Thanks to Our Wired World, We’re Running Out of Numbers

As our dependence on mobile technology grows, our need for more numbers to link those magical devices grows too.

SO much so, mobile service providers and governments are coming up with more creative ways to keep us from running out of numbers.

They can do what is taking place in Canada’s largest city today – Toronto gets two new area codes as of today, 437 and 365.

This adds a millions of potential phone combinations to an already crowded see of 10-digit codes.

Or you can go the way of some big service providers, which encourage you to have one number which is shared among all your mobile devices.

Alternatively, you could cut the cord with your phone company, and go completely digital, using a Voice Internet Protocol (VOIP) based service such as Skype.

Maybe that’s why software giant Microsoft recently bought out Skype – which incidentally is giving out free VOIP calling for one month, to current MSN account holders, to lure them over to their newly acquired messaging platform.

All of these solutions work – for now.

What happens when Apple’s iWatch, Samsung’s version of the iWatch and Google Glass from the search engine company hit the streets later this year?

Think about all the numbers most people currently have – home landline, office landline, their personal smartphone and tablet, and then their work smartphone.

Some even have separate lines for their home office and home – both landline and mobile.

We’re swamped in a vast ocean of 10-digit dialing.

I remember years ago, when we only had to dial seven digits to connect over the phone. That’s before we got the addition of ONE – just one area code to our major urban area.

Now here in Toronto, we have six – SIX – area codes, and you’d never not dial the area code plus the number you are dialing.

As technical advances release us from the cables and cords of the past, allowing us to be free, and still be wired to the world, we’ll need to work together to ensure we don’t run out of numbers to connect our wireless devices.

Otherwise, regardless of how wonderful the tech is, it’ll be useless.

The Death of Payphones Could Kill Us All

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If there’s anything Hurricane Sandy taught us, is that despite our amazing advances in technology, we’re still subject to the might of Mother Nature.

If it wasn't for coin operated payphones, many people in the affected areas of the largest superstorm to hit North America would never have been able to call for help. About 30,000 to 40,000 people just in New Jersey are homeless. Cell towers and power lines are still non-functional in many large urban centres  due to flooding.

Let the lone payphone saved the day – enabling people to reach out to their friends, family and colleagues, even if just for a moment, to let us know they are still alive.

Without the lone payphone, many would still be worried sick, wondering if their son, daughter, mom, dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or best friend survived one of the worst natural disasters ever.

But the lone payphone is dying.

It’s been on the most endangered tech watch list for some time.

Since the first mobile telephone call in St. Louis Missouri on June 17, 1946 by three Bell Labs scientists, the  payphone's days have been numbered. Ironically, there wasn't much interest in the initial concept of being able to make a phone call from anywhere – the suits and ties didn't think anyone would be interested in chatting on the phone while walking their dog, driving their car, or any of the many things we do today.

Boy were they wrong. These days, it’s almost impossible to get a word in unless you are texting, tweeting or talking on a mobile device.

And mobile devices are no longer restricted to just cell and smartphones – tablets, mini-tablets, music players, even laptops to a lesser degree are all ways we stay connected when out and about.

Our mobile digital world has slowly been strangling payphones – many shopping malls across North America have been ripping them out, to make space for more public seating space, more retail store space, or even more signage space for billboards and posters.

The last refuge of the payphone – the corner gas station – is even turning away this now out-dated mode of communications.

I remember when I was a kid, and I’d go up with my uncle to the family cottage. We’d always stop off at the gas station at the top of the hill just as we entered town. My uncle would hand me a quarter, tell me to call ahead to see if they needed us to pickup anything, while he’d fill up the gas tank.

For as long as cars have been on the road, there have been payphones at gas stations. Whether it was to call ahead or call for help, if you were out and needed to make a call, you knew that there was always a payphone at a gas station.

Not anymore – most gas stations have nixed their payphones, replacing them with places to get hot coffee.

And the number of payphones in Canada could be cut by about 25 percent if the big and bullying phone companies don’t get their way.

Bell Canada is threatening the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) – the Canadian government’s federal regulator on such things – that if they aren’t allowed to increase the cost of a payphone call from 50 cents to a whole buck, they’ll be forced to remove payphones from the system to offset rising costs.

Phone and cable companies in Canada have used this strong-arm tactic before – and won – to get more money. Whenever they want to raise rates, they always threaten the government with reductions in service if they don’t get their way.

