For over a decade the Internet has been my playground. I’ve joined hundreds of communities, browsed an infinite number of websites, and enjoyed hours upon hours of music and video. In this time I’ve also used a number of devices to access the web, including my laptop, smartphone and game console. My XBOX 360 in particular has not only become my go-to box for Internet gaming, but also for streaming movies, television, and music.

In November my console was updated to include ESPN3. To my surprise, much of the content was unavailable, despite being an XBOX Live customer with a broadband Internet connection. As it turns out, Time Warner Cable had disabled much of my access to this feature, on a device purchased independently of their services, because I didn’t pay for a cable package that included ESPN3. I was angered and frustrated that my ISP had blocked features of a product they did not sell or control.

Around the same time, a new gadget called the Fascinate was released – a smartphone running Google’s open Android platform. The reviews came in and everyone was shocked to find that Verizon had locked the search engine to Bing, with no way to change it. Anyone who bought a Fascinate could search Google with their desktop – why not their phone? For an ‘open’ platform, it was frustrating to see how much choice it gave wireless ISPs, but took away from consumers.

Now, I make a living designing and developing websites. The food on my plate depends on an open Internet, where people can access whatever they want, however they want. And I love the Internet. While it’s not without its faults, I appreciate being able to listen to music on Grooveshark, Last.fm, Pandora, or Hype Machine. But it’s not only that – I love choice. I can search with Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. I can watch videos on Hulu, YouTube, or Vimeo. I can even create a new website and become the next Twitter or Facebook. And it’s all because I pay one monthly fee for general Internet access. That’s the power of the web – information and innovation without limitation.

I created TheOpenInter.net to depict a time in the future when ISPs control the Internet and all data is not downloaded equally. While creating the site’s design, I had the idea to bundle Netflix and Hulu as a package ISPs required you to buy. Halfway through development, I questioned the reality of my portrayal. Was I too far off-base? Then to my surprise a Wired article titled “Mobile Carriers Dream of Charging per Page” showed almost the exact same scenario. While there is no documentation within the article to prove wireless carriers have any current plans to implement a similar pricing structure, the fact that evidence exists to suggest its consideration is frightening.

So, why is network neutrality important? Why should ISPs treat all data the same? The web, more significantly the wireless web, is the next great frontier. If you think that an Internet service provider would never block access to Netflix, or remove Google Maps from your phone if it meant a higher monthly payment, then you live in a fantasy world. They’ve been testing the waters for years.

Think about this: back in 2003, I never thought my bank would carelessly manage their assets and put our economy at risk. But I guess we couldn’t have seen that coming, right?

Yesterday, Rich described our plans for a new Arc90 Lab experiment supporting our proposed talk at SXSW 2011, Toss The Projector: Redefining the Presenter/Audience Dynamic. He writes, “[m]aybe what we need to do is reboot the presenter-audience dynamic entirely” and then describes our vision for a tool that can accompany the presenter on stage and turn the distracted audience into an essential participant of the presentation. The structure of this talk is very Luigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author, where we plan to take advantage of the fact that the audience only half paying attention to us and use this as a narrative device to reinforce our message. But that trick will only get us so far, the presentation has to have content, a point of view, a take-away.

Theater of the theater. Or something.

Can I have your attention for a moment?

So what will be the content of this proposed talk? I’ve been thinking about (in)attention a lot lately. If you’re anything like me, you might have noticed a change in yourself over the past few years. I’m finding it harder and harder to pay attention to a single thing, to be fully in the moment, to be present.

I’m starting to worry that this is a plague affecting most of us. From sitting in someone’s office attempting to have a conversation with them as they tick away on their Blackberry, to checking your iPhone when playing at home with the kids, to an inability to read long form text, this plague has many symptoms.

This topic blew up into A CONVERSATION with the release of Nick Carr’s excellent book, The Shallows. For those of you that weren’t paying attention, Carr masterfully crafted an argument that our brains are changing, that they’re literally being rewired, as a result of our increasingly shallow interactions with the computer. Multi-tasking, now a requirement for success in the modern world, does in fact come with a cost. The Wall Street Journal held a side-by-side “debate” between Carr and Clay Shirky, where Carr offered:

When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

What we seem to be sacrificing in all our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The Web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion.

