Why can’t this sort of thing be done at the waste facility where it ends up anyway?  Why should the only folks sorting through trash be the homeless and why can’t this be institutionalized?  A premium is being put on garbage sorting – and I’m paying it.  It’s not the 5 bucks that I care about – it’s the extra time being lost that I value.

In a perfect world (one that we attempt to be aiming for by having recycling programs in the first place), we wouldn’t have to think too much about recycling because it would be done “invisibly”.  I throw stuff in the garbage, it leaves my house ends up somewhere where things just happen (robots or humans or some combination find the recyclable elements and pluck them out) and all is well.  We sort of do this with sewage already and just flush shit out (pun intended) and expect that some treatment facility will do the magic for us.

It’s funny because in India, recycling happens passively.  People throw garbage out the window and it lands on the street where somebody (usually the misfortuned) picks it up and does something “useful” with it – cans, plastic bags, etc do get picked up by the smart few who know where to take it and earn money to sustain themselves through the night.  It really is a “one man’s junk is another’s treasure” system and while it’s not *completely* optimized (there’s plenty of garbage that is *noone’s* treasure), it works out pretty well since there aren’t mountains of garbage to navigate around.

I suspect that this isn’t being done here in the US due to the “eeew” factor – as in, “eeeew, after a can hits the trash bag and gets mushed around with all that other garbage, i don’t want to touch it!”  Surely, there are people who love their planet enough to want to solve this pretty small problem.  I’ve never been to a landfill myself but I would gladly pay another $10/month (with the CRV fees pulled off) to do my own part in funding this problem and I think others wouldn’t mind paying a small fee as well if it meant that throwing the garbage out wasn’t so guilt-causing.

And therein lies the rub… See, the mobile subscriber has 30 days upon receipt of his mobile bill to actually make the payment.  He may or may not contest the charge depending on who actually made the transaction – her husband, child, friend, or dog maybe?  Regardless and if the payment is actually made, the phone company (Verizon, AT&T, etc) has to then figure out which merchant the payment should go to (and make sure they take their “fee” for facilitating the transaction through their platform).  This process takes another 30 days or so and the money usually ends up in the hands of a party known in the mobile marketing world as the “aggregator” – termed this way because they aggregate connections across the two handful of major carriers out there.  The aggregator then takes their fee and pays out the actual company providing the service to the various charities and NGOs of the world.  Wow, that was a mouthful (forgive me for not using separate paragraphs).

If you do the math and add up the time periods as money changes hands, you end up with a cumulative term of about 75-90 days before the money ends up where it ought to.  Compare this with credit card transactions which moves money in a matter of 24-48 hours on average.  Add to this that a grand total of about 35-40% in fees is racked up through the literally “trickle-down” process, and the $10 transaction evaporates pretty quickly.

You’d think that these figures would prompt a near-immediate backlash – and you would be right.  In fact, the carriers knew the backlash was imminent and so they were quick to proactively mention that all fees would be waived and the amount transacted in a much shorter period of time.  Good for them considering mobile giving was on pretty much every television station both major and cable network for the “Hope for Haiti” special with celebrities touting the method as the fastest way for watchers to donate.

The problem with this picture is that for all other charities that the company mGive provide mobile giving “solutions” to, the terms are exactly as I describe above (75-90 days with 40% fees).  Most subscribers who will more than likely be familiar with the system will equate the process to the Haiti fundraising initiatives when this will not actually be the case.  It’s estimated that the Haiti earthquake mobile giving initiatives pulled in over $12 million; at 40% fees spread across all facilitating parties involved, this would mean a staggering $4.8 million in fees alone.  Crookish I’d say.

Clean and simple to use and generally just works the way it should. To get it just search for wordpress in the App Market.

Update: one small issue I noticed is that you have to refresh the categories the first time you post.

• where you go is an expression of who you are but you do so less frequently than updating your status (not matter you trivial the content of your status might be).
• users should be able to backtrack where they were and not just where they are and be able to check-in accordingly.  I’ve already found myself forgetting to check-in (quite naturally) and then wishing that I could just go back and check-in as if I were there.  I suppose this is by design.
• I’d like to be able to check in privately (and still earn points) every so once in a while.  Gowalla recently released this as a feature – and I think it’s just that – a feature.  This is an important one for the simple reason that it doesn’t dilute the value of each foursquare posting as your friends/followers see them but still allows you to keep track of where you’ve been through foursquare.  I was at IKEA today which might be fascinating but then I was also at Taco Bell which I don’t think people give two shits about.
• the context of each location should be taken into account when checking in; if i’m at the movie theater, i should be asked follow-up questions like “what movie are you watching?”; at a redbox (assuming redbox were a location in foursquare) – what movie are you renting?, etc

Overall, it’s an elitist thing to constantly post all the fancy cool places you’ve been and I think a large part of the population do not go to fancy cool places (and when they do, they surely do not remember to check in on foursquare). 

