Amid all that, you might think that guessing the winner would be hard. But one man predicted the result… sort of.

Meet Martin O’Leary, a glaciologist and data nerd who works at the University of Michigan. O’Leary, who calls himself a “recovering mathematician,” decided to use statistical analysis on Eurovision to try and understand which country would win:

Sweden’s going to win, unless it’s Malta, or maybe somebody else. If you average together the taste in pop music of all of Europe, you get a Hungarian. Don’t trust the scores on Saturday night, they’re just toying with your emotions.

And guess what? Sweden won!

You can read O’Leary’s entire series of posts to understand how he arrived at that conclusion, but here’s the quick version.

He did it by taking performing a Bayesian analysis on a wide range of previous Eurovision results, taking into account a few important factors with his model. First, the recognition that while Eurovision is a song competition, the results are not really based on the quality of song — although it can play a part. Then there’s the fact that there are semi-finals (held to whittle the number of contestants down) that allow some songs to be tested in public.

And then, most importantly, there’s the recognition that Eurovision is heavily influenced by transnational politics: which countries like which other countries plays a big part in voting. Entrants from the Balkans, for example, tend to trade votes with each other. Greece nearly always awards maximum points to Cyprus and vice versa. Big European powers like the U.K, France and Germany perform less well than smaller countries with lots of positive sentiment toward them.

But while O’Leary’s number-crunching enabled him to predict Sweden’s victory — and claim a victory for data modeling — it wasn’t infallible.

In particular, his prediction that Malta would be in the mixed seems to have caused some consternation. His guess was so exciting to the Maltese that it even made the newspapers, but in the end the country’s entry came in a measly 21st out of 26.

This was clearly upsetting to the Maltese, so he issued an apology:

This prediction caused quite a stir in Malta, with a story in the Times of Malta and over 16,000 pageviews from Malta1 on Saturday alone. Many took this as good evidence that Malta were going to do well in the contest, and some people were rather annoyed with me when they did not.

I’d like to apologise if I misled anyone. I didn’t expect anyone to take the model predictions particularly seriously, and if I had known, I would have included some more caveats and explanations of exactly what the model was predicting. Instead, I was fairly loose and jokey about the model results, and didn’t really talk about what they meant in real terms. Sorry, guys.

But will they forgive him?

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Prieto Battery is leveraging nanotechnology to develop tiny copper nanowires that make up the anode of the battery. A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. For traditional lithium ion batteries, lithium ions travel from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte, creating a chemical reaction that allows electrons to be harvested along the way. Prieto’s battery is a solid state battery so the electrolyte isn’t liquid, it’s made of a polymer.

The nanowires increase the surface area of the anode, so that more lithium ions can be stored. A lot of new battery research is using nanowires and nanotubes for the same reason. Stanford’s materials scientist Yi Cui, who founded startup Amprius, is working on a lithium ion battery that uses silicon nanotubes coated with silicon oxide shells for the anode.

The researchers behind Prieto also designed the architecture of the battery to be 3D — the cathode and the anode are intertwined. The company says this design gives the battery higher power density, a longer battery life and faster charging times. Because there’s no liquid electrolyte, Prieto says its batteries have removed much of the toxic chemicals of the traditional lithium ion batteries as well.

The technology is still in the development phase, and will need to be proved out at a larger commercial manufacturing scale. The battery could be used for mobile phones and gadgets as well as electric vehicles.

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I get too much credit for RSS and for Yelp, but the one thing that I can unashamedly claim to have invented is visual bookmarking, and more specifically the “choose images to thumbnail via a bookmarklet” method that Pinterest is based on. It’s not much of an “invention” per se. It’s a moronically simple thing, but it’s the right moronically simple thing. And given that more than one billion dollars rests on the idea, maybe it’s worth looking back at its history.

Wists’s service was originally dubbed “visual bookmarks.” Later we used the term “social shopping,” since people were mainly using Wists to share wish lists of things they wanted to buy. The original revenue model was via affiliate links. Wists used Skimlinks, the same affiliate aggregator that Pinterest adopted (then dropped).

To use Wists, you signed up and installed a bookmarklet that you clicked on while browsing other websites. This allowed you to collect images by simply clicking on them. You could then add a description, view these images as a thumbnail gallery, and share them with friends. (The site is still running, but it’s an old rickety shell.) The flow was almost exactly the same as Pinterest except that the metaphor was slightly different. Wists was used as a platform to power product blogs, such as Cribcandy and the visual lists site, Oobject.

