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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• To Think Lists: We all have to-do lists. They don’t end. They help us try to make sense of our days. However, the important thing for us to do is to ask why this item is on your to-do list, argues Rajesh Shetty. It is a great way to think.
• Ten reasons to slow down. I just need one reason to slow down. But other nine are pretty darn good reasons as well. You should check them out.
• From telegraph and tubes to Skype — how the world of communication has changed. A great, fun piece that you should check out and marvel at how far we have come.
• Once you are done reading the previous post, check out Martin Geddes’s essay on the end of the phone system, what it means and where we are going. It will give you context and a sense of the decay in the “phone system.”
• Distributed and destination thinking. Neil Perkin writes about how the changes in the media landscape are fundamental and it is too bad we don’t seem to realize that.
• My buddy Brian Lam writes about robot boats and their epic voyage across the Pacific Ocean. It is just fun reading.
• And for some heavy thinking: Is Finland a model for tomorrow’s society? Not sure, but I know I love my Finnish friends.

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Reflecting interest from the U.S. (the site’s users are split evenly between the U.S. and Europe), the company opened an office in New York in March, and today is rolling out new features that let users receive rewards as points that are redeemable as exclusive offers from merchants.

Roxanne Varza, the company’s communications director, declined to disclose the number of Shopcade users, but said the user population is growing about 20-30 percent a month and is 35 percent male. The website also features about 65 million products, including those from brands like Urban Outfitters, Adidas and Forever 21.

Users log into Shopcade with their Facebook account to follow brands, people and categories. They can also select products from the overall pool and add them to their personal “shopcades” (or individual collections of favorite items). As they recommend and buy products, users receive cash or points from the sale. (User actions generate affiliate links, which enable the site to give users a cut of sales.)

Previously, Shopcade only let users redeem points to customize their shopcades (with different colors, decorations, etc.). But Varza said the new changes will enable users to redeem their points with exclusive offers from merchants, as well as digital goods, such as music from iTunes or Spotify. The company is also exploring the use of those new points to drive offline shopping.

Previous reports have suggested that the affiliate e-commerce site encourages social spam. But Varza said users are rewarded per purchase (when friends make a purchase after entering their Shopcade) and not per click, so they’re incentivized to choose products others will buy and not just overwhelm their friends with products.

While the site hasn’t boasted of a multimillion dollar funding round, its founder and funders offer compelling pedigrees. Nathalie Gaveau, the founder and CEO, co-founded PriceMinister, a French eBay rival that was later acquired by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten (which recently invested in Pinterest).  Its angel investors include Daniel Bernard, former CEO of European retailer Carrefour, Ian Livingston, co-founder of Eidos Games and Lord John Birt, former director general of the BBC. The company hasn’t disclosed the amount of its seed funding but is looking to raise a new round.

Shopcade’s latest changes come on the heels of Fab.com’s recent decision to step up its social options. And, like Pinterest, Varza said, people are using the site to express themselves through shopcades dedicated to specific categories and interests (like Hello Kitty or, oddly, Moose).

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By now, many people are familiar with the story of how NPR editor Andy Carvin used Twitter to create a kind of crowdsourced newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East last year, inventing a brand-new kind of journalism on the fly and in full public view. In a discussion with me on Thursday in Toronto about the lessons that can be learned from his experience, Carvin made some interesting points about the value of such an approach — including the importance of being transparent about the process, and the virtues of being human.

The discussion at the Mesh 2012 conference (full disclosure: I am a co-founder) touched on a number of different elements of what Carvin did during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, including two important factors that allowed him to take on the role that he did. The first was the nature of his job at NPR, which — as a senior digital strategist — allowed him to experiment with new tools and take risks. The second was the fact that he already had a number of contacts in the Middle East through his work with Global Voices and other social advocacy groups (Harvard researcher and author David Weinberger, whom I also interviewed at the conference, live-blogged the session with Carvin).

Both of these meant that Carvin was perfectly positioned to do what he did when dissidents started revolting in Tunisia, and then following that in Egypt and Libya. He also noted with a laugh that “it helps when you have ADHD” (which he does), because for several months during the height of those revolutions, he was spending almost every waking minute reading or posting on Twitter, managing several lists of dissidents and thousands of responses from followers. His peak output reached 1,400 tweets a day at one point, whereupon Twitter blocked his account as spam.

Not a newswire, but a crowdsourced newsroom of public editors

But Carvin also talked about how he approached the reporting of real-time events on Twitter, and how he doesn’t really like having what he did called a “newswire.” Instead, he says he prefers to think of it as a crowdsourced newsroom — with him as the reporter, or the anchor (or “news DJ,” another term he likes to use) pulling in reports from different places, and then relying on his followers to act as editors and sources, fact-checking and verifying and also distributing the news that he was curating. As he put it:

I get uncomfortable when people prefer my twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.

