Most mobile data pricing plans are set up like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Regardless of your device, you’re probably paying a fixed price per month. Reality: No way that will last.

Being with Verizon, my wife and I each pay $30 per month for unlimited data. To me, however, it’s more interesting what we’re paying per KB for each device. I have an iPhone, and she has a Blackberry.

Over the last twelve months, I’ve used an average of 647,311 KB each month.1 My wife, on the other hand, chewed through only 17,013 KB—though she uses her Blackberry quite a bit.

That’s a huge difference in consumption for the same price—0.17 cents per KB to be exact.  (Scale that against the countless GBs of mobile data flitting through the air right now.)

I highly doubt our case is an outlier either.2 A Blackberry simply isn’t equipped to consume the data an iPhone or Android phone can—no matter how many flustered hours you spend trying to use the circa 2004 Blackberry web browser.

Thank you Blackberry users of the world—for now

As the Blackberry continues to retreat from mobile market share graphs, I think it will be interesting to see what happens to data pricing once this subsidy dries up—or less likely, when the Blackberry catches up to its competition.

If $30 per month is the “right” price for today’s aggregate data appetite, what happens when everyone is carrying a real app phone with a real browser? It's just one more reason I think data prices will rise before they fall.

But for now, I just want to say thanks, Blackberry users. I really appreciate your help paying for my data. It's sweet of you. And: Hold out as long as you can, okay?

It was a line that defined an era:

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

In some ways, though, what John F. Kennedy did not say in January of 1961 was nearly as noteworthy. He didn’t end his inaugural address with “via my Choate School headmaster, George St. John.”

Chris Matthews recently uncovered a portion of an essay that Kennedy’s headmaster often read to students during chapel sermons:

As has often been said, the youth who loves his Alma Mater will always ask not “What can she do for me?” but “What can I do for her.”

So yeah. Some might argue that Kennedy plagiarized his headmaster.

Do you care, though?

What if Kennedy had attempted to attribute that line to his headmaster in the speech? Would the message, set in the context of the collective 1961 American psyche, have been as provocative?

What if Kennedy had scrapped the line all together to avoid controversy? How differently would the 1960s have looked? Would you even be sitting where you are right now?

I advocate attribution as much as anyone else who creates (occasionally) original content on the web. But I also find myself sometimes avoiding saying things when I can’t remember if I really got the idea from someone else. And sometimes I forget where I got great articles that took me weeks to get around to reading in Instapaper—so I skip quoting them, too. This is a mistake.

My advice to myself and you: Don’t let via become a mental roadblock. Don't let it keep you from saying something potentially profound. Most importantly, accept that most great art is stolen anyway. You will steal; you will likely be stolen from.

Graeme Wood ponders what might come of us:

Most humans who have ever lived have died in conditions almost exactly like the ones into which they were born, and without written history had no way to grasp that the future might be different at all. Only now have we gained the scientific knowledge necessary to appreciate how exactly how deep a rabbit-hole the future really is: not just long enough to see empires rise and crumble, but long enough to make all human history so far seem like a sneeze of the gods.

Fantastic article. I found it via Justin Blanton, a guy whose site, Hypertext, has a comfy seat in my RSS Favorites folder.

We now know that sitting all day is bad for us. Thomas Borowski isn’t taking the news sitting down either. He built his own standing desk. Very cool.

Even if your 1Password master password is weak, and even if your 1Password data were to fall into the wrong hands, AgileBits still wants to make life suck for someone trying to crack your keychain.

It’s little things like PBKDF2 that make me love 1Password even more:

The idea is to make using automated password guessing tools, such as John the Ripper, impractical. PBKDF2 strengthens what would otherwise the be weakest part of a system, your master password.

 

Anne Kadet, WSJ:

If you're wondering why it's hard to juggle new roles, ask a neuroscientist. Recent research suggests that multitasking can reduce productivity, because it takes a ton of mental energy to switch from one task to the next. The sheer number of hours demanded by the superjob also can impair your performance as your brain gets fatigued...</p>

You might want to put some of those hats in a closet.