I’ll have you out of here in no time…

I was surprised by the reaction against Carr’s thesis. To me it’s so plainly obvious that this is the case that it almost goes without saying. Much like our shift away from written text to electronic (have you even tried to hand-write a full page of script lately? I simply cannot do it.), the brain optimizes for its environment. And the environment that is increasingly in demand from us is the ability to shift from item to item with no notice. The modern world rewards quicker thought, and quicker thought isn’t free.

Pay attention to how you work, I’m sure you bounce around from emails, to interrupting IMs, to flying around on the Web following links and skimming headlines and articles. How much deep thinking and deep reading do you do anymore? How often to do you listen to an album all the way through? OK, how about a single song?

Just a minute of your time, it’s all I’ll need…

And have you been to a conference lately? The audience is only half paying attention, at best. Sometimes I feel like people are in attendance to get one quote to tweet to prove that they were there, either as social currency or for their coworkers and bosses back home. Get the tweet, then get back to whatever it is that you’re more interested in. Perhaps that’s cynical, but certainly there are very few people actually present at the average conference talk.

But then again, very few people are actually present at the average meeting.

And increasingly, people are not even present when interacting with their spouses:

Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

Or most damaging of all, people are even finding it difficult to be present while interacting with their kids.

Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread. Her findings will be published in “Alone Together” early next year by Basic Books. In her studies, Dr. Turkle said, “Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.”

And finally, I wonder about the next generation. Our brains are being rewired to optimize for the modern world, their brains are starting out wired this way.

Checking in at the park

We’re finished, carry on.

Alain de Botton recently wrote that “[o]ne of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is how we can relearn to concentrate”, but that is the state of affairs that we’ll explore at our talk. Both through the content and delivery of the presentation, we hope to open up an important conversation about attention in the modern world. If you agree that this is an issue worth discussing, there are at least two paths forward. First, perhaps by being aware of this trend in ourselves, we can each take steps towards being more present and mindful in our actions. This brings to mind the most important book I’ve read in my life, Emotional Intelligence, which taught me that you can learn to control and respond to a situation more effectively by being aware of your emotional state. Awareness is half the battle. But there’s another way forward – much like this structure of this talk, perhaps new patterns can be used to bridge this gap. In fact the culprit, technology, might show us a way forward.

It should be fun, we hope you join us.

Where’s that damn stapler?

Today, we’re updating our Readability bookmarklet with one of the most requested features since its release. Now, when you click on Readability while viewing an article that spans multiple pages, it will show a readable view of the entire article. We’ve found this update to work effectively on nearly all popular sites.

We’ve also included some minor fixes and enhancements in this release, including a subtle user experience enhancement: paging through the text with the space bar now triggers a smoother (and slightly slower) scroll, making it a bit easier to keep track of your place in the article.

You do not need to reinstall the bookmarklet to take advantage of these new features. The update will propagate automatically. If you run into articles that Readability fails to parse properly or run into any other issues, be sure to let us know.

At our apartment, my roommate and I have a strict “Mac only” policy. Between us, we have five laptops (for work and personal use), a set of iPhones and iPods and the Airport wireless system.

We’re technology snobs—in fact, we tend to mock visitors who still use a Windows operating system.

During the work day, I’m also surrounded by MacBooks and other gadgets from Steve Jobs’ company. Arc90 is primarily an Apple consumer; there are 25 Mac users and 6 PC users.

We’re technology nerds–when Apple announced the launch of the iPad in January, we gathered in a conference room to watch the live announcement. Yes, there was even a bingo-style game of “Predict the iPad’s Features.” Some of the people weren’t aware that the State of the Union address was happening the same night but they were very close to guessing how much the iPad would cost. We currently have a desk set aside for the iPad–the gadget is available for the office’s browsing pleasure.

After living in my Mac bubble for way too long, I had to adjust my viewpoints while visiting the Indian subcontinent. It turns out that in some parts of the this world, not everybody knows about Apple C or how to force quit. In fact, some of them haven’t even seen or touched a Mac.

Most of Pakistan’s WiFi operates through a company called World Call. You select a package based on speed (256 Kbps, 512 Kbps, 1 Mbps) and the agent gives you a USB. Just plug in the device, activate the software and you’re connected to the Internet without worrying about modems or power sources.

Sounds easy, right? Well, only if you are using a laptop with Windows or Mac OS X 10.6.

My MacBook has OS X 10.7 so I had the USB, access to an instruction manual but was left without a connection to the World Wide Web. Upon bringing my laptop to the point of purchase, the agent admitted that he wasn’t familiar with Macs and advised me to take it to the company’s headquarters.

