I need to get a global phone from Verizon before I go to Berlin this summer, and found out last night that they approved an early upgrade for me.  I’m likely going to purchase it today, so that I can get going with setting it up and unlocking the SIM, but I need to decide which one to get.

It’s between the HTC Incredible 2, and the Motorola Droid 2 Global.

Help me decide!   Here are my thoughts:

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“(Their) whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism. “

OK. No wonder it’s been such slow going.

A year in Berlin, and my progress mit der deutschen Sprache ist leider nicht schnell genug für mich – but according to a recent piece in the New York Times, maybe it’s due not to a lack of time and/or discipline (my two most often-used excuses), but to all those years of ‘monolingualism’ having left my brain less able to handle a second language.

The article claims numerous advantages to having a multilingual brain: increased multitasking ability, reduced risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, and increased problem-solving ability, to name just a few.  So although I could get by here in cosmopolitan Berlin without speaking any German at all, I’m not giving up – I’d like to have me one of them multilingual brains.

According to the New York Times, it’s good for me (and I have to admit, it’s a challenging and interesting process to go through).

Andreas and Christoph are both bilingual.  My wife speaks three languages – fluently.  I’m as smart as these guys, right?   I hope so, because I now find myself in a race against time, a race against my 9 month old German-born niece: will I speak German as well as a 2 year old by next year?

It’s on, my ruthless, diapered rival.  OK, so you’ve got something on me in the cuteness department, that doesn’t scare me.  I’ve got a few tricks of my own up my sleeve, “baby”: I’ve got technology on my side: apps, audio books, google translate,  deutsche welle, and any number of the countless message boards out there.  In the brutal competition to come, I will show you no mercy.

Still, I’ve been trying to transfer all this data, this German language, onto my ‘system’ for about 12 months now – and I can’t help but notice that the transfer rate, the data throughput, has been a bit disappointing.

If the New York Times article is correct, maybe what I really need is a firmware update.

P.S.  Mark Twain (who, it turns out, is a lot funnier than I remember) went through a similar experience over a century ago.   For an idea of just what I’m up against, read his short essay “The Awful German Language“.

It’s almost time… In less than one week, I will become the “official” foreign correspondent of digitalmissive. As already announced, I’ll be finishing my time at the once-biggest social network Myspace at the end of March, and I’ll be sitting on a plane to Bangkok early on the very next day.  I’m taking this opportunity to go an extended trip around the world, so I have four months ahead of me, first in extremely developed 3G/VDSL/Dualband-LTE environments in Asia (Hong Kong or Shanghai), and then on to much less developed areas such as Peru, Ecuador and even Galapagos, where the currency is (still?) US Dollar, and you can hardly get mobile coverage in most parts of the country due to the great Andean mountains.  From one extreme to the other…

This trip should give me a long-deserved digital vacation and some extended time offline (after over 10 years of online-/mobile-/social network-madness), but of course I won’t be without some digital devices to play with. I’ll be taking a brand new Kindle 2 3G+Wifi with me, and will test, for example, if I can still get Whispernet (Amazon’s 3G Service, in general accessible without any monthly fee or wireless subscription) in the various parts of Asia and South America I’ll be heading to – so at least I expect to have the free 3G internet in some countries (already I’ve noticed that Whispernet makes the English language Wikipedia available in Germany, but not the German language Wikipedia page – but that’s another story…). I’ve also already tested the Kindle’s built-in browser (funny: this feature is labeled “experimental” in the Kindle OS).  Results? So far, I’ve found that the Kindle’s browsing capabilities and flash/javascript display is quite limited – not to mention the less than impressive look of a website on the E-Ink screen.  But the Kindle is optimized for reading e-books, right?

Another interesting part of my trip will be checking out the state of internet penetration in each of the countries I visit – not only by pure numbers, but also culturally and socially. And I’ve had a good start there, too: Last week I ‘friended’ my travel consultant for the Galapagos Islands, who is working from Quito, Ecuador.  At left is her and her seal friend – one of the nicer Facebook profile pictures I’ve seen

As promised, last week I took the train from Berlin to Hannover for a day at CeBIT.  This was my first opportunity to visit Europe’s largest technology exposition since moving to Berlin, and since Andreas had already made his annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the CES show back in January, I was eager to go – and eager to compare notes with Mr. Wuerfel.

