I was pretty slow about getting around to reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. The career-capping book by Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, spent months on all the bestseller lists back in 2011. I finally picked up a paperback copy a couple of weeks ago.

The book is mainly about the limits of intuition and the biases—seemingly built into the way the human mind has evolved—that keep us from acting in accord with logic, rationality, and statistics. For example, the “anchoring effect” means we’re highly suggestible when it comes to numbers and prices. No matter how much soup they really want, grocery-store customers buy more when there’s a sign saying “Limit 12 cans per customer.”

It was Kahneman’s studies of such impulses that won him a Nobel Prize in economics in 2002. Together with Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler, and many others, Kahneman overturned economists’ old picture of society as a mathematical utopia in which individuals act rationally to maximize their own utility. Thinking, Fast and Slow is a lengthy, detailed, yet approachable summary of that revolution. You’ve probably seen or read popular behavioral-economics boks like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics or Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational; those are like sugary desserts next to Kahneman’s protein-packed tome.

As I absorbed Kahneman’s points about all the ways human judgment breaks down under various stresses and distractions, I couldn’t help looking for lessons that might apply to the high-tech circus we insiders sometimes call, in a self-congratulatory way, the “innovation ecosystem.” By which I mean the researchers and developers who incubate new technologies inside universities, corporate labs, and garages; the entrepreneurs who turn these new ideas into products; the angel and venture investors who place bets on the entrepreneurs; and the eager customers who fuel the whole process.

And such lessons abound. Indeed, entrepreneurs, executives, and investors are prone to so many kinds of errors that they almost seem to be Kahneman’s favorite subspecies of homo economicus. In the end, I think Kahneman’s observations about bias lead to a big puzzle about the nature of entrepreneurship and technological progress. But before I get into that, I’ll relate a few examples from the book—each one richly supported by the psychological experiments and surveys conducted by Kahneman and his colleagues over the last three decades:

1. The illusion of understanding: If we can fit past events into a satisfying story, we think we understand what really happened, and we can’t imagine things turning out any other way. Here Kahneman cites the example of Google, which was started by two Stanford graduate students who lucked into one of the biggest untapped markets in the history of business (i.e, search-based advertising) and came out looking like invincible geniuses. In fact, there were numerous points at which Google’s story could have taken a drastically different turn—such as 1999, when Page and Brin were willing to sell the company for $1 million but the buyer thought the price was too high. But luck took them in a different direction. “A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability,” Kahneman observes.

2. Outcome bias: Closely related to the illusion of understanding, this is the tendency to reward or blame decision makers for the performance of their organizations, even though the correlation between leadership quality and corporate performance is generally low. “We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact,” Kahneman writes. “Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak.”

3. The illusion of pattern: Kahneman thinks we’re far too willing to ascribe meaning to events that are the product of pure chance. A basketball player who sinks three or four baskets in a row is seen as having a “hot hand,” and a CEO who oversees several successful product launches or acquisitions acquires a reputation for extraordinary insight or skill when in fact, like Page and Brin, he was probably just fortunate. “We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random,” Kahneman warns.

4. Nonregressive explanations: An outstanding performance is likely to be followed by a mediocre performance. This isn’t backsliding: it’s usually just regression to the mean, the tendency of variables to gravitate around a historical average. The concept is well established, but because we’re hard-wired to seek causal rather than statistical explanations, we have a hard time accepting it. One corollary is that we shouldn’t punish a company that fails to follow up a stellar product with an even more stellar one (the iPad and its regrettable sequel, the iPad mini, come to mind). Another is that all extreme predictions are unreliable; we shouldn’t believe any entrepreneur who says his company is the next Google.

5. The illusion of validity, also known as the illusion of skill: We’re strongly influenced by the world in front of our eyes, and unwilling to admit that there’s much we don’t know—a phenomenon that Kahneman calls WYSIATI, for What You See Is All There Is. As a result, we come to believe—sometimes fiercely—that our own predictions are accurate, even when it wouldn’t take much digging to show that they’re little better than … Next Page »

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Consumer Reports, the nation’s most respected source of product reviews and buying advice, does not mince words about extended warranties. It calls them a bad idea and money down the drain. The website Consumerist agrees, calling extended warranties useless and usually a bad deal.

So why on earth would you consider shelling out an extra $50 to $150 for a couple of extra years of warranty coverage on your new appliance, computer, or mobile gadget?

Well, dear reader, try to suspend your cynicism for a moment while I tell you about a 200-employee company in San Francisco called SquareTrade, which works with bricks-and-mortar chains like Costco and TigerDirect and e-retailers like Amazon, eBay, and Buy.com to offer protection plans for laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other electronics.

Steve Abernethy, the company’s energetic CEO, says he’s well aware of the extended-warranty industry’s dreadful reputation. But he thinks SquareTrade has a shot at salvaging it, mainly by offering broader coverage and better service at lower prices.

He also has some interesting thoughts about the physical and financial risks we’re taking as we become ever more inseparable from our smartphones and tablets. Sure, the chances that your new Frigidaire will conk out within the warranty period may be tiny. But what about that $700 chunk of glass and integrated circuits that you’re carrying in your pocket? How sure are you that you can go three years without accidentally sitting on it or dropping it in the toilet? (It happens more often than you might think.)

I’m not saying SquareTrade has won me over, and I haven’t bought extended warranties for any of my own devices. But I’ll say this: I went into a recent interview with Abernethy as a hardened warranty skeptic. I came out thinking that the industry might be changing, and that buying an extended warranty might be a good idea for some people.

Steve Abernethy, co-founder and CEO of SquareTrade

To start, Abernethy knows why people are suspicious about extended-warranty offers. He acknowledges that it’s been “a business done poorly, with a fundamentally flawed business model.”

You can file most of the historic problems with extended warranties under lack-of-transparency. To start, it’s hard to make an informed decision about buying a warranty, since they’re usually pitched at the point of sale, when customers tend to be hurried, and it’s difficult to inspect the fine print or research alternatives. It’s also hard to predict whether your new $200 microwave oven will go kaput in the next two years, and therefore, whether a $50 two-year extended warranty pencils out.

On top of that, it’s often tricky to figure out who’s actually behind a warranty offer. Companies like Apple and Dell have their own protection plans. But the warranties that many big-box stores sell under their own brand names actually come from third-party providers; the stores essentially buy the plans wholesale and mark up the price.

This outside provider is the company you’ll have to talk to if you ever need to get an item repaired or replaced. In the gadget sector, the largest warranty provider is Nashville, TN-based Asurion, which might just be the biggest company nobody has ever heard of. It works with Walmart, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, among others. In 2010, it reported $3.8 billion in revenue.

Then there’s the claims experience. If your laptop, TV, or tablet shorts out, it’s often difficult to get definitive word about whether or when it will get fixed or replaced. That’s assuming you were even able to dig up your receipt and your warranty papers before you called in your claim. (Abernethy says other warranty providers count on a certain level of “breakage,” i.e., customers who are entitled to file claims but forget they even bought a warranty, or don’t have the documents to prove it.)

These kinds of flaws and frustrations are exactly what attracted SquareTrade to the warranty business in the first place, says Abernethy. He co-founded the company in 1999 with fellow Harvard Business School alum Ahmed Khaishgi.

Up to 2006, the company was in a completely different field: mediation and dispute resolution for buyers and sellers on eBay. When it turned out that there wasn’t much demand for that service outside the auction site, Abernethy and his team started looking for other sectors where … Next Page »

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My car is probably the dumbest machine I own. It’s a 2000 Honda Accord, meaning it’s got none of the cool in-dash electronics found in today’s latest models, like the MyFord Touch entertainment system from Ford, the OnStar safety and navigation system from GM, or the iDrive computer system from BMW.

But what I do have is a state-of-the-art smartphone, an Apple iPhone 5, with 33 million times as much memory as the Apollo 11 flight computer. Why can’t I just use my phone to monitor my car’s vital functions?

For that matter, why does Detroit even bother to put fancy electronics in cars, when blazing-fast product cycles in the mobile world mean that even the slickest car infotainment system is going to look outdated within a year or two?

Those are exactly the same questions that Automatic Labs is asking. The San Francisco startup makes a $70 Bluetooth gadget, the Automatic Link, that plugs into the onboard data port found in every gasoline-engine car made since 1996. From there, it beams data about engine performance to your iPhone, where it’s collected and displayed inside Automatic’s app.

The free app monitors your speed, braking, fuel consumption, and other factors, and gives you feedback about your driving habits that the company says can lead to “huge savings” on gas. You can even use it to control your car’s onboard computer—for example, you can turn off that pesky “check engine” light that probably came on the last time you left your gas cap loose.

The big idea is to connect your car to the powerful computing device in your pocket and give you the data you need to be a better, more efficient driver. (And to keep you safe: there’s an accelerometer inside the Link that can detect when you’ve been in an accident and automatically alert 911 operators.)

But don’t let me prattle on—it’s far easier to watch this video of my recent test drive with Ljuba Miljkovic, chief product officer at Automatic.

That short, 7.5-mile drive around San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood took 45 minutes (we talked a lot along the way) and burned $1.62 worth of gas, according to the Automatic app. How did it know that? By multiplying our miles driven by the fuel efficiency data from the Toyota Corolla’s computer, then grabbing local gas-station price data from the Web.

You may have noticed the chirp from the app when Miljkovic deliberately came to a screeching stop at the corner of Carolina and Mariposa, at 2:28 in the video. (The rough braking probably cost him a few tenths of a point on his Automatic driving score, but hey, that’s part of his job.) That’s one example of the mild audio admonishments Automatic users get for driving inefficiently. If we’d accelerated too fast or driven faster than 70 miles per hour—both gas-wasters—the app would have chirped again.

The driving score, which is displayed once you park, gives a running assessment of your frugality. People who keep their scores in the 90s can reduce their yearly fuel costs by as much as $1,000, according to the company. (As an added bonus, the app automatically logs your location when you park, in case you’re the kind of person who can never remember where you left your car.)