He couldn’t even open a new browser window on a Mac? This guy could never be welcome at my apartment.

After an hour long commute to the main office, I had to see two salesmen before the latest software was installed. I’m an impatient New Yorker and it seemed tedious to me to spend all that time just to have a person transfer some files to my laptop so I could surf the Web.

Of course, World Call primarily has a Windows-based clientele (even the website shows an Hewlett Packard laptop) and didn’t bother to update its software for Mac users. The ironic (or strange) thing is that the World Call website has the latest software but if you aren’t connected to the Internet, you can’t download it.

When I began to wonder why I knew more about Apple computers and software than the salesmen, all I had to do was look around me.

Blackberries were all the rage and people with iPhones tended to have American passports. Kids were using netbooks, the stripped down, mini-laptops that have seen explosive growth all over the world. Their parents owned Dells and used Internet Explorer to surf the Web.

When a family member used my Mac, he needed help navigating Safari and was shocked that he couldn’t open an Excel spreadsheet. He also couldn’t get a hang of the MacBook’s trackpad.

As a daily Mac user, I took his comments for granted. At Arc90, we do most of our quality assurance using Windows and Internet Explorer but MacBooks and the last version of Firefox are our preferred tools of the trade. We tend to share spreadsheets through Google documents.

In contrast, Internet Explorer usage dominates the web browser market, with about 60.7 percent of users. Firefox is second, with 24.5 percent users, while Safari is fourth with 4.7 percent of the market.

Mac’s stronghold is the United States, where Apple has more than 220 retail stores. It was the No. 4 PC maker in the December quarter with a 7.2 percent market share, according to research group Gartner. It ranks only seventh globally with a share of less than half that. Although Apple’s online store is popular, Mac’s global retail presence is smaller than that of competitors, with 12,000 points of sale. Top PC maker Hewlett-Packard has 80,000 outlets, while No. 2 Dell Inc. has 24,000.

The company can replicate the strategy overseas that it has used effectively at home–generate buzz and get Macs into the hands of consumers who have never used one. In the last fiscal quarter, international sales made up nearly 60 percent of Apple’s revenue, with big growth seen in the Asia Pacific region, Japan and Europe.

The witty Mac vs. PC commercials have also expanded to the United Kingdom and Japan, displaying Apple’s attempt to take over the computer market in select countries.

With 65 stores in 12 countries, Apple executives signaled their growing interest in China by announcing they would open two more retail stores in Shanghai by summer and they plan to have 25 retail stores in the country by 2011.

But where is India on that list? Or what about South Africa or Brazil?

The growth momentum may be tough to maintain due to the smaller retail distribution network, spreading economic gloom, and Mac’s higher price point. Apple continues to resist a move to substantially cheaper PCs, making it more difficult to win over converts in some emerging markets. The MacBook laptop starts at $999, more than double the price of the average netbook.

Doing some rough calculations, I realized that a MacBook costs almost a third of the annual salary for households in South America and Africa. According to NationMaster, a massive central data source and a method for graphically comparing nations, Brazil is ranked No. 68 for gross national income per capita, at $2,842.36 per person and South Africa is No. 69, at $2,751.22 per person.

Research also show that high import taxes, including those in Brazil, can drastically double the price of a laptop. There is also an increase in cost if countries, including South Africa, do not have official distributors.

Somebody living in Sao Paulo might invest a smaller percentage of his salary in a PC instead of saving up for a Mac, which can be considered a luxury item in many parts of the world. If you own a Mac and live in Johannesburg, what do you do if your laptop overheats or you spill coffee on your keyboard? Without a local Apple store, you’ll probably need to dip into your savings to cover shipping and repair costs.

Although I’ve become accustomed to an all Mac lifestyle (minus the logo tattoo), it took a trip to a part of the world that isn’t dominated by Apple to realize how different–and PC dominated–the computer user experience can be.

I admit that I wasn’t a fan girl during my college days. When the Mac 3G crashed during late night sessions, I ended up spending extra hours tweaking layouts on QuarkXpress. Over the years, Apple revolutionized its products. I was pulled back in by their sleek designs and functionality. Now, I will never go back.

It might seem that the majority of NYC technology meetups are targeted towards developers and designers.  What about the people who make sure that the software designed and built actually works?

Some members of Arc90′s Quality Assurance team–QA Engineer Melissa Adams, business analyst Ravi Rajakumar and I–recently attended the first QA meetup at the Brooklyn office of HUGE.