It’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course – while the Consumer Electronics Show is limited to Consumer Electronics, CeBit’s scope is much wider: the “B” in CeBit stands for office technology (büroautomation in German), the “I” stands for information technology, and the “T” stands for telecommunications. No, the “Ce” does not stand for consumer electronics, but that industry’s well represented at CeBIT too (see the photo below of attendees trying out 3D television) – in short, CeBit covers it all.

Put another way…

• CES is a big show.
• CeBit is a massive show.

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I’ve just gotten back from my first ever digital vacation—I spent five days in the Caribbean offline. Well, I’ll admit—I didn’t go completely offline. What I did was commit to 5 days of zero digital communication, and I didn’t answer or use anything on my phone. (It helped that I was abroad, so I didn’t want to pay insane roaming fees associated with both voice & data service.) The place where I stayed had free wifi, and I had my laptop with me so that I could write. My Kindle also has 3G and wifi. Ultimately, it was a matter of choice and then self-discipline to be out of touch. Some observations:

1. I wrote in my journal a lot more. All the things I might have tweeted or posted to Facebook went into a personal journal. It made me realize that since I don’t share deeply intimate details online, I have a lot of thoughts & experiences that don’t get documented in any way anymore. I have been, at most times of my life, an extreme self-documentarian (it’s probably what makes sharing random bits of it not that big of a deal for me), and even though I download Twitter backups, I’m wondering what I’ll be missing from this chunk of my life when I look back and see only the public bits. I still carry a paper journal with me everywhere; it just never gets used.
2. The only real urge to get onto Twitter and Facebook I had was when Mubarak was rumored to be leaving, and then actually resigned the next day. Social networks have become my lifeline for news & analysis, and though I had CNN International, Al Jazeera English and MSNBC at my disposal, I missed jumping into the breaking-news frenzy with my friends and colleagues.
3. Email, on the other hand, was a daily challenge not to think about checking. I didn’t necessarily want to know what was going on with work, but I had the nagging feeling of, “Does anyone need me?” It’s a big part of my identity, both professionally and personally, to be useful. I had to know that I was needed or missed. (Something I’d learned earlier in my online life, by the way, is that you cannot rely on social networks for this. Once you drop out, it’s “out of sight, out of mind.”) I need to work on this being such a big part of my identity, I think. A friend of mine says, “Truth is, you’re not needed. You’re completely replaceable,” at least in the professional sense. Accepting that is an exercise in a zen kind of freedom.
4. I was irritated by the feeling of not knowing what was going on in the world when I woke up every morning. I compromised by continuing to abandon the immediate picking up of my phone to check my social networks for news, but instead picking up my Kindle and going to the New York Times’ mobile site.
5. Sometimes my desire to get online really did feel like addiction. It reminded me of when I quit smoking, and my brain would try to make these little deals with me to have a cigarette. Luckily, I read a really good book to quit smoking that also helped me with answering those deals (except for the above news deal, I caved on that one). There’s a study that shows that stuff that happens online releases oxytocin in our brains, the same chemical that’s released in cuddling and affection. I suspect I was feeling a real lack of that experience and my “addiction” was trying to make it happen. “Just a little bit,” my brain would whimper.
6. I also fought urges to get just a little bit of work done. I would imagine for a second that I could just do that one writeup that was waiting to finished, and then I’d walk away. But just as I’m not a casual smoker, I know I’m not a casual worker. Just one and I’d be hooked, and back in the deep end. I chose to stay away and it worked for me.
7. Ultimately, all those urges were about self-discipline, something that’s lacking from the bigger discussions of, “Are we spending too much time online?” We worry that Facebook is going to suck us in and eat up all our time. It’s not Facebook (or Twitter), it’s you. You are choosing to go there and spend time, and you need to choose how long you’re going to be there. You do it with TV, you do it with going out with your friends, you do it with reading books. These tools are no different, except that you’re getting different chemicals into your brain that you are with some of your other free-time activities. Self-discipline is needs to be a part of our daily digital diet. (And if you have a problem with it, as I do sometimes, download a helper like Self-Control for Mac.)

