The US Department of Justice today coordinated the shutdown of Megaupload and the arrest of several of its founders. In response, the web hacking group called Anonymous has taken to the digital streets and started taking down various related websites including the US Department of Justice and the MPAA.

Megaupload, for me and for my friends, has always been the go-to destination for watching HBO or other TV programs that can’t be easily found on Hulu, Netflix, or iTunes. It’s common knowledge: Megaupload is for watching copyrighted TV and Movies for free.

So why is everyone surprised? And why does everyone appear pissed off?

The fact of the matter is the the US DOJ and FBI are right about Megaupload, and regardless of whether or not it can be proved conclusively that media companies are suffering a financial loss because of Megaupload’s existence (I doubt it can be proved conclusively), the act of running a business offering someone else’s product without an agreement to do so is certainly wrong, and because I think the DOJ has done their research, I think it’s probably illegal too.

Following up seems to be one of the most important aspects of business, but it’s also something that suffers a lot without a significant amount of systemization. I think there are a lot of opportunities that pass by for companies, especially smaller businesses, because they open doorways and then for various (good) reasons they don’t end up walking all the way through.

Of course there are different types of businesses and there are different types of follow up. So let’s see if we can categorize some of the kinds of people you would follow up with:

• A potential consumer customer
• A potential b2b customer (a lead)
• A consumer who has bought your product
• A b2b customer who has bought your product
• A potential partner who can help your business

Out of this list, I think we already pay a lot of attention to potential customers, be they consumers or other businesses. There are whole lot of SaaS systems dedicated to tracking leads, bringing leads in to a “funnel,” and assigning various follow up to the right staff.

In this sense, the system of lead generation and follow up is a very “solved” problem, and the issue facing many small businesses in this space is a lack of adherence to any given system.

These systems are also readily used for the business development deals where the end goal may not be a sale, but certainly an agreement of some kind.

That leaves follow up with a consumer or business customer who has already bought your product.

This people are really the most likely people to be customers for you again. In the b2b world, a “lead” doesn’t get thrown away once they’ve bought something once, they get pushed up the priority list and hopefully become a long term regular customer.

In some consumer industries, especially where (like in the b2b market) the sales process is competitive and the final product is extremely expensive — like automobiles and houses — there is already a standard practice for customer follow up and retention.

Car dealerships maintain a relationship with you not only through maintenance but in some cases through drivers club memberships, magazines, and other regular mailings. I’ve only bought one house, but the follow up has been very good so far, and it’s definitely going to keep the agent top-of-mind when it comes time to sell the house I’m currently in and find a new one.

Even though the costs of having this kind of follow up in place could be large (staff dedicated to the process, printing and mailing materials, database management, and so on), it’s well worth it if a returning customer brings in, per purchase, several thousand dollars or more.

What if this process could be made more efficient for smaller, consumer facing companies, or for companies with less expensive products, but for whom the returning customer is an essential part of the package? Essentially, what if there was a resource-poor way to increase the lifetime value of each of your customers?

For all I know these services already exist (in fact, it looks like followup.com offers something in this vein, but only for auto dealerships, and a bit ham-handed), but I imagine that being able to sign up for a company that will manage this process for you would be a great advantage. Hand off the contact info, exclusively to be used for these very limited purposes, and allow the company to send various follow-up materials on your behalf that will encourage customers to become repeat customers and even real devoted fans.

How noticeable would it be if you signed up for an online service and received an actual physical thank-you in the mail? What if you got a free ticket to a movie? What if you got something on your birthday?

I can think of a lot of businesses that could benefit from a service like that.

When Path first launched I was instantly on board with their concept of a fifty-friend limit. As Facebook has grown it has become a place where I no longer feel that it is a personal place to share things, rather it is a semi-public forum where people transact the business of social interaction.

There are plenty of people who use it primarily to stay close with family, I know, but this is the world it has grown to be for me.

Path, then, offers an artificial restraint on the common business-use case: get as many connections as you can. If you force people to limit the number of connections they make, you remove at least some of the incentives that have driven Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Google+, and others to the brand-driven experience that they currently have.

I also like the idea (perhaps it is foolish to think it’s possible) of creating a non-geographical small group of friends tied together by frequent communication of minutia.