Here’s the trip summary for our test drive:

Automatic's record of my test drive around San Francisco's Potrero Hill

If these screen shots remind you of the jogging maps and calorie counts you get with a fitness app like RunKeeper or Runmeter, it’s not a total coincidence. You might think of Automatic as one harbinger of a “quantified car” movement paralleling the quantified self craze. Now that our phones have become so powerful—able to communicate with many different kinds of sensors, and full of sensors of their own—it makes sense that they’re becoming the information hubs for all of our daily activities, from exercising to eating to driving.

A few background details: Automatic was co-founded in 2011 by Jerry Jariyasunant, a former BAE Systems software engineer who went back to school at Berkeley to get a PhD in civil engineering, and Thejo Kote, a mobile entrepreneur whose previous company used SMS messages to keep people up to date about water utilities in urban India. The company was part of the Summer 2011 class at the Y Combinator startup accelerator in Mountain View, CA, but operated in secret for an extended period while it raised venture backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund and worked out design and manufacturing issues.

The company finally came out of stealth mode this March and began taking pre-orders for the Link device, which is expected to begin shipping in May. (If you haven’t ordered one already, you’ll have to wait until July.) The app is iPhone-only for now, though an Android version should be ready later this year.

As Miljkovic says in the video, one of Automatic’s goals is to increase driver efficiency on a large scale—that’s why the startup chose a simple business model, selling the Link for a flat $70 rather than making customers sign up for some complex subscription service.

If you’re looking for a way to help millions of people save gas, there’s probably no better way than to turn the devices they’re already carrying into driving coaches. As Miljkovic says: “Small changes, if we all do our part, can have a really large impact.”

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When you hear people in the tech world talking about “consumerization,” they’re usually referring to complex business software that’s been overhauled to look and feel more like personal technology. But consumerization is washing over other parts of the software market too.

One of them is professional media creation and editing.

Photoshop is a great example. If you don’t want to drop $700 on the professional version of Adobe’s flagship photo editing program, you can get a $10 version for your iPad that has many of the core features of Photoshop CS 6. Similarly, Autodesk, the maker of 3D design software for engineers and architects, has been busy releasing cheap yet professional-grade mobile apps like the $5 Sketchbook Pro app for Android and iOS.

Overall, it’s astonishing how much power software makers have put into the hands of amateurs over the last few years, while asking a fraction of the prices they charge for their high-end applications. Yes, these consumerized apps come with a few compromises, but they also include user-interface improvements—especially on the tablet versions—that make them a lot easier to use than their full-priced counterparts.

Then there’s the contentious case of Final Cut Pro and iMovie.

Final Cut Pro is Apple’s professional non-linear video editing program. It’s been used to create dozens of major feature films, from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to Eat, Pray, Love and John Carter.

Apple didn’t really need to consumerize Final Cut Pro, since it already had iMovie, a desktop editing program aimed at home videographers. Yet over time, Apple has simplified Final Cut Pro in ways that put it within reach of the amateur. The most drastic overhaul was the introduction of Final Cut Pro X in 2011. Besides remaking the user interface to resemble iMovie, Apple chopped the price for the program from $1,000 to a far more affordable $300.

Media professionals were initially irate about many of the changes, and some longtime Final Cut Pro users defected to competing programs from Avid and Adobe. But Apple has restored many of the features that were missing from the first version of FCPX, such as multi-cam editing. The upshot is that Final Cut Pro is still the leading choice of professional editors.

Now it’s consumers who have a tough decision to make. Let’s say you need to produce a video, and it needs to look good, and/or it’s going to be seen by a lot of people. Should you choose the easy path and use iMovie, or should you take the time to learn FCPX, now that it has a more consumer-friendly price tag?

I’ve shot and edited plenty of my own news-related videos in iMovie. It’s good for short interviews where you just want to give readers a sense of somebody’s personality. (You can check out some of these videos of Doximity’s Jeff Tangney, GiftRocket’s Kapil Kale, and HealthTap’s Ron Gutman.) And iMovie is also a fine choice for people like YouTube personality Shane Dawson. For video bloggers, humor and brevity are paramount, not production values.

My own position on Final Cut Pro has evolved quite a bit. Back in 2011, when Apple released an iPad version of iMovie, I wrote that the app “clears the crucial good-enough bar for anyone doing amateur or even semi-serious videography.” I even wished that iMovie had been available on the iPad a year earlier, in the summer of 2010, when my friend Graham Ramsay and I made a series of videos chronicling our cross-country trip from Boston to San Francisco. We shot those videos on a Canon camcorder and edited them in Final Cut Pro 7, and the technical hassles involved were so major that personally, I would have been happy to sacrifice the control and precision of Final Cut Pro for the ease of shooting and editing entirely in iMovie.

But Graham always disagreed about that. His feeling is that iMovie gives “quick and slick but limited results,” to quote from one of our e-mail debates. And sure enough, when the time came to produce my own video, without Graham’s help, I came around to his point of view. I’m now convinced that the results you can get with Final Cut Pro X or a comparable program such as Adobe Premiere CS6 or Avid Media Composer make the time investment worthwhile.

Here’s what changed my mind. Back in February, when we were getting ready to unveil Xperience—the new consumer section of Xconomy, which you’re reading right now—I decided we needed a 1-minute explainer video for marketing purposes. There are plenty of production studios around San Francisco that specialize in such fare, but Xperience is a lean operation, so I knew I’d need to shoot and edit the video myself.

Once I wrote a script and started storyboarding, it became clear that this video was going to have a lot of moving parts. I wanted to use some old clips from my archives, plus some new shots that I could only get with the zoom lens on my Canon camcorder. I wanted some animated titles. There would have to be … Next Page »

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Phones and food are a match cooked up in heaven. Sometimes it seems as if our mobile gadgets were specifically designed to mesh with our cooking and eating habits.

After all, you don’t lug your desktop or laptop computer with you when you’re going out to a restaurant. When you want to find a great place to eat, or document or share a fantastic meal, your smartphone is the natural tool.

You probably don’t take your computer into the kitchen, either. But it’s the perfect setting for a tablet, which you can use to look up recipes or follow instructional videos.

On top of all that, pictures of food just look great on the high-resolution touchscreens of today’s smartphones and tablets. The mobile revolution has probably done more to boost the “food porn” genre than scores of old cooking shows and magazines.

App builders and publishers are fast coming to understand the fit between food and mobile technology. Here in San Francisco, where I’m based, we’ve seen a ton of activity in the food-tech sector just in the last week, with events like the Food Hackathon and the annual meeting of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, the theme of which was “Dirt to Digital: Real Food in a Virtual World.”

In honor of all that, we’ve put together a visual guide to 15 of our favorite food apps (see the slide show above). Below is a quick list of the apps we’ve included, with price information and links to the iOS and Android versions of each app, where available. Bon appétit!

Appetites | in-app purchases $0.99 to $2.99 | iOS

BigOven | iOS | Android

Epicurious | free | iOS | Android

Evernote Food | free | iOS | Android

Foodily | free | iOS

Foodspotting | free | iOS | Android

Paprika | $4.99 | iOS | Android

Panna | $4.99 per issue | iOS

Sara’s Kitchen | free| iOS

Seamless | free| iOS | Android

Shopwell | free| iOS

Tyler Florence Fresh | $14.99 | iBooks

Urbanspoon | free | iOS | Android

Wolfram Culinary Mathematics | $1.99 | iOS

Yummly | free | Web

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Ten years ago this month, I edited a cover story for MIT’s Technology Review magazine called “Surveillance Nation.” Written by veteran science journalist Charles Mann and network security guru Dan Farmer, the story looked at the state of digital video circa 2003 and envisaged a near future where every home, business, and street would be subject to constant video monitoring. Far from feeling victimized or invaded, Mann and Farmer predicted, consumers would actually ask for this technology. They wrote:

Widespread electronic scrutiny is usually denounced as a creature of political tyranny or corporate greed. But the rise of omnipresent surveillance will be driven as much by ordinary citizens’ understandable—even laudatory—desires for security, control, and comfort as by the imperatives of business and government. “Nanny cams,” global-positioning locators, police and home-security networks, traffic jam monitors, medical-device radio-frequency tags, small-business webcams: the list of monitoring devices already deployed by and for average Americans is already long, and it will only become longer. Extensive surveillance, in short, is coming into being because people like and want it.

A decade on, it’s clear that Mann and Farmer could not have been more right. With nary a backward glance, Americans have bought hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected video cameras and aimed them at checkout counters, baby cradles, living-room couches, and pet kennels across the land. Add to all these stationary cameras our camera phones, dash cams, and sports cams, and there’s hardly a holdup, traffic accident, tremor, or meteor strike that goes unrecorded.

To George Orwell, or even to the average member of pre-9/11 society, this would have been a startling development. But the amount of public hand-wringing heard today over the arrival of ubiquitous surveillance is roughly zero. A few bloggers think Google Glasses are creepy, but a far more common complaint is that they’re deeply unfashionable. The American Civil Liberties Union worries about warrantless wiretapping, but video surveillance isn’t one of the “key issues” listed on its website.

How did this happen? When did we stop worrying and learn to love our surveillance cameras? I’d argue that you can attribute much of the shift to the way a few next-generation security-camera companies have positioned their products—and to a few key technology decisions at these companies that have reduced the risk of privacy disasters.

To find out how one startup has navigated these potentially hazardous shoals, I visited this week with Greg Duffy, the co-founder and CEO of Dropcam. The San Francisco-based company makes a $149 gadget called the Dropcam HD, which connects to your home Wi-Fi network and sends a continuous, high-definition video signal to Dropcam’s cloud servers. You can connect to the servers from any Web browser, iPhone, iPad, or Android device and watch the video in near real time—there’s a delay of a second or two. You can also listen in on the action via the camera’s microphone, and send voice messages back to the camera’s built-in speaker via a push-to-talk feature.

For an extra $10 per month or $100 per year, the company also provides a “cloud DVR” service that stores video for 7 days and lets you save and share the most interesting or important clips, which are automatically highlighted based on movement in the scene. (Think burglars, or perhaps bored pets who’ve decided to shred your important papers while you’re away.)

All in all, it’s the same sort of Internet Protocol-based security video technology that’s been used for years in retail locations, garages, and other public spots. But the video is captured at a higher resolution and a drastically lower price point, and without the hassle of having to store the data on local servers.