What I do think would be more interesting is immersive game play as being invented and developed at SCVNGR.  The problem with this experience is that what you take away in terms of genericism, you make up in complexity and longtailness.  I don’t want to have 18 SCVNGR type apps for each of the venues I go to.  Perhaps that is the ultimate system – location-based games tied together Ning style.

One of the most amazing features of Android is that it’s not “married” to one (or 5) particular PCs.  You can essentially plug your Android phone into any computer and start browsing files on the device.  DRM-free MP3s from Amazon means that you can transfer music from one machine to another effortlessly.  Others find iTunes intuitive – I find it the opposite and doubleTwist a natural calling.

DoubleTwist, which operates on Windows and Mac, not only syncs music but videos and photos as well – and even allows you to buy music from AmazonMP3 and share to Facebook from within the app.  My wife happens to have a Droid Eris (no accident there).  This means mixing and matching our phones with our laptops and desktop PCs loaded with DoubleTwist is a breeze.

At the risk of sounding like a doubleTwist fanboy, let me express my concerns about the product.  Considering it’s general device agnosticism, this means that no real device manufacturer promotes the software.  It’s only discovered through forums and blog posts like this – which may be alright as long they see commissions through the purchase of music through it’s AmazonMP3 store but also means that people evaluating phones based on capabilities miss out on this software gem as a feature to consider (and tip them to go Android over iPhone).

Ideally, doubleTwist would be bundled with Android phones.  Palm tried backhanded tactics by attempting to have their devices sync with iTunes when they really should just be telling users to use doubleTwist.  I’m not sure who would acquire them (and hope that’s not in the cards for them in the short term at least) – if Motorola or HTC were to, it would essentially abandon the other devices that doubleTwist is made to work with.  We’ll have to see.

I suspect that others feel the same way and as a result, the richness of content on Facebook is slowly fading – even as Facebook has brands promoting Facebook pages.  Twitter has successfully been positioning itself as a true broadcast platform for brands and individuals both.   On the reciprocating side, users expect information to be disseminated to them via Twitter accounts and so they begin proactively following individuals and brands to get this information.   Twitter Lists makes it even easier to categorize and segregate your “channels”.

It is true that Twitter faces the same problem as Facebook; that when posting to Twitter, a user has no control over which “group” or “follower set” he can direct a  tweet to.  Twitter Lists makes this the responsibility of the viewer since a user that I am following may be on my “social media” list but on somebody else’s “web 2.0″ list.  It keeps broadcasting simple.   Facebook aims to do the same thing but has the arduous task of breaking it’s users habits of seeing it as a general social network.   Considering that it had its beginnings as an intimate social network, this will be difficult to do.

In Sugar Land, Texas (several thousand miles away), the scene was no less different with the Best Buy dude mentioning that all the stores in Houston area also being out out stock. What?

I say Microsoft is holding Windows 7 hostage as a profit-making scheme and here’s why.  A 1-machine license of Windows 7 Home Premium costs $119 or so.  Assuming that production costs (after every overhead you can think of) are $34, Microsoft makes $85.  A 3-license Family Pack costs $149 (retail).  Divide by 3 and you get an effective license cost of about $49.  Which means Microsoft makes $15 per device (or $45 on the license pack).

If the desperate family man comes into Best Buy eagerly looking for the much sought after Family Pack (after all he spent $400 on each crappy Vista machine in his home, has 3, and needs to salvage his investment) and can’t find the Family Pack, what’s he to do?  He can either [a] wait indefinitely for new shipment (which doesn’t come) or [b] buy at least 1 single license pack for his main PC and deal with the others later.  What happens then is Microsoft profits $85 on the first machine and on the other 2 makes $30 netting a grand total of $115 over $45.

All this over Microsoft screwing the public over with the unbelievably crappy release of Vista.  Crooks I say.

The iPhone app store has over 100,000 apps and over 200 more are approved every day.  That’s a lot of apps.  What’s amazing is how many are in the app store in spite of Apple’s nothing-short-of-ridiculous and erratic app review and approval methodology. Take for instance today’s story on Techcrunch describing Apple’s approval of the Mein Kampf app with the Nazi Swastika as the app icon.  I had been trying to get an app discovery app called Apps-a-lot approved by Apple for weeks only to find it rejected on grounds that the iTunes Store not be crawled.  Except, AppSniper and BargainBin continue to stay available after mention by Apple app review staffers that they would be “dealt with” for employing similar practices.  As a developer, this is nothing less than disconcerting and I write more about this here.

