When was the last time you donated money to a good cause – using your very cell phone that is?

No, this is not about poll voting for one’s favorite America Idol performer, or buying another app.

This is about wielding one’s smartphone to part ways with some of your hard-earned money purely with philanthropic intent.

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Facebook yesterday announced it is adding Skype video chat to its growing list of features.

This is not a trivial matter.

With its Skype video chat announcement, Facebook merges social with communication. If done right, that’s a tremendously powerful combination.

For one, think of Facebook as your white pages on steroids; a single globally connected super-large phonebook stuffed with detailed profiles, likes and dislikes, photos, links, messaging – the works!

Now add video chat to the mix. Is this the genesis of Facebook Telecom?

Not quite. But at closer look, the social network giant might just have the wherewithal to grow into the first global social IP carrier.

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Ready, set, go!   Today, June 20, Keith Olbermann starts his new old show on Current TV.

Now on Al Gore’s user-gen channel, the former host of Countdown on MSNBC will henceforth reach 60 million US homes (plus 10 million in the UK and Italy).  That’s not chump change, but it’s still a not-so-shy 35 million less than his previous target primetime audience.

Still, if all goes well, Current’s young(er)-and-social audience will dig Keith enough for maximum ratings – plus help with viral promotion of the program across the online social sphere – which in turn would, yep, help boost viewership.

Current also hopes Olbermann’s name will help with new subscriber acquisition.  Using its new anchor as it’s #1 spokesman, Current is now asking anyone inside Cablevision’s Long Island TV market to campaign for Current TV carriage.

But Olbermann’s arrival at Current TV marks more than just a new show.  Both Countdown and Olberman’s new role as Chief News Officer role further moves the channel away from its original user-generated video roots, towards a (hopefully) capable alternative to existing cable news.

Not sure whether this means a definite end for Current’s initial viewer-submitted short-form video format?  With Olbermann’s arrival, there seems plenty room for an entirely new TV news format.  Let’s see what the new Olbermann / Current TV duo can conjure up.

Meanwhile, off we go with pre-launch coverage about Olbermann the *feuding co-worker* , the *larger-then-life egomaniac*, or Olbermann the *millionaire media mogul*.

Be it as it may, Countdown on Current promises to be every bit as informative and controversial as Olbermann’s previous gig.

PS: If you happen to be a Cablevision customer not wanting to miss out on Current’s Countdown, here’s how to reach out to be heard.

When you live and work in the abstract world of zeros and ones, it’s nice every now and then to spend some time thinking about and looking at physical objects – so a few weeks ago, I went to the Berlin International Design Festival.  The venue for the festival was the now-closed Tempelhof airport’s terminal/hangar complex.

Speaking of physical objects – these massive buildings date from the 1930′s, and were intended by the 3rd Reich to serve as the showpiece gateway to their empire.  Happily, of course, that never came to pass – and after the war, this was the airport used for the Berlin Airlift.  In short, there’s a lot of history at Tempelhof, and I was happy to finally get to see the buildings from the inside.

The festival took up two full hangars, and was full of interesting and well-designed objects – the perfect tonic for the day-to-day digitally obsessed.  One particular exhibit that stood out was the Akkuschrauber Rennon 2011 Cordless Drill Race as presented by the Hildesheim College for Applied Science and Art: 16 teams of design students from universities across Germany and Switzerland were tasked with designing, building, and racing lightweight 1-person vehicles, each powered by identical Bosch Akku-Bohrschrauber PSR 18 LI-2 cordless electric hand drills.

The exhibit worked for me on several levels:

• First off, it was just plain fun – I’ve still got enough of the ‘little boy’ left in me that the sight of a modern, cutting-edge vehicle powered by a hand drill protruding out from its side just brings a smile to my face, I’ll admit it.
• Beyond the initial cleverness of the premise, it was clear that from a pure design and engineering perspective, the work was uniformly strong – and that the approaches taken by the competing teams were remarkably varied.
• Then there was the green technology angle: the project provided a great opportunity for the student teams to work with lightweight materials, and since, after all, it was a race, the emphasis was on performance and efficiency.
• On perhaps a somewhat more cynical level, the program served as an affordable yet effective marketing device, both for the schools involved and for corporate sponsor Bosch.