At SXSW in 2011, I loved the fact that a spontaneous “Seattleites” Beluga (group messaging) “pod” showed up and filled in with a good group of us Seattleites in Austin. It was endlessly entertaining to be connected to the Seattle back-channel while we all roamed around SXSW, checked lines at parties, reported on the interestingness of sessions, and cracked jokes at everyone’s expense. I miss that experience, it was great.

I can see Path filling that gap with a persistent group of close friends, where I am comfortable sharing my home address, or when my entire family is on vacation.

The first version of Path was, I think, iPhone only, and unfortunately a lot of my family and really close friends “in real life” are not iPhone users, and so I found it harder to put together a really good list of “friends” on Path. I ultimately deleted the app from my phone.

This new version of Path is, firstly, extremely pretty, and a pleasure to use. I’ve been playing with it for about a week, and I love the interfaces for posting where you are, who you’re with, and (of course) whether you’re awake or asleep.

If you looked at Path before and set it aside, I’d recommend taking another look now.

Jason Calacanis seems to gravitate towards publishing startups, and his latest publishing project (which has been quietly gathering steam) is the ThisWeekIn video network. For those of you who haven’t run in to it, it’s a clever collection of talk-show formatted live interviews hosted on both Justin.TV and YouTube, and collected into a good-looking “network” front end at ThisWeekIn.com.

I’ve been a skeptic of making web video shows work for a long time, because it’s hard to find an hour at work to watch any of this kind of video, and it’s not necessarily comfortable to watch this kind of video in front of the computer at home. Short form video shows are often too short, in my opinion. They’re not really “worth it” if you have to see an ad or even sit through an intro sequence.

The magic one-to-two-minutes number surfaced as a result of analyzing successful viral videos, but of course a one-time runaway hit video and a consistent show are really two different things entirely.

But now with more people hooking computers up to TVs at home, and more mobile devices being able either to stream video or to load the audio version of a show and play it back (for a car ride, for example), these longer form shows are starting to make more sense.

Calacanis isn’t the only one starting a video network. Leo Laporte has been doing This Week in Tech (separate, I believe, from Calacanis’s network) for a long time, and my buddy Andru Edwards at GearLive had turned his garage into a video studio years ago for the Bleeding Edge TV program he does on his site.

I’m starting to think that 2012 might be the year we see video shows start to hit the mainstream the way Weblogs Inc introduced blogging in the early 2000s.

I don’t know if Cringely is planning to make “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” available somehow outside of the limited theater release which ended tonight, but I hope that he does. In this interview, Jobs is a truly captivating subject, carrying an audience almost entirely on his own wit through a seventy minute talking-head film. And it is fascinating.

Like many of the figures that loom larger than life in our public consciousness, I’m sure that Jobs’s accomplishments are exaggerated and so are his negatives. Looking at this interview, it’s easy to understand how he could draw people to him, and work to build the things he did in his life.

Coming away from this interview, I feel a little inspired to try just a little bit more in my own life to do whatever it is I do “with taste,” to use his phrase, and to reject the mediocre in favor of the great.

I just discovered Producteev (via Brett Schulte), a task management service that seems to offer real group collaboration tools. It’s a really promising service that allows us to save and assign tasks to various members within a group, a feature that is notably missing from some of the best productivity software out there like Things and OmniFocus.

One of the things that jumps out at me from Producteev is that it can be operated almost completely from a dashboard I am perfectly familiar with already: my inbox.

When I get an email that I need to turn into a task, either for myself or for someone else, I can simply forward it to producteev with a deadline date in the email subject line. In reply, I get a confirmation mail containing another series of actions I can take:

Cool Tips: by replying to this email you can accomplish the following different actions
- Complete the task by replying done.
- Assign priority with a number of stars (*** or 3* will give the task three stars).
- Assign the task to a colleague @michael lewis (or @ml, @michael, @lewis).
- Label the task like this ##marketing.
- Modify the deadline with : tomorrow, today, next week, 09/27…
- Add a note to the task by replying “this is my note” (use quotes).
- Move the task to another workspace with #NewWorkspaceName.

This kind of “command line” integration into email is extremely useful for all kinds of reasons, and Producteev is not the only, or even the first, to offer it. Disqus, the comment system that you see on this blog, has for a long time provided moderation features (reply with “Delete” or “Spam” to comment notifications) via e-mail. One of the big differentiating ideas behind the creation of Posterous was that you made your bog posts in your e-mail client.

