Mark Kolier’s Blog

Archive for December, 2009

A small article in today’s (December 10) NY Times – AT&T to Urge Customers to Use Less Wireless Data had me shaking my head.   Here is a link to the article – http://bit.ly/8IgbCg.    For those that do not know AT & T is the primary carrier for the Apple iPhone.    With nearly 100,000 iPhone apps and with a substantial number of all-inclusive data plans it’s no wonder that the network is fast becoming overloaded.  

They told us years ago that these days would come.   When we first installed cable modem service a number of years ago the fear was that as more people adopted cable modem service to access the internet the ‘stream’ would become exceedingly clogged thereby slowing down overall communication.    While I have not experienced more than one or two occasional slow-downs (apparently in our area we have some of the fastest service around), I fully expect that things could get worse before they get better. 

What I found to be the most interesting statistic in the article was that 3% of Apple iPhone data traffic accounts for 40% of AT & T’s wireless data transmissions.   So AT & T wireless is considering a pricing scheme that would ‘address the usage’.    So I interpret that as what iPhone users that are on unlimited data plans are getting now will soon have to pay more.    That strategy has been attempted (unsuccessfully) by frequent flyer programs and I suspect the same will be true of data plans.  The horse is out of the barn folks and people are accustomed to getting it for a low flat price.   Good luck with that. 

An AT & T spokesman emphasized that the company would first focus on educating consumers about their data consumption in the hope that doing so would encourage them to cut back, even though they are paying for unlimited data use.

“We’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage, so they don’t crowd out the customers on those same cell sites,” he said.

How do you think that will go?    Companies are encouraging people to use their Smartphones to a greater extent but the provider is hoping people will use them less.   

So at this moment I am happy to be a Blackberry Storm customer since the Verizon network is notably superior to AT& T, (ask any iPhone user about the frustrations of making phone calls on their iPhone) and there are so few apps for the Storm (a feature I don’t like but I guess is some sort of weird benefit).   

Like Charlie Brown would say – ‘I can’t stand it’.   Or understand it.

There was an article in Ad Age this week – ‘Can you imagine a business card or a print magazine page that can actually send an e-mail or facilitate the transaction of an online sale?  Livescribe’s Pulse Smartpen — which is a real pen containing a full-powered, internet-accessing computer — is a tool that makes such actions conveniently possible’.   

My family got me a Livescribe pen computer earlier this summer.   After initially fooling around with it I became too busy to really dig in and figure out how to get the most out of it.   This week I was visiting a client for meetings and brought the pen and notebook and used it to write notes and record (with my client’s full knowledge) some of the proceedings.    When I began to distill the notes and recordings I finally realized the power of this great product.   

It has a 2MB or 4MB drive in the pen itself and the intelligence of the unit far exceeds my own expectations.   T here is also a USB port for syncing to a computer.   College students are adopting the Livescribe pen as it is so much easier to carry around than a laptop and has the recording function for lectures as well.  

Livescribe Chairman Jim Margraff spoke recently at the IDEA conference in NYC last month and expounded on the power and breadth of the capabilities of Livescribe.    AdAge did a nice 3 minute sum-up of his talk and where this is all going is both interesting and exciting.   Interactive business cards, print advertisements are something I had not even been thinking about but the folks at Livescribe are doing a great job of taking cool and useful technology and coming up with creative new uses for the device.  

The device costs about $200 and you should really check it out.    You will see me using it all the time from now on.   Here’s a link to AdAge’s 3 minute video on the product. 

http://adage.com/video/article?article_id=140864

Bet you want one now.

I had the ‘pleasure’ of attending my wife’s high school reunion recently.   We both went to the same high school but graduated in different years.   There were more than 330 students in my wife’s graduating class (way back in the late 1970’s).   75 people showed up for the reunion and that number included spouses and significant others.    It was set up by one of what appears to be several companies that specialize in setting up class reunions.   They did an ok job but it was expensive (buffet dinner and open bar was included) and most of the attendees spent their time within 50 feet of the bar and a sad DJ was playing music from the ‘70’s and ’80’s,   

I heard several people mention that all that was really needed was a big room with drinks without food.    Tracking down people has never been easier and one would think Facebook could even consider getting into the business of helping set up reunions – if people still want to go to reunions in the first place. 

After 30 years it is interesting to see how people have turned out even if only 15% of your classmates were able to attend.   But social networking has put people back together on a much more personal level (at least initially).   One of my still under 30 nieces said she does not even think she’d go to a reunion since she is in touch with the people she wants to be in touch with via FB.  

Remember Classmates.com?   They are still around but that might not be the case much longer.   They too have been undone by Facebook and to a lesser degree MySpace.   Same problem.   I had a friend tell me that when he was contacted by someone he had not heard from in more than 25 years it was awkward.   He said the reason that he hadn’t been in touch with that person was NOT because he could not find him! 

Still, I maintain that there is nothing like being there.   But the notion of reunions every ten years (is that really necessary?) seems to me to be a dying proposition.    Maybe 25 year and 50 year reunion s (for those that are still around) will survive but I think the heyday of class reunions has come and gone.

What do you think?