 

Around 8,000 BC—give or take a millennium—people were finally being allowed think less about one of the most nagging and day-to-day life-governing questions of their world: “Where's the next meal coming from?” The Neolithic Revolution was defined by the advent of mass agriculture, a remarkable tipping point in human civilization. It was truly life-altering because individual people suddenly had to spend less time fending for themselves. That meant time for other things.

With food far more abundant, it became less important for everyone to know how to trap a rabbit and stalk a deer. New occupations like carpentry emerged. The specialist—a required citizen in any advanced civilization—was born.

With less need for vast hunting expanses per capita, cities naturally began to emerge. More sophisticated economies began to gel. Life was getting so much better.

Except for one thing.

People got sicker. Since people were spending less time physically looking for food, they were sitting more. On top of that, the Neolithic diet—made possible by mass agriculture—was less nutritious, less balanced. People were making a timeless human trade: quantity over quality.

Poorer diets combined with denser populations welcomed a host of new diseases, including many perennial enemies we fight to this day—like influenza.

10,000 years later: the 21st century

The trigger for the Neolithic Revolution was mass agriculture. Today, we may be participants in a no less remarkable revolution enabled by mass information. The similarities, to me, are striking. And the effects of mass information are likely to be just as civilization-altering—and unfortunately, no more healthy.

Instead of walking to a book shelf to look up a word in a dictionary, we look it up online. Instead of physically traveling to a movie rental store, we click a few buttons online. Instead of walking three cubes down to ask a question, we send an email or IM.

We are no longer hunter-gatherers of information. In the 21st century, we’ve managed to replace the little bits physical activity left in our lives with sitting.

We’ve become sedentary all over again—and on a scale that would have been unimaginable to anyone even twenty years ago.

The health effects of our neosedentism are only now coming into focus. Scientific American:

There is a rapidly accumulating body of evidence which suggests that prolonged sitting is very bad for our health, even for lean and otherwise physically active individuals.

It doesn’t matter that you hit the gym after work. If you’re sitting all day—everyday—that just ain’t good. Sorry. It’s a fact. Our bodies simply were not designed for prolonged states of stillness, no more than a car was built to stay in a garage.

Information dessert

Physical (un)health is only one negative consequence of mass information. Though mass agriculture introduced unbalanced diets, at least it embraced the vegetable. Mass information has introduced an infinitely long buffet of empty mental calories.

Not only do we spend an inordinate amount of time reading and consuming “information” online that does nothing to advance our understanding of the world, the internet is encouraging it through a seemingly useful, but in all likelihood, insidious thing called algorithmic curation.

Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, rightly observes that we’re moving closer and closer to a world where

… the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.

Facebook’s social black box might decide that I don’t need to see my aunt’s status update today but you do. Google might think that if I search for Hilton, I’m looking for hotels, but it might think you’re looking for Paris of the same last name.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant than your interests right now than people dying in Africa. –Mark Zuckerbergg

If only Aldous Huxley could see us now.

Bon (vice) voyage

Most kids would like to eat ice cream for dinner instead of veggies. But fortunately, they have parents that won’t let them. But what about the parents? How will their dessert taste in a world without vegetables? What does rest feel like at the end of a day devoid of physical movement?

Can we expect non-human curators to act ethically?

If increased sedentism is an unavoidable consequence of each tipping point in human civilization, are the benefits really offsetting the costs?

Is the ultimate destiny of humanity stillness?

On the road. Vacation has finally started. Finally sweet relief. Time to relax.

T-minus 3, 2, 1. Pipe dream turns to pipe bomb: An hour or so into the drive, thoughts begin to arrive: “Did I lock the back door?”

