stuckinstuff

Billions and Billions - Are We Talking the Poor or the Cellphone Sales?

Sara Corbett has written a fascinating (long) article for the New York Times Magazine, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?  Hmm.  I just don't quite know how to react.  For example, read this from the article.  It's a paragraph describing the responses that anthropologists from Nokia received when discussing possible cellphone features with people in developing countries,

Jung and Tulusan said they’d found this everywhere, the phone representing what people are aspiring to. “It’s an easy way to see what’s important to them, what their challenges are,” Jung said. One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a “peace button” that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

So does Nokia see billions of cellphone customers or billions of impoverished people when it designs a cellphone that can withstand the rough and tumble conditions of a developing-world slum?  Does it matter if they see both?

I suppose one reason that stories like Corbett's sit tentatively on my mind and heart is that my experience has been that cellphones and other technology gadgets are as much a conduit to unnecessary consumption as they are a means to economic subsistence.  What will Nokia or partners of Nokia do with their billions of new customers?  Market them, says the cynic in me.  If corporations can sell a poverty stricken person a cellphone for $25 surely they'll be tempted to sell that person a brand name pair of shoes for $18.  To a point, of course it is better to have a nice pair of shoes instead of no shoes at all.  It's just that most of us in the West have passed that point.  A nice pair of shoes is not enough to celebrate.  Nor the nicer pair of shoes we want after we see an advertisement.

For us, it never ends.  For the developing world, it's just beginning.  With what I trust is genuine humility and concern, I'd say there is hope for our world to get consumption right.  It will be hard.  Very hard.

TWWGBL... oh and while you're at it, LOL

In the past I used to joke with friends that my favorite company would be created by a M&A of Microsoft, Nordstrom, and Starbucks.  These days I feel more like Saint Anthony, having sold all my PCs and for years having not set foot inside a Nordstrom.  Well, but I've not had the wherewithal to give away my Starbucks cards.  And I've now two Apple computers.  No ascetic am I.

I have no plans to clean my teeth of yellow and rid breath of coffee stench.  Nor do I intend to abandon my Apple computers, an old iMac and older still PowerBook Pro.  But the news that Apple and Starbucks are working on a means of wireless in-store ordering has me shaking my head.  In the past I've been critical of Apple for its fall from higher ground.  This latest news is only more of the same.

Can convenience and efficiency get any less human?  First our baristas start wearing headsets so that they can talk to drive-through customers while pushing the button that makes our lattes and still have a finger left to ring us up.  Now we don't even have to talk to them.  Instead we'll text them with our iPhone.

Is there no end to the madness of technology?

The Stupidest Stupid Page Ever

I'm not a huge music fan.  So I don't totally care about the bazillions of music sites that pop up day in and day out.  But Nokia just caught my attention.  Their new online music store does not support FireFox.

But take a closer look at the picture.  Are they truly implying that FireFox is old school?!  If you use FireFox you're a behind-the-times tatted LP collector?

 

Stuck In Email Stuff

Email.  Email.  Email!  I get a lot of email.  I know, so do you.  Maybe more than me.  And you might think that not getting email would be refreshing once in a while.  Interesting.  Actually, not getting email is often frustrating.  Case in point, Microsoft’s Hotmail email service.

I’ve not used Hotmail for years.  Frankly, Hotmail sucks.  It always has and never will not.  And so I was content ignoring it and occasionally pitying friends who use it.  Also I’m a Mac user.  I have nearly completely moved away from all Microsoft products, except that I still export Apple Pages documents as Microsoft Word documents to send to people who I pity.  I really don’t have a personal grudge against Microsoft.  What the Gates Foundation is doing is great.  And it’s not like Steve Jobs is an angel.  But even if I did really really not like Microsoft, Microsoft does not go away quietly.

Honestly it’s my fault.  I’ve helped start several businesses.  I could have chosen to start just about anything.  But me and my entrepreneurial friends at 81 Miles chose to start LetterPop.com an email newsletter service.  Email!  Yes, email.  You guessed it, I let down my defenses - let Microsoft have at me again.