PS—Things I did do on my vacation: ran a lot, did yoga, ate relatively well (no peanut butter M&Ms all week!), watched a few Oscar contenders, read Girlbomb’s amazing memoir, drew comics, napped, drank margaritas. Other random analog things, too. It was utterly fantastic.

“First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin” - Leonard Cohen

If the recent inundation of billboards promoting the Chrome browser on the streets of my adopted city is any indication, it appears someone at Google is familiar with the song and is following a similar plan – have you noticed any sudden increase in advertising for Chrome in your neighborhood too?

Chrome is over two years old, though – why the promotional push now?

In terms of profitability, Google remains essentially a one-trick pony – and although search-driven contextual advertising is one pretty nifty trick (and one that Google’s pretty good at), the company has had less than a Midas touch when it comes to following that success up in other markets (think Buzz, Wave, or Google TV).

YouTube?  The site was acquired for $1.65 billion US four years ago and has yet to turn a profit.

Android?  Every day, another estimated 200,000 Android phones come online – yet each activation contributes no direct revenue to Google whatsoever.  The Android platform was developed as free open source software, solely to support Google’s core contextual advertising business by allowing the company to control as much of the search experience on mobile devices as possible.

It turns out these are all merely ancillary ventures – Google’s big-picture ‘second act’, the technology with the potential to dwarf even their search-driven advertising business, is cloud-based computing.  In support of that goal, as loyal subjects of Google we’ve been treated to not only a spate of free internet applications over the past few years (Gmail, Google Docs, et al), but also to the Chrome browser – the subject of the billboard blitz  Berlin currently finds itself in the midst of.

The important thing to understand about the Chrome browser is that it was never intended as merely a competitor to IE/Firefox/Safari – rather, it’s nothing less than the first iteration in the development of the Chrome operating system, upon which Google’s future cloud-based computing paradigm will be based (in Google’s version of the future, the browser is the operating system).  In that context, it’s a bit surprising that Chrome hasn’t already been promoted more heavily than it has – after all, the company enjoys unparalleled direct access to internet eyeballs (that is, until Facebook decides to build a browser).

Despite the relatively soft sell, though, the Chrome application has still managed to creep to a respectable 10% – 14% browser market share (depending on who you ask) – just in time for the Chrome operating system to make its debut on selected devices later this year.

In the meantime, if the streets and U-bahn stations of Berlin are any indication, it appears Google is ramping up the promotion of their Chrome browser (and not incidentally, the Chrome brand) in anticipation of their cloud-based OS – and  they’re not above using decidedly old-school media such as billboards to do it.

Personal computing is changing.  The post-desktop OS will either be based on an ‘App Store’ model (Apple’s just launched an iOS-style App Store for their Mac computers) or a thin client, cloud-based model – such as Google’s Chrome OS.

With the advent of multiple tablet options, 2011 is shaping up to be a battle between the two.  What you have to like about Google is that with both Chrome and Android, they have a viable horse in both races.

P.S. Not surprisingly, Chrome is increasingly in the news these days:

• Chrome cancels native support for the H.264 video codec
• Google retains Chrome product head VP despite Twitter poaching attempt
• Google pays record amount for Chrome bug discovery

This blog is written by a German living in New York and an American living in Berlin – a uniquely reciprocal situation, and one that we haven’t explored much yet.  True, we’ve each written about our respective summer vacations (here and here) – but maybe a more relevant way to explore our transatlantic perspective here at digitalmissive would be to compare and contrast the two big upcoming consumer electronics trade shows: CES in Las Vegas, and CEBIT in Hannover.

So that’s what we’re gonna do:  later this month, look for a few words from Andreas after he returns from CES in Las Vegas – and in March, I’ll chime in with my impressions of CEBIT from Hannover.

I think I’ve gotten the short end of the stick, weather-wise…

Ikea – hey, what’s not to like? You pick and choose from its vast furniture selection exactly what you like, pass through a (relatively) quick check-out and off you go, enjoying your new purchases.

So, how does a popular self-serve furniture store figure into this yours truly digital technology and media blog?

Attending the recently-held Paley Media Center’s IC 2010 event in New York, a-la-carte programingwas among the hot hot button issues. The notion that one day we could freely pick and choose Ikea-style (and thus pay only for) our personal cable, satellite, or IPTV channel favorites scares the living daylight out of some while others believe it’s a must or at the least - unavoidable.

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