For the next five hours of your drive, you won’t be looking forward to your vacation. You’ll be wondering if that goddamn door is locked… or unlocked… or locked… or…

And you’ll start working through all the horrible scenarios that walk through that might-be-open door and put their feet up in your mind.

Defusing the recurring attention time bombs of travel

I can’t help you go back in time, and I can’t help you teleport back to your back door, but I can give you some advice.

You’re probably already good at making lists, especially before traveling. Writing down things like pants, socks, toothbrush is obvious. That's great. Consider your back patted.

But quite honestly, it takes more than a packed bag to leave to house for a weekend or week, doesn’t it? You also need to remember things like:

• Arm security system
• Lock all doors
• Close windows
• Turn down or turn off heating and AC
• Check to see if the iron is unplugged
• Turn off all lights

In OmniFocus, I keep these things in a generic a packing project template,1 and I check them off as I do them. It’s the best assurance I can give my future self that I actually did these things.

Investing just a little forethought in the form of an OmniFocus packing project can take you miles and miles toward enjoying your vacation more—before you ever hit the road.

On Tuesday, February 3, 2009, Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., a real estate services firm, reported a 60 percent decrease in quarterly net income. Their stock soared the next day, gaining 17 percent.1

On Thursday, July 17, 2008, Google reported earnings of $5 billion—a whopping 39 percent increase over the prior year. Google’s stock plunged—losing more than $40, nearly an 8 percent decrease.2

WTF

Five billion dollars of income was a huge number—both in dollars and percent—but it was less than what Google’s investors expected. And though Jones Lang LaSalle’s earnings were headed in very much the opposite direction of Google’s, investors were expecting even worse.

Human expectations are powerful. So powerful that they can turn a 39 percent increase income into bad news and a 60 percent decrease in income into good news.

Expectations are truly the lenses through which we, the higher-thinking but highly emotional hominids of the world, see… the world.

Expectations mold reality, which, if anything at all, is the continuous experience of having our expectations affirmed, refuted, or surprised.

Using expectations to your advantage

Effective companies and knowledge workers are good at managing expectations in two key ways:

1. Under-promising and over-delivering
2. Creating positive surprises

A tale of two expectations

As great as the iPad is, it would seem far less amazing had it been promised to arrive in 2008. And it would have been a major disappointment if Apple had promised Flash or promised printing or promised a USB port—or promised any “feature” that wasn’t shipped.

Apple ships products, not promises. In doing so, they all but completely ensure positive surprises when they pull the veil on the latest iThing.

Not all companies are like Apple.

Hewlett Packard—like so many companies in the touch screen era—have slipped into the habit of “show but don’t ship.” That is, over-promising and under-delivering. Often, never delivering.

HP’s new head, Leo Apotheker, wanted to change that (or so it seemed earlier this year). In January, he told the BBC that

“HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn’t have. When HP makes announcements, it will be getting ready to ship,” he promises, saying the products launched on 9 February will be on sale just a few weeks later.

On February 9, HP’s iPad-killer, the TouchPad, took center stage. It was a beautiful product. Unfortunately, one glaring feature was missing: a ship date. If the TouchPad was to slay the iPad “just a few weeks later,” it would have to do so among dragons and pixies—or wherever the laws of the universe allow vaporware to gain real market share.

It seems that even HP’s announcement that they would no longer announce products too early, came… too early.

Why don’t people manage expectations well?

The reason many people and organizations fail to manage expectations is simple: It’s hard.

Managing expectations requires restraint and maturity. It requires an unwavering adherence to a simple but tough rule: Don’t tell people what you have before you have it. In a world that moves faster every day, following this rule isn’t getting any easier.

But that also means the spoils available to those who can manage expectations well are growing richer and richer.

Expectations and brand capital

Managing expectations is a constant exercise in managing one’s own emotions and ego.

It’s about confidence and timing. And it’s about understanding that the expectations that frame your product are actually more important that what you produce. Really.