Microsoft chooses not to deliver emails to Hotmail sometimes.  Why?  I don’t know.  Why is my over-tired two year old not napping right now?  It’s just the way it is.  Should I go in her room right now and ask her to explain?

Right.  So let me address a more mature audience, you.  Please, for the love of email delivery, get rid of your Hotmail account!  Use Gmail.  It filters spam like a champ.  Nothing ever gets lost in a Microsoft Cloud of Unknowing.  It’s got way better features.  And on an on.  And if you switch then you’ll have one less thing to be frustrated with in life, Microsoft.  Well, that is if you are a Mac user.

Apple and Stuff - “Think Indifferent”

“Less like an exciting event and more like a pitch to get me to buy more stuff.”  That’s a paraphrase from a friend who watched the Apple announcements today.  I didn’t see it.  But I can rely on this guy, an Apple fanatic.  And I check the blogs.  And I have some other Apple “fan boy” friends.  And I kind of like Apple products.  All this leads me to a question.

Has Apple gone from intelligent niche to mindless mainstream?

Consider the tag line for one of the more exciting announcements, “Sip. Buy. Repeat.”  This is the mantra of the allegedly interesting free access iTunes Wi-Fi music store coming soon to Starbucks.  But really the tag line reveals a kind of dissatisfaction with the present state of our on-the-go always-need-more techno-centric consumer culture.  The tag line could be just as well be, “Addicted.  Consume.  Again, Again!”

Remember all those Apple billboards lining Highway 101?  The Apple “Think Different” campaign that featured pictures of Albert Einstein, Rosa Parks, Pablo Picasso, Alfred Hitchcock, and others?  Wasn’t Apple attempting to associate its brand with the creativity, intelligence, and risk that combined in the lives of great men and women for the good of the world?  Wasn’t Apple saying there is something “more” to be a part of in this life than crunching numbers using Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS in a gray cubicle for some impersonal corporation?

In the Think Different ads Apple championed the real faces of cultural heros, and conspicuously left technological devices out of the picture.  The implication was clear.  Technology is good.  In fact, Apple technology is great - it’s creative, intelligent, and risky.  But technology takes a back seat to more important things, like the virtues of courage and hard work and social responsibility.

Am I the only one who thinks that “Sip. Buy. Repeat.” is about 180 degrees in the other direction?

Warning: I Might Talk About Technology

Like quite a few entrepreneurs I make my rounds on the Internet each morning.  The optimist in me thinks the ritual is less like a doctor doing her morning rounds at the hospital and more like a research scientist checking up on his rats first thing in the morning when he gets to the lab.  Grab a cup of coffee and browse what new developments occurred last night.  And even sometimes disinterested observation turns into a kind of affection.  “Ah,” I might think, “Facebook is all befuddled in the maze.  Poor little critter.”

I figure if you blog, you pretty much have to work one or both of the two ubiquitous blog topics into your regular posts: politics and technology.  (Find me a blog that never discusses either.)  Politics just doesn’t do it for me.  And though I think I’d like to be living on a thirty-acre plot of land substance farming, the reality is that I live in a suburban wonderland and scrape by on a few technology companies.  You can see where this is going.

Occasionally I’ll write about technology.  Mostly about the web, and primarily about design.  There are far too many excellent blogs about web design for me to contribute much, except perhaps that I’ll add an angle that is only implicit in several of the blogs, namely, that too much stuff (even on the web) can create problems.

If you care to comment on this post I’d like to ask your opinion, Is abundance on the web a neutral thing made good or bad by the quality of our search and sort capabilities?  Or should content providers and patrons place limits on online stuff?

Why I'll Try To Resist Ever Getting An IPhone

I'll never forget the week my former employer purchased Blackberries for the Management Team and within a day the COO emailed me while he was taking a dump.  And Luddites bemoan technology is a barrier to intimacy.  Barrier to hygiene maybe.  Who would have thought back in 1999 that email might cause you to pause the next time you go to shake your boss's hand?

If you believe there will be a common-sense correction away from mobile email addition, checkout the post at GigaOM on the subject.