In many cases, Carvin says, this process worked remarkably well — and quickly. In one photo of Egypt, for example, someone he asked for an opinion said that the corner of a building in the background was clearly a prominent local landmark, and then sent a link to a Google Earth view of the building, allowing Carvin to confirm within minutes that it was the same location. He also gave his followers what he called “fire drills,” in which he would ask them to fact-check photos that he knew were fake and then he would look at how many errors they found.

And what happened when he made a mistake and posted something that wasn’t accurate? In one case, he distributed a photo he thought was of a woman who had been shot in battle and was being attended to by nurses — but it turned out she was actually dead, his followers told him, and her body was being prepared for burial. Carvin says he admitted his mistake multiple times, and then retweeted both the criticisms and the corrections as broadly as possible:

You have to be prepared to be accountable in real time. When I screw up, my followers tell me.

News as a process, and the virtues of being human

The NPR editor, who is now working on a book about his experiences, says he believes in the “news as a process” approach, as author Jeff Jarvis and others have described it — in which not only is the reporting of an event crowdsourced in real time, but new information is added and mistakes are also corrected by readers, who journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience” (recent events have also shown how social networks like Twitter and Reddit can act as fact-checking engines).

As I tried to argue in a Twitter debate on Friday with a number of people (which Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute curated with Storify) I think there is a lot of public value in doing what Carvin did, by assembling and fact-checking and correcting information in real time. That’s not to say editors don’t have value, or that reporters shouldn’t try to report things as accurately as possible. But when errors are made, I think admitting them publicly and being seen to correct them (not something traditional media is very good at) actually builds trust.

For me — and I think for Carvin — doing this is connected to a larger principle, and that is the value of being human, and of expressing that humanity, even if it means acknowledging a mistake. The NPR editor also admitted that in some cases he was so disturbed by the videos and images he was seeing from Egypt and elsewhere that he responded on Twitter in a way that he says might not have been professional — but he still felt was justified. As Weinberger noted in his live-blog: “Andy perfectly modeled a committed journalist who remains personal, situated, transparent, and himself.”

This is the kind of thing that mainstream media outlets discourage, just as many try to avoid admitting that they have made mistakes. Restrictive social-media policies put in place by many of these outlets seem designed to remove as many of the elements of being human as possible from the practice of being a journalist — which I think is the exact opposite of what needs to happen if traditional journalism is to survive. And I think Andy Carvin is a pretty good example of what one possible future of real-time, crowdsourced journalism actually looks like.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Luc Legay and personaldemocracy

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Enter Talktala, a NY-based startup that believes it can bring counseling to more consumers with a Web platform that provides anonymity and more affordable prices.

Launched with $650,000 in seed funding from angel investors in New York and Israel, Talktala says it provides a secure online platform for people to join topic-based group therapy sessions led by certified therapists. If users want to remain anonymous, they can participate via text or audio. They also have the option to participate as themselves with Web video.

“In a way, it’s a hybrid between traditional therapy and support groups,” said founder Oren Frank, adding that it’s also like an “introduction” to therapy for the 35 million people that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration estimates could benefit from mental-health treatment but don’t receive it. In the week since its launch, Frank said it has attracted 800 patients and 150 certified therapists.

Because the sessions are split among a handful of people, the price is more affordable than a traditional session for each user, but therapists earn the same amount online as they’d make offline. Most sessions cost $9.99 for an hour, although bigger-name therapists have the option to charge more.

Frank is an advertising executive (formerly global creative officer for MRM Worldwide) and his co-founder wife, Roni Frank, was a software developer before returning to graduate school for psychoanalysis. But they developed the site in consultation with psychologists, including Dr. Irvin D. Yalom, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford and a well-regarded author. The site, which is in beta, isn’t as clean-looking as other design-driven contemporary sites, but it does provide an accessible environment that could attract consumers intimidated by traditional treatment.

Talktala isn’t the first to test a platform for Web-based therapy. In 2009, BreakThrough, an online service that let patients search for certified mental-health professionals and schedule appoints conducted via chat, email, phone or a custom HIPAA-compliant video system, was selected to be part of the TechCrunch50.  According to Angel List, the company has attracted investors such as former PayPal executive Keith Rabois and Invite Media’s Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg and was part of Stanford’s StartX accelerator. For the moment, it only offers therapists in California but has partnered with Blue Shield of California and Magellan.

A recent article in ComputerWorld also documented the rise of Web-based therapy, citing the development of Web video technology, better security and broadband as reasons behind the trend.