Whether you’re a large corporation, an entrepreneur, a corporate cubicle worker, or a receptionist, your job should be to brand yourself in a positive light. World class brands are built and differentiated largely through the effective management of expectations.

Consistently delivering your product or service on time and consistently delivering positive surprises will keep your clients, customers, and bosses super happy.

I don’t care what you do for a living, I’m talking to you.

How to build brand capital by managing expectations

• Pad deadlines. Show restraint when suggesting deadlines for your deliverables. If you think you can get something done in a day, say it will take three days. If you think it can be done in a week, say two weeks. Don’t try to dazzle people by telling them how fast you can do something. Show them.

• Ask for time to firm up deadlines. They’re so important: deadlines. If a deadline is tentative, say so upfront. Scope out the project, then offer a firmer, well-informed deadline later.

• Save surprises. Practice the art of not giving away everything upfront. When you hand off your product to your client or boss, it’s always better when they walk away with more than they thought they’d get. That means they can’t know everything in advance. Positive surprises.

• Communicate, communicate, communicate. If things aren’t going well, communicate with your client or boss ahead of time. Don’t wait until the last minute to postpone a deadline. Don’t wait until the last minute to tell them that something will be missing. Minimize negative surprises; maximize positive surprises.

• Strive for incremental improvement. Even if your job is to do the same thing every single day, make a goal to do it a little better each time. Compound greatness, no matter how small.

Most importantly: Understand that what you deliver and how you deliver it is what counts in the end. That’s what people remember.

See you through their eyes

So much of this is art. But it’s all about building a reputation based on execution and punctuating execution by beating the expectations others have for you.

And it’s about understanding that you have a ton of control of what others expect, and that, in turn, empowers you to best the expectations of you.

If you consistently beat deadlines and “go the extra” mile (by artfully promising less mileage), you won’t be remembered as the person or company that “pads expectations.” You’ll be remembered as the one who can be counted on. The one that's on time. The one that delivers. And you’ll stand out in an ever expanding sea of salesmen who never close the deal.

In every successful company’s life cycle, there’s a point when the company “grows up” and gets big. It has nothing to do with sales and profitability. It’s a cultural shift. And it can be an awful thing.

The tectonic plates of bureaucracy are set in motion. The productivity landscape buckles. It goes from being a flat plane over which ideas can travel and gel in any direction to being rocky, jagged, and disorienting. Ideas must climb mountains for affirmation. And to get there, they must navigate perilous crags and cliffs, often falling to their death before ever reaching the summits of endorsement.

At Google, Larry Page seems to be combating this phenomenon by “asking product and engineering managers to email him about their projects to potentially winnow them down.”

Nilofer Merchant doesn't think it will work:

It’s what a 20th century manager would do. To ask for information to flow up and down a hierarchical chain of command slows things down. It’s old school. As soon as Larry Page does this, he is putting himself in a position as “Chief of Answers,” a term I used in my first book to describe leaders who work on being the smartest guy in the room. The problem with the “Chief of Answers” concept is just this: it makes everyone else the “Tribe of Doing Things.” It disables rather than enables people to co-create. It moves power away from the people and towards titled leadership.

Can Google, one of the 21st century’s greatest models of flat, co-creative employee-driven innovation, maintain a non-20th century approach to the management of its employees?

 

A few years ago I read Moby Dick. Awesome book, but I remember thinking how weird it was that Ishmael not only shared a room with Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, they slept in the same bed, even touching each other. More recently, reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Private Life cleared things up a bit. Well, kinda.

Privacy was a much different concept in former times. In inns, sharing beds remained common into the nineteenth century, and diaries frequently contain entries lamenting how the author was disappointed to find a late-arriving stranger clambering into bed with him. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were required to share a bed at an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1776, and passed a grumpy and largely sleepless night squabbling over whether to have the window open or not.

Even at home, it was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master’s bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed.

