Gabe was presenting at The Next Web 2012 conference held in April in Amsterdam. But what he talked about in this presentation was gaming, game theory and ways in which his audience could think about the accelerating shift in task/achievement/reward and how profound gaming is in making that happen.

I’ve written in the past about gaming here and follow people like this guy, a Northwestern University professor named Dr. Tae, who has publicly wondered Can Skateboarding Save Our Schools?, and I’m sold. Now I am wondering how long it will take before people understand how to create work, tasks, and achievement all wrapped up in to what Zichermann says is essentially the magic three: Feedback. Friends. Fun.

Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean:

An executive from Sony said Monday that concerns about Comcast’s discriminatory data cap are giving the firm second thoughts about launching an Internet video service that would compete with cable and satellite TV services. In March, Comcast announced that video streamed to the Xbox from Comcast’s own video service would be exempted from the cable giant’s 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap.

Oops…we've gone over the 250GB 'cap' for the last 3 months! (Click for larger view)

I am growing SO weary of the obvious control Comcast is leveraging in order to protect their own cable TV franchise. Here are posts I’ve written about this in the past, pointing out how Comcast is a monopoly and how the 250GB ‘cap’ is there to ensure Comcast can deliver their video services and keep out competition. Any other explanation I’ve heard from Comcast or others to the contrary is a load of crap.  

As you can see from the Comcast Customer Central image to your right, my household has exceeded the Comcast 250GB cap three months in a row. Are we going to get shut down like this guy? Maybe (especially after this post). The kicker is that Comcast has always classified households like ours as “excessive use“.

I do spend a lot of money with Comcast every month: home TV; home internet; the quite fast business class 50/10 DOCSIS 3 service in my own firm. I also evangelize Comcast’s business class service to others and also run a Minnesota tech site called Minnov8 that would certainly serve as one helluva bully pulpit should I get cut off.

Fortunately I’m certain we’re atypical in our data use in our area. Comcast states on that excessive use page that, “We contact customers who have repeatedly exceeded the threshold in geographic areas where those excessive users are, or could, negatively impact the experience of other customers in their area.” It’s unlikely we’re causing issues for anyone within our network subnet so hopefully we’re safe.

How can we possibly consume so much data? We’ve got a lot of tech that consumes data with smartphones, tablets, laptops, and devices (e.g., AppleTVs, a TiVo box and a Sony Playstation) which stream Netflix. Since we’re avid users of on-demand streaming — and have always found Comcast’s on-demand streaming and access to it a joke — we use what our family considers best-of-breed services. 

With Sony, Netflix and possibly Apple (rumors about them shipping a TV) lining up to battle with Comcast over equal access to the network, I’m really hoping Comcast gets forced to be network neutral. Otherwise we’ll all be relegated to their less-than-good services. Or, as the old joke from the 1990s went about the former monopoly Microsoft vs. Apple, “If it hadn’t been for the Macintosh user interface being invented, we’d all still be using a command line MS-DOS.“

Increasingly social apps like Socialcam, Spotify, Google Play and most others have set, as a default if you connect your Facebook or Twitter accounts, to go ahead and auto-post EVERYTHING the app does to your Facebook news feed! The result is a steady stream of stuff I don’t care to read or to see from an accelerating number of friends and family who are starting to use these social apps.

Socialcam's Facebook settings (click for larger view)

This morning my sister commented under a rant I did within Facebook (imploring people to go in to app settings and to please disable auto-posting to Facebook) and she pointed out she was seeing EVERYTHING posted from my Socialcam app. 

Sigh.

So I went in to Socialcam’s settings on Facebook and discovered that these were set by default:

• + Add your Facebook friends’ videos to your feed
• + Publish my Socialcam actions (Follow, Like and Comment) to Facebook
• + Publish videos I watch to Facebook.

Seriously? I kicked myself for not having taken more time when installing Socialcam — which I’d done some time ago but then deleted in favor of using another app called Klip but reinstalled it when so many of my friends started using it — and didn’t spend any time deciding what I’d allow the app to do and not do.

My bad.

The bummer is that this sort of “auto connecting” to Facebook is “EVERYONE’s bad” and newbies (or the masses who, for the most part, are not tech-savvy or aware) will quickly make Facebook more of a cluttered and horrible user experience as these “social apps” are adopted by them in droves. 