Many of us spend a lot of time in our e-mail interface, and it turns out that there’s a whole lot of flexibility in what you can do with e-mail, especially if you can start to interpret email responses in natural-language ways, the way scheduling apps have started to interpret appointment and reminder inputs.

With hosting services like Heroku offering integration on incoming e-mail services, processing incoming e-mail in your web app is going to become more and more straightforward, and more of a no-brainer.

Why try to twist people’s arms and re-invent an interface problem when you can stand on the shoulders of one of the most optimized computer interfaces in existence?

I am excited about e-mail as a dashboard, and I’m looking forward to seeing what other clever ways people will find to build services I need into a workflow I already have.

One of the sacred pieces of wisdom about the internet that has developed over the past decade, is that anyone can publish to the web with only a few clicks, with no money — and that this is as good as owning your own personal newspaper, magazine, or other old school publication.

But of course this isn’t true. After more than a decade, Google has yet to really solve the problem of getting the best piece of content in front of those who are looking for it, and other search engines lag behind them. Sure, anyone can publish to a web page, but distribution is still a valuable commodity.

I think different web platforms have focused more either on publishing or on distribution. WordPress in undeniably a platform. So is Tumblr. These are publishing tools that focus on making content creation easy, but leave it up to the author to develop their own methods of putting their words in front of an audience.

This is a valuable service, and it fills a great need, but it is maybe less valuable than building a distribution platform. Twitter is a distribution platform. Many people who read this post will come to it through the link I share on Twitter; it is where I have nearly 4,000 followers and my own primary distribution channel. If I want to reach the most people I can, I use Twitter.

Twitter provides infrastructure not just for posting messages, but for delivering those messages to others. This is why Twitter wants to own their own desktop and mobile clients, because the value of their network is deeply tied to their ability to control the delivery and presentation of what goes through it. Google has decided they’re going to gut their classic blogging platform (Blogger) and convert it to Google+ — a platform that provides distribution through “circles.”

Facebook of course is the ultimate distribution platform. It has managed to become the default way in which families communicate across continents, friends across campuses, and co-workers across cities. The news feed is a direct portal for distribution to your network.

Distribution in web platforms is the key to people’s attention. It is what has enabled newspapers and magazines to charge the rates they command for advertising. On the web, it will be no different.

I really like Mark Suster’s phrase that he invests in lines not dots. What a great way to put it.

When he uses it he often talks about entrepreneurs and founders, and how it takes more than one meeting to make a relationship, and it takes a line to warrant an investment. Obviously we’re also familiar with trend lines in our industries.

I think a lot of success comes from spotting lines, either in people or in an industry, and it takes a kind of talent to see where an industry is going to be in a few years, especially if it’s a consumer facing industry.

A secondary talent, which is maybe more valuable than linespotting, is being able to see the opportunities those lines illuminate that nobody else is paying attention to.

While the world was focused on blogging and mobile web consumption, Naveen and Dennis started Foursquare (and in fact, before that, Dennis started Dodgeball, acquired and ignored by Google), looking ahead to how mobile web adoption could change the shape of coupon advertising.

I’m a sucker for the stories of great businesses that reinvented the way things were done, and almost always these stories start with someone looking at the way they worked day in and day out, and being able to see an inefficiency that other people could not. Something that could be done better, or some way to replace a key component of the existing system so that everyone (except the dinosaur of course) is better off.

What a great talent to have.

If you watch Hacker News and blogs written by VCs and entrepreneurs, you’ve probably seen a lot of conversation about co-founders and equity splits recently. And of course that’s accompanied by the endless articles about finding or evaluating a technical cofounder, or, if you’re a technical co-founder type, how to evaluate the business co-founder that will inevitably approach you with some world-changing idea.

This ethos is all helped along by programs like Startup Weekend (which I’ve never attended, so don’t really have a valid opinion on) and countless other incubators and events and institutions all designed to pair up the magical technical-business co-founder team that’s going to make everyone rich.

I don’t think this is healthy.

I think that any business partnership is a complex relationship to handle. For example, someone has to be the CEO, and someone needs to take orders, between two strong-minded founders that’s not always an easy decision to make.

Regardless of who’s in what role, being a co-founder is realistically a long-term deal. This “I have an idea now all I need is a hacker with a keyboard” thing will lead to a lot of enthusiastic but short lived partnerships.

Just two years ago, I was the business/idea guy on the hunt for a technical co-founder. I looked around my network for someone to work with and I did find someone. It was a great learning experience.