Dropcam co-founder and CEO Greg Duffy

The four leading uses for the Dropcam HD, according to Duffy, are home security, child monitoring, pet monitoring, and small-business security. Of course, there are a number of wackier edge cases. More than 100,000 viewers logged on to see video from one boat owner’s Dropcam during Superstorm Sandy. Firefighters have attached the devices to their helmets to help fire chiefs see what’s going on inside burning buildings. One pet-store owner attached a Dropcam to the back of a tortoise, just for fun. In my own case, I used a loaner Dropcam this week to verify that—as I had feared—my dog barks a lot when I’m not home.

Most users leave their Dropcams running all the time, even when they’re home, which means they catch everything people say and do. And I mean everything: in one Dropcam video I saw, a homeowner is absentmindedly scratching his behind just moments before the family cat goes crazy (which turns out to be the cue for an earthquake).

Duffy says he and co-founder Aamir Virani have been thinking and talking about the potential privacy implications of full-time home video monitoring ever since they started the company four years ago. “If you ignore the social issues surrounding the products you create, you are asking for society to use them in a way that you didn’t expect and maybe didn’t want,” Duffy says. He says there are three major protections in place to prevent video from being misused or improperly accessed.

The first is that Dropcam’s site, apps, and cloud DVR are password-protected and private by default. Think of it as the opposite of Facebook or live Web broadcasting services like Justin.tv. “We don’t put the sharing options in your face or make sharing options part of the setup process,” Duffy says. “If you want to share that camera with people in your home, like your spouse, you can do that. If you … Next Page »

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Do you really need a to-do list?

In the age of personal optimization, when books like The 4-Hour Workweek peddle the idea that you could be superhumanly productive if you just had the right tools, the question is almost blasphemous. Of course you need a to-do list. How else are you supposed to know what to work on during that 15-minute gap between practicing your TED talk and going to your CrossFit class?

I’m being sarcastic, of course, but the idea that every busy person should have a to-do list is so baked into our culture that the first Palm Pilot back in 1997 had a button just for that. The fetish lives on in today’s smartphone app stores, where there are literally thousands of list-making and to-do apps to choose from.

Some of these apps are quite nifty, and lists do have a place in our lives. There’s even a book called The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande, which argues that doctors can save lives by adhering to checklists when they see patients. In case you haven’t found a to-do app you like, I’ve listed a few of the best options below. But what I’d really like to do in my first Voice of Xperience column is take a look at the fundamental reasons people use to-do lists. I want to sort the good reasons from the bad, and ask whether there might ultimately be better ways to think about managing our workload and our commitments.

Thoreau once said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” My own attitude boils down to this: beware of all enterprises that require a to-do list. And when you do engage in a project so complex that you have to start a list, don’t let the list itself consume you.

Let’s talk first about the kind of stuff people put on to-do lists. It’s never the actions that would really make a difference in your life—things like “Change careers,” “Finally learn Italian,” “Do something nice for my significant other,” or “Plan for retirement.” Rather, it’s the little stuff you feel like you have to do to meet your day-to-day obligations to your employer or your family. Things like “File expense report,” “Finish PowerPoint deck for Tuesday’s meeting,” and “Buy milk.”

The traditional argument for maintaining a to-do list is that if you don’t get such items out of your head and write them down, you’ll suffer the constant mental stress of trying to remember them. (Psychologists have a name for that: the Zeigarnik effect, the nagging feeling that you’ve left a task incomplete.) You won’t have a “mind like water,” to quote one of productivity guru David Allen’s favorite phrases, and you won’t be ready to focus your full attention on each task.

That’s true, as far as it goes. Unless you have a photographic memory, which nobody really does, you aren’t going to be able to keep your whole grocery list in your head. So by all means, write stuff down. Just be aware that if you only put quotidian tasks on your list, and you spend all your time executing those tasks, you’ll never get anything important done.

Here’s where the to-do list debate smashes into that other “productivity” tool that rules so much of our lives: e-mail. Every time-management system ever invented comes with its own set of dictates about dealing with your e-mail. But almost all of them start with having a separate to-do list—or as many as 43 of them, in the case of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (one for every day of the coming month and every month of the year).

In GTD, emptying your inbox goes like this: Delete the unimportant e-mails. Archive the ones with information you might need later. Act on the requests that can be executed in two minutes or less, then delete those messages too. Translate everything else into an item on a to-do list.

I follow this procedure myself, but I am none too happy about it. Yes, I get a little spurt of dopamine for every e-mail I delete, and a big one when I reach inbox zero. But what have I really accomplished in the end? Nothing, except … Next Page »

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They say it’s better to quit while you’re ahead, and I believe them. It’s easy to see what happens when you don’t. Remember season 7 of The West Wing? The second term of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency? All of the Star Wars prequels?

With precedents like that in mind, I’m shutting down World Wide Wade. This is my final column under that intentionally goofy title. If you are a follower, don’t worry—I’ll be back next week with a new column under a new name. (In fact, next week will be full of surprises here at Xconomy, so stay tuned.) But after five years and 228 columns, it’s time to shake things up a bit.

I started the column for a simple reason. As I wrote back in April 2008, when Xconomy was still focused solely on Boston:

Every week I come across news items, tech trends, and useful gadgets and services that I know Xconomy’s readers would find interesting, but that don’t fit with our usual lineup of hyperlocal news stories about Boston’s innovation scene. To create an outlet for such random finds…we’ve decided to carve out a bit of space for articles that don’t necessarily relate to New England.

Even as Xconomy has expanded far beyond the Northeast, I’ve continued to use this space every Friday to investigate obscure technologies, raise questions no one else seems to be asking, or light up under-appreciated subjects or companies, with a heavy emphasis on the “random.”

To cap things off and provide a map of sorts for interested readers, I thought I’d try to organize the best columns into some clearly labeled buckets. Click around in the lists below, and you’ll get a pretty good sense of the themes I’ve been most obsessed with over the last few years.

The evolution of the World Wide Wade logo

Diagnosing Big Trends

I’ve argued that the Internet encourages introversion (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and written about how the accelerating pace of modern life is actually a good thing. Sometimes the hardware or software we buy keeps getting better even after we bought it; I called that consumer surplus. On the other side of the ledger, I wrote about how technology is taking jobs away. I started a directory of food-tech startups—a category that’s now booming—and wrote about how Internet video is endangering the traditional university.

The Future of Television

I’ve written about how to turn your HDTV into a digital art canvas. I’ve asked whether it makes sense to cut the cord and live without cable TV, and pointed out how the networks and cable companies are holding back innovation. I’ve spent a lot of time with streaming devices like the Roku Player and Apple TV. I’ve covered companies like Dijit Media that hope to change the way people find shows to watch and asked what if your next TV is a tablet? I’ve even reviewed a couple of tech-related TV shows, including The Last Enemy and Fringe.

Desktop, Web, and Mobile Mapping

I’ve covered censorship on Google Maps, and showed how to use online maps to locate abandoned highways. Google Earth has come up several times in the column—I’ve written about the effort to populate it with 3D buildings, tools for contributing your own 3D structures, and how its layers of historical photos can help solve modern-day detective stories. I’ve also written about the sport of geocaching and how you can use your iPhone or your iPad to make it more fun.

E-Books

I panned the first Kindle and talked about what Amazon could do to improve it, then talked about why you shouldn’t buy a Kindle at all, and then promptly bought one myself and fell in love with it. I’ve complained about high e-book prices and talked about how I published my first Kindle e-book (a compendium of World Wide Wade columns called Pixel Nation) and why it’s dumb for authors to keep their e-books off Amazon. I covered Vook’s multimedia e-books. I’ve talked about how some e-books make poor use of the iPad and others look fantastic. I’ve written about the e-textbook wars in education circles and speculated that schools are Apple’s real target with the iPad mini.

Media for Learning

I’ve waxed elegaic about the golden age of multimedia CD-ROMs in the 1990s, the bounty of free course material at iTunes U, and several cool educational tools from Microsoft, including Project Tuva and the World Wide Telescope. I’ve written several times about TouchPress, a UK-based publisher of iPad apps that may yet bring back the golden age.

Digital Photography

I’ve explored the new vogue for camera phone photography, the rise of HDR photography, and how you can use your consumer point-and-shoot camera to make gigapixel images. I chronicled the fascinating early days of Microsoft’s Photosynth app, and have kept tabs on the best photo apps for tablets. I’ve worried about what might happen if Flickr died (thankfully, it looks like it won’t). I covered the debut of the revolutionary Lytro light-field camera and wrote about how Lytro may change the way we think about 3D imaging.

The Rebirth of Radio

I’ve talked about how to listen to radio without a radio, raved about favorite NPR shows like RadioLab, and visited with radio-related startups like Stitcher and TuneIn.

… Next Page »

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A remarkable shift is taking place right under our noses. The universe of electronic devices in our homes and offices has stopped expanding, and has in fact begun to shrink. At the same time, our productivity continues to rise and our information, entertainment, and learning options keep exploding. In other words, we’re getting more stuff done—using less actual stuff.

For the graphic proof, check out the two pictures above, showing my own array of digital gadgets. The first one was taken in May 2005. The second was taken yesterday.

The idea behind both photos was to document every object I own that contains a microchip. Compared to the 2013 photo, the 2005 photo is positively cluttered with electronic paraphernalia. But it’s not as if I’ve adopted a Spartan existence or stopped doing all the things I used to do. I’m just doing them using fewer devices—and I bet you are too.

Exactly how this consolidation has come about, and which devices have emerged as today’s workhorses, is a question I’ll come back to in a moment. First, a bit of backstory on the two photographs.

There’s a fantastic coffee-table book that came out in 1994 called Material World: A Global Family Portrait, with photos by Peter Menzel and text by Charles Mann. The idea was to get families around the world to pose in front of their homes with all their earthly belongings arrayed around them. The book is still a favorite of mine because it provides such an intimate, revealing look at how families lived in places like Albania, Iceland, Japan, Kuwait, Mali, Mongolia, the United States and Vietnam. The contrasts were obviously stunning. A family in Haiti owned little more than a goat and a few sticks of furniture, while a family in Texas needed an entire cul-de-sac to hold their household possessions.