Though these default setups by social apps are undoubtedly making it easier for an app to go viral — it’s exactly what Instagram did and look at what happened to them — the result is that more and more people are becoming really agitated about this practice (like me) and will either have to go in to each app settings to find ways to turn the damn things off, or they’ll just delete the app…

…or slow their use of Facebook or delete their account altogether.

The hopeful image of active, fit and healthy seniors is, at best, a myth.

My sisters and I are helping our 86 year old father “age in place” as best he can by staying in his home. With even cursory analysis, it’s pretty clear there won’t be anywhere near enough capital to build assistive living or nursing home facilities to accomodate the huge pending influx of aging baby boomers, over 70 million of whom started retiring in January of 2011 and will do so through 2029.

When you add to that the real possibility that these oldster’s life expectancy is expected to rise as well, and it certainly appears we have an impending crisis on our hands. As you’ll see below, I argue that the enormity of this population of aging boomers represents quite a market opportunity for technological, community, societal and financial support solutions to alleviate that crisis and make money to boot! 

 TECHNOLOGICAL

Since tech is my focus, that’s where my thoughts go immediately. When I wrote, Elderly Need Super-Simple, Phone-like Skype it was clear that this amazing technology could go a long way to enable aging in place and keep seniors connected with friends and loved ones.

My horizons have been raised dramatically as I’ve searched for, and implemented, several solutions for my Dad. From an auto-dialer for his phone so he can alert my sisters and I by pushing a button on the pendant he wears around his neck, to Wifi in his house for connectivity of devices, I can easily see how in-home healthcare support devices could really help seniors with remote montoring solutions like these and others.

Providing these sorts of products to seniors, adapting mobile devices (and their applications) to a population whose eyesight is diminished, is a huge opportunity.

 COMMUNITY

With services like this non-profit grocery shopping service and innovative solutions like the Village Movement or several initiatives outlined on this PBS website for caregivers, there are an almost overwhelming number of choices available. Like most of these sorts of grass-roots solutions to an increasing problem like a rapidly aging population, there appears to be no true leadership organization and a dizzying array of redundancy as many of their services and approaches overlap one another.

Whenever startups and innovators look at inefficiencies and redundancies — and costs that can be radically reduced through technological applications and solutions — means we see new innovations abound. 

 SOCIETAL

One of the key trends we’ve identified in our home furnishings industry trend business is the increasing shift away from exurbs and suburbs and back to urban areas. One of the terms coined by others describes the choices many Millenials are making when choosing their first home: Place Over Space.

The desire to be closer to amenities (e.g., art museums, clubs, restaurants) is a much stronger pull for them vs. having a bigger house and large yard. The New York Times had this article about the death of the “exurb”, those bedroom communities outside the city core and its suburbs. 

The benefit to aging in place seniors, many of whom have remained in their homes built decades earlier, is the revitalizing of neighborhoods and new energy brought in. Add to that easier access to transportation, shopping, and reductions in costs, and you can see why there will be a continued migration to urban and close-in suburban housing.

 FINANCIAL

No question the global economic meltdown in 2008 destroyed a lot of the net worth seniors had built up. An article in The Futurist blog discusses Why Baby Boomers Will Have a Troubled Retirement:

While the first Baby Boomer turned 65 in 2011, the median Boomer (born in 1955) turns 65 in 2020, and the last ones turn 65 in 2029, which indicates that their big harvesting of Social Security and Medicare from the government has not even begun yet.  Given rising life expectancies, the peak years of Boomer harvesting will be 2015-2035 or so, which means that a huge level of withdrawals are anticipated for this 20-year window.  

But alas, someone got to the goodies first.  This chart from Carpe Diem shows how US Federal Debt went from 65%  of GDP in 2008 to almost 100% today.  That 35-point rise was supposed to be consumed by Boomers seeking to finance their retirement, but now, with debt already so high well before Boomers can get their, the future payouts to Boomers have been crowded out.  There is certainly no room for another 35-point rise in Federal Debt as a percentage of GDP (credit downgrades and a capital exodus would happen long before debt could ever reach 135% of GDP), and given that the big debt spike began in 2009, it appears that President Obama and the Democrat Senate have already expended the funds that were supposed to sustain the Boomers.

