First, let’s just say it: roaming outside the US with a US-carrier smartphone and SIM card, no matter what you do, is highway robbery. There, now that that’s out of the way…

I have a global phone from Verizon (shoutout: Droid Incredible 2, w00t w00t), and I’d planned on purchasing a German SIM card to use on my trip, since it’s too expensive to use Verizon’s global services. To do so, I called ahead and got the unlock code for my phone (this is not “jailbreaking” or “rooting” as some have asked in forums online— this is just unlocking your phone to be able to use with another carrier).

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Take Al Gore, Gore Vidal, or Vidal Sassoon. Would any of these gentlemen have turned as successful had their parents picked less recognizable names for them?

Likely. After all, how do you explain the success and phenomenon around someone named Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gisele Bundchen?

Clearly, it’s not about one’s given name, but how you manage to *live*it: fill it with life, meaning and gestalt. To put it into today’s social media speak, it’s about how you create the brand of you!

But what happens if social media turns into the new go-to engine for parents eager to hone in on the ultimate name for their kid? What happens if the über-popular engagement platform begins to not just promote but indeed shape parents’ decisions on what to name their kids?

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Try sitting at a restaurant and not follow the over-the-bar TV. Try taking your office building elevator and not focus on the in-car monitor. Even at my local barber shop, a sizable flat screen TV is constantly running, with videos routinely cutting into if not suppressing actual conversation.

Add to that screens at home, at work, inside stores and your favorite local bodega. Frankly, I probably encountered plenty more digital screen today if only I hadn’t been busy, well, looking at another screen.

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The Honorable Justice Clarence Thomas has been a judge on the U.S. Supreme Court since 1991. The last time his voice was heard during proceedings was five years ago. According to court manuscripts, he has since not asked any in-court questions or engaged in dialog while on the bench.

According to the Pew Research Institute, young online audiences seem to be taking a similar approach.

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Last week we wrote about dropbox, and how business concerns can sometimes muddy the waters of what (in a perfect world) should be a transparent and open relationship – the relationship between technology and us humans.

The week before, we wrote about Chrome OS, Google’s view of a cloud-based, thin-client future of personal computing.

Here then, is a post combining these two themes.

The other day, I started playing around with the Chrome Web Store.  We’ve been interested in the Chrome OS since it was a just a twinkle in Google’s eye, and now that devices running the new ‘browser-as-operating system’ are just a few months away from hitting the market, it seemed like high time to check out  these Chrome “apps”.

So I “downloaded”‘ and “installed” a few of these “apps” onto the Chrome browser: a few from Aviary having to do with photo and audio editing, and a music streaming service from from a company called Grooveshark.  Initially, I was pretty impressed – I got it.  Then I started seeing  Adobe Flash prompts popping up when I tried to use the <back> key, and a thought occurred to me – was I looking at a brave new world of Chrome web apps, or was I looking at merely a few simple bookmarks to Flash-enabled websites masquerading as Chrome-specific “apps”?  The obvious thing to do was to try accessing these same URLs directly from a different browser, so that’s what I did – and lo and behold,  my shiny new Chrome “apps” functioned identically on Firefox - without having anything to do with Chrome.  At all.

So mere months before Chrome OS devices are slated to start hitting the market, all three Chrome ‘apps’ I tried out were really just bookmarks to Flash-enabled websites available on any browser.  If you’re Google, that’s a problem.  What bothered me more, though, was how Google chose to handle that problem: by misrepresenting a simple bookmark as an “App” that “requires Chrome” that’s saved via a button labeled “Install” – all of which is followed by a few seconds of a (completely bogus?) OS X-style spinning progress ring!

In short, the simple saving of a generic bookmark is being made to look like a Chrome-specific “application installation”.

I do want to like the Chrome OS, I really do – but that kind of thing, well, it ticks us off a bit (we hate it when our software is being – let’s say – disingenuous with us).