There were several other visual bookmark sites that later appeared, including Kaboodle, Stylehive and later, ThisNext, but each of these was less like Pinterest in terms of flow.

Right before I moved from San Francisco to New York City, I worked out of the Obvious Corporation’s offices for a week. At the time, the team had just launched Twitter. I visited the re-incarnated Obvious Corp. a month ago, and Biz Stone asked me why I’d shown them Wists and said it was a piece of crap when clearly the concept had legs. Was that a self-deprecating Brit thing? The short answer is that the quick and dirty prototype that I’d partially written myself (on top of a much better version written by Yaroslav Faybishenko) looked like crap. I’m a designer not a developer, so I was embarrassed to show something unfinished — even though I wanted to finish it. It was as if I was an architect and I’d tried to lay bricks rather than design the wall. I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. If I said it was great (even though I believed in the concept), I could look like a bad designer. And if I said it was crap, it would be hard to acquire the resources to make a good version. The lesson here is only deliver as much as you can finish and do well.

Wists was also too early. The big social networks weren’t in place yet for the site to leverage off of. Still, it started to grow on its own, with exactly the same early adopters that Pinterest attracted five years later — Etsy users, crafts people and, above all, women. It also managed to get reasonable PR. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal covered it, largely because the term “social shopping” sounded particularly lucrative. Instead of raising money, I wanted to bootstrap a lifestyle business and do things on the cheap. My friend Graham Hill had a great time building Treehugger from scratch and exited successfully, and I hoped to do the same. In retrospect, however, no matter how simple the product, a consumer Internet application is not like a content site. It requires bespoke software and scaling, and it needs funding if it’s getting traction.

Lastly, Wists didn’t have the pinning metaphor that people have claimed is important. But despite what marketers will say, this part of Pinterest’s resonance is largely irrelevant, because the craftsters who were early Wist adopters and evangelists got it fine without the pinning metaphor. I suspect that because Pinterest isn’t very different, quantitatively speaking, from some of the applications that preceded it, people latch onto the only thing that is new about it. Pinterest is a success because it is qualitatively different and properly timed. It had proper resources to make it work well and scale at a time when the market was ready for it. The lesson to be learned here is that first to market is not as important as sometimes claimed. Most successful Internet platforms are second or third generation versions of an earlier idea.

So Wists was early, and it was never built into much more than a prototype. Pinterest really works. It’s a good, fast, snappy product that scales with the technical demands caused by “many to many” social features, and that is all there is to it. When people look for the special sauce that helps some sites displace others — why Google trumped Altavista or Facebook beat Friendster — they miss the obvious fact that “simple” and “works” go a long way.

The reason I’m sanguine, however, is that Pinterest’s success with the visual bookmark model has opened up a new crack in the ecosystem that will allow others to innovate further. Traditionally, stores have been both a showcase for a curated selection of items and a place that handles transactions and inventory storage. I think that e-commerce may now experience significant disruption as shops are curated online, separating logistics from showcasing. Online stores will be more like product galleries, and there are opportunities to build platforms for these. In the future, experts with an online “voice,” and people we are genuinely familiar with, may endorse items in lists of curated links. These curators will replace some aspects of celebrity endorsements in retail promotion. E-commerce services that handle the transaction and logistics could then pass a commission on to the curator for each sale — the CPA model of Skimlinks. I believe that this is a long term change in the nature of retail, and I’ll be creating something to fulfill this opportunity at Curations.com.

In a post tomorrow, I will examine the evolution of visual bookmarks and grid sites, and how those websites paved the way for Pinterest’s massive success.

David Galbraith is an architect turned tech entrepreneur. He is the co-creator of RSS and co-founder of Moreover, Yelp, Mocoms and Curations.

Image courtesy of  Flickr user Mykl Roventine.

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For instance, an afternoon at the ballpark yielded about 180 photos that were culled and edited solely on the iPad.  While I’m faster sorting on my Mac in Lightroom or Aperture, not having to drag my laptop around when sorting out shots is a big advantage. I’ve found this to work best for daytime photos in decent light, or candid shots where I used the flash. Some of my photography is shooting bands in low light areas, and while I may use iPhoto to sort through them, I won’t be doing any post processing with the program.

Here are five tips I use that might help you if you’re just starting out using the software.

1. Plan ahead with photos.

One of the big failures with iPhoto is how little photo management you can actually do in the app. It’s fine for enhancing and cropping photos, but you can’t delete photos or organize your albums in iPhoto. Instead, after you’ve imported your photos into Photos, take a few moments and clear out the rejects and create the associated albums with your shots. This way, when you do access the album in iPhoto, your best shots are ready for the final touches.

