It seems that every time I contact Shaw Cablevision, I come away somewhere between disappointed and furious. After several months without cablevision, I decided to re-connect to watch my summer reality show guilty pleasures.

Shaw — like many cable providers, to be fair — bundle their most popular channels, forcing you to pay arbitrarily high prices for the single channel you want.

• If you want HBO — just HBO — you’ll have to pay for four movie channels.¹
• If you want just TSN2, you’ll be forced to pay for channels 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, and 87² even if you never plan to watch them.

This bundling is pitched to consumers as offering “better value.” In reality, it’s a way of obfuscating the price.

My Dream Ad Campaign

Just once, I’d love to see an ad from a cable provider in which the CEO, straight to camera, says

“We know our bundling makes ordering services from us confusing. That’s why from now on, each individual channel costs $3. Order as many or as few as you want. And take only the channels you want.”

The Sound of Shaw’s Silence

But we won’t hear this from Shaw. Actually, we never hear much of anything from the company. Shaw is a notoriously tight-lipped, family organization. It’s privately held and only the CEO-Owner, Jim Shaw, speaks on behalf of the company. Or, I should say, doesn’t speak. When covering technology for the CBC, I occasionally had to call Shaw for comment on related stories — not a single call for comment was returned.

Photo J McIntosh/CP

And good luck finding any social media channels — I couldn’t find a single Facebook page or group for the company, and the variants of Shaw’s name I guessed on Twitter clearly aren’t owned by the company.

Ordering Is Broken

Let’s say you opt to take your chances with the bundling game and add channels anyway — you’ll be doing it by phone since there’s no way to activate channels online. Shaw’s online customer care centre, at the time of this writing, actually returns a web server error. Classic.

Shaw would do well to get some basics underway — a monitored Twitter account and a Facebook page at the very least — and start listening to customers. It wouldn’t take much. For the time being, I’m holding http://twitter.com/shawcablevision. Jim, when you’re ready…

UPDATE: Apparently, Shaw has just hired someone to handle social media stuff. (Hat tip to Colleen.)

1. Three separate Movie Channel channels, plus a high-def version of one of the channels.
2. Canadian time-shifted channels

There’s no denying that Apple makes beautifully designed products. From the simplicity of the Mac Mini to the impossibly tiny iPod Shuffle, Apple wins design kudos for form and function all time time.

But there’s one big flaw in Apple’s design of the iPhone and iPad that still hasn’t been fixed — the onboard speakers.

On both the iPhone and iPad, the speaker is located on the rim of the product — which means that when you’re looking at the screen and listening to audio, the audio is shooting out away from you. This isn’t a problem for audio that’s recorded at decent levels, but so many videos out there (especially those on YouTube) are recorded with levels that are way too low. Cranking up the volume doesn’t help.

I often end up having to hold my iPhone in this position:

Although silly looking, this actually increases the volume significantly. On my audio test, cupping your hand in front of the speaker increased the decibel level from a peak of 70db to a peak of 78db. Since dB levels are logarithmic, this is quite an increase in the volume.

All Apple would have to do is locate the speakers on the front to provide better quality audio. (Misdirected audio also tends to drop a lot of the high-end frequency ranges, making the audio also sound muddier and duller.)

I’ve MacGyver’ed a solution for my iPad — tin foil (folded over several times to make it thicker) taped to the back and shaped in the same hand-cup form. It’s goofy looking, but works like a charm and makes listening a much better experience.

Griffin, which makes excellent ‘iProduct’ accessories, has an acoustic amplifier that looks great, but isn’t quite portable. ThinkGeek has come up with a simple but awesome solution — the iPhone Audio Booster is a simple piece of plastic that clips onto the bottom of your iPhone and essentially forms a plastic cup that does the same thing. Genius. And only $8.

Still, the right solution is for Apple to simply locate speakers on the front. Steve? Please?

N.B. On the iPad, speakers on both ends would also be good to provide stereo listening. But I’ll take what I can get.

This morning, the University of Calgary breathlessly released a news release titled Danger in the Internet Café.

It reports on a new computer virus that can sneak onto your computer from other infected computers via unencrypted wireless signals, like the ones typically found in Internet cafés. From there, like most viri these days, it plants adware. The only difference between this and other viruses is it spreads from computer-to-computer on unencrypted networks, not by you opening an email.

Oh, and one more thing.

It doesn’t actually exist.

News releases from universities and computer-virus software manufactures are a kind of virus unto themselves. When you cover technology, you get them all the time. The formula is the same — a provocative headline saying there’s a new threat, that everyone needs to (a) download the University’s white paper, or, (b) buy/upgrade your anti-virus software.