THAT is why assisting seniors with efficient means to save money will be in high demand. So many have landlines, for example, that cost them approximately $40 per month in addition to their TV and internet bills. There are Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions that could be delivered to seniors that would cost just a few dollars (e.g., a Skype cordless phone with an included 200 minutes or, after that’s exhausted, a trivial $3/month subscription for unlimited calling in North America).

Services to monitor their vital signs — with automatic notifications to a caregiver, clinic or doctor — could easily reduce the cost or lost time caregiver cost for office visits and other sometimes wasteful healthcare visits.

All that said, there are so many possibilities that any entrepreneur wanting to build a sustainable company might like to focus on this growing baby boomer retiree market opportunity instead of how to make the next Instagram and make $1 Billion. 

“Though sometimes elaborate and painstakingly crafted, 99% of the April Fools jokes on tech/geek sites and blogs are simply not funny. Even my grandma wouldn’t crack a smile, and she’ll even let out a chuckle when my toddler farts,” explained internationally renowned comedian and SGYAFJAUL spokesman, Dward Farquard.

Dward Farquard

From Google’s “Gmail Tap” spoof (one that clearly cost some dough to produce the associated video) to Techcrunch’s “Google’s Sergey Brin To Retire: “I’m Really Into Blues Guitar” (one of several unfunny posts at Techcrunch on this April Fools day) the geeks are making Farquard’s point.

“Year after year I hope for some post that would cause the corners of my mouth—anyone’s mouth—to turn upwards just a tiny bit with amusement,” said Farquard with some disgust, “But not ONE comedian I know has even cracked a smile with April Fools jokes online in years.”

Farquard continued, “My comedian bretheren and I, when we connected on a global Google Hangout last week for SGYAFJAUL, were all shuddering at the thought of yet another April Fools day and lame attempts at humor. Our only consolation? That we certainly will NEVER be out of a job and thank God every one of us in SGYAFJAUL is far funnier while sleeping than geeks are awake.”

Asked what he’d be doing on a Sunday April Fools day instead of catching up with all the latest tech news, Farquard looked at this reporter with a “Doh!” look and said, “Grandma’s coming over and we’ll listen to my toddler farting.“

As someone who is very active in tech coverage within Minnesota at a site I run with three others called Minnov8, I am constantly challenged to get logged on to event or public Wifi in order to liveblog or tweet during events. Too often all the Wifi slots are used up by other attendees, the “press” Wifi is overloaded, and filing stories or delivering social media content is incredibly frustrating.

Whether it is being at some event at the Minneapolis Convention Center for the Minnesota High Tech Association Spring Conference, the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association annual event at the Minneapolis Hilton, or even interviewing some startup or technology leader during any given week at their offices, having a connection I can count on is an imperative. 

Fortunately the Verizon LTE connection has been both reliable and fast since I set up my new account on the iPad on March 16th. So fast that the following Monday I challenged my buddy and his new iPad with AT&T “4G” to a test while we were in a restaurant for breakfast. In the exact same location he achieved just over 1mbps download with his AT&T’s so-called 4G HSDPA and my download speed was 10 TIMES THAT at just over 10mbps. Wow. 

I’ve already used that speed to engage the Verizon LTE personal tethering capability in order to use my laptop when I had a client emergency and had to use the tools I had on my Macbook Air to take care of it. The week after I’d setup my new iPad I was on the road and got a call from a client with a big problem. Realizing I was 20 minutes from the office I thought, “Hey! I’ll pull over and connect through tethering on my new iPad and take care of my client’s problem right now.” In less than 10 minutes I’d pulled over, logged on with my laptop, fired up the software I needed, fixed the problem, and emailed my client that all was well. Right there the service cost of $30/month for 2GB paid for itself many times over in goodwill.

Here’s the frosting-on-the-cake for me though: security. The stakes are going up quickly as more and more of us are always on and always connected with our mobile devices, logging in to all our online services and sharing much through social media. As such, those of us in-the-know realize how vulnerable we all are and that we need to ensure we are as safe and secure as possible while online.