Since then I’ve taught myself to code well enough in Rails to prototype just about anything I can think of.

The next time I go looking, it won’t necessarily be for a technical co-founder, and I wouldn’t recommend that hunt to any other “idea/business” folks out there now. The best thing you can do is spend a few months building your idea — it is really not as hard as you think.

Then you’re in the position to take Mark Suster’s advice and hire your co-founder for significantly less equity dilution than you would have before, and you’ll be in a much better position to get good, talented technical people because they’ll see that you’ve gotten your hands dirty.

In fact, if your prototype works, you now have the luxury of looking for a co-founder with other areas of expertise (say you want someone with enterprise sales experience, or a deep understanding of the food health & safety market, or the oil & gas industry, or medicine, or anything else you don’t have but the business would benefit greatly from).

So if you’re on the hunt for a co-founder, I really recommend taking a step back and thinking about what your business will really need to make it work, and whether or not you’re trying to find someone to build you something you really could prototype out yourself.

Some of the things you want to do when building a web app are surprisingly complex to set up. I’ve been using Heroku for hosting while teaching myself to build apps in Ruby on Rails, because everyone I talked to pretty much recommended it.

It’s a great system, it takes all the “sysadmin” level stuff mostly out of the picture for me, and it even makes things like sending e-mail from an app relatively straightforward. But if you want to execute a process every half hour? Tough luck.

So my solution is to use my media center PC (hooked up to my TV, and rarely, if ever, turned off) as a poor man’s cron. I used Windows Task Scheduler to launch chrome and load the URL, once every half hour. We’ll see how it works. I still need to remember go downstairs and close the tabs ;)

You don’t have to look far to find smart and influential people discussing the power and potential of social data. The thing is, “social data” is all a bit hand-wavy at the moment for most people. It’s hard to make the conceptual leap from knowing that there’s this amoeba of data in the cloud to thinking about how it can work in a practical setting.

As with all things, the reality is a whole lot simpler than the concept. I’ll give you an example of something we’ve done at the Parnassus Group. About a year ago, we helped manage a private screening of Adrian Grenier’s new movie Teenage Paparazzo for a group of social influencers in San Francisco.

In order to narrow down our selection of invited influencers, we used Topsy to search through the Twitter streams of the people on our list, looking for mentions of Adrian, his movie, or his hit HBO show Entourage.

With a few simple steps, and using only data that has been made explicitly publicly available (the contents of someone’s Tweets), we had turned a mostly random list of contacts and influencers in the Bay Area into a targeted list of known fans, to whom our outreach would be exciting and welcome.

That, in a nutshell, is Social Data.

I know that the way comments and content interact is something Fred Wilson has written about extensively over the past few years, and companies like Disqus and IntenseDebate have been working on solutions to this set of problems for a while.

For a long time I have felt that splitting my content from the native comment systems within WordPress would be a bad idea. Mostly this is because Google was such a big driver of traffic that I wanted to make sure Google considered all of those comments to be part of the actual blog post page, so that I would get the resulting traffic.

But methods of content discovery have changed dramatically over the past few years, at least for me. I find very little content via Google anymore (mostly I find ways to fix programming errors), and instead do most of my reading by following links from a core set of blogs and news sources.

Also, I think that identity on the web has changed dramatically over the past few years. Facebook has done such an incredible job of making sure their users are all real people that it has started to become the de facto ID-card of the internet. I use it as login to a number of new web tools, and it becomes easier every day to identify someone online.

So I’ve started to care a lot less about my blog posts and my content being read on my own site. These posts are imported to Facebook, and more often than not, Facebook is where the interesting discussion happens in the comments, not here. Do the people reading it know it comes from me? Yes.

What I would love is a way for these comments to be portable, and travel with the content of my blog post wherever it goes. If someone leaves a comment on Facebook, I would like it to appear on this blog as well. If Mark Suster posts to TechCrunch, and then re-posts it to his own blog, the comments should all be part of the same thread across both sites.

It’s a hard problem to solve, because content providers all across the internet have to opt-in to any shared system by hosting some of their code, and then the system has to be smart enough to recognize when it’s looking at the same post in a different location (or, in the short term, that can be flagged by the author or the audience, and existing comments can be combined).

Disqus has been doing a good job of getting their comment system widely into use across many popular blogs, but I think Facebook is best positioned to do this.

