5/13/2013: Your Brand Message Sucks: How to Pitch Your “Amazing” Product to Journalists, Influence HR

I spoke on a panel with Reputation Capital’s Mary Ellen Slayter, the Starr Conspiracy’s Lance Haun and Angles PR’s Ania Kubicki about good and bad ways PR types can deal with the press. (What was I doing at an HR-oriented conference? Mary Ellen’s an old friend from the Post and invited me onto the panel.)

I talked to WTOP about Google’s I/O news on Wednesday, but that interview doesn’t seem to have been preserved on the station’s index for that day. Drat!

5/16/2013: Google Probably Knew About This Post Before Me, Discovery News

The headline for this Google I/O recap popped into my head almost fully formed. I’m glad the editors stuck with that; I’m a little disappointed nobody picked up the Suzanne Vega reference in the excerpt that shows up in search results and on D News’ home page.

I was interviewed again that evening–this time at a press reception, along with USA Today’s Ed Baig, by Thai tech journalist Chatpawee Trichachawanwong. I don’t know if that piece has run, or how insightful Ed and I might sound in it. (We didn’t have much time to prepare.)

5/17/2013: Google’s I/O News: A Reminder Of How Apps Don’t Just Write Themselves, Disruptive Competition Project

Here, I tried to put Google’s developer-focused I/O news in the context of iOS’s continued lead in one important area: profit potential for the average developer.

5/19/2013: Q&A: What’s the best basic Windows photo program?, USA Today

A question from a relative looking to prune the assortment of photo apps on his laptop led to this column. It also includes a tip about the difficulty you may have sharing some of the neater multimedia-enhanced photos your phone’s camera can take.

Most of this week’s posts on Sulia covered particular I/O announcements or sessions–for instance, a talk on Android’s design principles, an upcoming fix for buggy Bluetooth, an uncertain detail about Google’s stock-Android version of Samsung’s Galaxy S 4–but I also reviewed the Lyft and SideCar ride-sharing services and described my experience being served, slowly, by a robot bartender.

5/20/2013, 12:52 p.m. And here’s my brief Flickr set from I/O 2013.

For that, I might have to give the nod to Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs’ freakshow of a CES keynote this year that somehow included Steve Ballmer, Bishop Tutu, Guillermo del Toro and Big Bird. But I could also point to last year’s I/O keynote, capped off by a livestreamed skydive onto the Moscone West roof. Or what about the epic networking meltdowns of one of 2010′s two I/O keynotes?

The Microsoft keynotes that opened CES through 2011 were their own breed of weird, thanks to their history of random celebrity-guest appearances and technical meltdowns.

The keynotes Steve Jobs led for Apple were models of restraint in comparison. (I can’t speak to the live experience of those since his death, as I haven’t been gotten given a press pass to any of them.) Jobs spoke at a measured pace, the slides mostly consisted of white text on black backgrounds, supporting speakers didn’t come onstage to their own at-bat music, and the guests who didn’t work at Apple were almost always confined to executives at other tech firms cooperating with Apple on various projects–not random boldface names.

But the Steve Jobs And Apple Show made its own mistakes. The extended dissertation at Macworld NY in 2001 over how Apple’s PowerPC processors weren’t really slower than Intel chips was both legendarily dull and distinctly dodgy, given that Apple was already working on its subsequent switch to Intel. (Trivia: I think was also the one and only time a review of mine got favorably cited in an Apple keynote, when Jobs gave a shout-out to my iDVD review.) And was it really necessary to end each one by playing an ad for the new product not once but often twice?

I can’t think of too many other forms of creative output more in need of editing than the average tech-industry keynote. But if the people involved can’t do that, I have two lesser suggestions: Keep any slides with numbers on the screen a little longer, so we can jot them down correctly, and follow Google’s good example by providing power strips and Ethernet in at least the first rows of seats for the press.