In short,  a win-win-win situation – and a good model for other industry/academia collaborations, I might add.

Here are a few of the Akkuschrauber Rennon entries on display:

P.S. And here, by the way, are a few of the other cool objects from the festival that caught my eye…

a couch…                                                                     an extension cord…

build your own pen…                                                     resistor-LED art…

The Problem: Video content owners are comfortable making their programming available over the internet only if the delivery device is a computer hitting a website (i.e. hulu.com or the thedailyshow.com).  More compelling platforms such as tablets (and, um, televisions) are denied access to this premium content – precisely because they are more compelling platforms  (and would be too disruptive to incumbent business models).  For example, note hulu’s cat-and-mouse maneuvering to fend off access by boxee television software for almost two years now – or Viacom’s threats to sue various cable providers over their new internet-based on-demand mobile device apps.

The Solution (for now, at least): If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  Until internet television really ‘happens’, the best solution (for me and many others) is to get video and audio from the computer over to the television, so I can appear to the internet to be someone sitting in front of their computer – when in fact I’m a guy sitting on his couch in front of his television.  This way, I have access to all that web-only content (take that, hulu!).

It does involve solving the technical problem of getting audio and video (in at least 720p resolution) over to the television, though.  That’s a lot of data to move, and an HDMI cable running across the floor is not an option – what’s required instead is a  ‘short fat pipe’ capable of moving a lot of data over a short distance wirelessly.  I’ve written about the various options available (and what I’ve been using for the past few months) here.

Is my solution a bit clunky?  Sure – I have to go to the computer, enter full-screen mode, and then control the video transport from there.  But the fact remains that until the business-side issues preventing true internet television get resolved, the web will continue to offer a richer video selection than dedicated systems such as Apple TV or Google TV – and for all its lack of elegance, my low-cost solution makes that problem just go away.

In fact, it has been working so well for me, I wonder if there’s a business opportunity being missed…

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This Tuesday (May 3rd) is “National Teacher Appreciation Day” in the US.

I know, it’s easy to feel a little cynical about these ‘National <insert your cause here> Week’ proclamations – it can sometimes seem that they’re primarily about safe uncontroversial camera time for the politicians proposing them.  On the other hand, “National Teacher Appreciation Day” has me taking a minute or two to reflect back on two of the best teachers I’ve had: one from my master’s degree studies, one from back in high school.

Here, by way of a belated ‘thank you’, is a little about them…

Navin Chopra, Economics My master’s degree curriculum was made up of equal parts Stern School of Business MBA courses and NYU graduate-level computer science courses.  At NYU, computer science is part the mathematics department, and although math is a  big deal there, the fact remains that computer science has less to do with mathematics than you’d think – so I always had the impression it was given short shrift at NYU.  Not so the Stern MBA courses I was spending the other half of my time in – while I was there, Financial Times had the school ranked 10th worldwide and 3rd worldwide in finance.  So as I sat surrounded by MBA students for Professor Chopra’s first ‘Foundations of Finance’ lecture, I was eager to see what all the fuss was about.

‘Foundations of Finance’ was part of the MBA core curriculum, and was viewed at Stern as something akin to ‘economics boot camp’.  The material was challenging, and the course moved quickly: NPV, IRR, PVIFA, yield curves, bond pricing, correlation coefficients…  I’ll be honest, I’ve half-forgotten many of those formulas, and I haven’t touched the scientific calculator I had to buy for the course since minutes after finishing my final exam.  To this day, though, I’m still struck by how rewarding (and enjoyable) Professor Chopra made the experience.  Granted, it was a self-selected, highly motivated room to begin with – but he had most of us wanting to learn this difficult material for its own sake - we were  into it.  And let’s be honest, that’s not often the case in business school (it appears Prof. Chopra has since moved on to Columbia Business School – NYU’s loss).

