Stage One: Have a price range in mind. You have to know what you want to spend before you test drive anything. At this point you can optionally start researching cars, I used Consumer Reports and bought a 3-month online subscription for cheap.

Step Two: Test drive. Politely listen to the sales rep, but insist on a test drive as early as possible on any or all the cars you want to drive. Is the seat comfortable? Do you bang your head against the ceiling? Will your family fit into the back seat? Does it merge onto the interstate well? How about rear-end visibility? These things are important. Don't let the rep influence you: you're testing how the manufacturer built the car, not his ability to sell it to you. He didn't design the car.

Step Three: Make a decision. You now know exactly which car you want, and it is roughly in line with your budget. Make it abundantly clear to the sales rep that this is the car and that you want the lowest possible price. Sometimes they will try to steer you toward another model during negotiations. Don't fall for this.

Step Four: Get their no-negotiation price. Get him or her to call over their sales manager by insisting that you want the absolute, rock-bottom, lowest price. Tell them that you don't want to negotiate. But you're going to negotiate because they will not give you their lowest price right away.

Step Five: Negotiate. Leave the dealership and go to TrueCar.com and figure out where to start. You can also purchase a $14 price report from ConsumerReports.com which will give you the TrueCar rates and a whole lot more. $14 is nothing compared to the amount you will save with this knowledge. Look at the rock-bottom rate on TrueCar and go back to the dealership. Proudly tell their sales manager that you will pay this price and NO MORE. That is the absolute maximum you can pay. If he asks how you got that price, tell him. No reason to be anything but completely honest about which price you want.

A side note about politeness: You need to be polite but insistent this entire process. At the negotiating table, your politeness will cost you actual money. Think about it this way: if I paid you $1300 to be only 80% polite to a stranger for 20 minutes, would you do it? Of course you would. This is your chance to make $1300 in one conversation. It's called doing business: they are professionals and they will respect you more if you give them blunt answers. They may try to make you feel bad for this, as if they were some sort of charity you are funding. Don't fall for it.

Step Six: Wait for them to come down in price. Even though they said they didn't, they will. Just sit there and stare at whatever piece of paper they offered you with the price on it. This will make them insecure if you do it right.

Step Seven: Walk out. Seriously. Thank them for their time, state that you are sorry that you didn't come to an agreement, and tell them that you are happy to resume negotiating "first thing tomorrow morning." Get up and leave, shaking their hands and thanking them by name. There is a good chance they will either agree to your rate right before you head out the door, or at least give you a better offer. You can choose whether you want to stay or continue the walk-out at that point, but they are professionals and will know if you do a fake walk-out. So make sure you mean it or you will be embarrassed when they call your bluff (I say this from experience).

Step Eight: Extras. When the dealer comes down to a price that you are happy with, tell them you will agree to pay $100 lower than that price, but only if they throw in three oil changes. For my last purchase, I asked for three oil changes and an auto-dimming mirror (a $450+ value in total) at this stage, and got it. You know your've reached a good price when they leave the room to "check with their boss."

Happy car hunting!

• Tweets older than five minutes are automatically deleted. It's all about real-time, baby!
• Twitter Search will go away completely. Yet another confusing feature, gone!
• Tweets without hashtags will be demoted. Hashtags are where it's at!
• Private messages will go away. Why would you talk to your friends when you can interact with companies?
• Your timeline will be filled with sponsored tweets (perfectly relevant to your interests, of course!)
• Companies can write tweets longer than 140 characters, and include images and videos right there on your timeline. Sweet!
• The star button will change to a "Like" button.
• You can comment on sponsored tweets, and tweets from hot celebrities like Kim Kardashian!
• No more permanent linking to tweets. Only those darned /power users/ and /journalists/ used this feature anyway.
• No more third-party clients. These *confuse* users!

The trouble with social networks today is that they are centrally-controlled by a single organization, which means every user must put all of their trust in this company in order to use it for personal purposes. The company, being a company, expects to turn a profit somehow, and if charging users isn't an option then it needs to monetize them somehow. Facebook does this by selling your information to advertisers. One other problem with Facebook is that law enforcement can subpoena the company and get any user's private messages, usage, location, passwords or anything else they find useful, without the user's permission and for any reason the law sees fit. This can be done en masse and in secret. As a perk to employees, Facebook used to allow its people full access to anybody's data. I don't think it's true anymore but it's amazing the amount of trust we place in them.

The same, of course, is true for text messages, tweets, emails, phone calls and pretty much everything else (even, I think, Skype). You don't really have privacy, you just have trust in the organization to give you a reasonable amount of privacy, and allow that company to sit between you and your friends and deliver your most private thoughts to your friends.