5/6/2013: SideCar Approaches A Regulatory On-Ramp, Disruptive Competition Project

This ride-sharing service aims to match drivers with time to spare on their existing routes with people heading in the same general direction. The D.C. Taxi Commission, along with other local regulators, sees it as an illegal taxi service. SideCar is pleading its case with the public but also with elected representatives: my interview with CEO Sunil Paul was delayed 45 minutes because he was finishing up a breakfast meeting with Ward 3 city councilmember Mary Cheh.

5/8/2013: Expert: Online sales tax would make real difference to main street, Voice of Russia American Edition

Harvard Business School professor Benjamin G. Edelman and I talked about the Marketplace Fairness Act, the bill that would require most Internet retailers to collect sales taxes for states that simplify their tax regimes.

5/10/2013: Group-Playback Apps Let You Choose Your Own Copyright Adventure, Disruptive Competition Project

I thought there might be an interesting piece about the copyright-law implications of Samsung’s Group Play app, which lets you play one song through multiple devices at once; after encountering a similar, Web-based app at the Day of Fosterly event last weekend, I decided there was.

5/12/2013: Will spam calls ever stop?, USA Today

A query on my neighborhood’s mailing list about a clearly illegal telemarketing call we’ve received a couple of times led me to revisit the topic of spam calls–and spam texts. There’s also a tip about two ways to strengthen the pattern-lock option on Android phones.

On Sulia, I noted two unexpectedly gutsy tech-policy bills–one from Sen. John McCain that would basically blow up much of the TV business, another from Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Anna Eshoo, Jared Polis and Thomas Massie that would repair the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention clause–and shared Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s low opinion of Congressional tech literacy. I also related news about United Airlines’ upcoming switch from drop-down screens to streaming media on its A319s and A320s, at the cost of its Channel 9 air-traffic-control audio. And I wrote a sponsored post about Betabeat’s startup-pitch webisode series that, apparently, almost nobody read.

That purchase also represented the third version of my card’s design since my initial market research: sifting through the stack of cards on my desk and determining that those made of unusual materials (not to name-drop, but Steve Wozniak’s card is photochemically etched steel) and those in unusual sizes stuck out.

A different size of paper being a lot cheaper than metal or plastic, I opted for miniature cards–which brought the added benefit of doubling my wallet’s capacity.

The basic design has stayed the same since (for those curious, the image on the back is the photo of the Blue Ridge I picked for my Twitter background years ago, the close-up of a manual typewriter’s @ symbol on the front comes from the too-many shots I took for this blog’s header image, and the text is in Franklin Gothic and Hoefler Text). But I’ve increased the font size on the front after people said that copy was too hard to read; on the back, it’s gotten smaller to leave more room to jot down notes.

I’m sure that I’m overthinking this. But I also like graphic design, and this exercise yields nearly instant, mostly positive feedback from people who see a card that doesn’t look like most.

My cards at the Post weren’t so interesting to look at, especially before a 2009 or 2010 redesign finally put something on the back and added a Web address to the front. But the first set I ever got there was exciting for a different reason.

Back in 1995, my editors had elected to ship me out to Los Angeles to cover the debut E3 video-game trade show–but since I was only a “news aide,” not an actual reporter, management balked at providing me with cards. So my boss (note, no longer at the Post) had a print shop a few blocks away crank out a batch of knockoffs, and nobody was the wiser. Until now.

4/30/2013: Meet the Tech Media, BusinessWire

I talked about the intersections of technology, the media and public relations with Washington Technology editor Nick Wakeman, freelance writer Andrew Feinberg, Washington Business Journal reporter Bill Flook and Potomac Tech Wire editor Paul Sherman at the Tysons Corner Marriott.

5/1/2013: Government To Industry: Secure Your Systems, But Also Make Them Easy To Wiretap, Disruptive Competition Project

This post started when I read my old Post colleague Ellen Nakashima’s front-page story about a campaign to compel Internet services to provide real-time decryption of their encrypted communications services for law-enforcement inquiries. Then I thought about how that effort might square with the last two years of debate over what the Feds can do to get private industry to strengthen its cybersecurity defenses–and realized how that paralleled mid-1990s arguments over the government’s “Clipper chip” scheme.