They are the only ones who can manage the comments inside their own platform, and their code, logins, and enhancements are already widely adopted around the web at large. I have already seen sites where I have the option to just log in with Facebook to comment; why not have a bit of Facebook code pulling all of those comments together?

Just encountered a google search result asking me to connect to Quora. Offhand, this seems to me like a GREAT marketing move for Quora.

In the process of moving I’ve somehow managed to lose a computer. I know things get lost when people move, but it’s usually not a 40lb desktop computer that people talk about misplacing.

It’s not that big of a deal, because it’s a computer that I haven’t used regularly in four years, ever since I built the desktop that now replaces it (I keep a desktop PC around for videogames). But it brings up the point that I actually still have not one, or two, but five old computers that I have yet to give away or sell.

Part of the hangup is that I don’t really have a good process for migrating data from one PC to another (I know the Mac has that covered). Another part of the reason is that I’m a little nervous about parting with hardware that I’ve used for banking, taxes, and other sensitive information.

Of course, I could just open up the machines, rip the hard drives out, and then take them to goodwill. Or replace the hard drives with new ones and then sell them, but it’s far easier to just keep them around, in case I find the need to gut them for parts later, or find an old file, or set up a development server on my home network, or any other thing that realistically will never happen.

It’s an interesting kind of junk that didn’t exist a few decades ago.

I’ve noticed my direct use of RSS has decreased steadily over the past few years. In 2006 and 2007, I was avidly using a variety of RSS Readers from FeedDemon to Bloglines to several Firefox extensions that I’ve since forgotten the names of — but RSS was a big part of my web reading experience in and of itself: it was the visual framework through which I got my content.

Back in October of 2006 I wrote that RSS would reach its stride once it became “invisible” to the end-user. About two years after I wrote that post, I decided to abandon feed readers of all kinds for a system of saved bookmarks — bookmarks! — in my browser that I have opened faithfully every morning ever since then.

But the web has come a long way since then, and in particular the rise of mobile platforms and mobile applications has helped bring RSS back in to my life.

My tabbed browsing solution has worked well for so long because it allows me to experience the content I read in the environment it was meant to be consumed. I get all of the Facebook content recommendations in the sidebar. I get to see the cool design choices by the creators of these blogs, and just as importantly, if I decide to click on a link and follow the thread of a conversation, I am already up and running in Chrome, and it’s all very integrated into my normal browsing experience because it is my normal browsing experience.

This system has broken down lately as I’ve been doing more and more work on my phone. It’s just easier and more pleasant for me to do my reading, browsing, and email from my phone while I’m on the go, even though I have a MacBook Air.

But mobile interfaces are not built for this style of gimmicked feed-reading, especially because I often want to re-blog or share what I am reading, so the other day I went into my Google Reader account and “rebooted” it with a set of feeds that correspond to the pages I read every day in my browser and then added the mobile Google Reader interface to my phone as a bookmark.

A little later a friend pointed me to an app called Feedly that offers a great RSS solution that lives somewhere between Flipboard (another great option for RSS, but also not yet available for my phone) and a classic RSS reader, it embraces the native format of my phone and provides great tools for interacting with the content I find. I now already prefer this to my usual tabbed-browsing desktop solution.

I have built a side project or two, none of which have taken advantage of RSS in any way, in part because I don’t have any idea how to produce an XML/RSS document from Rails and haven’t bothered to learn, but in part because RSS just hasn’t been part of my idea of the web landscape of late, but I think that is a fault and a flaw that needs to be corrected.

RSS is a powerful standard and it will only become more powerful as it becomes more ubiquitous and more invisible to the end user. RSS doesn’t get a lot of limelight anymore, in part because there’s not much exciting happening around the technology itself, but I think we are just starting to see companies figure out how best to take advantage of it.

I think that the creepiness factor is something that many of the most promising startups are going to have to content with over the next year and a half, as their services become more and more mainstream, and data collection and analysis techniques get more and more sophisticated.

Facebook is often at the forefront of the privacy conversation, so I think it makes sense to use them as an example.

Facebook has extended data tendrils throughout the web, including like and share buttons and widgets that get used daily on most major news sites. Today, while reading a story on GigaOm, they (via Facebook) were able to tell me that my wife had shared another GigaOm story a few weeks earlier:

Through these technologies and the relationships that I’ve declared on Facebook, GigaOm can customize my content experience through the magical filter of my friends’ and relatives tastes.