Firefox, the open source web browser, has a plugin architecture. One plugin, called Firesheep, makes it trivial to view passwords and logins in public Wifi networks.

I cannot tell you how often I talk with people in public Wifi locations and they are logging on to email, Facebook, Twitter and other sites WITHOUT ANY SECURITY! When the Firefox plugin called Firesheep appeared, making it trivial to “sniff” passwords flying through the air, I truly thought the availability of that plugin and its ease-of-use would scare people in to taking action to protect themselves while in a public Wifi location. It hasn’t. To learn more about how treacherous Firesheep is see, “Firesheep Firefox Add-On Hijacks Twitter, Facebook Over Wi-Fi“. 

LTE (i.e., 3GPP Long Term Evolution) is a technology that provides enhanced security through strong mutual authentication, user identity confidentiality, along with several other security technologies. Though no communication technology is completely secure or immune to compromise, I am significantly more comfortable logging on to my email, social, banking or shopping sites using my Verizon LTE connection than I am doing so within some coffee shop or other public Wifi network!

Only one downside to this whole adventure with the new iPad and the Verizon LTE however: I’m carrying the new iPad with me virtually everywhere I go and it’s really tough to jam in to my pants pocket!

Sick with the flu one weekend this past January I’d gone to bed early on a Sunday night only to be awakened by two back-to-back text messages arriving on my iPhone at about 2am. Having been in the internet/web industry since its beginning in the mid-1990s, I instantly recognized the potential for charges from this scammer so I sat up, grabbed my iPad, and started poking around to see if either the message identifier (the “318-50″ in the screengrab below) or the toll-free 866-861-1606 number was an active scam.

I was stunned to learn it is a scam and even ignoring the message meant my account would be charged $9.99 PER MONTH! 

Based upon the sheer volume of complaints I found during my searching online shows that this scam is rampant, apparently is seeing little-to-no preemptive action on the part of the wireless carriers, and many, many mobile users are being charged monthly fees. This fraud is commonly known as cramming.

I am writing this post for the express purpose of bringing this issue to your attention. If *I* can get scammed (and I am VERY cautious, careful and savvy about online scams and still don’t know how my number was discovered) I can only guess how pervasive this is and that it appears the carriers are likely complicit in perpetuating these cramming scams since they apparently receive 30% of all subscription fees collected..

What is this scam and what can you do? 

THE SCAM

This is a mobile SMS (text message) scam which automatically subscribes the user to a monthly plan, in my case a $9.99 one as you can see from the screenshot to your left. What’s curious is that many people on several complaint forums I discovered recommended replying “STOP” to cancel since that would be an explicit opt-out. In my case I didn’t respond (never do to spam) and instead called AT&T Customer Service. The charges were applied anyway which, I now know, is a common cramming practice. AT&T removed the charge and I explicitly requested they place a “subscription or purchase block” under my account for all phones on my family plan. This part of the adventure burned up 45 minutes of my time (and yes, between 2am-3am).

Wide awake now I embarked on a short investigation for another 30 minutes and came across these links to other people who have been victims of cramming from this same provider and have had similar charges:

• 800 Notes, a website for 800# scamming, had these reports
• SMS Watchdog, a website for text scamming, had these reports
• Text Complaints had these reports
• Plus all of these other ones…

…and so on and so on. 

One alleged scammer in Arizona has been called out and the AZ Central paper wrote this article about the company, JAWA. They pointed out that Verizon alone froze $19 million in charges…so I can only imagine the millions JAWA and the aggregators have already raked in, let alone all the other cramming scammers out there:

Lawsuits filed by Verizon Wireless and the Texas attorney general allege that cellphone-applications developer Jawa used shell corporations, false business addresses, websites that did not comply with industry standards and diversionary software to deceive customers to buy its services.

Beyond the lawsuit, Verizon Wireless has taken other business actions. It instructed four companies, known as aggregators, to freeze $19 million in charges for messaging services already provided by Jawa and for which customers already have been billed.

Aggregators, known as mobile-transaction hubs, enable wireless messages to be delivered to a customer and compile and transmit charges to the customer’s carrier.

As it turns out, Verizon kept 30% of the fees collected and passed the other 70% to the aggregators (see this article). Other articles I’ve read say the same thing about all carriers: they keep 30% of the fees. If those fees number in the tens of millions of dollars, one can see why the carriers have zero incentive to be on their customer’s side and proactively terminate these sleazy relationships.