5/3/2013: Media outreach breakfast, 1776

Déjà vu set in as I once again found myself onstage with Paul Sherman to talk about how the media covers tech startups–this time at the 1776 incubator on 15th Street downtown, almost directly across from the Post.

5/4/2013: May 4, 2013 —Tim Angel, Rob Pegoraro and Daniel Eran Dilger, Tech Night Owl Live

I returned to Gene Steinberg’s podcast to talk about Apple’s cliff-diving stock price (and what that says about Wall Street’s short-term judgment), Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest report on how well some major tech companies protect your data from government inquiries.

5/5/2013: Why hang on to your unlimited data plan?, USA Today

The post I wrote here about how much data people actually use on their phones led to this column questioning the value of unlimited-data wireless plans. It has not won universal applause so far. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin astutely pointed out that if you signed up for Verizon’s old unlimited plan long enough  ago, you could well save money by sticking with that, even if you have to pay an unsubsidized price for a phone; I was less persuaded by people saying they plow through 15 or 20 gigabytes a month without citing what apps chew up that much data.

On Sulia, I assessed the iOS version of Google Now, shared some quick reactions to my Fosterly Media Match experience, related how much my Nexus 4′s battery seems to like being on WiFi and 3G at the same time, and asked Web admins to make sure that site addresses don’t require users to type in a “www” prefix.

Between late March and mid-May, three things come together for D.C.-area people who don’t mind dirt under their fingernails: many of the plants you want return to life, most of the plants you don’t want run rampant, and the mosquitoes remain offstage.

Since I work from home, I only need to look up from my desk to see the state of my yard. There, I have problems that I can attack without waiting for a reply from a source, the end of a tedious battery-life test, or a go-ahead from an editor: weeds to yank out, seeds to sow, flowers and shrubs to move around, borders between the lawn and the landscaped areas to tidy up.

Some of this work is hot and exhausting–I must have transplanted around 100 pounds’ worth of plants this spring–but much of it can be done in short stretches before I shower or right after some other chore that takes me outside, like getting the mail or taking in the trash and recycling. Plus, with many of the fast-spreading weeds that infest my yard every spring–I must have yanked out 15 pounds of chickweed and deadnettles so far–there’s the seductive promise that with a twist of a weeding fork in the right spot, I can painlessly dislodge a massive clot of uninvited foliage.

And as a 10-minute break stretches into an hour and I realize that my hands have gotten too dirty for me to want to check my phone, upstairs I have a half-written e-mail, a document that stops with my byline and a blog post that only consists of a handful of links. But when I do return to those things, the view outside will please me so much more.

4/23/2013: Road Testing the Newest Wave in Taxi Hailing Apps, The Atlantic Cities

I tried three smartphone apps that let you book and pay for a taxi–Uber, Taxi Magic and myTaxi–for The Atlantic’s urbanite blog. Note the comment I left to pass on an update and a clarification about myTaxi and Uber.

4/24/2013: TV Tech Night, Best Night In

TV Land ran me up to New York in early April to record a few segments about TV-viewing upgrades for its interview series. If you watched Monday’s run of “Everybody Loves Raymond” on that channel, you could have seen all of them; there’s a condensed version of host Leila Sbitani quizzing me at the link above.

4/24/2013: Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 is a No-Touch-Touchscreen, Not-Quite-Android Android Phone, Boing Boing

I reviewed Samsung’s latest Android smartphone. In retrospect, this post was a little too harsh about the Galaxy S 4′s camera and not harsh enough about its keyboard and the counterproductive behavior of some of its gesture-control options. You can read some interesting feedback about this phone’s operating costs in the comments and in a Reddit thread about the review.

4/24/2013: Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 Strives For Sentience, Discovery News

In my second review about this phone, I went into more detail about how the phone’s sensors and accompanying applications aim for an unprecedented level of situational awareness.

4/24/2013: Sizing up the Samsung Galaxy S 4, WTOP

Washington’s news-radio station interviewed me about the phone. (Tip: If you need to do a radio interview over the phone shortly after a baseball game, the steps in Yards Park that lead down to its “waterwall” make for a pretty quiet spot.)