Given that half my courses met in the Institute of Mathematics building, it’s a little ironic that the math I was exposed to while at NYU happened down the street at the b-school, but that’s what ‘Foundations of Finance’ was – essentially, a math class.  What I particularly appreciated were the fleeting glimpses into the beauty of the math that Prof. Chopra seemed to get a kick out of showing us: more than once, we’d be taken up to a certain point with some new formula or chart, and then with a trace of a dry smile, he’d reveal it as another way of approaching the same concept expressed by an entirely different formula or chart we had covered a month and a half ago.  During those ‘eureka’ moments, I suddenly  understood (for the first time!) how a young person could become fascinated enough with math and/or economics to choose a career based upon it, as Prof. Chopra had clearly done (and as has I had done with music, back in high school).

Which brings me to…

Arthur Simeone Mr. Simeone was one of my high school’s three music teachers (I’m pretty confident that’s not so common anymore).   He taught chorus and music theory, and although chorus was not my thing, I did take his music theory classes – and in that laser-like way teenagers can become fascinated by things, I became fascinated by the harmonic architecture of music.

In addition to his teaching, Mr. Simeone was also a jazz piano player of some local renown.  To have a professional musician in my midst, the first I’d ever met – well, that made a big impression on me.  It wasn’t jazz harmony that he was teaching us, though – Mr. Simeone’s theory classes were based around the study of “figured bass” (“generalbass” in German), a type of chord notation used 350 years ago during the Baroque period.  As it happens, the study of this archaic notation makes for a great introduction to music theory, because it introduces into the relatively ‘vertical’ study of harmony some basic counterpoint (which deals with the relative ‘horizontal’ movement of notes) – but I digress.  The point is, although he was the ‘cool’ teacher with a mysterious and (to me, at least) glamorous musical life outside school, Arthur Simeone’s music theory classes were pretty rigorous.  Baroque music is all about structural and logical soundness, and so working with figured bass involves following some hard and fast rules – the teaching of which he took very seriously.  Like Prof. Chopra, he had great respect for the subject matter, which proved infectious in the classroom.

He also managed to approach the subject matter with a curiosity (and even a playfulness) students could identify with, and that proved infectious too.  Granted, by then I had just resolved to pursue music seriously, had little use for high school other than my music courses, and was about to graduate six months early to study music for a semester at a local state university – maybe it’s not surprising, then, that I was so impressed by a music teacher – maybe it was the subject matter itself.  Alas, for my own sake, I wish that was true: in my undergraduate studies I found it was possible, quite possible, in fact, to have some astoundingly bad music teachers – even at a ‘prestigious’ conservatory.

No, Mr. Simeone would have been a great teacher regardless of the subject.  He also would have had an equally great effect on his students regardless of whether he taught at a local high school or at a major conservatory – and since “National Teacher Appreciation Day” is primarily about the same public school teachers who are being made such political scapegoats of these days (cue Jon Stewart), this a point worth using the bold font for.

What makes a good teacher?  I think you’ve first got to have some innate talent for the simple ‘public speaking’ aspect of it, there’s no way around that (I’ve given just enough workshops to suspect that this might be a talent that, unlike my university professor brother, I might lack).  The more crucial quality, though, is intellectual generosity.  Although one taught at an internationally ranked business school and one taught in a suburban New York high school, both Prof. Chopra and Mr. Simeone both ‘got it’ – they both approached the job of teaching without bringing any ego-related baggage of their own to the table, and maybe that in itself was a lesson.

So, thanks Professor Chopra.

Thanks, Mr. Simeone.