The increase in startups that allow professionals in other fields to share their expertise online — such as online course platform Udemy and health network Healthtap that lets doctors answer patient questions online — also suggests some potential for Web-based therapy solutions.

But despite the growing interest in the field, questions still remain. When asked about liability concerns, Frank said the website only works with certified professionals who have information about the patients and a way to reach emergency contacts if they believe a patient is in any immediate danger. But one could imagine that lawsuit-leery professionals might be reluctant to join the site. Consumers might also worry about security and the possibility that their anonymity could be compromised.

Also, consumers already have access to other free mental-health consultations online, such as PsychCentral’s Ask the Therapist service and other online support groups and discussion threads. John Grohol, psychologist and founder of PsychCentral, said it’s unknown how much of a consumer demand there is for tele-psychiatry services that consumer services need to pay for directly. But, he added that Talktala’s lower price point and focus on appealing to everyday people with everyday problems is a move in the right direction.

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The Dawsons, a family of five, created a Kickstarter project last month to raise $30,000 for a series of films aimed at children. The films, called “Clara Tales” were aimed to creating positive, family fare that would inspire kids to create their own work, complete projects associated with the videos or just provide some entertainment. The plan was to make five more and post them all on YouTube with accompanying educational activities.

Why pay for something if you can get it for free?

The first video, posted as part of the pleas for funds, is a well-done story that my own five-year-old loved. She and I watched it, but we didn’t contribute. And that’s part of the problem. Jan Dawson figures that one of the key reasons that the project failed — the family raised $4,727 in pledges — was that people who didn’t contribute would still benefit if others did. From our emailed conversation:

Not to get too nerdy about it, but it’s a classic public good / free rider problem – everybody benefits just the same whether they personally pay for it or not, as long as someone does and it still happens. … This is in stark contrast to some of Kickstarter’s huge success stories, which offered the actual paid product at a discount if you pledged over a certain amount – Kickstarter became simply a channel for pre-orders, and with a popular product that gets you a lot of funding.

He also said that the emotional toll of supporting and monitoring a Kickstarter project was hard. While listing the idea and getting the Kickstarter in place was easy, making the original video to show people what the family was doing, as well as asking friends, family and strangers for money wasn’t something the Dawsons were used to.

What made it hard was that putting yourself out there in this way and repeatedly begging people for money is emotionally draining. We sent countless numbers of emails to friends and family, posted repeated updates on Facebook and Twitter (as you saw) etc. Even though we knew lots of people wanted to pledge, they never quite seemed to get around to it, so that sort of reminding was key. (It’s also made me view our local NPR station’s pledge drives with a little more sympathy!)

Despite their pleas the original Kickstarter closed far short of their goal.

If at first you don’t succeed….

So the family went back to the drawing board, found ways to cut their production costs and came back with another Kickstarter project, this time for $3,000 instead of $30,000. Staying small helped, especially since they had managed to raise more than that the first time around. The second Kickstarter is funded and the family is working on producing more videos. Dawson said that backers from the first project collectively gave the family 90 percent of what they gave us the first time around. Many of the smaller pledges, especially from people the Dawson’s didn’t know, didn’t re-up for the second effort.

Some of the previous contributors pledged larger amounts (perhaps in hopes of seeing this come through) and another $700 or so came from new backers, some who were strangers to the Dawsons. The first project attracted 75 backers while the second raised more and had 69. The Dawsons managed to get some publicity for their efforts thanks to getting a few parenting blogs to pick up the project, but neither of them are some kind of Ze Frank or Louis CK- level of celebrity.

So a few possible lessons one can draw from the Dawsons’ experience is that funding a Kickstarter is possible for anyone — it just requires a willingness to ask people for money. Freeloaders exist on Kickstarter as they do everywhere, so offering an actual product or more tangible rewards might help someone doing a public project get the pledges he or she needs.

And finally, if the first project doesn’t work, maybe your second one will.

For more on the Kickstarter phenomenon see Om’s epic interview with Co-founder Perry Chen.

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The FCC has designated 40 megahertz in the 2.3 GHz frequency band for short-range, wideband transmission within medical facilities and homes. The idea is that cumbersome instruments and their accompanying cords can be replaced with lightweight, disposable sensors, allowing patients more freedom of movement as well as hospitals to keep their patients constantly monitored no matter where they happen to be.

While using the radio waves to assist in monitoring and caring for patients isn’t a new phenomenon, this is the first a government has specifically designated a band specifically for this kind of body area medical telemetry. According to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski it will allow medical device makers to consolidate many of the technologies they have developed on wide array on unlicensed or multi-use frequencies into a single medical band.