4/25/2013: Feed Me, See More, The Magazine

I dug into BuzzFeed’s image-appropriation habits for this iPad/Kindle/Web publication. I expected to hear griping from photographers who had seen their work duplicated without permission, much less compensation; I and my editor Glenn Fleishman were surprised to get more appreciative responses. (The Magazine costs $1.99 a month to subscribe–an eminently reasonable price! It also lets authors repost their work elsewhere 30 days later, so look for the piece here in late May.)

4/26/2013: Resolved: Competing Over Pocket-Sized Screen Resolution Has Gotten Out Of Hand, Disruptive Competition Project

Many recent phones, the Galaxy S 4 included, go beyond the “pixel density” of the iPhone’s Retina Display to pack in more resolution than you can hope to see without magnification. Why do manufacturers bother, and what could they have done with those engineering and manufacturing resources instead?

4/27/2013: How to keep your computer ‘awake’, USA Today

A stay with family last weekend yielded two items for this week’s column: one about Windows’ ill thought-out interface for changing how often you’ll have to enter your account password, another about the downsides of registry-cleaner apps.

By a huge margin, my most-read post on Sulia this week was a comparison of the purchase and service costs of the Galaxy S 4 on the big four carriers. I also complained about how difficult it can be to share that phone’s multimedia-enriched photos, endorsed using FlightAware to check for air-travel delays, implored America not to judge Washington by the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and wondered why company reps shy away from comments threads in stories about their employers or clients.

Updated 4/29 to fix an incomplete headline.

My hunch is that the first group has the wiser strategy. Consider the graph at right, charting my data usage from early March to early April: Even with all of SXSW and more than 900 megabytes’ worth of tethering, I still only racked up 2.13 gigabytes.

And that’s well above average, going by the latest numbers about North American usage from Alcatel-Lucent. That wireless-infrastructure vendor found that LTE users consumed an average of 46 MB a day–about 1.4 gigabytes a month–while 3G users ate up 17 megs a day, or only half a gig.

Am I missing something here? You tell me. Take a look at your own phone’s monthly data consumption and report back in the poll below. To check that detail in Android, open the Settings app and select “Data usage.” In iOS, open the Settings app, tap General, then tap Usage, then “Cellular Usage.” (Note that this isn’t broken down month by month, and that if you want to see which apps ate up the most data you’ll have to spring for a third-party app like DataMan Pro.)

For extra credit: Is that number more or less than you expected, and does it have you rethinking your choice of wireless plan?

4/15/2013: Facebook Home: Social Network Engulfs Android, Discovery News

I reviewed Facebook’s add-on software layer, as seen on the HTC First phone. I did not like it much–how could a company that generally gets the importance of security ship an app that bypasses the entire screen-lock function on Android?

4/19/2013: Yes, Android Updates Are A Mess. What Do We Do About That?, Disruptive Competition Project

The ACLU wants the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on wireless carriers that ship Android security updates late or not at all. Would it help if the FTC made examples of one or two of the worst offenders?

4/19/2013: Joe Rospars fireside chat and “Social media: What’s the next big thing?” panel, Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit

I helped kick off this one-day conference at Gannett’s Tysons Corner HQ with an onstage interview with Joe Rospars, chief digital strategist for the Obama campaign and co-founder of Blue State Digital (my schtick was to preface each question with one of the Obama campaign’s quirky e-mail subject headers, such as “Hey” or “We could risk losing everything”). That afternoon, I moderated a panel about upcoming shifts in social media with Vocus’s Brendon O’Donovan, New Media Strategies’ Gayle Weiswasser, the Pappas Group’s Lisa Byrne and Susan Ganeshan of newBrandAnalytics.

4/21/2013: Try these alternative keyboard options for your smartphone, USA Today

A reader’s seemingly simple question about physical versus virtual keyboards gave me an opportunity to cover the variety of keyboards available in Android; hearing a Samsung phone’s whistling alert in the Quiet Car on Amtrak reminded me of why it’s a good idea to change a phone’s ringtone and notification sounds from the defaults.