2. Use the Face Balance setting.

Under the Color area (the pallet icon), you can choose to adjust the white balance to favor skin tones by using the Face Balance setting. Pressing this puts a loupe on the screen that you’ll position over a face and it’ll adjust the white balance of the rest of the image. If you do use a post-processing app, it works similarly to the white balance picker in those apps. Your results will vary depending on how well shot and lit the image is; sometimes the effect is subtle.

3. Use the loupe to zoom in up to 3x.

To use the loupe, press and hold on the image with two fingers. After a second or so, the the loupe will appear and you can adjust the zoom. This will only affect the areas under the loupe. I’ve found this handy for checking image clarity if I’m not sure if that area is sharp.

4. Flag and favorite photos for showing.

My bag limit for photos to show from an event is five. I’d rather show five great images than 10 merely OK images. When I show Mom the photos from Fenway, I’ll just flag five so she doesn’t see the 20 images I’m sorting through to see which is the best one of a favorite player. After I’ve shown them to her, I’ll likely un-flag them. However, a truly amazing photo — one that I’d want to show when someone wants to see some photos — will get favorited. Flagged and favorited photos have their own albums automatically created by iPhoto.

5. Use Photo Stream to send the file to your Mac.

The isolated nature of iPhoto on iOS gets even more frustrating when you try and send a photo back to your Mac. Right now, photos and albums don’t sync back to iPhoto on the Mac. I can only hope and pray that when iPhoto gets the inevitable OS X Mountain Lion upgrade this summer, this will get easier. At least with an updated version hopefully Journals might sync.

Until then, the most painless way I’ve found to get an edited photo back to the Mac is to simply export it back to the Camera Roll in iPhoto and let Photo Stream carry it back over. If need be, I’ll recreate an album in iPhoto or Aperture and move it in there.

If you have any iPhoto for iOS tips that you use frequently, please feel free to add them to the comments.

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But hidden in the headlines was a much more powerful underlying trend. With the JOBS Act came the creation of an entirely new class of capital that could be far more valuable to startups: customer capital.

Meet the new investor class: Customers.

Instead of raising capital from VCs to build a product, entrepreneurs can skip the line and reach out to customers before the product is actually produced. It’s called a pre-order, but it has a twist. In this case, the pre-order is for a product that doesn’t actually exist yet.

We’ve all dealt with pre-orders before, whether it’s the new iPad or a blockbuster summer movie. But this time customers fund the idea of a product, with the hope that the object itself will someday follow. For example, the Pebble Watch raised $10 million on Kickstarter by crowdfunding from customers strictly through pre-orders. This is just the start.

A big, juicy new fund.

While there is a big, amount of capital available from VCs, angel investors and private equity folks, the amount of capital available for entrepreneurs when you count the customer market is much larger. And the audience is far more diverse.

The customer capital pool is not limited to the commitments of LPs or how much cash a newly-minted angel investor just netted from the Facebook IPO. It’s only limited by the quality of the ideas and the absorption rate of early adopters in all segments.

More importantly, the pledge of capital is available to startups before they build their product, which allows them to do important market testing before they spend a dollar of real money. Granted, crowdfunding isn’t the end-all, be-all of proving a market, but it sure beats the old model of “if you build it, they might come.”

A new twist on an old model.

Funding through customer capital is nothing new. Savvy entrepreneurs have been pre-selling customers for years in an effort to bootstrap businesses to profitability. It’s just that they were doing it out of necessity, not because it was the most efficient way to access capital — and certainly not because it was fun.

Bootstrapping was what you did to get your minimal product out to the market quickly. It was your cost of finding out whether anyone would ever commit to buying your product. But it took a lot of time and cost to simply ask your market, “Will you buy this?”

Context is king.

Instead of hitting up friends and family, ask a crowd.

Platforms that aggregate crowdfunding backers provide a big pool of customer capital providing entrepreneurs with customers who are particularly willing and able to accept the risk that an idea may not come to fruition. The platform already presumes risk, and for an entrepreneur presenting an idea, that is an invaluable piece of context when asking for money.

The ability to query your potential customer base at scale prior to building anything addresses a lot of painful problems. First, you learn whether there is really anyone that wants your product. Your friends can tell you it’s the greatest idea and VCs can tell you it’s a horrible idea, but the only true indicator is a customer order. Second, you avoid wasting a year of your life building a product you thought someone might want, only to find out that you were incredibly off base.