Now, depending on your own predispositions, me telling you that this post isn’t about homoeroticism will either thrill or disappoint. But it’s not. You’re welcome and I’m sorry, respectively.

I’m going to talk about privacy, a subjective and ephemeral concept if there ever was one.

Privacy entitlement

We are all entitled to some basic level of privacy. That much, I think, we can all agree on. The Global Internet Liberty Campaign notes that:

Privacy can be defined as a fundamental (though not an absolute) human right. The law of privacy can be traced as far back as 1361, when the Justices of the Peace Act in England provided for the arrest of peeping toms and eavesdroppers.

It’s clear, though, that acceptable levels of privacy vary a great deal across cultures, age groups, and time.

Today, I think most people’s views on privacy remain rooted in 20th century culture, a time in history when people got really comfortable with the idea of having space between them and their neighbors—and other hotel guests.

The 20th century is in our rear view mirror now. And, more significantly, we’re buttoning up a long run in human history when knowledge of our doings was governed primarily by physical space.

In less than two decades time, the internet has completely marginalized the physical dimensions that protect our perception of private life. Is this good news or bad news? Honestly, it's whatever you allow it to be.

What level of privacy do you need to enjoy life?

As Bill Bryson makes clear, our modern, private lives are a relatively new endowment. We didn’t always live in gated communities with 4,000-square-foot McMansions. We didn’t always have the option of hosting gym meets in our master bathrooms. Hell, we didn’t even get our own bathrooms until a blink of an eye ago.

Maybe the 20th century is an anomaly. Maybe it isn’t. But honestly, how much privacy do you really need? What’s your privacy worth to you?

More on point: Can we use new and highly information-communicable technology while maintaining the standard of privacy we set a few years ago in the pre-internet era?

I’m almost sure the answer is no, and I’m totally fine with that.

So my iPhone has a location cache file

So what? I don’t care. I’m being dead serious. I don’t. If I had an Android phone, I wouldn’t care that it sends my location data to Google. If I had a Windows Phone 7… (Okay, you’re right—I would never have a Windows Phone 7.)

But if you do care about the fact that a phone knows where you’ve been, I think you should step back and ask yourself why.

If you’re worried that some device or entity knows that you went through a McDonald’s drive-through before going to Walgreens before going to work yesterday, I’ll bet that’s already on record without any help from a phone. You use credit/debit cards, right?

As an even remotely active member of modern society, your digital footprints and fingerprints are everywhere. If you can’t live with that,

• Stop using mobile phones and devices. Period.
• Stop using email.
• Avoid the internet, especially web searches. Better, just stop using computers or any hardware that collects electronic residue.
• Stop posting geo-tagged photos of you and your kids on Facebook.
• Stop volunteering your location on Foursquare and Twitter.
• Cancel all of your credit cards.
• Pay with cash—but don’t withdraw it from ATMs.

Or, keep doing those things and realize that you’re getting a lot of benefits from the aggregate location knowledge collected by companies that provide really valuable crowdsourced services.

I love seeing Google traffic data, and the first time you use it to avoid twenty miles of interstate gridlock, I bet you will too.

Parting with privacy whether we like it or not

If you feel that you can carry your 20th century version of privacy into this century, let me sober you. The odds are very much not in your favor. Robert Lee Hotz of the Wall Street Journal:

Today, almost three-quarters of the world’s people carry a wireless phone. That activity generates immense commercial databases that reveal the ways we arrange ourselves into networks of power, money, love and trust. The patterns allow researchers to see past our individual differences to forms of behavior that shape us in common.

Technology is simply an economic enabler. Given the tools, companies will collect information about where you’ve been and what you did there. But that’s not all bad. Not even close to all bad. Hotz, again:

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus…

Investing your private endowment

If privacy is an endowed asset, then losing privacy is an expense—or more metaphorically accurate, a tax—that we pay in exchange for the consumption of goods that can only exist through the collection of private data.