This week’s Sulia highlights: observing a brief outage for some Google accounts; notes on a minute or two of wearing Google Glass; my takeaways from an enlightening discussion about passwords and security; relating an apparently successful attempt to convince Google that “DCA” and “National Airport” are valid terms for the airport closest to D.C.

For well over a decade, I’ve had the same wish list for each new gadget: smaller, lighter and thinner than its predecessors. But lately, I wonder if I should be more careful about what I wish for.

I still appreciate carrying around devices that weigh less and take up less space than earlier models—preferably while running longer on a charge. But some recent devices I’ve tested or purchased suggest the costs of being too thin or too small.

Consider the connections around the edges of many new laptops, including the MacBook Air I just bought, but also many Intel-based Ultrabook PCs. The thinnest among them often leave out wired Ethernet ports and standard HDMI video outputs, requiring users to pack adapters.

That’s not a huge tradeoff for video. If you expect to plug a laptop into a monitor or an HDTV, you’re foolish not to bring your own cable, and one with a micro-HDMI plug at one end will take up less space than a full-sized equivalent. But with networking, you’ll need to bring an adapter supported by your operating system or trust that Wi-Fi will always work, no matter how many other people jam the airwaves near you.

And as just about anybody who’s gone to CES or any other tech conference can testify, that rarely happens. Veterans of these events know to look for Ethernet, and some companies have taken note: Google won compliments for providing wired Internet access in the press seats at its I/O conference last month.

The race to build the thinnest laptop, as opposed to the lightest, doesn’t make much sense from a usability perspective. An added eighth of an inch in thickness won’t make a laptop any more awkward to operate or carry. It’s not a thick phone that will break the line of a suit when tucked into a pocket.

Smartphones risk a different sort of miniaturization malfunction. Since the 1990s, phones using the GSM standard have used compact SIM (subscriber identity module) cards to store account data. This has made it easy to move a number from one phone to another and, with an unlocked phone, switch temporarily or permanently to a new carrier.

That’s given GSM a serious advantage over the competing CDMA standard, which doesn’t require any such physical separation of an account and a phone. (Trivia: Some CDMA carriers have employed a SIM equivalent called an R-UIM  or removable user identity module, but not in the U.S.)

In recent years, the SIM scenario has gotten a little more complicated with the arrival of micro-SIM cards. But you can still use a micro-SIM in place of a standard card (technically a mini-SIM) if you pop it into an adapter or position it so its contacts align properly in the slot (I’ve done it, but it took a few tries). And you can cut down a SIM to micro-SIM size.

Now, however, the industry has certified a “nano-SIM” standard that is smaller still and slightly thinner. So you won’t be able to shoehorn a micro-SIM into a nano-SIM slot, and using a nano-SIM card in phones designed for bigger cards will require an adapter instead of just careful placement.

Whether saving .0037 cubic inches of space over the already tiny micro-SIM card (in context, .1 percent of the volume of an iPhone 4S, considerably less in the current crop of big-screen smartphones) is worth that complication seems to have gone unexplored. Would we be better off if everybody had standardized on micro-SIM and let designers find other ways to condense phone hardware? We’ll never know.

Manufacturing ever-smaller gadgets also imposes costs we may not notice until later on. You may find that you can’t upgrade the memory on a new laptop—a serious risk if an operating system upgrade requires more memory than the last release. Are we ready to foreclose on the idea of upgradable hardware?

Repairing a tablet or a computer can also move from tricky to difficult once its components get tightly-packed together. The same goes for recycling a defunct device—although if a manufacturer provides its own, easily accessible recycling service for those gadgets, I’ll give it a pass.

The risk in making this kind of complaint is sounding like a grumpy old man, desperately clinging to his trusty old Ethernet cable and SIM card as he stands in the way of progress and the laudable goal of making computers simple, worry-free appliances.

But at a certain point, standards friendliness, repairability and expandability should outrank shaving yet another fraction of an inch or an ounce off a product. That would leave plenty of other things companies can try to beat each other on. Did I mention battery life?