So we need a way for people to talk to each other without any potential interception by a third party, right? We already have this, with PGP encryption, except it needs to be expanded to handle more than just email.

As I understand it, the way PGP works is this: I have a private key, which is a string of characters too long to memorize, and a public key, another long string of characters. I sign my emails with my private key, and people with my public key can verify that it's me with a simple check. People can use my public key to encrypt messages which only I can decrypt with my private key. I keep my private key safe, on my hard drive or on a USB key, so that no one can steal it and pretend to be me. The private key is so long that it would take even the most powerful computers several thousand years to guess it.

The way the new social network would work is this: everyone would have software on their computer/iphone/device/implant/whatever, let's call it CryptBook. When you first use it, CryptBook asks you to create an account. The makers of CryptBook don't make you pick out a password; instead, they ask for a $10 donation, and in return they send you two personalized USB keys. On these USB keys you encrypt a private PGP key. One key stays with you, and in case you lose it, the other one goes to your safety deposit box (or to a friend, or to a secret hidden bunker or wherever). If you lose both USB keys, your account is forever lost and you have to start over. But at least no one else can steal your key.

As soon as you sign on with your private key, the service allows you to connect to friends in a distributed fashion. Your computer connects directly to the "network," which is massively distributed, encrypted and cached, so that you can view your friends' profiles and pictures even when you're offline. Messages are sent client-to-client and cached on your friends' computers. Friend requests must be accepted by both people, so even though your data everywhere is encrypted with your private key, it is only stored on your computer and your trusted friends' computers. To add your first friend, you have to be on the same wireless network as them and they must accept the request; once you are part of the service, you can see your friends' friends and add them, too. Because of this, none of the network would need to go through DNS, which has the potential to be monitored by law enforcement in the future. Everything critical to the network would be P2P. Maybe to make it easier to add your friends, "edge" services would sprint up to offer up a directory of them, but users will have to trust these services in the same way they would trust a phone call from a "relative" to not be a scammer.

Some great things about this proposal:

- Security-conscious users are happy because they don't have to remember another password, they control where their data lives and that it doesn't pass through a single entity

- The CryptBook people earn a steady profit off of $10 USB keys, which should only cost them $1 once they hit an appropriate economy of scale. The reason for personalized USB keys is so they can be trendy (a standard USB drive would work just fine, too).

- The ecosystem of the Internet is happy because there is finally a way for users to identify themselves without having a relationship with some corporate entity which could change their terms of service at any time

- Liberty-conscious users are happy because a corporation can't claim rights to any of the intellectual property they share through CryptBook

Some not-so-great things about this proposal:

- Confusing to users ("How do I add all my friends?" "How do I set a password?")

- Law enforcement will hate it and will try to shut down the CryptBook company, stopping development

- Still possible to gain a non-friend's data by creating an account and pretending to be one of their real-life friends. (BTW, Facebook makes this easy; all of your friends' names and profile pictures are exposed for the world to see, no matter what your or their privacy settings are)

In addition, since Facebook already exists, nobody will want to join a social network with none of their friends on it, so compelling features would have to be added to CryptBook which would never exist on Facebook.

So that's where we stand right now with this idea. But I think some sort of distributed social network is coming, and probably already being developed by people smarter than me, especially if SOPA passes.

But two things come to mind:

1. I don't think people will like using this for their desktop machines. No one wants to hold their arm up to touch their screen, a mouse is just better when you're at your desk. Your arm will get tired if you have to move it all around just to work with a spreadsheet or scroll a web page. The problem gets bigger when you're talking about 21 and 24-inch monitors. So, people will either use only the "legacy" interface for a long time or deal with the Metro interface with a mouse, which it wasn't designed for.
2. This stuff is all such a long ways from coming out. At least a year. Lots can change in a year—Google will no doubt start their copying machines and have a workable competitor by then (since their tablet strategy is pretty much doomed right now), and we have no idea what Apple has in the works because they only announce it when it's ready. When Windows 8 comes out maybe enough people will already have tablets that no one will want to switch.

Browsing apps today seems more like browsing the yellow pages. For users to get the best experience, they should be able to look around in a more immersive interface, without so much text. You go to Foot Locker to try on the shoes. People don't read.

Maybe we need a full-screen carousel of app interfaces, with videos, demos and other interactive content, instead of lists and lists of icons tucked inside a single "App Store" icon. Maybe the app store should be integrated with Safari better. But one thing is for sure: for it to succeed, we need to be able to install apps as easily as visiting a website.