Complaining about losing privacy while enjoying the fruits of it is no more rational than complaining about property taxes but sending your kids to public school—or dialing 911. It’s no less hypocritical than lamenting the loss of American manufacturing jobs while shopping at Wal-Mart.

There are pros and cons of location-based technology. The pros are winning. Take the gains from your private investments, and focus on how those gains make your life better. Don’t just dwell on your losses.

My so-called pre-inbox.txt:

Figure out why dairy cows have spots
Paint interior of crawl space
Research anti-virus programs for my Mac
Install crown molding in attic

Stop.

Not everything that falls out of your head is worth doing—no more than every tweet in your timeline is worth reading.

I completely agree with David that automating batch entry of inbox tasks isn’t worth it:

I’m still adding tasks from a text list manually. I do this because quite often something that seems like a good idea when I peck it into a text file, like perhaps running with scissors, doesn’t pass the sniff test when it comes time to add the tasks to OmniFocus.

Moreover, this type of automation can come with a cost. As bitter a cocktail as it may be to the reader base of this blog, Bill Gates really nailed it:

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Let your thoughts flow, and jot them down freely, but apply as much human judgment as possible when deciding what to actually work on.

Pursue the right things. Don’t discount your wetware filter, and don’t let your past self become some idiot boss that gives your future self busy work all day.

After a couple of weeks of parenting in the books, one thing is clear to me: The iPhone is the most useful device computer inanimate object in my life. A few reasons why:

• Taking, editing, and sharing impossibly-good-for-a-phone photos with Camera+
• Posting photos online to share with friends and family in other states
• Shooting HD video and posting straight to YouTube
• Tracking questions for my pediatrician in Simplenote
• Scanning and retrieving insurance and other reference information in Dropbox and Evernote
• Keeping up with “parenting projects,” grocery lists, and errands in OmniFocus
• Referencing books in my Kindle library
• Playing Angry Birds at 3:30 am as a last resort to keep myself from falling asleep with a baby in my arms1
• Recording key milestones and baby stats in Baby Connect2
• Recording thoughts and doing light writing when being near a full keyboard for more than 10 minutes is impossible
• Sharing photos straight from my iPhone to an Apple TV in a room full of people3
• A battery that can handle everything I throw at it in a day

What? Seriously? People had kids before iPhones? Nah. Really? How?

For all the things wrong with the Mac App Store, ScreenFloat is example of something right with it. ScreenFloat ($8) is a super handy app that lets you hover screen shots over other windows.1

Bringing low-cost online

Some applications—though awesome—just aren’t worth more than, say, $10, to users. Before the Mac App Store, these applications usually wouldn’t happen—unless there was enough of an open source movement behind them. Or maybe there was some super philanthropic developer that gave them away for free. Even then, they were hard to find.

Crazy talk alert. You’d never know it by looking at the web’s landscape today, but in a normal economy, people are willing to give up money for things they value. And producers of valuable things typically want to receive money for what they make. I’m being totally serious, kids; that’s how things happened before the freemium boom.

The Mac App Store—though flawed in many ways—makes this low-cost class of applications possible by providing an efficient “match making” system that brings users and developers together in great enough numbers to make making cheap apps worthwhile.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start—a working model.

My bottom line, their bottom line

I don’t mind paying for things that are useful. In fact, I would like to do more of it. And I would like to see more makers of valuable things get compensated for their effort.

Any system that greases the economic wheels of software innovation is a win to me.

If you’re looking for concise reviews of iOS weather apps, Ben Brooks is your guy. He’s got some great thoughts on weather apps for both the iPhone and iPad.

I’ve always been kind of a weather nerd. I don’t know why. I’ve also never been totally happy with any single weather app on any mobile platform I’ve ever used.

My main weather app on my iPhone is Weather Alert USA. Pretty it’s not, but it’s fast and information-rich. It also offers really comprehensive alerts for severe weather and other weird events you might be interested in.