In early 2005, after I had worked with Mann on a couple of magazine features for MIT Technology Review, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to repeat the Material World project, but with a focus on digital objects. As a demonstration, I started with my own household, gathering up every object that included a microchip and posing for the first self-portrait above. (My dog Rhody counts because he’s got a HomeAgain RFID chip implanted under his skin.) I put the photo up on Flickr, where it has become, by far, the most-viewed photo I ever published.

I remember being surprised back in 2005, once I had laid everything out, at how much electronic junk I actually owned. But here’s the funny thing: over the next few years, I stopped needing most of it.

When you compare the two photos, it’s easier to tally up the things that haven’t changed, because the list is a lot shorter. I still have a laptop and an external monitor. I still have a television (though the old Sony Trinitron with a cathode-ray tube inside has been replaced by an LCD HDTV). I still have a printer, and a land-line phone (cordless now), and a smartphone (an iPhone 5, which makes the Treo 650 from 2005 look as old as Betsy Ross).

Almost everything else has been slimmed down, jettisoned as unnecessary to my lifestyle, or consolidated into some other device.

Music: I used to have two CD players, a tape deck, a turntable, a tuner, and a pair of loudspeakers. Now I have an iPhone and a Jambox.

Video: As the input devices for my television, I used to have a DVR, a VCR, three DVD players, and a cable box. Now I just have an Apple TV.

Personal devices: My iPad and iPhone have taken the place of a whole slew of older gadgets, including an iPod, a Rio MP3 player, a Ceiva electronic picture frame, a digital voice recorder, a PDA, a digital wristwatch, and a couple of point-and-shoot digital cameras. I got a Kindle a couple of years after the first photo was taken, but now I don’t use that either, thanks to the Kindle app on my iPad.

Gaming: I used to have a Playstation 2, and shortly after the 2005 photo was taken I got an Xbox 360. But I gradually lost interest in console games, and when my Xbox blew up, I never bothered to get it fixed. Now I just play games on my iPad.

Internet: I used to have a DSL modem and a separate wireless modem; then I got cable Internet and switched to a cable modem. Now I have an Airport Express, hooked into Webpass.

Kitchen: I used to have a super-fancy electronic rice cooker from Asia, but I don’t eat rice much anymore. My coffeemaker, which has a built-in digital timer, is my only electronic kitchen gadget now, aside from the built-in appliances. [Update 3/16/13: Yes, I still own a microwave, but it's a built-in one now, as I implied but didn't spell out in the previous sentence, so I couldn't include it in the photo.]

Housecleaning: I used to have a Roomba vacuum cleaner, but it died. Now I have concrete floors, so I sweep by hand.

There are two categories where my digital inventory has seen the most dramatic change. The first is personal technology, where smartphones and tablets have reached the point where they can credibly replace a slew of older single-purpose devices like cameras. (Seattle entrepreneur Dan Shapiro has called this the good enough threshold.) I’ve written before about the information devices I can’t live without, and the number keeps going down.

The second category is the “home entertainment system,” a once-lucrative market for consumer electronics makers like Sony, Hitachi, and Pioneer. Certainly, you can still go out and buy a cabinet full of audiophile turntables and tape decks and CD players and tuners and hook them up to a $4,000 pair of Bang & Olufsen speakers. But why bother, when you can just power on the Jambox or stick in some earbuds and head to iTunes, Pandora, Rdio, Slacker, Spotify, or Stitcher?

Has your own biome of electronic gadgets been going through similar mass extinction event? I’ll wager a bunch that it has—and I don’t see a new Cambrian explosion of gadgets coming anytime soon (except, perhaps, in the area of personal health monitoring devices like Fitbit and Nike Plus). Marc Andreessen famously said back in 2011 that software is eating the world. But in the home, it would be more accurate to say that smartphones and tablets are eating everything else.

In the comments, let us know how the story is playing out in your home.

Postscript: For the detail-oriented among you, here’s a full rundown of the items in the 2005 and 2013 photos.

2005 

2Wire DSL Modem

ESA Portable DVD Player

Panasonic Portable DVD Player

Kenmore Elite Sensor QuickTouch Microwave Oven

Sony Discman Portable CD Player

Panasonic KX-TS108W Desk Telephone

Sanyo ECJ-D55S Rice Cooker

Sony ICF-C793 Radio Alarm Clock

Dell Dimension 2400 PC

Netgar MR814v2 Wireless Modem

Dell E152FP 15-inch LCD Monitor

iRobot Roomba Red Robot Vacuum Cleaner

Apple iPod

Ceiva Electronic Picture Frame

Sony Trinitron 28-inch Television

Dell Inspiron 8600 Laptop Computer

Technis Quartz SL1301 Turntable

Kenwood KXW8060 Double Cassette Player

Yamaha HTR-5550 Tuner

Sony CPD-C315 5-CD Compact Disc Player

Sony Playstation 2

Sharp VC-H810 VCR

Motorola cable box

Replay TV 2000 DVR

Boston HD7 Loudspeakers

Minolta Dimage F100 Digital Camera

HP Printer-Fax-Copier

Brother label maker

Handspring Treo 300 smartphone

Handspring Treo 650 smarthpone

Rio Diamond MP3 Player

Sony ICD-S10 Digital Voice Recorder

Sony Clie PEG-T415 Personal Organizer

Swatch Beat 0033 Internet Wristwatch

HomeAgain Pet Microchip

2013

Samsung B2333OH LCD Monitor

Seagate GoFlex 2TB External Hard Drive

Jawbone Jambox Wireless Speaker

Cuisinart Coffeemaker

Canon Pixma Multifunction Printer/Scanner

Apple Macbook Pro (early 2011)

Apple iPad (third generation)

Apple iPhone 5

Sony Vixia Camcorder

Sharp Aquos 32-inch HDTV

Apple TV (hidden behind me in the photo)

Apple Airport Express (not shown)

HomeAgain Pet Microchip

Canon Powershot S5 IS (not shown—was using it to take this picture)

Eton Emergency Radio (not shown; forgot to grab it for the photo)

Frigidaire Gallery Microwave (built-in, belongs to landlord, couldn’t rip it out for this photo!)

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If you were starting a Mobile App Design Hall of Fame, how would you decide which apps to nominate? Personally, I think I’d vote for the apps that keep me engaged through creative, elegant use of touchscreen-specific design principles. I’d point to a handful of mobile apps that are so delightful to play with that I want to keep tapping around even after I’ve finished doing what I set out to do.

I’m talking about apps like Any.do, Band of the Day, Clear, Cloze, Circle, Evernote Food, Flipboard, Houzz, Letterpress, Mailbox, Paper, Path, Pinterest, Pocket, and Snapseed. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is about the design of these apps that makes them succeed so well; as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said about pornography, you know it when you see it. But it has something to do with beauty, utility, attention to detail, and above all, simplicity.

The paradox of a truly great app is that the design becomes invisible. An effective interface puts every function you need at your fingertips and gives you feedback when necessary—but it doesn’t get in your way.

There’s a just-released app for the iPhone, Mokriya Craigslist, that embodies all of these qualities, and I had the opportunity to talk this week with one of its creators, Sunil Kanderi of the Cupertino, CA-based mobile design studio Mokriya. Kanderi walked me through the design thinking that went into the project, and he even shared some of the firm’s early drawings and wireframes (see the slide show above). It adds up to a rare glimpse into the process that most great designers tend to follow—that is, alternately brainstorming creative ideas and paring them down to their essential core.

As the name suggests, Mokriya Craigslist is an app for browsing Craigslist, the global classified ads and discussion site born in San Francisco in 1996.

If you’ve been to Craigslist on the Web lately, you know that it follows an uber-minimalist design ethic—it’s just column after column of blue links. The site’s basic look hasn’t changed much since the ’90s. There’s a slightly more mobile-friendly version of the website for smartphones, but the company has never built native iOS or Android apps that would make it truly convenient to browse the site’s hundreds of millions of listings on today’s smartphones.

Instead, dozens of independent developers have tried—often without permission from Craigslist itself—to build their own apps that scrape and reformat the site’s data. Nearly all of them suck.

“With such an important property, not having a decent mobile experience just didn’t feel right, so we wanted to devote some effort to trying to solve that,” says Kanderi, who is Mokriya’s co-founder and CEO. The firm has built apps for notable Silicon Valley companies like Hipster, Mixpanel, Threadflip, Sidecar, and SimpleGeo; it sees the Craigslist app, its first solo product, as an opportunity to stretch its design and business muscles. Capturing even a small percentage of Craiglist’s 50 billion page views per month, after all, would be a huge coup for any startup.

To get off on the right foot, Kanderi negotiated an agreement with Craigslist’s lawyers that allows Mokriya to hit Craigslist’s servers with data requests, in return for a licensing fee and a share of Mokriya’s revenue. (The app is free, but there’s a $0.99 upgrade fee if you want to post listings, set up alerts for items you’re following, or favorite a listing for later viewing. The conversion rate since the app’s February 20 release has been very high so far—Kanderi says about 10 percent of the app’s users have paid for the upgrade, which is at least twice the usual conversion rate for a freemium app.)

When it came time to design the app, the first task was to size up Craigslist itself. The catalog is multi-layered, organized first by geography, then by topic (community, personals, housing, for sale, services, jobs, gigs, resumes etc), then by sub-topic (there 36 categories of for-sale items alone). That adds up to a big design challenge. “If you look at other Craigslist apps, they make browsing/searching possible, but with at least seven to eight taps” required to get to individual listings, Kanderi says. “We wanted to make it super easy.”

In their earliest sketches, Mokriya’s designers played around with a circular top-level topic menu, playing off the peace symbol that is the Craigslist emblem. They eventually gravitated to something less slick but more functional. “If you try to be too clever you can get in the way of the user’s experience,” Kanderi says. “We came up with a vertical tab menu that allows you to quickly select a category and sub-category with just two taps.” Kanderi says he considers this two-tap system the biggest user interface innovation in the app.

The sub-category list view is probably where users spend the most time in the app—it’s where you scroll through the actual listings for, say, Apartments/Housing in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, where I live. Here, again, the interface tries to stay out of the way.