Of course, a crowdfunded project can’t predict every market.Mark Zuckerberg could have presented Facebook and may have not found a single backer. It happens. Crowdfunding is just one indicator, but at least it’s feedback from real customers – not theoretical feedback from pundits.

The important point is that you can get feedback now, before you start spending lots of cycles, improving upon your idea in real time. Anyone that’s ever built a landing page to test a new concept on the Web (and failed miserably) knows exactly how valuable it is to test first and build the product later.

A true game changer.

Between providing early access to capital, testing new ideas in real time and potentially growing the entire pool of startup capital astronomically, the emergence of crowdfunding customer capital is about to change the startup game in a big way.

As of now the market is incredibly nascent. Funding a watch for $10 million sounds novel and grabs headlines. Ideally that kind of traction will be old news in the next few years as more companies are crowdfunded and the records for what they raise continue to jump.

In the meantime, the world just got a whole new startup fund. Let’s go do something amazing with it.

Wil Schroter is the co-founder and CEO of Fundable.com, a crowdfunding platform for startup companies.

Oliver Twist image provided by Corbis/Guy Ferrandis/Tristar Pictures.

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Indie Game‘s story began on the web, thanks to Kickstarter funding, and covers a topic near and dear to the Internet’s heart: the rise of the independent video game designer.

So while, according to co-director James Swirsky via email, the theatrical release and an earlier sold outscreening tour were profitable ways of building word-of-mouth about the film, making the film available online was extremely important to him and co-director Lisanne Pajot, as “that is where our audience is.”

“We wanted to get this film into the hands of those people who want to see it the most as quickly as reasonably possible,” he added. “Which is the main motivation behind the very tight release windows we’re working within.”

Indie Game‘s digital release will come through three platforms — one expected, two unconventional. The film, like many independent films before it, will be available on iTunes, but it’ll also be released by VHX as a direct DRM-free download — the second-ever project to be distributed by VHX, following their release of Aziz Ansari’s comedy special last April.

The story of how Indie Game ended up working with VHX couldn’t be more webby. Via the film’s extremely active Twitter account, the filmmakers mentioned they were looking for a distribution platform — instantly, Andy Baio (@waxpancake) connected the two:

Check the date stamp on that tweet — it’s less than two weeks ago. Only nine days after making contact, Indie Game‘s deal with VHX was solidified. “A new record for us, and a trend we hope will continue,” VHX co-founder Jamie Wilkinson said via email.

There’s no exact date yet on when the VHX for Artists platform will be officially open for all, according to co-founder Casey Pugh, but “it will be soon,” he promised.

In addition to iTunes and VHX, Indie Game will also be distributed through Steam, Valve’s video game distribution platform. That’s right, a gaming platform. According to Swirsky, with the exception of a zombie film created by Valve employees several years ago, Indie Game is the first film to ever receive major release through the popular service.

However, the decision to work with Steam made sense for Swirsky and Pajot, because of the film’s deep connections with the independent gaming community. “From a pure distribution standpoint, we can not get any closer to our core audience that being listed side by side with the games that are featured in the film,” Swirsky said. “If you like and bought Super Meat Boy, Braid, World of Goo, etc, there’s a good chance you might be interested in the backstory behind those games, and games like them. Steam brings us to the core of our most relevant audience in a very unique way. It’s kind of amazing.”

Across platforms, the cost will be $10, though those pre-ordering on Steam can purchase it for $8.99. According to Swirsky, “When it comes to sales and knowing their consumer base, Steam is second to none. They know their stuff. They know how to effective launch, maintain and promote the products within their system. When they suggested debuting with a pre-order pricing incentive, it made a lot of sense to us.”

To Swirsky and Pajot, each platform has its unique advantages. Steam, as previously mentioned, delivers the film to the most passionate portion of its fanbase. With iTunes, he says, it’s “a juggernaut. We always wanted this film to be there. They bring an audience and ease of purchase/viewing that we could only dream of with this film.”

And working with VHX, Swirsky says, “allows us to continue the direct conversation with our audience that we’ve been having since Day 1. It’s all on our site, it’s all under our control, it’s as personal as delivering the final film to the end audience as we can get digitally. VHX is doing some really exciting things. We’re really proud to be a part of it all.”

“It’s truly a great film. It also perfectly aligns with our beliefs on the future of film,” Pugh said. “Crowd-funded on Kickstarter and self-released on VHX. This is where the film, video and television business is going and it’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

Between the three platforms, Swirsky and Pajot are hopeful to not only make up the actual production budget of the film, but also compensate themselves for the two years they spent making the film. “The film is very much on track to make back its budget. But that’s a budget that doesn’t include paying ourselves for the past two years. If we go by that budget, we still have a little ways to go. But it should be worth it,” Swirsky said.