They did this only a handful of years back, when they wanted to increase cable rates claiming the cost of providing communications technologies to the northern parts of the country were forcing them to raise costs across the board. They threatened that if they didn’t get their rate increase, they’d just delay or stop outright providing new technologies in the north. Essentially they threatened to cut off Canada’s north from the digital revolution sweeping across the world.

Freakin’ bullies.

If the communications giants like Bell Canada don’t get to raise the cost of dialing a payphone, they could disappear like dinosaurs.

And as global warming, climate change, solar storms, and other natural phenomenon which is beyond any of our control increases the likelihood of superstorms, we could find ourselves in dire situations, without a means of calling for help.

Scientists are predicting an increase in earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadic activity, and even snow and ice storms, because of changes they've been monitoring here on Earth, and out in space from satellites, and the International Space Station.

So at a time when we may need an old, out-dated form of communication – the lone payphone – we may not be able to find one.

Mobile Devices, Meetings, Conferences, and I

I love to be the centre of attention – maybe it’s the Leo within me.

Throughout my career I've enjoyed many opportunities to feed my ego, and share some of my insights, by publicly speaking, at lectures, lunch and learns, and various conferences and workshops.

Years ago, before we were all wired, everyone paid attention. Well, there were the occasional folks who were told by their boss they had to attend, and just didn't want to be there. But they don’t count – you can’t force someone to listen if they've already decided not too.

These days, even those that are supposedly very excited to hear me –or any public speaker – often spend the whole time with their head down, seemingly ignoring the very speech they wanted to hear.

They aren't sleeping. They aren't glancing at their shoes – though sometimes I wonder. They are stuck with their eyes glued to their mobile devices.

Years ago, we’d tell the few that had cell phones and pagers– remember those? – to please turn them off at the start of the session. It was considered rude, and often drew rolling eyeballs of disgust when someone’s cell phone went off during a professional presentation. 

These days, it’s okay.

Wait a sec. . .

NO IT IS NOT OKAY.

We've become so used to people with their heads buried in their mobile devices at all times and in all social and professional situations, that we've been conditioned to ignore it, and just accept it.

But that’ doesn't make it okay.

It’s still the height of rudeness to ignore anyone, while you text, tweet or post a new status update on your mobile device.

It’s rude to take a call, answer an email, or do any of the zillion of other things we do on our mobile devices, when our attention should be on the person speaking.

The problem isn't so much the mobile device, they are just bits of plastic and metal – they can’t control themselves.

The problem is with our increasingly iSociety.

The iPhone was – and still is – a remarkable piece of tech. As Apple founder, the late Steve Jobs said when he first showed off the iPhone “this changes everything.”

Never before has any piece of technology become so entrenched in the notion of our self, that it created a whole cultural change.

Until the iPhone, which now made it possible to spend an entire life, buried head first, eyes glued to the screen.

The iPhone – and now all smart phones and most mobile devices – are so customizable, and so full of every bit of our lives, that we have created a society which is focused solely on the I.

There are few of us or we anymore.

Oh we share everything we think on the social networks. But think about it – when you are tweeting, emailing and texting, and most things we do on our mobile devices, you are engaging in solely singularly one person activities. You don't jointly tweet, email, text or talk.

And as almost everyone these days is wired with one of these mobile devices – or more –  we've become accustomed to living in a world, where eye contact and the thought of interacting with those around us has become a rare – if not unheard of – thing.

We've created an iSociety.

And, sadly, in an iSociety, no one else matters but me, myself and I.

So that speaker you tweeted you were excited to listen to goes unheard. All you remember about the lecture is that cute cat picture someone posted on their Facebook during the speech.

It’s rude to ignore those around you. And it’s even worse that our society has made that an acceptable part of life.

Let’s change that. Starting today, from now on, when you go to a meeting, conference, or any professional or social function, tuck away your mobile device into a pocket, purse or someplace out of sight. And leave it there, out of sight, and out of mind, until you are really alone.

You can do it. I have faith in you.

And you might actually hear that speaker you tweeted you were excited to hear – for a change!

Is Facebook Drowning Itself?

Ah, Facebook, don’t you ever learn?

Yesterday, the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, changed all its users email addresses to some silly, impossible to remember number@facebook.com.