“If you look at most of iPhone apps, there is a tabbed menu at the bottom, and a title bar at the top,” says Kanderi. “That’s almost 100 pixels of real estate gone. Not much space left to show content. So we tried to keep our footprint really, really small, with just one title bar with two buttons on top, and a bottom wheel that takes about 30 percent of the space at the bottom.”

The category and location menus are squeezed into the title bar, which means they’re always at hand, reducing the number of taps needed to surf around the catalog. The wheel, meanwhile, lets users choose between a standard list view, a tiled view, or a map view.

But even the wheel is unobtrusive. “We paid close attention to browsing habits and optimized around it,” Kanderi says. “As you scroll down, you really don’t need to see the bottom wheel or the Alert bar, so they disappear. As you scroll up, they appear again. So we automatically conserve real estate for browsing to give you the best experience and reduced clutter.”

Once you open an individual listing, the user interface almost entirely disappears, and all of the screen real estate is devoted to the item itself. If you’re looking at an apartment listing, for example, there’s a big area for a photo, which you swipe left or right to see additional photos; a big text area; icons for calling or e-mailing the landlord or favoriting the listing; an “X” for returning to the list view. That’s it.

Surrounding all this simplicity are a multitude of tiny design touches that do little to enhance the basic Craigslist data, but make the process of finding it more enjoyable. There’s the color scheme, for example—a classy, modern combination of white, gray, and the signature Craigslist purple. “On the iPhone, the choice of colors matters a lot,” says Kanderi. “We think it’s core to the overall user experience.”

The app also makes extensive—but discreet—use of animation. When you open the category list, there’s a slow reveal, as if a door is opening on the information. When you switch subcategories, a highlight marker slides up and down the column. When you’re scrolling up in a list view, new items settle in lazily from the lower left, as if the items were pieces of paper being fanned onto a desk.

“With a resource like Craigslist, a lot of the decisions have already been made, in terms of what data is going to be there. We wanted to add some elements that would make it a fun experience, and those little gestures and animations help,” says Kanderi. “You can actually overdo it, and we took out a lot of elements that we initially had. But we wanted to make it playful. When people use it, they should feel happy.”

After we’d finished going through the whole Craigslist app, I asked Kanderi if he could boil Mokriya’s design process down into just a few points.

“The number one thing is that we spend a ton of time just using pen and paper,” he says. “That is the easiest way to iterate on a design. Then we wireframe every single iteration, and spend a lot of time on each individual interaction within the app. I think, at the end of the day, when the app comes out, if you haven’t put enough thought into every single item, it’s easy to pick out the pieces you missed. It’s really crucial to pay attention to every single app, every single button.”

Just as important: counting taps. “In every screen, every interaction, we counted the number of taps and swipes it takes for the user to get the job done,” says Kanderi. “These are really small design decisions, but cumulatively they actually make or break the experience.”

The bottom line: making an app simple is hard work. Says Kanderi, “You go through five or six iterations before you get to the one experience that makes people say ‘Wow, it’s so simple to use.’”

Check out Mokriya’s app yourself and leave us a comment with your impressions. If you tell us which apps you’d put into your own Design Hall of Fame, we might just write about them down the road.

As Path founder and CEO Dave Morin put it to me a few months ago, “We are just barely getting going in technology’s ability to make our interactions with other humans more interesting.” Design principles will keep evolving, and there’s no doubt that the apps of 2016 or 2020 will make Mokriya’s apps—and everything else we use today—look just as quaint as Craigslist.

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Travels With Rhody has reached the end of the road.

Don’t worry, Rhody himself is fine—he’ll turn 16 in a couple of months and his only problem in life is a touch of arthritis. I’m talking about my blog, not my dog.

Since 2004 I’ve owned the domain name travelswithrhody.net, where I’ve always maintained a personal blog of some kind. For a long time I used TypePad as my blogging platform. In 2009 I went indie, renting space from a Web hosting service and setting up my own WordPress server. But the domain name is set to expire today, and I’ve decided not to renew it.

The causes for my blog’s death are several, but the main one is Facebook.

You’ve got to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is more than just the world’s largest social network, or a huge online game arcade, or a $5 billion advertising engine. It also takes over most of the functions that blogs once filled, and adds many features blogs never had. Once the company rolled out its Timeline feature in 2011, remaking everyone’s Facebook profiles so that they resembled endless blogs, the case for maintaining one’s own blog grew thin indeed.

Here’s how I look at it. Whenever I have non-work-related thoughts or photos or videos that I want to share, I have two choices. I can put them on my blog, then do a bunch of work to promote the posts via social media, hoping they’ll attract some traffic. Or I can just put them on Facebook and let the company’s EdgeRank algorithm take care of getting the news out to my 500 Facebook friends.

It’s clear, from the number of Likes and comments I get on my Facebook posts, which publishing strategy works and which one doesn’t.

Travels With Rhody, in its final incarnation.

On top of that, Facebook is more casual. I don’t feel like my Facebook posts have to be long, polished, or uniquely insightful. All that’s important is that they be authentic. And because the activation energy for posting on Facebook is so much lower, I do it a lot more often. I’ve shared hundreds, possibly thousands, of links, check-ins, photos, and videos on Facebook over the last three years, compared about 60 posts on Travels With Rhody.

I’m hardly the first to notice this trend. In fact, classic blogging, in the sense of creating diary-like essays, images, or videos and organizing them online in reverse chronological order, probably passed its peak several years ago. Back in 2006, some 28 percent of teenagers and young adults had a blog, but by 2010 only 15 percent did, according to a survey that year by the Pew Internet Project. At the time, only 11 percent of adults still had a blog; 73 percent said they used Facebook. Pew hasn’t even bothered to redo the survey since then.

Don’t get me wrong: the blog was a great invention and it will never entirely die. There are still many fantastic indie blogs, like Kottke.org and Daring Fireball and Boing Boing, and millions of people scribbling away on Blogger and Tumblr and LiveJournal. (Xconomy, by the way is not a blog. It’s a news site. So, to all those people who are endorsing me on LinkedIn for my “blogging” skills: thank you, but please stop.)

All I’m saying is that most of our information sharing and information foraging now happen through social media services like Facebook and Twitter, which offer more variety, more velocity, and—let’s admit it—more vivacity than blogs. In fact, if it weren’t for social media, it’s possible that no one would notice blogs at all. RSS is in decline, and nobody I know has time to surf to dozens of separate sites every day just to look for the newest posts. The links passed along by friends on Facebook and Twitter are, for many people, the daily gateway to the rest of the Internet.

But I can’t lay all the blame for my blog’s death at Facebook’s door. Another big culprit was comment spam. My blog attracted megabytes of it, and the WordPress spam filters seemed unable to cope. I was spending so much time manually deleting spammy comments that I finally had to turn off comments altogether. Which is the online equivalent of covering your readers’ mouths with duct tape; it defeats the whole point of blogging.

There’s also Path, which I now use every day in place of my blog to share moments with my closest friends. Path is mobile-only, which is symptomatic of the larger shift away from a desktop-centric Web to a world dominated by smartphone- and tablet-sized screens, where old-fashioned blogs just don’t shine.

If you ask me, WordPress has really missed the boat over the past few years—rather than just building mobile interfaces to their existing publishing system, they should have tried to reinvent blogs for mobile platforms, the way Seattle-based Zapd is doing. Zapd says its app helps users build “social and mobile websites,” but these “zaps” are really just group photoblogs, reformatted in a smart way for the iPhone.

Maybe I’ll resurrect my personal blog someday on a mobile-first blogging platform yet to be invented. But starting today, the only place to find Travels With Rhody will be the Wayback Machine. I’m taking my blog and my dog and moving on.

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For more than a decade, I was a faithful user of Quicken, Intuit’s desktop personal finance program. I stopped using it in 2008 after Mint.com came along, giving me the ability to monitor all my accounts from one simple, attractive, mobile-friendly app.

It wasn’t long before Intuit acquired Mint.com, so the company didn’t really lose me as a customer. And they still haven’t. Each spring, I use TurboTax to complete my federal and state tax returns. (The new iPad version of TurboTax works great, by the way—I finished my taxes in about two hours on Super Bowl Sunday.)

But I’ve now stopped using Mint.com as well, and I’ll tell you why: Pageonce came along, giving me the ability to monitor all my accounts from an even simpler, more mobile-friendly—and most importantly, more technically robust—app.

I sat down with Pageonce founder and CEO Guy Goldstein a few weeks ago to get the full story behind the Palo Alto, CA-based startup, which has 60 employees and has raised $25 million from Morgenthaler Ventures and Pitango Venture Capital. But before I tell you about the company, I want to say a little more about their app, and why I think it now outshines Mint.com in the usability department.

The great thing about Mint.com, when it first appeared in late 2007, was that it showed you all of your checking, savings, credit card, loan, and investment accounts in one place: the Mint.com website. Working with a financial data aggregator called Yodlee, Mint.com was able to grab updated account information automatically, every time you visited the site. It built on that data by alerting you about low balances, helping you track your spending by category, and showing you offers for lower-interest-rate credit cards and other financial products. Mint.com’s website and its iPhone app, which appeared in late 2008, were widely praised for their fresh, engaging design.

The trouble, for me, began about 18 months after the Intuit acquisition, when the Mint.com team decided to stop using Yodlee as their data provider and switch to Intuit’s own back end. The reasoning behind the change was understandable, but for users, it was a huge pain. I remember having to re-enter the usernames and passwords for all of my financial accounts. In several cases duplicate accounts showed up that I couldn’t figure out how to delete. As a result, Mint.com was telling me I had a lot more money than I actually had.

And after the switchover, the app never really seemed the same. Every time I logged in, there would be multiple “issues” requiring my attention—usually connections with bank or credit card accounts that had broken and needed to be manually repaired by reentering a password or secret answer. It was exhausting. I was spending more time fixing things in Mint.com than actually monitoring my finances.

I was ready to try any new finance app that could spare me these data-connection hassles. So when Rebecca Lynn at Morgenthaler Ventures told me about Pageonce, one of the companies in her portfolio, I was eager to check it out.

