A recent WSJ article (may require registration) brings more attention to a lesser-known capability of cellphones: connecting your phone to a computer as a USB modem to gain access to the Internet, a.k.a. tethering.  This feature was critical to me in a fairly common setting in the consulting life: having spotty or no Internet access on the road or at the client’s office.  And I’m arguing now that wireless carriers should include this value-add service in all of their wireless data plans for free, not to charge a monthly fee for it separately.

A natural question of course is “Why should wireless carriers want to give this away for free if it’s so important?”  I would pose that it gives two big benefits to the carriers:

• Improved sales of higher-margin smartphones and use of data plans.
• A new software-based monetization opportunity.

By continuing to push so-called “unlimited” plans for cellphones, I think the carrier that makes their marketing more compelling by formally including tethering as a capability would improve their sales and retention rates.  At the same time, the carrier would have an opportunity to either sell configuration software to ease support of the tethering function, or else use the configuration software as an avenue for advertising, cobranding, or bundleware opportunities.

To give some context, I used to work at a client’s offices where I had to share a single desktop computer and Internet connection with multiple people throughout the day because it was a very locked-down environment.  Since I couldn’t use my own laptop to get things done, I found that I couldn’t keep up with either client project deliverables or extracurricular work that I’d be doing as well all while sharing a single computer.  That’s when tethering came to the rescue.  After buying myself a smartphone and fussing with the configuration for a while (drivers, registry edits, and the like), I finally got connected!  IM, e-mail, the Web, and online resources were available to me again after nearly 2 months straight of maddeningly working off of one computer.  It felt like a breath of fresh air.

Recommendation: Carriers should legitimize a value-add service that they have a hard time controlling as a part of their data plans to improve their sales and image as well as opening a new incremental revenue stream for themselves.

Wolfram Alpha is a great way to find a fact and do some analysis about it. You might think that after 19 days of being available to the public that I would understand what it’s all about as a user. Just like Mathematica, I think this product is a tad ahead of its time. This quote from their site: “Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone” is now much more meaningful after having used the service: “immediately computable” means a whole world of analysis can be at your fingertips, and “systematic knowledge” is another phrase for data and facts.

Now, there are some recognized shortcomings but by-and-large, as a proof-of-concept, it’s fantastic! The above link should bring you to a query state that lists the following major US specialty retailers: Staples, Office Depot, and OfficeMax. Now what I was trying to do was to find information quickly about this particular sector of retailers, provide a basis to generate an estimate on the size of the market for office supplies, and see data points relative to each other. And of course, it did so beautifully.

There’s plenty more work to follow, however. I think there are two key high-priority enhancement projects Wolfram Alpha should consider for their next release cycle:

1. a simplified and standardized (mathematical?) grammar structure, and
2. a fact-drilling capability.

The first suggestion would greatly help users understand how to structure their input and reduce the incidence of the “don’t know how to handle the input” page appearing to users. After all, I can’t think of a single language that doesn’t have syntax with which to standardize expressions and context. And at the same time, I don’t think one system can understand every single kind of expression and context from a myraid of users without extensive effort into a (in my opinion) futile effort.

The second suggestion would be a means to offer transparency to the facts presented by the engine. Similar to Wikipedia and to the tradition of citations in written works, Wolfram Alpha should consider a way to cite every single fact in its database. After all, each one should be verifiable in its own way, and the source content would go a long ways to confirming that work. Good luck to the Wolfram Alpha team, I wish you the best of success!

Recommendations: Put in a grammar/syntax structure to help users understand how to input their queries, while keeping it at a minimum. And don’t forget the beauty of the Web being built on hyperlinks, so link to your facts where possible!

The “what” is particularly tricky, since the “who” is actually composed of a larger public mindset whose perceptions of acceptable behavior, taste, and content continuously change. What is innovative can become intolerable very quickly. Consider the following example, bottled water. Earlier in the millennium (by the way, has society agreed on a name for this decade yet?), bottled water was very popular. Now, it’s shunned as wasteful and damaging to the environment.

Recommendation: The best way to meet this challenge is to adopt an all (versus the alternative “nothing”) approach. Making an implicit contract regarding censorship and moderation with the wider public is a futile effort if the objective is to broaden appeal to the widest possible market. Thus, letting everything in based on a very small and specific functional criteria set is probably the best and easiest method for Apple’s goals. Otherwise, you’ll have to adopt a continuously evolving (and large) censorship filter that adapts to users on the fly, based on sentiment analysis and international thinking (one common fallacy is that the US should be the arbiter of taste, but what about every other country that has access to the App Store?), which is the alternative. Apple is definitely in between a rock and a hard place.

Some food for thought:
Social networking “fatigue”, from 11/2/2006
The emergence of an older generation of users, from 8/20/2007
Survey numbers on the impact of social networking applications, from 4/12/2008
A more personal story, from 3/15/2009

Shouldn’t a significant enhancement be made to allow different strata of friends? The idea is that you have that inner circle that should be unfiltered and broad, and then groups that extend outward but allow you to control the level and messages at a finer level. There are political correctness issues here, of course: what happens when someone finds out that you’ve put them in the “not-so-close” group? What if you update one group accidentally with information that you didn’t mean to disseminate? What if a friend stops being such a close friend and you decide to move them to another group?

Does the functionality benefit outweigh the political risks and social downsides? Recommendation: Allowing people to have better control of their network would likely drive the adoption of a single social networking platform as a destination. At the same time, this sort of functionality would also likely encourage the dissemination of even more information, thereby increasing the value of the platform as an investment. I think that the first platform to do this will have an almost-win-win on their hands, but they’ll have to be very: 1. brave, 2. savvy about pitching this functionality, 3. gradual about monetizing this capability.

It was quite fortunate that there was minimal drama involved, but I still think that there are several improvements that could be made to clarify this “life process” (for lack of a better term, moving your belongings, like managing your financial identity, is only modestly documented and difficult to work with).

Recommendation: The American Moving and Storage Association (AMSA) should aggressively distribute information through the hands of landlords, rental car companies, and home improvement stores regarding moving tips such as recommended boxes, ways to wrap items, and how to carry large items.