Doesn’t matter what you set your default email address to on your contact page, it was changed to the social network’s own email system.

Thanks for telling us about the change. Hell, don’t you knock first? Wouldn’t it have been more polite to ask us users first?

Yes it would have, but that’s never been Mark Zuckerberg’s way. The young self-made zillionare that founded Facebook has never been one to care about the 400 million members when making dramatic changes to their personal information, why would he care about how people contact you from their site?

Over the years, under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Facebook has got flack from members for making changes affecting the use of personal private information, which have created even more tension between the social network’s top brass and various governments around the world.

Facebook has always had the pig-headed blindness to turn on these new “features” or “enhancements” as they refer to them, forcing their members to either turn them off, or disable them after the fact.

If it wasn’t for all the media hype around these changes, most wouldn’t know about them – thanks Facebook for letting us know.

For years we have tolerated this rude behavior – everyone’s on Facebook. But the social networking landscape is changing.

 

Twitter is still king for short status updates, YouTube is the video social network which is always on, and dare we say Facebook is being given a run for it’s money by Google+?

The world’s largest and most popular search engine began a social networking service recently, called it Google+ (or G+ for short) and it is increasingly growing as Facebook continues to give the middle finger to its users and government regulators.

Google+ -- so far – has learned a thing or two about being polite, and not forcing changes upon its users. G+ seems to go out of their way to make privacy settings simple, so you know exactly what information you are sharing and with whom. And the Google+ interface is visually stunning, placing an emphasis on the images associated with the post, making it a joy to browse.

Back when Facebook began, it was the only game in town. People joined often sceptically like myself, not so much to network socially, but to catch up with friends and family from years gone by.

When most started their Facebook pages, we added everyone we used to know, but had lost touch with, because there was no one else using Facebook that we knew to add.

Social networking was a new world, where people were more caught up in the ability to actually connect with old friends and family, instead of just becoming popular.

These days, the popularity bug has bitten most social network platforms, so it’s not who you know, it’s how many. 

And that popularity thing extends beyond the amount of friends, fans and followers, to the actual networks, so the more people saying good things about your social network, the more likely people will use that social network.

Just look at how quickly Pinterest has grown, thanks in part to the positive hype, while the once popular Digg has been long since forgotten, due to lots of negative talk on the social networks and in the media.

The more people complaining about your social network – Facebook take note – the fewer people using your social network, and eventually that social network dies. Myspace was once thought to take over Facebook, but now, most don’t even mention it except when talking about social networking relics from the past. If it wasn’t for the handful of musicians using Myspace, it would have been dead and buried long ago.

Popularity might not be the best judge of character, but it certainly has economic power -- if your once popular product or service suddenly falls out of favor, people stop using it, and the business dies.

Just look at Research In Motion (RIM)’s BlackBerry – once the primary smartphone, RIM ruled the stock market. These days, RIM is the butt of jokes and speculation about the future of the company, as they have failed to keep up with innovations in smartphone tech, and they have lost focus of their primary user-base.

If Facebook continues to alienate and offend their user, as other social networks mature and expand, eventually Facebook will be just like RIM – barely able to float in the cyberspace sea of change.

Cool Apps Only Work if Used – Duh!

Anyone who knows me knows I love my iPhone. It is far more than a phone, and more than a computer, because it’s so personal.

 

Which is probably why I have over a 150 apps on the thing.

I have an app -- SoundHound -- that will “listen” to songs, identify the name of the song, the band playing it, the songwriters, even display the lyrics in Karaoke format as the music is playing so I can sing along.

I have an app that tells me my current heart rate, and what I should be aiming for at rest and during a workout. I have an app that will help me rest and sleep, by playing soothing sounds, images and binaural beats – which the documentation claims, are psychological sounds to put your mind in specific mental states.

When you have apps to seduce you to sleep at the psychological level – you just know they must have an app for everything.

But then you get apps which do wonderful and amazing things, but they require your friends to use them too.

One of the coolest apps I have is Bump, which allows you to instantly share selected photos and contact details with another person, just by bumping your smartphone (iPhone, BlackBerry or Android) together.

It eliminates the hassle of trying to type in their contact details quickly, and ensures that neither person writes down the wrong information. 

Whenever I want to exchange my contact details with a new friend or colleague, I always ask “do you bump?”

After their initial reaction of “WTF?!?” fades, I explain the Bump app, and ask if they use it.