Pageonce overview screen on the iPhone

Pageonce works across multiple devices (the Web, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and 8, and Blackberry) and is exceedingly simple—or at least, the part users see is simple. You start by supplying Pageonce with the login credentials for your financial accounts and your regular household accounts, such as your cable, electric, gas, and wireless bills. The application then pulls all the updated balances together into a dashboard that summarizes your financial situation in one glance. It shows your total cash and investment account balances, the amount you owe on your credit cards, and alerts about things like large bank or credit transactions.

You can also dive deeper into each area, and check the balances of your individual checking, savings, and credit accounts. You can see which bills are coming up soon—and, even better, you can pay them from within the app. Pageonce shows the balance on investment accounts such as your 401(k) or IRA, and how your holdings break down within those accounts.

Finally, the application shows you financial offers tailored to your situation, such as credit card offers. Pageonce itself is free, so the lead-generation fees on these offers are how the company makes money. The startup also offers a credit score reporting service called Pageonce Credit Guard for $6.99 a month.

There are no fancy categorization or budgeting tools, though there is a very basic pie chart tool that compares your spending on utilities, insurance, interest, and the like. There’s also a cool feature called “File Cabinet” that stores copies of your past bank statements and utility bills. And that’s about it.

Goldstein, the Pageonce founder and CEO, says his philosophy about personal-finance apps is simple. “People are struggling with their money and they really need help,” he says. “We give them a solution to track everything and help them with their day-to-day finances,” so they can avoid late fees and other hazards.

And so far, consumers and mobile-industry observers are loving it. Some 8 million people have registered to use Pageonce. CNNMoney called it the “Cadillac of money management apps,” Apple named it a “Staff Favorite” app in November 2011, and the current version of the app gets five stars, on average, from reviewers in the iTunes App Store. That’s a much better showing than the latest version of Mint.com, which gets three stars.

The design of Pageonce isn’t as warm or inviting as that of Mint.com, but what’s far more important to me is that … Next Page »

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I have some difficult news to share. Your e-mail overload problem is here to stay.

We’d all prefer to spend less time managing e-mail, and every so often a new app, service, or time-management system comes along promising to help. The latest one is called Mailbox, and it’s been generating a lot of buzz over the last week or two. But unfortunately, there are no magic solutions for our e-mail woes. Unless you decide to buy some land in Montana and go off the grid (and believe me, I’ve been tempted), there are only grim, arduous solutions.

I’ve been testing Mailbox for the past week, and I’m going to tell you what I like about it and what I find lacking. But more importantly, I’m going to share some common-sense tips based on my own e-mail habits.

My process allows me to get to inbox zero more days than not. But I won’t mince words: it’s still extremely time-consuming. I find that the boost I get from Mailbox is marginal, and mainly psychological. But that doesn’t mean the app isn’t cool or useful.

Mailbox is an iOS app from Palo Alto, CA-based Orchestra, which was previously best known for building a to-do-list app (also called Orchestra). Mailbox only works on the iPhone, and it only interfaces with Gmail accounts. Those limitations will leave a lot of people out in the cold, including everyone who depends on Outlook or Exchange, but they didn’t bother me, since I love my iPhone and I’ve been a Gmail user from day one.

I applied for a place in Mailbox’s reservation queue last fall, shortly after Orchestra released a preview of the app, so I wasn’t very far back in the line when it finally went live last week. I’ll let other pundits argue over whether the app’s widely discussed reservation system was a wise strategy for avoiding server overload or just a brilliant marketing ploy.

Mailbox’s main selling point is a clever user interface that relies on four types of swiping gestures—left or right, short or long—to help you get e-mails out of your inbox. “Mailbox makes getting to zero—and staying there—a breeze,” the company promises. (At this point, I could detour into a long lament about the fact that we no longer think of electronic mail as a way to form genuine connections with other people, but merely as a source of digital litter that must be swept away as quickly as possible; but what would be the point?)

As in Apple’s own Mail app, the main screen in Mailbox shows a list of recent messages. A short swipe to the right puts the e-mail into the archive and a long one puts it into the trash. This strikes me as a delightful, economical way to elicit two possible meanings from a single gesture. (Maybe I’m weird, but I always get a little thrill from such UI innovations.)

The leftward options are more complex. A short left swipe brings up a menu that lets you “put off” a message until a time you specify (“Later Today,” “This Evening,” “Tomorrow,” “The Weekend,” “Next Week,” “In a Month,” “Someday,” or on a date of your choosing). When you put off a message, it disappears from your inbox, then re-appears at the requested time. Other companies have offered this feature in the past—notably Baydin, which has a Firefox and Chrome plugin for Gmail users called Boomerang—but Mailbox’s mobile implementation is a little more elegant.

A long left swipe, meanwhile, lets you assign an e-mail to a “list” where you can get back to it later. Technically, Mailbox lists are the same as Gmail labels, and show up as such in the Gmail Web client. Mailbox gives you three pre-specified lists (“To Buy,” “To Read,” and “To Watch”) and you can create as many new ones as you like.

This video from Mailbox explains it all in just over a minute:

And that’s all there is to Mailbox. If there is a theme at work here, it’s finding new uses for the now-familiar gestures—swiping and tapping—that make mobile computing so much more fun than PC computing. That’s my interpretation of the Mailbox philosophy, anyway. I haven’t seen Orchestra’s engineers saying that in so many words.

And I like this impulse, as far as it goes. But I don’t think it goes very far.

Mailbox does nothing to help with the core challenge of e-mail, which is that after you’ve archived and trashed and postponed as many messages as you can, you’ll probably still have a truckload of e-mails that require actual responses. And in reality, if you use Mailbox’s “Put It Off” feature, the situation will be even worse than that. On top of all the e-mails coming in from other people, you’ll also be dealing with the postponed messages sent by your past self.

Typing responses to all these non-disposable messages on the iPhone’s tiny keyboard is just as time-consuming in Mailbox as it is in any other e-mail app. If you have an iPhone 4S or later, you can gain back some time using voice dictation, but unfortunately there’s a bug in Mailbox that causes dictated text to get stuck behind the keyboard. I’ve wasted a lot of effort trying to bring text back up where I can see it.

In sum: Mailbox’s snappy interface makes it more fun to use than the iPhone’s native Mail app or Google’s Gmail app. The ability to archive or delete a message with a single rightward swipe is a very nice touch. But the list feature isn’t terribly useful, especially given that it doesn’t play well with any existing Gmail labels you may be using. And the postpone feature is just plain counterproductive—it’s a terrible idea to … Next Page »

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You’d think that a technology writer like me would learn not to say things like “I’ll never buy an iPad mini.”

But that’s approximately what I said back in October, around the time Apple finally confirmed all the rumors that a smaller version of the iPad was on its way. What I said, to be exact, was that a 7-inch tablet “feels like the worst of both worlds to me—too big for simple e-reading, too small for serious Web browsing, games, and photos.”

What I couldn’t anticipate, and what finally changed my mind, was the incredible lightness of the thing. As soon as I got to play with an iPad mini and feel how weightless it is compared to my iPad 3, I started to feel a kind of reverse buyer’s remorse over my declaration of non-interest. Last week, I finally abandoned my pride and bought a basic Wi-Fi-only model.

But now I’m feeling actual buyer’s remorse. Once you take it home, the iPad mini isn’t nearly as sexy as it seemed in the glamorous light of the Apple Store. (There’s got to be a lesson in there.)

I’ve been using the mini all week, waiting for it to find a perch in my heart, but it just hasn’t. So I’ve decided to take advantage of Apple’s generous 14-day, no-questions-asked return policy and return the device.

I won’t be the first to do that (I’ve found people saying the same thing here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) and I’m afraid my reason is pretty unoriginal too. The mini’s major selling point is that it’s light—just 0.68 pounds, less than half the weight of the iPad. But that’s the only big advantage it can claim.

This is a case where less is just less. The screen of the iPad mini has 65 percent of the surface area of the regular iPad, but Apple didn’t require developers to submit modified apps for the device. This means that everything, including the on-screen keyboard, has simply been shrunk down to fit on the mini.

That might be tolerable on a retina display—tiny little icons and buttons work just fine on the iPhone 5. But the mini doesn’t have a retina display. The screen has the same pixel count as the first-generation iPad (1024×768). And that, for me, is the showstopper.

I admit it, I’m a retina snob. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t marvel at the screens on my iPhone 5 and my iPad 3. If the San Andreas fault yawned open beneath my apartment building, I would beg the gods of the underworld to spare just two of my possessions: my dog and my iPad. My love for it is extreme and irrational.

But the iPad is pretty heavy, which makes it tiring to hold for extended periods, like when I’m reading a magazine or an e-book. That’s why I was interested in the mini. I figured my iPad wouldn’t mind the occasional infidelity, and I thought I would probably get used to the mini’s low-res screen, as a lot of other people say they have.

But I haven’t. Letters and other shapes that have razor-sharp edges on the iPad still look horribly fuzzy on the mini, as you can see in the photos above. Which is inevitable, since the mini’s screen has only a quarter as many pixels as its retina cousin; it just turns out I can’t abide the difference. (Maybe it’s just my age. I probably should have gotten bifocals on my last trip to the eye doctor, but I delayed. With the mini, I’m constantly asking “Is it my eyes, or is it the screen?)

As sure as the snow turns brown in Boston, Apple will eventually come out with a retina version of the mini. When it does, I might make another pilgrimage to the Apple Store.

But I won’t be holding my breath, as it might take Apple a while to solve the engineering dilemmas involved. It takes more powerful processors to run all the pixels in a retina display (that’s why the iPad 3 feels so warm). So a retina iPad mini would either have a shorter battery life, or it would need bigger, heavier batteries, thus sacrificing lightness.

The smart people in Cupertino will figure something out. Now excuse me while I go make up with my iPad.

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The first time I got to play with a Lytro light-field camera was in March, 2012. If I had to sum up my reaction in eight words, it would be: “Concept: Mind-blowing. Execution: Not quite there yet.”

It was clear that the technology inside the camera—which makes it possible to refocus a picture after it’s been taken—would eventually upset all of our notions about photos and photography. But the device itself reminded me of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercial home video game console.