In each individual stage of the process involved in providing this recommendation, nothing is creepy. After all, I’m reading a story on this site, and I’ve logged in, and they know who I am. And on Facebook I’ve voluntarily mapped out my relationships.

And the end result doesn’t seem creepy at all, especially to the creators of the software — (maybe) until you experience it. There’s a very powerful world of both marketing and customer value to be unlocked in this data, but I am more and more convinced that it will not be an easy sell for the average consumer, especially one who is at all concerned about privacy.

I think I could improve on this patented method and develop something entirely new.

Since I’ve started programming on my own I’ve run in to all kinds of tools and services that I had no idea existed. Things like Heroku and Recurly and Sendgrid that all conspire to make the life of an app developer much much easier.

I don’t remember the name of it at the moment but the other day I found a Rails gem that pre-builds an admin interface for a web app with most of the common features that normally you’d need to code.

Many developers practice DRY coding, which stands for “Don’t Repeat Yourself,” and these tools and services seem to embrace that mentality.

But more importantly it looks as though existing popular web services have managed to create enough of a standard practice in a number of key areas that we can now start to build and rely on a number of the basic infrastructure pieces that have traditionally been the burden of every new web startup.

That’s very cool and exciting because it lowers the barrier to entry even further, and lets us begin to build a whole new layer on the stack.

If you went to the Seattle 2.0 Awards last night you got the live version of Mark Suster’s great Techcrunch post about startup culture and the elements that drive it. Mark hits on a number of issues that became themes for the conversation throughout the evening: where is the recycled capital in Seattle? Where is the support network of superconnectors and regional boosters?

For some time I’ve felt like Seattle acts like a bigger city than it is. The population of the San Francisco Bay Area is about 7.5 million. New York City is 8.1 million. In contrast, the greater Seattle area houses a mere 3.3 million people, and that includes a lot of suburban landscape that frankly does not contribute to the technology startup space.

But we do have many, if not all, of the ingredients needed to put together an amazing culture of innovation and business success. We have an incredible university in our backyard (University of Washington) that churns out graduates every year and those local entrepreneurs that are here are incredibly friendly, collaborative, and enthusiastic. Not to mention irrationally attached to our beautiful city.

You can’t throw a rock without hitting a local barcamp, meetup, or startup weekend. For my own part I go to dozens of events, both local and around the country, over the course of the year, and talk to all kinds of entrepreneurs with new projects, and when I’m in other cities I always find a significant number of people from Seattle, getting out there and being part of the conversation.

I think it’s incredible that Seattle is in the national startup conversation as much as it is already. Even with our disadvantages to the Valley and to New York, we are competitive to people that want to launch a startup.

The kind of engineering talent in this city is what draws companies like Google, Facebook, and Zynga to open offices in downtown Seattle. People like Peter Chee and Jacob Sayles are building a network of co-working spaces where early stage companies (or entrepreneurial individuals) can find a support network as they work through all kinds of issues facing startups, not the least of which is just having a community to belong to.

One of the things I kept hearing last night was that Seattle is “poised” to be a startup city. But I think we’re already moving — we are past the starting point.

I think that entrepreneurs will only find this city more attractive as the number of existing Seattle startups grows, and the infrastructure along with it, and I am very excited for that community to be here in Seattle.

Like a lot of geeks, I’ve read a lot of sci-fi over the course of my lifetime, and one of the things I’m starting to get really excited about is that the world is finally getting the datapad.

Looking back, the personal mobile phone is the device that started it all – people became introduced to, and grew used to:

1. Carrying a pocket-sized electronic device
2. A device that was used for communication
3. Belonging to one person individually

When you think about it, these are huge changes in every communications and computing paradigm that previously existed. You used to call a location looking for a particular person, and now you call a person…who cares where they are?

Carrying a personalized, individually-owned portable communication device is 90% of what sci-fi calls a datapad. The missing magical element has been effective, wide-scale data connectivity…

…right, internet access.

Now we have all kinds of Android-powered mobile devices, iOS phones and pads, and now smart mobile handsets powered by Windows Phone 7. All of which can magically interact with gaziagabytes of data through cell-tower based data transfer technology, just like magic. We have datapads.

What I’m excited to learn over the next few years:

1. Will the iPad become primarily a personal device or a family/group access point?
2. Assuming that mobile internet access will become the most frequent consumer access point for the internet. How will these interface restrictions redefine the online services we take for granted/consider mature today?