P.S. Maybe the more interesting aspect of this whole story, though, is how Google will differentiate the Chrome Flash (and later, HTML5) user experience from the Flash/HTML5 user experience offered via competing browsers – because if the Chrome OS is going to gain real traction, there’s going to have to be some additional ‘value add’ to the Chrome browser proposition.  In other words, Chrome will have to become extensible in such a way as to allow for optimized (Javascript/HTML5) performance and for more native-feeling (and standardized)  user  interfaces and control sets than those offered by other standalone browsers.

Have you been to a book store lately? No, not online, not the virtual kind. I mean the real thing. The old-fashioned brick-and-mortar version. The real McCoy.

This past week I went book hunting up and down Manhattan. Apparently, I had forgotten exactly how tedious the process was compared to the comforting efficiency of an online shopping experience.

Well, five! store locations and several book-hunting hours later, I finally did walk away with my priced copies.

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It’s hard not to be a fan of Dropbox – the popular cloud-based data storage service has a simple and intuitive user interface, and integrates seamlessly into both Windows and Apple operation systems.

It just works – and it’s free (for 2GB of space, at least).

Many users are surprised, though, by how quickly they bump up against that 2GB storage limit.  That’s because Dropbox charges not by the amount of data stored, but by the amount of access to that data.  In other words, if I have a 100 MB folder of vacation photos I want share with three other people, Dropbox counts that same data four times over (each new share is counted against each member’s limits as if it were new freshly uploaded data).  Additionally, each member of a shared folder can in turn share that folder to any number of other people who can then each share it to any number of other people… well, you get the idea.

Not surprisingly, Dropbox really wants you to share your folders:

Start accepting enough other users’ invitations to shared folders, though, and you’ll see your data count grow pretty quickly.  In fact, you could soon require a premium account for additional storage, which Dropbox will be happy to sell you.  Of course, a user could counter this ‘data creep’ simply by managing her account a bit and leaving (and/or unsharing) folders after all those vacation photos have been exchanged and downloaded, but Dropbox doesn’t make it easy:

• The option to leave and/or unshare a folder is simply not available on the contextual menu installed by the local Dropbox app (which is how most users access the service).
• Up on the Dropbox website, leaving/unsharing folders isn’t available on a folder’s contextual dropdown menus, either (although “Invite to folder” heads the list of options offered).
• The website’s top-level “Sharing” tab (see above) offers an “Invite others” option, but no direct option for leaving/unsharing folders.
• While the website also offers a 2nd-level tab called “Share a folder” (see above), there’s no direct option for leaving/unsharing folders.

Leaving or unsharing a Dropbox folder is possible, but only from the website’s Shared Folder “Members” list.  Since everything else about the service is otherwise so well-designed, the single (and non-intuitive) location of this one option is curious.

But hey.  Dropbox gives away 2 GB of storage for free – can you blame them for not making it easy for users to avoid having to purchase a premium account as their data count accumulates?

Probably not.  After all, business-side concerns can often tend to make the human-technology interface less open and forthright than one would ideally hope for – it would be naive to assume otherwise.  I’m reminded of a recent New Yorker article in which an ex-AOL exec estimates that 60% of the company’s profits come from ill-informed users unaware they don’t need an AOL subscription in addition to their cable or DSL subscriptions to get onto the internet – or the news that the FCC is considering ‘anti-overage’ regulations requiring  mobile carriers to actively notify customers as they approach their monthly usage limits.

As newfangled as all these consumer technologies are, it could be that some old fashioned ideas – such as “Let the Buyer Beware” – still apply.

Back from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, strangely, of all things, it was micro-blogging that got rejected.

Yup! No Twitter, no Facebook status updates, no quick text shout-outs. Nope! Nada! Nothing!

To be sure, any and all mobile communication on all carrier networks was out. Voice and data. You name it.

While I initially suspected complete event-caused subscriber overload (my Blackberry screen message said as much), I soon discovered this “no mobile” diet is a perfectly normal scenario on D.C.’s National Mall.

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