When it appeared in 1972, the Odyssey had analog circuitry, no sound, and grainy black-and-white graphics, and could only run a handful of games. Yet it’s remembered now because it heralded a true revolution in home entertainment. (Atari’s Pong didn’t come until three years later.)

Likewise, the first-generation Lytro has a low-resolution sensor, a lamentably tiny display, and an awkward interface. But it’s still enough to get across the enormous potential of light field photography.

What’s amazing is how quickly the technology is evolving. There’s no second-generation Lytro yet (though it’s safe to assume the Mountain View, CA-based company is working on one). But because light field photography is mostly about computation, not optics or electronics, Lytro can make its existing camera more powerful simply by upgrading the software used to process light-field images.

And that’s exactly what it did in November, rolling out a new feature called Perspective Shift. As the name implies, the feature lets you nudge the perspective in a Lytro image slightly, as if you were present in the scene and moving your head a few inches in one direction or the other.

It’s easier to show Perspective Shift than to describe it—just click and drag on the Lytro image below to see how it works. (You can also click on any point in the image to refocus it; that feature was the Lytro’s original selling point.)

Pretty damn cool, huh? You can go to Lytro’s gallery to explore a bunch more of these images.

Perspective Shift is possible because the Lytro camera captures far more information about a scene than a traditional digital camera. In fact, there’s enough data in a single Lytro image to reconstruct a 3-D scene, or at least a sliver of one. “The light field itself is inherently multidimensional,” explains Eric Cheng, Lytro’s director of photography. “The 2-D refocusable picture that we launched with was just one way to represent that.”

The big picture here (so to speak) is that we are about to enter the second age of 3-D photography, and this time it will be consumers, rather than just professional photographers, behind the lens. I’ll explain what happened during the first age, and how Lytro is changing things, in a moment. But if you retain nothing else about this article, remember this: The Lytro images we’re seeing today are but a meager taste of what’s coming.

Whether or not future light field cameras bear the Lytro logo, they’re going to give us capabilities that even science-fiction movie directors haven’t imagined. With a single snapshot, you’ll be able to capture an entire 3-D environment, then explore it later using either a 2-D or a 3-D display. The implications for consumer-level home and travel photography are exciting enough. But when you imagine what architects, designers, engineers, and entertainers could do with the technology, the mind boggles.

But let’s back up about 160 years. Most people don’t realize it, but 3-D photography is almost as old as photography itself. By 1845, a British scientist named Charles Wheatstone had already figured out that if you take two photos of the same scene from slightly different angles, and then arrange the printed pictures so that … Next Page »

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If you live in San Francisco, it’s hard to justify traveling anywhere else, since you already have a bed in the postcard-perfect place that 16 million other people go out of their way visit every year. Still, sometimes you just need to get the hell out of Dodge. That’s why I drove up to Napa Valley last weekend and spent Sunday night at the Vintage Inn in Yountville.

This trip wasn’t about vineyard tours or wine tastings or restaurants. I picked the property because I just wanted to read a book, free of interruptions and distractions, and I knew that most of the rooms have a pleasant little window seat looking out on a burbling fountain.

In fact, I had a specific book in mind, and it meshed with my travel plans. It’s called Quiet: The Power of Introverts In a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

Written by Susan Cain, a former corporate lawyer and consultant, the book presents itself as an argument for greater balance between two age-old cultural types: the “man of action” and the “man of contemplation.” In business, politics, and education, Cain says, we too often expect leaders to fit the “Extrovert Ideal,” the Dale Carnegie image of the salesman with a magnetic personality.

I originally bought the book because I wanted to see what Cain had to say about how introverts can also make good leaders, or how we might reshape our very definitions of success (in business or other realms) to better reflect introverts’ strengths and preferences.

And the book has much to offer on those points. As soon I discovered, though, Quiet is actually something more—it’s part of the syndrome, eloquently diagnosed by Boris Kachka in New York Magazine last week, in which all the old publishing categories like business, psychology, and social science are gradually morphing into something closer to self-help. In the same way that Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love is a paean to being single (at least, until Gilbert gets to Bali and meets her true love), Quiet is bursting with evidence that It’s Okay To Be An Introvert. More than that, Cain liberally sprinkles the book with suggestions that Those Extroverts Might Just Be a Little Too Smug For Their Own Good.

My window seat at The Vintage Inn in Yountville -- occupied by my dog Rhody (an extrovert when he's not sleeping).

But the pep talk was okay with me. Like a lot of loners, I’m a little defensive about my introversion, so I’m not averse to some validation once in a while. In fact, that was probably the real point of giving myself some alone time, in a cozy setting, to read a book about introversion. I wanted to “nourish my inner introvert,” as I put it in a Facebook update.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t really alone. I took my iPhone and my iPad with me to Yountville, not to mention my extraordinarily outgoing dog. I checked my e-mail and Path and Facebook just about as often as I always do. I posted some photos and replied to some comments. Obviously, I wasn’t feeling so introverted that I didn’t want to share my little holiday with all of my online friends.

So the question I’m left with, having finished the book and returned to San Francisco, is about the interplay between introversion and technology, especially the mobile Internet. While I’m happy being an introvert, I’d like to find the right balance of introversion and extroversion in my life. If I’m letting my gadgets sway me too far in one direction or the other, I’d like to know.

Am I naturally more social than I think, or even less? If I hadn’t taken my communication tools with me last weekend, would I have felt cut off—or, on the contrary, freed? Is the Internet an enabler, giving me leave to take my introversion to unhealthy extremes? Or, viewed the other way around, does it actually keep me tethered to the world while I let the introvert in me get things done? (I do feel, after all, that my introversion is one of the main sources of my productivity.)

Cain doesn’t really address these kinds of questions. In a funny way, her book feels like it’s from the pre-Internet, pre-mobile era. There are a few pages, drawing on Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, that discuss the Internet as a playing field for “Connector” personalities like Craig Newmark, Guy Kawasaki, and Pete Cashmore, all self-professed introverts. And there is a section on the paradox of the open-source software movement, which is the creation of millions of mostly introverted programmers who work separately—yet together—over the Internet.

But that’s about it. While there’s plenty to like about Quiet, I realized I’d have to look elsewhere for insight about the Internet’s role as a facilitator of, or antidote to, my natural introversion.

So I picked up Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other, published last year by my friend and former teacher Sherry Turkle. A psychoanalytically trained psychologist at MIT, Turkle has been observing how people use computers, robots, games, and networks for decades. She’s deeply concerned that in the name of convenience, we’ve allowed texting, e-mail, chat rooms, and Web surfing to replace authentic human communication.

Turkle writes of parents so lost in their BlackBerrys that they don’t speak with their children at dinner; of teens so caught up in texting and cultivating their Facebook profiles that they have to make appointments with each other to have real conversations. Her title, Alone Together, evokes the idea that in a networked world, people can be together in the same physical place, but still alone, immersed in their electronic devices. (It’s a common enough sight in the lecture halls and corridors at any technology conference.) But at the same time, Turkle says, we’re all together in cyberspace, tethered to … Next Page »

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I spend a lot of time on Facebook. Probably more than the average user, who spends around 400 minutes on the site per month, or about 13 minutes per day, according to data from comScore. It isn’t exactly wasted time—I’m usually gathering or spreading news and keeping up with my friends by browsing their news feeds, profiles, and photos—but it’s not quite what I’d call productive. It doesn’t help me plan my time or get stuff done in the real world. So I usually feel a little guilty about it. That’s something I’d never say about other online tools like Google or Gmail or Twitter.

But I think all of this is about to change. For better or worse, Facebook isn’t just for socializing anymore. With the addition of Graph Search, the new search utility that the company began rolling out to its English-speaking users this week, it’s about to become a whole lot more useful.

Graph Search, in a nutshell, turns the signature blue bar at the top of every Facebook page into a big search box. Using natural language, I can type queries relating to the stuff Facebook knows about—people, places, photos, and entities with a Facebook page, to start—and get results custom-filtered for me, based on the connections I’ve built and the preferences I (and my friends) have expressed inside Facebook.

Say I’m having trouble remembering which of my high-school classmates went to Michigan State, the university closest to my home town. I can just type, “My friends from high school who went to Michigan State University” and see the whole list. (It turns out there were 10 of them.)

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at this week's Graph Search announcement. Lead project engineers Tom Stocky (left) and Lars Rasmussen (middle), both ex-Googlers, are in the background.

And that’s just a simple example. By stringing together clauses, I can get results of amazing specificity. For instance: “Movies liked by people who like movies I like” or “Friends of my friends who are Web designers and live in San Francisco.” Facebook has spent years accumulating the data needed to answer such questions. But before Graph Search, only programmers inside the company could ask them.

Do these changes mean Facebook will also become less fun? Quite possibly. It depends on exactly how people end up using the feature, and how Facebook goes about monetizing it. I’ve been playing with Graph Search since Tuesday, and I don’t think it’s ridiculous to predict that it will be game-changing. Web entrepreneurs have been talking for years about using social data as the foundation for a new type of online search. Facebook is the first to pull it off.

Here’s the really big picture: From now on, if you’re trying to decide what movies to watch, what albums to buy, what books to read, what restaurants to eat at, or where to go on vacation, Facebook—not Google, not Yelp, not Amazon—could be your first stop, and possibly your only stop. That’s about as big a shift as we ever see in the Internet business, and there is no doubt that it’s going to upset the established order.

I’m not saying that Facebook is about to displace Google. But, by creating a new way to look for stuff, Graph Search also creates a new way to be found, which will change the way businesses think about search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Up to now, SEO and SEM have been all about Google, and how to get the search giant to rank your links higher on Google search result pages. But for the first time since the late 1990s, there’s another serious player in search. (You might count Microsoft’s Bing as a serious player, of course, but Microsoft has allied with Facebook on Graph Search.)

Nobody knows yet what the new tools for optimizing one’s exposure within Graph Search will be. Getting lots of “likes” will certainly become more important than ever, and it’s also possible (John Battelle thinks it’s probable) that Facebook will introduce some way for companies to buy paid Graph Search listings. For the moment, Facebook is staying mum, and says it will focus first on expanding Graph Search so that it includes more types of data, is accessible in other languages, and works on mobile devices (right now it’s Web-only).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. All I really want to do with this week’s column is convince you that Graph Search, a project led by ex-Google engineers Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky, is a big deal. Facebook says it’s limiting the feature to “a very small number of people” for now, to give it time to test and optimize the feature, so it may be a while before … Next Page »

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Radio. It’s my periodic obsession, my news lifeline, my aural ecosystem. It’s the most antique of electronic media, yet at the same time, it’s evolving as fast as the Internet, perhaps faster.