Ripping the user out of the app store and making her type in a password, and then making her wait for the entire app to download, and then tap again before using it, is about the most disruptive experience possible. That is no way to sell shoes.

Notifications: We did indeed see a revamp here. Now, they are pulled down from the top of the screen, just like all the jailbreak iPhones do and just like the Palm Pre and Android phones. I threw in a wildcard guess (that they would be pulled from the left side of the screen) which was incorrect. I still think it would be neat to be different, though. One out of two possible points.

Widgets: Did and didn't happen. We have stocks and weather on the iPhone's notifications screen, but for some reason those are the only widgets, and you don't even see these on the iPad. Clearly a half-finished feature, so maybe my prediction was just too early instead of incorrect. Call it what you will. Half a point.

Auto-updating: Yes. iCloud will let you back up and restore your phone, but you have to enable it yourself. This is a killer feature and will finally let me use iTunes for playing music instead of staring at a "synch" screen. One point!

iCloud: I was dead-on about the synching of music, apps and documents (which live inside apps). No user-login capability though. I would imagine that this is coming soon since iCloud ties all your apps to the same Apple ID even stronger. This will come in handy when, for example, you want a different set of Safari bookmarks than your wife. One point out of two.

Concierge: This is what I thought Apple would call an enhanced voice control service. Didn't happen, zero points awarded.

HTML 5 apps: Nothing was announced here. I'm not sure if there is anything un-announced coming in iOS 5 relating to HTML 5 apps, but if there is, it's covered by the NDA. Let's give me a quarter point for being half right on an easy question.

In-app purchases for Mac apps: Got it. Point!

Steve Jobs will tell everyone to turn off their WiFi for a demo: Nope, no demos required wireless. No points.

There will be an incredible demo of the iPad 2′s graphics capabilities that will blow everyone away: Didn't happen, no points.

MobileMe will be rebranded as iCloud, and a one-year subscription will be included when you buy any device: I got the easy part of this prediction correct, but iCloud is free. Half a point.

Phil Schiller: Happened. One entire point.

Final score, based on my dubious scoring system: 6.25 out of 13. Better than last year!

MORE PREDICTIONS:

• Lion will be released this month alongside new MacBook Airs (or is it "MacBooks Air?")
• iOS 5 will be released in September alongside a new iPhone and iPod Touches (or is it "iPods Touch?")
• Publishers will not understand that they cannot just load a bunch of PDFs into the iPad / iPhone newsstand. Businesses making apps to assist publishers will make huge bucks. At the top of the money pile will be Adobe. Side question: why does the iPhone have a newsstand? ("What is this, a newsstand for ANTS?")
• As soon as iOS 5 is released, apps will standardize on using Twitter for authentication instead of asking users to create accounts (wishful thinking on my part)
• Lots of iPad games will start using Apple TV to display things
• The next version of the Apple TV will be smaller and include velcro and an RF remote, so it can be mounted out-of-sight

1. What does Omaha.com offer that I can't get on a combination of free sources, such as the AP (for national news), JournalStar.com (local news and commentary) and over-the-air TV (local/national news)? Bonus points if the answer doesn't include the words, "Cindy Lange-Kubick." Local commentary is not a business model by itself.
2. How did you settle on $10/month? This invites the comparison to Netflix and Wall Street Journal, both of which charge around $8/month.
3. Will you distinguish your digital offering, or are you sticking to a "print first" approach for all articles? For example, do you plan on having interactive infographics, long-form articles, blogs, wikis, an enhanced taxonomy and social content to make use of the medium? Or will you be following the inverted pyramid, strictly enforcing article word counts, and tacking on comments/discussion as an afterthought?
4. Right now reading Omaha.com is a chore. The layout is not easy to navigate, there is a lot of scrolling to get to the narrow channel of content down the middle, and it is dominated by ads. How will this change when the paywall comes up? The type of readers who pay for content are the type who care about the experience of reading it.

The internet is changing the distribution methods for intellectual property. In the same way that Apple is succeeding with iPod and iTunes, Amazon is succeeding because they make it easy to purchase books and pleasant to read them on their device. Maybe newspapers could learn a thing or two from these models.

While both facts are true, they can be confusing. Android is growing faster and is selling more phones than Apple is selling iPhones. There is lots of news lately about Android overtaking iPhone. But these articles are comparing Android, the operating system, against iPhone, a device. Yes, when pitted against each other, Android is winning the market share war.

But that's not a fair comparison. When pitted against any other phone, iPhone is winning by a very clear and distinct margin. When comparing profit margin, iPhone is winning by an even larger margin. The iPhone got a year head start, so there are more iPhones out there than Android phones. When you compare iOS, the operating system, against Android, the operating system, there are more iOS devices being sold because iOS represents iPhones, iPod touches, Apple TVs and iPads. In each of the device categories it appears, iOS devices out-sell all other devices, and in all cases except for phones, iOS devices out-sell all other devices in its respective category *combined*.

So why doesn't iPhone have more market share right now? If Android is growing faster in the phone category, Apple will not be able to define the future of phones, as they clearly want to do. If Android ends up being installed on 80% of phones in the future, protocols like FaceTime are just not going to catch on if they only work with 20% of your friends' phones. And FaceTime is no longer a selling feature if none of your friends are already on it. Apple would be forced to adopt protocols someone else made instead of defining their own.

First of all, right now smart phones are less than 10% of the market, and everyone expects it to be near 100% within the next few years. There is huge opportunity there for growth and the battle for market share is just beginning. Apple has so far been limited by how much supply it has, not how many phones it can sell, so they have aimed for the upper-end of the market with a $200 price point. Apple is in the business of selling high-quality hardware so this is an easy target to hit.

Now that supply constraints have relaxed a bit, Apple has brokered a deal with Verizon which indicates to me that they are ready to grow. The Verizon deal was stage one. What is stage two?

The iPhone 5, expected this Fall, is another part of this deal. Many potential Verizon iPhone buyers have held off since they don't want a phone which will be obsolete in a few months, so the iPhone 5 will be the biggest launch yet. Since each previous iPhone has doubled its beginning sales from the previous year (and that was with an AT&T-only phone), I would expect this one to continue this trend and possibly exceed it, even at its standard $199 price tag.

But what about that price? Android phones can be had for free with a service plan. If the average user just wants Angry Birds and a bunch of free apps, how does Apple expect them to fork over $199 up front? Keep in mind that they are already asking users to pay for a monthly data plan.

One solution would be to cut the device's price in half. At $99, a phone with hardware similar to the iPhone 4 might still give Apple a hefty profit since the price of the individual components have decreased due to economies of scale. They already did this with the 3GS and the 3G when the iPhone 4 and 3GS were released. But last year's Apple device can't necessarily compete with this year's stampede of Android devices.

Maybe another way to compete against free Android phones is to offer...wait for it... a free iPhone. This would be an iPhone 4 running iOS 5, with a required unlimited data plan. AT&T has phased out its unlimited plan and Verizon has announced plans for it, and I think it's because they plan to re-introduce it for $10 more per month. If you want an iPhone 4 for free, you can have it as long as you buy this new plan. The carriers are happy because they get users to sign up for a beefed-up two-year contract (they are in the contract business and not the device business), and Apple is happy because a good chunk of that $240 goes back to them and (more importantly) they have a more attractive deal for lots of people.

A few other thoughts and predictions:

• If the $10 / month unlimited plan indeed happens, I would expect the price of text messaging to drop. This is a feature that is in trouble with the new iMessages and the plethora of chat apps available on Android and iOS. By lowering the price of texting they make the iPhone 4 more attractive to buyers. Look for Sprint to try this out first.
• A free (or even $99) phone leaves out repeat iPhone buyers—why would an iPhone 4 user upgrade to a cheaper phone? These users are willing to pay $199 and are too important to be ignored. In addition, Apple loves to one-up themselves year after year, and are not going to rest on their laurels while competitors catch up to the Retina display and FaceTime. Apple has to create another $199 device this year to capture these buyers and hold the attention of the press.

Yahoo mail is doing great, but who cares? You can get free email anywhere, and people are using less and less of it now that Facebook is getting serious about their Messages feature. Besides, putting ads next to personal emails is not a respectable business model, and it just won't work if your core business isn't advertising.

Why hasn't more attention been brought to Flickr, a service that many people are happy to pay for? Does Yahoo's CEO even use it? (She seems more like a Snapfish user to me.) People with iPhones have snatched up Instagram in record time. Flickr for iPhone would be more popular if they had actually put some effort into making it useful. Right now it's great for browsing my own photos but that's about it.

How about Delicious? Just as Flickr used to be the de-facto photo sharing site on the web, Delicious used to be the best way to store, tag and share your bookmarks. But just like Flickr, they stopped innovating five years ago and have festered while competitors (like Pinboard) snatch up their most important users.

So what's left for Yahoo? I think their main users see it as a "web portal," a home page with a bunch of ever-changing links they can click on when they get bored. Does the world need a web portal anymore? Do people need their hand held or can they type in a URL all by themselves? Isn't this why AOL went under?