Although everyone seems really curious how it works – by sharing your contact details over Wi-Fi or 3G networks – they admit that they don’t have the app. So, instead of getting to use this really awesome high-tech way of connecting with someone, we do it the old fashioned way, and either exchange business cards, or verbally tell each other our contact details, as we hammer them into our phones.

What a waste of good tech!

Another really cool app I use which goes to waste far too often is Viber. Viber allows you to make voice calls and send Short Message Service (SMS) text messages to anyone around the world, using your smartphone’s data plan, instead of it’s voice plan. This means you avoid long distance calls, and don’t use up your voice plan’s minutes. 

I’ve used Viber, and text messages are sent and received almost instantly – you’d never know it was being relayed using a data service instead of your service provider’s SMS network. Voice calls are crisp and clear, and you’d never know you were talking on a data plan instead of a voice network.

Problem is – as with Bump – in order to utilize this cool tech, your friends have to use it too. I have a handful of friends using Viber. 

Or should I say, I have a handful of friends that HAVE Viber on their phones. When someone in your smartphone’s contact list installs Viber, you are automatically notified by the app, so you can now use it.

However, you can still make calls and send text messages to those who have Viber using your service provider’s voice and SMS network – and I find on average, most people still do.

Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having the app? 

Viber doesn’t share any personal information, you don’t have to join anything to use it. Just you and your buddy have to have the app installed and running on your smartphones to make voice or text message calls using it.

I turn off apps when I’m not using them, but I always keep Viber running so that those who have it and have my iPhone’s number can take advantage of it. But they don’t – usually when they call me, it’s through the normal cell network.

Another cool use of tech wasted.

Makes me wonder if I should even bother to keep Viber running, or if I should even bother to keep Viber or Bump installed on my phone. Although they are both great apps, what’s the use if no one is using ‘em?

Sometimes, even the best apps can be so frustrating!

Even Someone Named Snooki Can Teach Us a Life Lesson

Yesterday we learned yet another celebs nude pictures were spreading over the Internet after their cell phone was hacked.

E! News confirmed that Jersey Shore actress Snooki’s cell phone was hacked, and images sans clothes of the pregnant actress are popping up on the net. The images supposedly, are partially censored, so no Snooki bits are exposed fully. Though one questions whether this was an actual hack, or a media stunt to generate free press for the reality TV star.

This is not the first time celebrities have had to deal with hacked mobile devices unleashing naked pictures of themselves over the worldwide web. Scarlett Johansson and Blake Lively have had nude pictures exposed due to cell phone hacks as well.

Snooki – who’s real name by the way is Nicole Elizabeth Polizzi – appears to have fallen victim to the same type of hacks as other celebs – an invasion of private information ripped from their mobile devices.

With a name that sounds like the aftermath of a sneeze, one might feel like saying something soothing after hearing of the horrid news of her hacked phone.

However, if there weren’t any nude pictures, or any other potentially embarrassing things on her mobile devices, we’d probably not be tweeting and discussing her this very moment.

Yes, our mobile devices have become a deeply engrained part of our everyday lives. We use them to keep track of where we are, where we are going, who we are meeting, and even capture and share memories of important events.

And maybe some of those events you want to capture involve removing all clothing, and doing strange things with duct tape, crayons, and a marsh mellow. But if your mobile device gets hacked, the world will finally figure out what you use the marsh mellow for – and you will be red-faced embarrassed, unless it’s for roasting over a camp fire and eating.

What we choose to do with our tech is a personal choice. And we have to weigh the pro’s and the con’s each time we snap that photo, capture that video, or log onto that website.

But as long as there have been passwords, there have been hackers attempting to gain access to those password-protected systems.

Mobile devices, with all their passwords and apps that claim to secure your personal and private data, and cool apps which will even let you wipe your mobile device’s hard drive remotely, still leave us open to public embarrassment, because in the time it takes you to realize your mobile device is missing or may have been hacked, it could already be too late.

To easiest and most guaranteed way to ensure your private and personal information stays private, is to not use your mobile devices to take or store anything which can compromise you, your friends or your family.

Or, you could use one of those old film cameras, which doesn’t store anything digitally. Unless you took the time to painstakingly scan in the film negatives or the actual still pictures, there is no way for one of those cameras to leak sensitive info online.

Ah, retro-technology. It still has a use!