Where is radio going? How will it thrive? What will it look like (or sound like) in an era when every phone, tablet, and automobile has a broadband data connection? Does the word “radio” even make sense anymore? As somebody who’s been a public radio fiend since the age of 12, I brood over these things.

In the past I’ve written about efforts to bring the community of public radio broadcasters into the Internet age, do away with public-radio pledge breaks, and let commercial radio stations crowdsource their playlists. I’ve covered a startup accelerator that hopes to bring Silicon Valley-style innovation to the world of public radio and other media, as well as efforts by companies like Apple and Stitcher to bring some order to the world of on-demand radio shows, aka podcasts.

But the one thing I’ve never really written about is live radio. That’s probably because I never listen to it, except for the handful of hours each week when I’m stuck in my car driving to interviews around Silicon Valley. And then I only listen to one station, KQED—I might as well glue my dial to 88.5 FM. All of my other “radio” listening is actually podcast listening. (Just like all my “TV” viewing is actually Netflix and iTunes viewing.)

I know I’m a latte-liberal weirdo in this regard, but I’m not about to start sitting in my car listening to Top-40 stations just to burnish my credentials as a plebeian. If I’m ever going to experience live radio north of 91.9 megahertz (the upper limit of the spectrum that the FCC designated for non-commercial radio back in 1945), it’s going to be mediated by one of my computing devices, where I can control the experience.

TuneIn CEO John Donham

That’s why I’ve been wanting to learn more about TuneIn, a startup in Palo Alto that’s probably doing more than any other company to marry live radio with the Internet. At its core, TuneIn is a huge annotated catalog of live radio programming from around the world—it knows what shows will be on which stations 24/7/365. It connects users to those stations’ live digital streams for free via its website; its iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Palm, and Samsung apps; home systems like Sonos audio players and smart TVs; and even Internet-connected cars.

Recently I sat down with TuneIn CEO John Donham, a veteran gaming and entertainment executive who’s done stints at Sony, Playdom, and Disney, to find out where the company came from and where it’s going. Interestingly, our talk turned into something of a debate over the value of live versus on-demand radio. As you’ll see in the Q&A below, Donham handled my sometimes combative questions graciously, while at the same time bringing some pretty powerful statistics to bear. It turns out that TuneIn users spend 98 percent of their time listening to the 70,000 live radio stations that the service aggregates—this despite the fact that the TuneIn directory also includes virtually every podcast ever published (some 2 million of them).

Donham believes that live radio carries an emotional resonance that on-demand shows just don’t. Sometimes that’s about immediacy: if a big news event like Superstorm Sandy is unfolding, you want to listen while it’s happening. Sometimes you want to be transported, in your mind’s ear, to the scene of the broadcast: Comerica Park or AT&T Park during the World Series, for example. And sometimes you just like knowing that there’s a live DJ on the other end of the audio stream, programming stuff you’ll like, and that thousands of other people are listening at the same time.

Those are Donham’s explanations for the popularity of live radio, anyway. I’m not sure any of these features matter much to me, but then I’m a writer, I live in my head, and my information needs are highly targeted (and don’t include live sports). TuneIn’s rocketship growth curve—from roughly zero users in 2009 to 40 million now—speaks for itself, and there’s no doubt that somebody had to create a global, real-time directory of radio programming. So my talk with Donham created a nice bookend to another conversation, around the same time, with Stitcher co-founder and CEO Noah Shanok. By aggregating on-demand radio, Stitcher is the perfect complement to TuneIn (though it’s not yet available on as many platforms).

TuneIn has raised $22 million in venture backing from Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, and Google Ventures, and it’s got a headcount of 80. Like Stitcher, it makes money by showing display ads within its mobile apps—and also like Stitcher, it has deals with automakers who are building more digital options into their infotainment systems. (Just this week GM named TuneIn as one of the partners for an experimental new in-car “app catalog.”) I think both companies will be around for a good long while, because they serve different needs.

Which brings us back to my “whither radio?” question. My guess is that radio is bifurcating into two separate media. There’s the stuff that’s valuable mainly because it’s live: breaking news, live sports, call-in talk shows, and perhaps music programmed by a DJ you like. That’s TuneIn’s territory. Then there’s the programming that’s a little more produced, content-rich, and evergreen, especially public-radio stuff like This American Life, Radiolab, and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. That’s Stitcher’s material, because people like me wouldn’t hear it at all unless they could time-shift it. Over time, there will be less and less reason to broadcast these programs at all. (Indeed, there are already some great NPR shows, like Planet Money, that are never actually heard on the radio.)

I guess the $30 billion question is whether there’s a convincing business model for both types of radio, and how streaming changes the equation on both sides. TuneIn shares the revenue from its in-app ads with radio stations, and in theory it’s adding an incremental, potentially global audience to each station’s terrestrial listenership (the people within 40 miles of the transmitter), which should boost advertising rates. In practice, the economics are still being worked out. Anyway, here’s the edited text of my conversation with Donham.

Wade Roush: What’s the history of TuneIn?

John Donham: TuneIn is an 11-year-old company, and for the first eight years it was called RadioTime which constructed a directory of live audio on the Web, including a lot of radio. It licensed that to manufacturers like Sonos or makers of Internet alarm clocks. The struggle was that they were waiting for one of these devices to take off in order to really generate business.

Along the way, a developer named Ben Alexander built an app called TuneIn that used the RadioTime back end. The founder of RadioTime, Bill Moore, finally saw the traction he had been waiting years and years for—it just happened that the device was a smartphone instead of some piece of consumer electronics in the home. He quickly acquired TuneIn, took the name, and pivoted the company over to become direct-to-consumer. At that point growth really started to take off. Between 2009 and 2011, the company went from nearly zero users to 25 million, with no marketing, just word of mouth.

WR: What attracted you to the company?

JD: Having just come from the social game space, when I got an introduction to TuneIn I was staggered to see that number of active users. In social games, you need a highly viral platform like Facebook and many millions of dollars in marketing to create an audience like that, so to see TuneIn do it organically was pretty stunning. Seeing that magic, and recognizing that … Next Page »

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Right before the holidays, I shared a list of 20 Must-Have Apps for That Tablet Under the Tree. That list focused on apps for the iPad and Android tablets, and it was intended as an introductory guide for new tablet owners eager to test-drive their gifts with apps that really showcase the capabilities of today’s tablets.

This week, to help out readers who may still be considering their New Year’s resolutions, I want to share 10 more apps—for both smartphones and tablets this time—that will make you a better conversationalist at the coming year’s cocktail parties. Download and peruse a few of the apps described in the slide show above and I guarantee that you’ll sparkle and scintillate more brightly, on subjects ranging from food and poetry to history, art, music, and literature.

Note that I’ve deliberately left out apps from Touch Press, which is a one-stop shop for amazing edutainment titles on the iPad like The Orchestra, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and The Waste Land. I’ve written so much about their apps that I decided it was only fair to give some other app builders a chance.

Here’s a text-based list of the apps above, with links to the app makers, app store pages, and pricing information.

The Atavist | iOS | $6.99 for a three-month subscription

Fontly | iOS | free

Goodreads | iOS | Android | free

Historypin | iOS | Android| free

Lumosity Brain Trainer | iOS | free

Philip Glass _Rework | iOS | $9.99

Poem Flow | iOS | $2.99 per year

Roaming Hunger | iOS | free

ShinyArt | iOS | $1.99 per month

Yours, Vincent | iOS | free

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It’s time for the third annual version of “iStocking Stuffers,” the holiday apps edition of my weekly column World Wide Wade. The slide show above covers 20 of my favorite apps from 2012, which makes it my longest list yet: the 2010 edition of this guide had just 10 apps, and the 2011 version had 15.

The premise this year, as before, is that a lot of people are going to be receiving tablets as gifts this season—whether they’re iPads, iPad minis, or Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 or Amazon’s Kindle Fire—and they’re going to need help figuring out what apps to put on them. The apps I’m recommending here aren’t all truly “must have” apps in the sense of being essential utilities—I’m leaving out a bunch of those, from weather apps to e-book apps to social networking apps. Rather, these are apps that show off the capabilities of today’s tablets and will help you get the most out of your new device in areas like games, news, shopping, video discovery, and photo editing.

Here’s an alphabetical list of the apps featured above, with price information, links to app store pages where you can download the apps, and links to past Xconomy coverage of these apps or app makers. There’s a bit of a bias here toward iPad apps, since that’s the tablet I have, but I’ve included links to Android versions of the apps where available. As for Microsoft Surface / Windows tablet apps? Maybe next year.

123D Catch | free | iOS | Autodesk Labs Builds Tools for Capturing Reality

Evernote | free | iOS | Android | Evernote Wants to Make Your Memories More Magical

Fayve | free | iOS

Google Earth | free | iOS | Android | The Case of the Tilted Clubhouse: A Geographical Detective Story

Google Search | free | iOS | Android | Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity, Part 3

Habu Music | $0.99 | iOS | Android

iPhoto | $4.99 | iOS

Madefire | free | iOS | Madefire’s Comics Bring a New Visual Grammar to the iPad

NextGuide | free | iOS | With NextGuide, Dijit Continues the Search for Perfect TV App

The Orchestra | $13.99 | iOS | Touch Press, the iPad, and the New Golden Age of Multimedia

The Room | $1.99 | iOS

Paper by FiftyThree | free | iOS | Notepaper App Showdown: Bamboo, FiftyThree, and Noteshelf

Path | free | iOS | Android | Why the World Will Beat a Path to Path

Pocket | free | iOS | Android | Can Pocket Become the TiVo of the Web?

Robots for iPad | $1.99 | iOS

Showyou | free | iOS | Android | ShowYou—The Social Browser That’s Taking on TV

Snapseed | free | iOS | Android

Stitcher Radio | free | iOS | Android

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