And to our readers, I hope you’ve been lucky enough to have a teacher as good as either of these guys – happy National Teacher Appreciation Day.

On internet use at work… There was an interesting article in last week’s New Yorker magazine by James Surowiecki.  Citing a University of Copenhagen study on the effects of willpower and deprivation, Surowiecki raises the possibility that although many companies routinely restrict access to websites such as YouTube and facebook in an effort to increase productivity, overly restricting employees’ personal access to the internet from the workplace could also adversely affect productivity.

The cloud is falling, the cloud is falling… From Lydia Leong at Gartner comes the best explanation we’ve come across yet as to what actually happened last week to cause Amazon’s Web Services/EC2 outage – and what it means to users of its cloud computing services.

As it turns out, it’s both less scary and more scary than you might think: the failure was limited to database access (the actual EC2 server instances were unaffected) in the Northeast US, and was caused by an automated self-induced storm of backups.

That’s the less scary part – the scarier part is there appears to be surprisingly little transparency and consensus regarding Amazon’s EC2 resiliency structure and fail-over options (and consequently, little understanding of them on the part of their customers).

On the economics of the internet… “How much more than the actual cost of your computer and your mobile devices (and the electricity and internet services they require) would someone have to pay you never to use them again?”

“What makes the internet a fundamentally less relevant invention than the railroads of a century ago?”

These are just a few of the questions addressed recently in two interesting articles by Slate‘s Annie Lowrey on the economics of the internet.  You can find them here and here.

P.S. Lastly – for those of you who’ve gotten an iPhone and/or an iPad, but haven’t quite gotten around to getting a life to go with them yet, here’s a list of the 10 best Prince William royal wedding apps.

Our collective clock is ticking. Before year’s end, we’ll be a record 7 billion people co-habitating planet earth. One way or another this presents all of us with unprecedented challenges and opportunities.

With that in mind, the United Nations Population Fund recently started looking to Social Media, to see what this new digital platform can do to help raise both general awareness and individual actions in response to our looming population crisis.

So what exactly can digital media add to this tremendous cause?

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Another month, another European trade show.  This time it’s musikmesse, the world’s largest musical instrument and accessory trade event.  Held in Frankfurt every April, musikmesse covers everything from musical instruments to DJ equipment to audio software (which is why I was there).
Think of the largest music store on the planet, spread across 6 or 7 huge convention halls – in other words, heaven, hell, or a bit of both, depending on your point of view.

Last month I wrote about my trip to CeBIT – musikmesse is, as you might imagine, quite a different kind of trade show experience.  One thing both shows have in common, though, is their own iPhone app.  Driven by an app store model that’s made applications safe, easy to install/uninstall, and often free, the use of such disposable event-specific apps is on the rise.  In fact, a dedicated mobile app – complete with exhibitor lists, floor plans, GPS, and some degree of social networking functionality (usually twitter) – has become ‘de rigeuer’ for any self-respecting trade show these days.

So I decided to try musikmesse’s iPhone app out.

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Like many of my friends with lives as semi-public figures (writers, activists, actors, etc.), I’ve decided that I need a more delineated approach to how my life on Facebook is managed. As many of you know, I’ve advocated (especially in my book) for a more-the-merrier approach to what you share with whom, since I feel like the cross-pollination of our lives across multiple spheres (work, family, friends) can really go a long way towards digital consciousness raising.

I still believe that deeply, but I’m having some difficulty managing my Facebook relationships with people that I don’t know at all. One of the main challenges I’ve run up against is how Facebook is now much more of a web platform/identity manager than it was previously. It connects with a multitude other services and tools now that don’t let me distinguish how I know people. I manage my information on Facebook itself with lists and assigning privileges to them, but it’s just not working for other services. I’m not able to take advantage of some new tools, because I can’t manage the flow of info, and I feel like I’m missing out on those new services. (And I’m not able to do the R&D I need to on behalf of my clients).

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