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When the two finally did meet, Jobs tried to impress Weeks with his knowledge of glass, and Weeks had to tell him to shut up — Corning, of course, has been making glass and ceramics for a century.

This anecdote is partly funny, partly troubling. It is made funnier by the fact that Corning, due to customer NDAs, cannot publicly confirm that the meeting ever took place. It is troubling, because few Valley companies look at companies in Kansas or Kenya as potential suppliers or partners — though their CEOS are happy to fly there to close a big customer sale.

In broader terms, it is symptomatic of how little the Valley knows about how much technology is being developed in corporate America. And in reverse, it hints at how little corporate America knows about the world class operations of many Valley companies. Both sides should wake up to the consumerization of enterprise tech and the enterprising of consumer tech.

The consumerization of enterprise tech

When I started research for my book, “The New Technology Elite,” I assumed that about ten industries (autos, medical devices, etc.) and a few outlier companies, such as Nike with its sensor-enabled shoes, were leading the way when it comes to embedding technology in products and services. My assumption was quickly proven wrong. I discovered a wide range of companies offering “smart” products and services, and I ended up covering more than 75 industries in my book. Here are just a few examples:

•    The smart shirt from Under Armour has a removable sensor pack with a triaxial accelerometer, a processor and two gigabytes of storage to measure athlete performance.

•    Do (as in Dough) in Atlanta is serving up a smart restaurant. Not only has it replaced paper menus with iPads, but the tablets can also be used to tell the valet to pull up your car.

•    Moen is making the shower smarter. The IOdigital wall-mounted control panel with a handheld remote lets you set and maintain water temperatures and bath levels.

•    Rain Birdʼs ESP-SMT irrigation controller makes lawn maintenance smarter. It utilizes historical and real-time weather data (you input data such as your zip code, allowed watering days and the plant and soil type for each zone) to determine the optimum watering time and amount.

•    John Deereʼs FarmSight initiative helps farmers in three areas: Machine optimization for increased up-time, logistics optimization for better fleet management, and decision support with user-friendly monitors, sensors and wireless networks to enable access to machinery and agronomic data.

•    Progressive Insurance offers Snapshot, a small telematics device that connects to the carʼs electronic diagnostic port and allows Progressive to monitor your driving patterns. And if the data shows that you are a safe driver, Progressive promises to discount your premium by up to 30 percent.

Many in the Valley still talk contemptuously of Xerox or Blockbuster and think corporate America does little interesting in the way of technological innovation. Based on the list above, thatʼs clearly a dated perspective.

The enterprising of consumer tech

In reverse, corporate America dismisses much of the Valley as “consumer” tech. Instead, it should be studying the operations at tech companies. For example, corporate America has much to learn from HPʼs complex global supply chain and how it can adjust to countless hiccups — including ones caused by the Japanese tsunami and the Icelandic volcano — and also how it deals with longer-term shifts as it integrates acquisitions and transitions from PCs to laptops to Ultrabooks. Similarly, Apple is running retail operations better than Nordstrom. eBayʼs PayPal unit is running better operations than many banks. Google and Facebook are running data centers far more efficiently than IBM. There are many more examples that show that Valley companies are the new “best practice” leaders in many operational areas.

The new technology elite

The convergence of the two powerful trends described above is revising the definition of technology excellence and who qualifies today as a “technology elite.” It is no longer just about being fluent in the geeky jargon of Big Data and cloud architectures.

Today’s tech elite are focused on:
•    Product design elegance
•    Physical presence in strategic retail locations
•    Ecosystems of developers and thriving app stores
•    Social savvy
•    Combating hacker groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous
•    Pragmatism in a world where attorneys are even more influential than engineers
•    Being able to fly to Xiamen or Xanadu at a momentʼs notice

Geoffrey Moore popularized the saying “crossing the chasm.” Itʼs time for companies on both sides to “traverse the Valley.” Thereʼs much to learn from each other.

Vinnie Mirchandani is the author of “The New Technology Elite” and other books on technology enabled innovation. He also consults with CIOs on technology strategy. He can be emailed at vm AT dealarchitect DOT com.

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What you would do is take one of your Apple IDs — the single username to manage all your Apple accounts — associate it with a single iTunes account and a credit card, and assign it to all of your iOS devices.  From here on out, you can continue to make all of your family’s purchases for all of their devices from that one iTunes account.