In my cursory search I was unable to learn if there has yet been a resolution to the Eye Level Holdings, LLC. suit by the State of Texas and Verizon. AT&T and Sprint are also investigating them so there might be a resolution that, if JAWA/Eye Level Holdings, LLC is guilty of cramming, puts these guys behind bars and confiscates their assets.

A staffer of Minnesota’s Attorney General, Lori Swanson, has also let me know that the AG’s office has launched an investigation and I’m keeping tabs on their progress. Here is a post I did about their followup on another site I run called Minnov8.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
But as we all know for every scumbag caught there are usually others:

1. Check your mobile phone bill for charges you didn’t authorize 
2. Place a “subscription” or “purchase” block on your account so, even if a crammer gets your mobile number, they cannot include you in their scam by simply sending you a text message
3. If you have been a victim, do the two above and then immediately email or write to your State Attorney General (list here) and then file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission here.

One of my favorite iPad apps is called Zite. As a self-proclaimed news-n-information junkie, I’m always on the hunt for better and more powerful ways to stay on top of trends. In the past I’ve trolled my 300+ RSS feeds in Google Reader, but increasingly am using “aggregation” apps like Zite to do the heavy lifting for me. It’s a bonus that skimming/reading/trolling for news and information with an app like Zite is A LOT more enjoyable than in a simple news reader.

I was having challenges with one aspect of Zite though: for some reason articles I was saving to Instapaper for later (or offline) reading weren’t being saved. Since remembering where a piece of news or info came from is increasingly difficult in today’s “drinking from a firehose of information” world, this non-saving was a deal-killer for me with Zite.

Figuring that support for a free app like Zite would be either marginally or non-responsive to my concern, was I ever pleasantly surprised with what took place!  

Zite is a "+" app so it runs on both iPhone and iPad

When I reached out to Zite support I was delighted to hear back quickly from Zite’s community manager, Brian Bejarano. He looked in to the issue and we went back-n-forth in email a few times over two days. He finally recommended a fix of doing a quick ‘save to Instapaper’ of a Zite article but immediately logging out when the box popped up for a very brief time, and then relogging in to Instapaper and saving again.

It worked! I’m back to saving to Instapaper. The result? I’d begun to use Flipboard more and more since I could save to Instapaper, but Brian’s continued followup kept me using Zite. While Flipboard is more eye-candy-attractive than Zite, the underlying Zite algorithms is what is their ‘secret sauce’. As they say in their FAQ: “Zite is the first news reader to go beyond manual customization and make use of more powerful technology to provide an individually personalized experience. Your days of wasting time sifting through bad information are over.“

My only wish now is that more and more of the apps on iOS and Android followed Zite’s example of strong community management. As many before me have said, “support is the new marketing” and the only way to build buzz, sustain positive word of mouth about an app, is through taking care of people as they use your app and interact with your company.

Well done Brian and smart support Zite.

This is my favorite photo from our wedding, standing outside Westminster Presbyterian in downtown Minneapolis moments after we got hitched (is the pressure-release evident? Was to us!).

My pal, Pete Gisselbeck, not only drove our “limo” (his Dad’s Lincoln Town Car) but he was an accomplished amateur photographer and grabbed lots of keeper shots that night…like this one. He also took a bunch of pictures, made a little photo album, and placed hilarious (but sometimes derogatory and nasty) captions underneath them. Therefore I couldn’t show them to my tiny, petite and darlingly straight-laced Grandma afterwards!

Happy Valentine’s Day Michelle Lamb.

WCCO-TV was the leader in the Twin Cities market and Dave Moore was a very serious, accomplished and trusted news anchor. This was in the day when the evening TV news — both national and local — were must-watch TV and just about everyone did. As such, someone like Dave Moore had quite a stature in the Twin Cities so having him perform such a loose, goofy and humorous rendition of TV news was amazing and a magnet for all ages.

Here is a special which WCCO’s heir to the Dave Moore throne, the now retired Don Shelby, hosts and is a fun look at the Bedtime Nooz. Worth a watch if you’re old enough and even if you never saw it: