to be considered in order to execute your strategy.  There are chapters on types of mobile applications, information architecture, and user interface. 

The remaining chapters focus on some practical advice for putting these ideas into practice.  I have already found myself referring to the chapter on mobile web development.

I recommend the book to anyone that is involved in internet technology and needs to start getting up to speed on mobility.  It is not written with the programmer in mind, rather for the person that needs to understand the impact of mobile devices on their business.  I believe that the biggest value in the book is in providing a framework for planning your mobile web strategy. 

Mobile Design and Development

Here are the apps on my home page right now. While I have seen a few “Top 25” and “Top 10” app lists, listing the Top 16 made the most sense to me, as that’s what fits on my home page.  While at any given time I may be experimenting around with a half dozen new apps, these are the applications that I use regularly.  I keep the experimental ones on a separate page.  I don’t root my phone.  I work with lots of sharp people that do that, but I rely on this phone to do my job.  Neither Verizon nor my company IT desk really have much patience for support calls that start out with “I have been playing around with the underlying OS…”

Core Communications – 1. Phone,  2. Touchdown, 3. Gmail, 4. Google Voice 5. Messaging, 6. Skype

At its heart, sales is depends upon communicating with people.  I need to be as responsive as possible, in the way that each person likes.  Some like email, some prefer texts, some really only want you to leave voice mail.   I think that three of these apps deserve a bit more information. 

I am on the Verizon network, and they have a special arrangement with Skype so that Skype calls are treated as on network.  I use Skype for the folks that I work with in Europe.

7. Touchdown is a really good exchange client for Android. It costs around $20.  Outlook is nerve center of my scheduling and contact management systems.  Salesforce.com pulls data from it, I use Plaxo to sync my different contact bases to it, and so on.  Touchdown does everything that I would expect, it pops up alarms, keeps the calendar, and handles email.  It works for me, as I am really only looking for a mobile client to keep a pulse on what’s going on.  I’m not sure it would work if it was my only system.

I find smartphones frustrating if you have to do much real work. I prefer to use a full computer for all of the real backoffice work.  I update my opportunities and everything back home, but by keeping everything in Outlook, I make it easy to process my backlog in one go.  

 8. Google Voice has become an important utility for me.  If you aren’t familiar with it, it acts like a combination of call routing and voicemail with online access.  With Google Voice, you get a phone number assigned, which then can be used to ring any and all other lines that you want.  For example, you could give that number to someone, then have it forward to both your desk and cell phone, so that it acts like a “find me, follow me” service.  I use it a bit differently.  I have my calls routed so that my desk phone rings 4 times, then forwards to my cell phone.  It then goes to Google voice (acting as voicemail) immediately.  I do it that way, because if I’m on the phone at my home office, I can see who is calling when it forwards to my cell.  That setup works for me whether I’m in my home office or on the road.  The nice thing is that Google Voice attempts to transcribe the voicemail and shows it to you visually.  The phone signals that a voice mail has arrived, and the text is displayed briefly.  You can then call up the voicemail either through gmail or the Google voice app.  In most cases, just seeing the caller and text is enough for the time.  It also has the benefit of making voice mails easy to forward. 

9. Navigation has been a real savings in time and money, simple as that.  Most rental car companies charge $15 a day.  It is also pretty easy to get twisted up, make a wrong turn on the interstate and spend at least 15 minutes getting lost the first time that you go anywhere.  I typically have a hard copy of directions as part of my Tripit package (more on that below), but the Google Navigator works well.  I have recently started using voice, and so far, it has worked perfectly. 

10. Settings isn’t really an app, but I use it a lot.  Settings is where you switch “airport mode” on and off.  You also go there to tether, manage bluetooth, wi-fi, and other networks, and lots of different things.  It gives you the ability to backup settings offline. I changed the settings so that the button on top hangs up phone calls.  I think that is an accessibility setting. 

I use 11.PDA Net to turn my Droid into a wireless modem when I am stuck for connectivity.  Too often, the connectivity at hotels is either problematic or expensive.  PDA net works pretty well, even with VPNs.  You also need to install a utility on your PC so that it can treat your phone like a modem.  That’s something that you need to have taken care of before you actually need it. 

The main time I end up using it is when I see in Touchdown that I have an updated presentation or contract that I need to get onto my laptop, but don’t have any other access.  I fire up PDA net, download the mail into Outlook, then get on with it.

12. Tripit.com is all about managing travel stuff, although I rarely use the mobile client.  The Tripit.com service is pretty idiot proof, in that you forward an itinerary from your corporate travel to a mailbox (plans@tripit.com).  It then breaks it down into components and saves it online.  

Tripit creates a printable itinerary that includes driving instructions, all of the information about flights, car rentals, and so on.  The Tripit service then acts like an update and reminder service.  It sends me an email or text message if my flight has been delayed.  It also provides some social features so that your trip can be posted on Facebook or LinkedIn.  It isn’t as contrived as it sounds. It effectively becomes an automatic notice for friends and family. We created a Tripit group for our team at work so that we can easily compare notes on itineraries and travel plans.  Tripit becomes a nice little travel process prompter.  It sends out a reminder email 24 hours before flight time reminding that you can check in online, then sends status alerts based upon your instructions.

 As you can see , the mobile client keeps the itinerary details, and if you click on the directions, it will open up and provide a navigation option.  It’s pretty slick all around. 

You can see an example of what a Tripit posting looks like on Facebook.  It will post a notice before the trip saying something like “Don is planning a trip to Chicago” and show the date range.  Like anything else, if you use the standard templates, it looks kind of mechanical.  If you take the time to upload a relevant picture and add some real details, it starts to become more useful. 

I also use 13. Foursquare for similar purposes.  I absolutely like the idea of being in control of when I make my location public. That said, I’m not always sure that I get quite enough value out of Foursquare.  I am using it, because I kind of get the potential, but I wouldn’t pay money for it.  (After I wrote this post, they really cheesed me off by automatically posting a “You Won a “You voted” badge” onto Facebook and Twitter.  I found it a real violation of my privacy. I decide who and when I tell people that I voted.  Major violation! I’m checking out Whrrl.)

The 14. camera and 15. Facebook app are my other two mainstay applications.  I always try to take pictures while I’m with customers.  I’ve gotten some great pictures that way.  The easiest thing to do right now is to send the pictures to Facebook via MMS or email.  You can see the picture from my hotel room in Chicago.  The Droid camera is fine for this kind of thing.  I think that the folks over at Foursquare should think really hard about how they can add the ability for me to create these kinds of messages from a checkin.  As with Tripit, the ability to change the picture and add my own text is all of the difference in the world.  My latest everyday camera has GPS built in.  It seems to me that being able to pick an image is part of the whole “check-in” concept.  It lets me tell people where I am and share it a bit more.  If you compare the picture from my hotel room to the map that was included with the Cheesecake factory checkin, you can kind of sense the opportunity.  The restaurant was really very rich visually, the map doesn’t tell the story. 

The final “must have” travel app is the 16. clock.  It has become my daily alarm clock.  I never call down for wake-up calls anymore.  I also use it for some meetings with people that just don’t seem to have any time boundaries.  When I have a meeting with someone that runs fast and loose with time, I try to remember to set an alarm for 5 minutes before my hard stop.  I warn them that I have a hard stop at the end, then when it goes off, they understand that I need to cut things off and they don’t take it personally. 

These seem to cover the bases for me.  I am always looking for other great tools, but these are my mainstays.  I am looking for a better contact system than comes with the phone, but haven’t found it yet.  

I would love to see comments on what works for you.