However, there’s one exception: iCloud. It may seem like you would want a separate iCloud account for each device because each iCloud account comes with a mere 5 GB of free storage.  This hardly seems enough to back up even one 64 GB iPhone 4S or iPad.  Each member of your family may own multiple Apple devices and want to have all of their data equally accessible from each device. But having a separate account for each device does not make much sense either.

So what can an Apple ID do?

Some of the confusion over how to handle multiple Apple IDs comes from not knowing exactly what is possible.  For instance, every Apple ID is not automatically enrolled with all of Apple’s services.  You can create your AppleID and enroll it in each Apple service individually as you need to.  You do this by logging into that service with your Apple ID.  Additionally, each device can utilize multiple Apple IDs at the same time.  Some of Apple’s services can be configured once per device, others multiple times per device.  For example, each device can only be backed up to one iCloud account whereas each device can have multiple iCloud email accounts configured.

It can be hard to figure out how to do this. Some Apple IDs are set in the device settings, other are set separately per an individual app setting.  The chart below illustrates how many Apple IDs you can have associated with each device, and where the ID associated with that service is configured:

We’ve narrowed down your options and here are some suggestions for best organizing your family’s devices and Apple accounts:

One iTunes Apple ID for apps and media

Using the chart above as a sort of Apple ID map, you can plan which services you want to use, and just how you want to configure them on each family member’s device.  To start, take one Apple ID and associate it with an iTunes account for all of the app and media purchases your family makes. This is the account that is linked to a credit card.  With each Apple device, the purchased apps, music, books, magazines, TV Shows and movies account will be accessible by all of the devices registered with this account.

Keep in mind that the rules are changing.  Whe the iPad first came out, it used to be that you could authorize up to five OS X computers with the same iTunes account.  And in turn each OS X computer could sync its locally stored library of purchased apps and media (via a USB cable) to an unlimited number of  iOS devices.  With Apple moving away from physical access, cable-based direct syncing and online music storage in the cloud through add on services like iTunes Match, the opportunity exists for more than a household of devices being configured to access a single iTunes account’s media files.

This now means that a single account that access its music via the cloud can only have up to 10 devices and computers combined.  Ten sounds like a lot for an individual, but not a family. Think of a family of four having a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad each.  That’s 12 computers and devices, not including any Apple TVs and additional iPods scattered throughout the house.

One primary iCloud Apple ID on each device

The Apple ID that you use to create your iTunes account does not need to have an iCloud account associated with it.  In fact you do not need an iCloud account in order to use your iOS or OS X device.  But to take full advantage of all of the iCloud based features of iOS 5 listed in the above chart, you will need an iCloud account.  For some of these features there can be only one iCloud setting per device.

When configuring your family’s Apple devices, these settings are part of each device’s primary iCloud account.  While each device can have multiple iCloud accounts associated with it, only one of these iCloud accounts can enable a select set of features.  These features include Bookmarks, Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Storage & Backup.

Unfortunately, since these features are configured only via the iCloud settings on the device, they must all be associated with the same iCloud account.  This fact is really disappointing since it would be nice to configure all of your family’s devices on one iCloud account for iCloud Backup, and a separate one for app-based Documents & Data.  This would allow a user to have to pay once for additional storage on that one shared family-sized backup iCloud account.

One Apple ID to keep track of all of your family’s devices

With your family’s iTunes purchases under control, and the core features of iCloud storage taken care of, there is one particular feature of iOS 5 that can be set separately from a device’s primary iCloud account.  When it comes to locating each of your family’s devices, do not rely solely on the Find My Friends app to locate their position.  Create a common family iCloud account and configure each device to use this account in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings.  In fact, you can even create this iCloud account without creating a new Apple email address.  This family iCloud account’s sole purpose will be to keep track of all of your Apple devices.

Configuring each device in such a manner does not interfere with the use of a different app, Find My Friends. You only need to have one account on the device enable the Find my iPhone service.  Then the Find My Friends app will use that enabled service to share your location with whatever account is used to log on with the app.  That means each family member can still individually manage who knows their whereabouts via the Find My Friends app.

Multiple secondary iCloud Apple IDs on each device

Most of the iOS features that require an iCloud account have been taken care of, except the ones that really matter most.  At this point you can decide if you want a me.com email address or not.  Each family member can create their own account (or accounts) for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes.

When it comes to mail, not every third-party service out there supports all of these features.  Hotmail, for instance, will support Reminders, but not Notes.  Some Microsoft Exchange Servers will support Reminders, some Notes and some both Reminders and Notes.  If you happen to configure your Google Mail as an Exchange service, you will not get Reminders or Notes.  Yahoo on the other hand actually supports them all and AOL, well, just Notes.  So be sure to pick a mail provider that will support all of the services you need.