Apple releases features in a “drip campaign” fashion.  They intentionally decide to cripple products with features and choose for horizontal sort of innovation over vertical.  This means taking a product like a mouse and turning it into a touch surface.  Is this groundbreaking?  In a way, yes.  But, it serves a different purpose to Apple by encouraging behavioral change one that users succumb to and then strongly defend largely because they can’t believe that the motive by Apple be ulterior in any way (true fan people).  An example of Apple crippling a product – not allowing video recording with the first two versions of the iPhone.   I equate this strategy to the release by labels of songs on an album in controlled succession taking advantage of “cd sale waves” – I remember when Red Hot Chili Peppers released Californication and the songs came out one by one after being burnt to death in airplay.  Apple is waiting to ride out the current 3GS craze and follow up with the next magical feature – simultaneous app support (and when they do, they’ll claim that it’s what you NEED to have and that they somehow discovered it when it’s been out for quite some time now).

The Droid is a computer that can do N things at the same time. The iPhone can do all of one thing at one time with the only exception being play music (due to its iPod touch origins).  The main reason Apple did this was to be efficient at memory management – specifically with leaks.  C does not manage memory very well with java as historically had garbage collection and stronger memory management.   To ensure that the user experience for the one application that was running would never be compromised by another running simultaneously, Apple decided to implement a “one app running”  at any time.  So, what if you wanted to chat, check a tweet or email and then come back to the chat session?  With Apple, you really are SOL – even with clumsy push notification solutions that are out there.  What do you think those kids with their Sidekicks and flip phones are doing in the mall food court glued to their screens?  Surely not sitting within one single app!  But again I tell you, Apple WILL release this and call it the greatest invention since…video recording.

What is sucky (and I’m hoping this will change) is that companies that have web portals for their services (banks and other subscription services) have solid or above implementations of a native iPhone app but no counterpart for Android.  This is probably due to the shared platform between iPhones and iPod touches.  There are 10M+ iPhones but then another 50M iPod touches out there. There has been a strong chicken/egg problem here since the launch of the Android platform.  It wasn’t “serious” enough to put development resources towards – while iPhones surfed on the existing popularity of the iPod touch.  In other words, it was easier to “boot” for Apple than for Google.  Dial back further in history and iTunes and linked credit cards made this even more serendipitous for Apple (though some would claim that this is far from serendipity and was all part of Steve Jobs’ super master plan for world domination).

A word about the Droid – it really is a “man’s phone”.  From the brush metal feel to the default sound effects.  That being said, I think the iPhone is largely a “woman’s phone” (and originally catered to the metrosexuality of men to get launched off the ground).  Lofty statement I know but I think on a subconscious level, the iPhone is so appealing due to its shiny, glossy backside and virtual shininess in the beveling of the icons/buttons. It just feels so damn…sexy the same way a Porsche Cayman does.  In fact, I think all said and done, this is really want drives iPhone growth – an innate sense of “I want one of those too” when looking over at the person next to you and seeing the shiny object with big square Playskool-like buttons sliding across the screen.  Slap a shiny backside to an Android phone, increase the size of icons on the Dashboard by about 15% and a little glossy effect, and there might be an Android phone that will have the “ooh” factor just the same – except then Apple would get litigation busy, I think.

Apps-a-lot – shot down because applications cannot crawl the app store.  Apps-a-lot was designed to solve the app discovery problem by sending push notifications to your iPhone/iPod touch when new apps came available that fit your “profile” (learned from your ratings and browsing behavior).   In all fairness, a term is a term and while the concept should have been shot down before development were to have commenced, I was confident that the app be approved based on the existence and availability of other apps – namely, AppSniper, Bargain Bin, and AppConnect.

LiveWall – shot down due to use of celebrity images (even though the images were licensed with re-distribution rights directly from AP Images).  LiveWall intended to be a wallpaper app that took news and current events photos and made them available as wallpapers for your device.   Amongst other neat features, you’d be sent push notifications for images that came available against your specified topic interests.  While a no go, I’m baffled at how all these Michael Jackson apps slipped through the App Review team’s fingers.

A bunch of Celebrity Quizzes – shot down for the same reasons as LiveWall.  I should have learned my lesson from LiveWall’s rejection but was hopeful due to the availability of apps like dozens of Jonas Brothers Quizzes, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Rihanna.  How did these get approved?  Clearly there’s a disconnect across the app review team – or some developers just lucky on a regular basis.

All in all, the app review team is unpredictable.  Pair this issue with the fact that apps take time and cost money to build (not so much with the quizzes) and you have developers thinking twice about the distribution channel that Apple gives developers the feeling they’ll be able to take advantage of.

Android bound.