“This creative use of spectrum provides wireless health manufacturers with the certainty they need to streamline their product development, which for many years operated on a variety of frequencies,” Genachowski said. “I expect it will eventually lead to technologies not just for health care facilities, but also for inhume use.”

The allocation is also significant because the band isn’t exclusive to medical devices. Health sensors will have to share it with its original occupant, commercial test pilots. With the cooperation of the Department of Defense and the governments spectrum manager the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the FCC hammered out a way to divvy up the spectrum by use case, allowing the health care industry to use it within the confines of the home and the aeronautics industry to use it in the skies above.

It’s an interesting development as the government is starting to get serious about the idea of sharing spectrum between government and commercial uses. The NTIA is proposing that mobile operators and the government agencies split time on the next big block of spectrum identified for mobile broadband use. The wireless industry isn’t exactly hot on the idea, though it has pledged to work with the government.

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That, Intuit Senior VP of Big Data, Social Design and Marketing Nora Denzel told me, was the reaction of one of her co-workers after getting a view of her personal finances using Mint.com. Company bias aside, the story is telling of how individuals might expect to directly benefit from analytics today. Large companies use big data techniques as methods to simultaneously increase revenue and save operating costs, but the most-direct benefit to consumers is usually a targeted advertisement or a list of possible social networking connections. That’s pretty lame. A consumer service that actually cares about your bottom line…? Well, that’s something.

“Data for delight”

That’s what Denzel says Mint is, and it’s able to be that because Intuit collects a lot of data on more than 5 million Mint users. Intuit calls it “data for delight.” The service becomes about more than just tracking your spending, but becomes a tool for comparison. Users can compare their financial situations to others who are similarly situated by demographic, geography or other factors. The service can tell users how much money they’d save by switching to a new credit card or refinancing their mortgages.

Nora Denzel

“The [alerts users] really dig is when we give them personalized information,” Denzel said, comparing Mint to her ink-ordering printer that saves her trips to the office supply store. “At least someone in this house is helping me.”

And let’s say you’re more than one person — let’s say five people running a small business — Intuit has you covered there, as well. Small business owners often have little insight  into the broader market, because they lack the tools, knowledge, and time to collect and analyze the relevant data. “You’re running a race and you have no idea where are,” is how Denzel explains the situation.

However, while many small business owners might never have heard of Hadoop, Voldemort or other big data technologies, Intuit has. And it uses them, Denzel said. Its data store is growing exponentially as it collects more data on users from a growing number of sources. “We call it big data for the little guy,” Denzel said.

For example, a flower shop that uses QuickBooks or any of Intuit’s small-business services can compare its finances to other flower shops in the same city or elsewhere based data gathered from Intuit’s more than 4 million small-business customers. Or the flower shop could be alerted in real-time that it’s about to pay too much for new packing supplies because Intuit’s system has spotted other businesses buying the same thing for less elsewhere.

“Data for decision-making”

But before you can delight anyone with data, you first have to attract and maintain customers. That’s why, Denzel said, about half of Intuit’s big data effort goes toward marketing and social media engagement, and why she has such a unique job title. Marketing especially is a blend of art and science, she explained: “No offense to Mad Men, but it’s all tested now.”

Although “the last mile is always humans,” Denzel said Intuit continuously tests everything from ads to product design to find out what’s working best for customers. After decades in the industry, one of the biggest — and most-humbling — changes she’s seen thanks to big data is that “we’ve outsourced product management to consumers.” If your experience tells you something should work but customers don’t respond, you’re wrong.

Notice the fourth tweet down.

On the social media front, Denzel said Intuit is adamant about monitoring and analyzing social data, as well as about engaging with customers. Sentiment analysis and data mining can tell a company a lot what consumers are saying or feeling about the brand, but they can also help the company meet customer expectations. Denzel said if a customer complains on Twitter, that person expects a response from the company (it’s “their Batphone to your company”). And if they complain on Twitter and then are forced to call, they expect the customer service agent to know how the situation has escalated.

“The chief communications officer is now the chief listening officer,” Denzel said. (I assume Intuit is doing plenty of listening thanks to Friday morning’s outage for QuickBooks Online.)

And Intuit is listening. Last week, I explained how LivePerson uses predictive models to help decide when website visitors might need to engage in live chat with a customer service representative. It turns out Intuit is a LivePerson customer and actually uses text from chats to make Intuit customer service even better.

Denzel said Intuit feeds that data into Hadoop, which lets it determine certain words and phrases that suggest a customer is going to stop using an Intuit product. When those phrases pop up in future chats, a customer might get transferred to the best-available agent; if they’re used on some public forum, that customer might get a call. As with most things big data, an unexpected phone call might be a little bit creepy at first, but it’s probably less so if the problem actually gets resolved and both parties get what they want.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user val lawless.

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