Several independent Apple IDs for everything else

So what’s left?  Quite a bit actually.  FaceTime, GameCenter, Messaging, HomeSharing and even the Apple Store app.  The default account used by each of these independent apps is the Apple ID configured to be used with the iTunes account on a particular device.  But you can use any Apple ID you like.

These apps support features that are independent from both the iTunes account as well as the iCloud account that are configured on the device.  They are managed separately, configured in separate settings and even stored in separate apps.  You can sign out of each of these particular features and sign back in using a different Apple ID.  And this will have no effect on the aforementioned iTunes and iCloud account settings on the device.

A good strategy

The idea here is that you can use multiple Apple IDs on each device, and at the same time each Apple ID does not need to be enrolled in every Apple product, feature and service.  Decide what products and services you want to use first and determine how each device will be used.  If you don’t, before you know it you could end up with a real rats nest of accounts.

Do consider using one master family account on all devices to manage iTunes purchases, and use that same shared account to track the location of all of your devices.  As an added bonus, you could use the calendar, contacts and reminders with this shared family iCloud account as well.  Once you have each device configured with these basics, let each family member decide which third-party email service they want.  This may well be the best strategy to employ, until Apple sees fit to enable multiple users per device.

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Last week’s announcement that a $200 million broadband investment fund is in play courtesy of Gigabit Squared is part of a quiet trend of communities searching for new ways to fund broadband.

Technologies such as desktop PCs, local area networks and mobile applications moved from their infancy to full-blown industries thanks to venture capitalists, investment firms and angel investors who drop big-to-huge bucks on promising startups. For better or worse, these investors drove industries to maturity. Expect the investment scenario for broadband to be different.

Few view broadband networks as startup businesses, but maybe more should. Many communities believe broadband is critical infrastructure, the same as water, electricity and highways. Enlightened communities also know these networks are business operations, even when in pursuit of the common good. The networks must generate revenue, though the financial goal for community-run and muni-run networks is more sustainability for the infrastructure rather than profit.

Gigabit Squared views broadband networks as technology ventures in need of investors and investments, but in a different vein than VCs. Gigabit Squared CEO Mark Ansboury explains that the company targeted private companies for investments that have a business stake in the growth of networks rather than aloof VCs only concerned with the IPO payday.

Gigabit Squared is similar to angel investors who value bringing their time and expertise into the thick of things to help startups. However, the amount of each investment in a broadband network is higher, and the experience the company brings is broader than what comes with typical angel investments.

Think different – more than a slogan.

These towns called on someone who cared about their broadband quality.

“Non-traditional” business  investments in broadband have been around for a while. Early in 2011, Corning, Inc. invested $10 million to three rural upstate New York countiesto build a fiber network, including the county from which Corning operates.  “We saw this as an investment not only in the community’s future, but in Corning’s future,” says Corning’s Dan Collins.

This “we win, the community wins” philosophy was showcased at last week’s Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, D.C., as a session panelist described how his software company is investing an undisclosed amount to build a fiber network throughout San Leandro, Calif,. Pat Kennedy, CEO of OSIsoft, says his company needs gigabit speed to continue to grow and compete effectively. Kennedy feels that, as a longtime resident, property owner and successful business in the city, he should give something back to the city. Lit San Leandro is his investment. How many communities could move their broadband projects forward by finding more such investors?

Here’s another example. Four friends in Emporia, Kan. who until several years ago held management roles in a successful small local telecom company, had become very unhappy with the poor quality of broadband in their town of 30,000. The large incumbent refused to upgrade its network to address the community’s needs. So the four started a new company – Valu-Net, LLC – with $500,000 of their own money. Then they proceeded to raise an additional $6.3 million from investors who had to put in at least $50,000 to participate.

This is more traditional tech startup fundraising. What wasn’t typical were the investors. Co-founder Rick Tidwell states, “The people who put money in … you wouldn’t expect to have this much to invest. There were small business owners, farmers who’d done well. Mostly average Emporia residents who invested because they believe in the founders and believe that it [the network] eventually helps the community.”

Issuing municipal bonds to fund networks is on the wane because of politics and the poor economy. But what if communities flip the script, take government out of the picture (directly), create a nonprofit corporation that is owned by local citizens and businesses, and replace bonds with promissory notes. You would have ECFiber in Vermont. To date the not for profit corporation has raised over $2 million for a fiber network selling $2,500-notes to rural residents who average two notes per purchase.

