Status-Q

A wonderful TED talk by Barry Schwartz calls for a return to practical wisdom.

Stick it on your iPod for your next train journey. Most inspiring.

Given the valuations that have been floating around for social network companies, there must be quite a financial reward in store for anyone who can predict, or invent, the next one. Sadly, I don’t have time to create it just at present, but I can tell you what it will look like.

Forsaking blogs, where you have to write reasonably coherent paragraphs, and Facebook, where you could at least write sentences, the youth of today are flocking to Twitter, where 140 characters is the limit of self-expression, partly so you can send and receive ‘tweets’ via SMS, which can’t do much more.

It’s clear, I think, that this trend must continue.

I expect the next killer network – let’s call it something monosyllabic like ‘Flub’ – to restrict you to one word only for each post. A post will automatically be submitted if you hit the space key, and conversations will be much more efficient, yet still allow you to share your plans with your pals:

A: coffee
B: yeah
A: starbucks
B: ‘k

You get the idea. Of course, some devices you might use to flub are capable of more complex interaction, but the beauty of flubbing is that you can type your response in morse using only the button on your iPhone headset.

“Brevity”, said Polonius, “is the soul of wit”, and I fear this needs more emphasis in our schools, particularly amongst those destined, in later life, to compose marketing materials.

A screen in a hospital waiting room shows a succession of slides about the services on offer; one begins:

BreastHealth UK

The concept of BreastHealth UK is to help women organise and manage their breast health.

A certain superfluity, perchance?

Besides, it seems unlikely to me that any of the fairer sex start their Monday mornings thinking, “This week I intend to organise and manage my breast health”.

The Camvine February Twitter Feed is going well – one new thing to do with your CODA screens every (working) day. We’re up to nine so far!

Some of them are just hints and tips, and some require a little more technical ability – though even those are pretty straightforward if you understand a bit of Python or PHP.

Thought for the day.

All the world’s a toolbox,
And all the men and women merely pliers.

I can think of few greater honours one could achieve in this life than to be celebrated in a song by Garrison Keillor. Here’s a little ditty he wrote last month about the crew of the Hudson River plane crash.

From the News from Lake Wobegon podcast.

Leaving a college late last night… passed a girl talking on her phone… “Oh… Psalms are my faves…”

Most of you will know by now that my company, Camvine, makes a particularly cunning lightweight digital signage system – that’s ‘screens on walls’ – which we call CODA.

One of the fun things about CODA is that it’s entirely web-based, and can link to other internet-based sources of data. This month, on the camvine Twitter feed, we’re going to be posting one example per day of fun and interesting things you can do with CODA.

The first one, appropriately, was a little PHP script that would allow you to display your Twitter feed on a CODA screen. This is an example, by the way, of what makes these social networks work for me. I don’t have to keep going back to their web pages or run lots of applications that get buried on my desktop. Amidst various newspaper front pages, weather forecasts, recent photos, my CODA screen also shows me my friends’ blogs, my Twitter and Facebook feeds, my diary and the company calendar… and I notice them when I walk past the screen to get a coffee, for example. it’s almost a way of picking up on the activities of your social world out of your peripheral vision.

I think this needs a name. I’m calling it ambient social networking.

The Blackstone Key has a different title in German:

Miss Mary and the Secret Document. I think they’re planning on a ‘Miss Mary and…’ series.

Some Swedish parents are trying (in vain) to name their son ‘Q’.

People of great taste and discernment, obviously.

Thanks to Abi for the link

Six months ago, I bought a new Energizer battery charger because I needed one which would handle AAA batteries as well as AAs. I commented at the time on my surprise at its incorporation of a big fan and a whopping great power supply – needed because it can recharge batteries in 15-20 mins.

Well, six months on, I’m… well… a big fan. I get through a lot of batteries, and the fact that this can turn empty ones into full ones in the time I need to turn a full cup of coffee into an empty one is a wonderful asset – I now have a constant supply of power.

It is a little sniffy about which batteries it will take, though, and turns up its nose at my attempts to use some of my more elderly rechargables. This is probably sensible, since it’s about to pump considerable amounts of current into them. All the Energizer cells I’ve procured to use with it, though, have been just fine.

And then I wondered if this was deliberate. You see, there’s a big business opportunity here. Batteries are a necessity now, and if you can come up with ones that have some cool features — extra-long-life, built in LCD meters, perhaps, or the ability to change colour based on current consumption or charge level — then you could do quite well. (USBCELL is a nice example.) I like the idea of batteries which learn their typical use patterns and can communicate with others in the same device, so they can tell you that you’ll only get about two hours’ use, and it’s mostly the fault of the one on the left there.

But suppose you also come up with a cool charger, perhaps which incorporates a travel adaptor, the ability to charge from USB, to recharge your phone, a built-in solar trickle-charger… hey, it could include an MP3 player. Everything else does. You sell it really cheap. Everyone wants one. But you make it so that it only effectively recharges your batteries, and your batteries need to be charged by it. Perhaps the batteries have unique IDs and the charger can log information about them and display it. Maybe it could even order new ones for you when it thinks you need them.

Anyway, people might then invest a reasonable amount in your particular brand, and you then have an ongoing revenue model which I’m sure could make for a good MBA project, at least!

Time for some market research. What killer features would you like in your batteries?