A short trip from Arc90′s office in Midtown East to DUMBO connected us with others in the QA community. After working in the technology industry for several years, it was rewarding to have our own event.

“QA people finally get a meetup of their very own!” commented Melissa, who has been testing software for two years.  “It was a good way to see what others are doing in the field.”

The premier QA session provided introductions to various testing tools, including Selenium and Browsermob.  The Arc90 team was familiar with both products since we’ve tested with Selenium and recently started using Browsermob.

Anthony Long, the event’s organizer and the QA Lead at HUGE, provided a walk-through of Selenium, a web application testing system, and explained what is in its future.

“I was interested to hear about Selenium 2 and the fact that Google will be taking the lead on further development,” noted Ravi.

Patrick Lightbody, the founder and CEO of Browsermob, presented the website monitoring and load testing service. Although he was in the in the company’s Portland, Oregon office, Patrick used modern technolgy–Skye and a screencast–to reach his NYC audience.

The next QA meetup will take place at HUGE’s office on Tuesday, June 1st at 7 p.m.  Anthony will discuss using the Python programming language, along with Selenium.  He will also cover the various Python modules he use in daily testing and explain how others can use them.  You can sign up here.

Our own Tyler Gaw just released this really incredible demo into the wild that recreates the Kinetic Typography animation style using only WebKit transitions, JavaScript and CSS. The demo uses a scene from the movie “Four Rooms”.

He’s also written a blog post up explaining a bit of his motivations behind the effort. Check it out.

Since we started working on Kindling, our idea management and collaboration application, we’ve focused on keeping people engaged with the product. We’re proud that in Q4 of 2009 the engagement level among all people with access to Kindling reached 77%—engagement level being the percentage of all potential users with access to Kindling who have either voted on an idea, commented on an idea, or submitted a new idea. The strength of that number largely results from the fact that we focus on it. Our feature set reinforces engagement: from the zero-training approach to the application, through email digests, to idea Campaigns, and plenty more.

To that end, we’re excited to announce the our latest release of Kindling, featuring reputation.

As a technology company, we’ve been impressed with the work done by the Stack Overflow team, and many among us are participants in the community they’ve created. We’ve seen firsthand how a good reputation system can motivate people and have applied some of this thinking to an organization’s innovation community in Kindling. Kindling’s reputation score for each user is derived from the value of their activities within the system. It’s based on the entirety of their participation, where high-value activities are most rewarded—such as having ideas approved or volunteering to help realize an idea. We’re excited to see how reputation within Kindling will motivate members of our client’s organizations to increase their participation in their innovation program.

The other exciting new addition to Kindling in this version is around the process for deciding which ideas should be approved. Many of our clients have communicated the same need to us, namely, better support for decision-makers to communicate and track relevant information upon which to base their decisions. Kindling 1.8 supports this in two ways: 1) Moderators and Administrators of a given Kindling Room now have a private comment thread on each idea where they can discuss the idea amongst themselves (these discussions were of course happening before this enhancement, only outside of Kindling); and 2) in the new decision-makers view of an idea, these same users can set values, such as ROI and others, which will enable the team to compare ideas based on quantitative values. This provides a powerful new means to value ideas. With another approach to valuing ideas comes more-informed decision making.

We’ve also been working to give decision makers more functionality to round out rooms and campaigns. One of the key features we’ve added here is the ability to have assets associated with a Room or Campaign. This will be hugely useful for our clients that may have heavy requirements for an effort. For example, this could be a great place to store competitive analysis documents in a room around getting a leg up on the competition. Along with this we’ve also implemented a fresh view of a Room or Campaign which gives a really nice birds-eye view of the activity within it.

To round out this release, we’ve introduced a groundbreaking new interface to the idea view within Kindling which we’re particularly proud of. It provides the user with more information like view count and number of users watching the idea, all while keeping the interface clean and simple (which Kindling is all about).

This is a milestone release and one that we’re confident will help our clients take their innovation management to the next level. We can’t wait to hear thoughts from our customers – and if you have any, by all means, let us know!

If you’re not yet using Kindling, learn more at http://www.kindlingapp.com.

A journalist lamenting the Twitterfication of his profession in 2010?

America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence, [...] the frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition.

Not exactly: “Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1891, W.J. Stillman, a journalist and critic, decried the effects of the telegraph on his profession.”

Everything old is new again.