Make a deal for better broadband.

Flip the script again. IPOs are the stuff of legend in the tech industry. In England, Broadband for the Rural North, LTD (B4RN) sold enough shares of stock to finance its initial network buildout. The main fact is when communities think outside of the box, good things can happen.

Control vs capital.

While these are definitely winners, from the perspective of those who champion the public good, the level of success is directly dependent on control. As with traditional tech startups, whether you take investment money – and from which investors – often comes down to how much you give up in exchange for the money.

How much communities control and direct the use of the network depends on who calls the shots. As Ann Millspaugh, Online Community Manager for EdLab Group, said after listening to Ansboury last week, “It seems like Gigabit Squared’s comprehensive, integrated buildout will make the community dependent on its infrastructure. The lack of transparency and input towards management/governance easily could lead to characteristics that have been defining the digital divide, particularly fiber deployment to areas that will be most profitable, and unchecked pricing structures.”

The trick for building networks that maximize benefits for the public good seems to be to create a strong governing body for the organization that owns the network, whether a co-op, nonprofit, community foundation, even a public-private partnership. Community stakeholders can’t be so enamored with the technology that they don’t pay close attention to the design of the infrastructure and business practices. How communities respond to options such as Gigabit Squared likely will depend on how they resolve the issue of control.

Craig Settles is a consultant who helps organizations develop broadband strategies, host of radio talk show Gigabit Nation and a broadband industry analyst. Follow him on Twitter (@cjsettles) or via his blog.

Handshake image courtesy of Shutterstock and skyshak roman.

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Many simply come home and leave OoVoo on in the background as they do homework or watch TV, sort of like an instant messager app. Friends jump on or jump off, checking in with each other and seeing what’s going on. The person who starts the video chats isn’t obligated to stay on. This is not appointment video: it’s ambient video, running in the background.

Video tells the story

That got me thinking about the evolution video. It’s similar in some sense to how pictures have undergone a transformation. We used to take pictures to preserve memories, using precious film to capture significant moments. But with advent of digital cameras and later mobile phones with cameras, pictures became akin to a casual form of communication, giving rise to services like Instagram and others.

Video chatting and broadcasting is also evolving in a similar manner. We used to think about scheduling Skype chats and video conferences.  Uploading a video to YouTube meant you often edited the video or at least reviewed it. But now, we’re seeing that video is becoming this casual, immediate medium that doesn’t have to convey anything special.

Cheaper broadband+free video services

Jackman believes the rise of ambient video is due to cheaper broadband and the growth of free services that allow users to use video with little regard to cost. The fact that video chatting can increasingly be multiparty also lends itself to this idea of video as an emerging background layer to life.

Google is seeing more people leave Google Hangouts on for long periods of time, according to Iska Hain, a company spokeswoman.

“We definitely see that use case, especially at Google where colleagues will jump into a Hangout from remote offices and we all do work together. Sometimes people do like to just ‘be around’ other people. There are cases of folks turning a hangout on while they go about cooking or knitting or painting,” Hain said.

Foursquare has set up a big screen video portal inside both of its New York and San Francisco offices that are constantly on, allowing people to see each other and organize impromptu meetings.

“I can just go up to the screen and shout someone’s name and they’ll come to the portal,” said Benjy Weinberger, Foursquare’s San Francisco engineering lead.  

Increasingly comfortable with live-sharing

It’s not just with video conferencing. People are increasingly more casual with video sharing as well. I was reminded of this when talking to Bill Nguyen, the co-founder of Color. Color, as we wrote recently, has signed a deal with Verizon to put its live video-sharing app on Verizon phones. The app allows users to start recording a video and alerts their friends that a live broadcast has started.

When I first heard about that, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sending out video before having the option to edit it. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen at the end of that clip. But that’s where things are going. We’ve seen that with other live-streaming services: people are increasingly comfortable broadcasting their lives and letting the world see whatever happens.

Gil Eyal, vice president of marketing for Mobli, a mobile photo and video sharing service, said increasingly people are just uploading videos directly to the service without editing out mistakes or taking a look again at what they’re showing.

“We’re seeing more spontaneous video, it’s all raw and unedited,” said Eyal. “It’s just people being real and video becoming this common language.”

Not everyone is ready for this kind of spontaneous, always-on video world. But it’s a natural extension of the trends were seeing in technology and social media. The barriers separating the private and the public are crumbling thanks to social and technological tools that make it easy to share. The same ideas at work behind Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram, will also spur people to be more open and free with video.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tyler Olsen.

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