Somewhere, buried several paragraphs down, is the confession that the virus doesn’t actually exist; it’s actually just a hypothetical one created in a lab. (To its credit, at least the University of Calgary’s news release calls it a “potential” threat in the first paragraph.)

You’ve got to hand it to whoever wrote the news release, though. They compare the (non-existent) virus to Typhoid Mary, the first person to contract and spread typhoid fever. Typhoid fever it transmitted over the air — hence, the likeness to the potential computer virus. They even coined the phrase “Typhoid adware.” Clever.

The best part, though, is the graphic the white paper uses to explain how the virus works:

Man. That’s one mean-looking virus!

The paper Typhoid Adware can be found: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/papers/eicar10.pdf

I don’t know why, but I’ve never liked picking up my voicemails. My entire communications system revolves around my email, so I’ve never understood why voicemails don’t show up in my email box.

A number of providers can do this for you — it’s likely that your phone company offers this kind of service, where people leave a voicemail and the audio is emailed to you.

I use a great service called PhoneTag that goes one stage beyond that — it actually transcribes the message for you. You forward any calls you miss from your office or cell phone to the special number PhoneTag gives you. To the caller, it sounds like any normal voicemail, complete with your voice prompting callers to leave a message. When they do so, a human being somewhere transcribes their message and that text is sent, along with an MP3 of the actual voicemail, to your regular email box.

Google Voice and others offer something similar, but their systems rely on a computer program to try to decrypt what someone is saying. As such, it doesn’t know when a comma or period goes, can’t figure out when someone is spelling out a name, and so on. The people at PhoneTag are usually very good at trying to accurately transcribe the message. They’ll even put [?] after guesses if it’s not clear. If you’d like someone else to take a whack at transcribing the voicemail, just hit Reply and Send.

I’ve found voicemails come to me transcribed less than five minutes after they were left. I never, ever actually “dial in” to pick up my messages.

The other advantage to this is that because it arrives in your email box, you can store the message and audio forever. Search your email for someone’s name and you’ll get their emails and voicemails sent to you. It will even put their actual name in the From line of the email if you upload your address book to the system.

PhoneTag comes with unlimited voicemail box storage, you can still dial-in and pick up messages if you like, and 24/7 customer support. You can pay in any of three ways:

• $0.35 per message

• $9.95 per month for up to 40 messages a month ($0.25 for each message over 40)
• $29.95 for unlimited messages

Whether you are in a meeting, showing off a home with a client, or on the golf course, you can instantly see who called, what they said, and you won’t have to listen to all of your messages to find out about an important missed call. I often hit Forward and reply via email to the person who left the voicemail. They’re often pretty amused to see their words in text form.

With everyone distracted by the various shiny tech objects out there (Twitter, Facebook, and so on), we’ve been neglecting our loyal — if a little rusty — friend: simple email.

Email, as we know it today, was developed in the early 1980s, a derivative of code from ARPANET made ten years prior. It went through a handful of iterations and today, most of the Internet relies on a solid little performer called sendmail. Sendmail is, surprisingly, quite a simple and small program. It sits in millions of Unix servers around the world to ferry email messages to and fro.

Sendmail is a great program. But it’s old. It’s still mostly the same program it began as. That’s no good.

Meanwhile, commercial email systems, like Microsoft’s Exchange or Novell’s Groupwise, have filled the functionality gap and added new functions that make electronic communications far more effective. And yet, we still slog along with the tired old sendmail. Email should do more than it does. And there’s no reason why we can’t start now.

Retracting Emails

Everyone who’s reading this article has had this experience: You compose an email, perhaps a little hot-headed, and hit the Send button. That’ll teach him, you think. An hour passes. You realize maybe you shouldn’t have called your boss a pig-headed douchebag after all. Lucky for you, he’s not back in the office until tomorrow. If your message were sent as a post-it note, you could walk into his office and throw it away. Not so with email. Barring breaking into his office, you’d best use your time thinking of grovelling strategies.

Commercial email systems like Exchange have been able to retract emails for years. You just track down your “Dear douchebag” email in your sent items, and click the “Retract Email” button. Done. Gmail has a slightly different take on it — you can send the email from your computer, but Gmail will hold onto it for up to 10 seconds before it actually sends it along (you have to turn this option on in Settings / Labs).

But the vast majority of email users should have this kind of functionality.

Enough With The Endless Quotes

An email currently in my inbox contains two sentences. And ten screens full of the past conversation. Gmail can hide this conversation, but it still gets sent through servers worldwide. I’d venture a bet that 85% of email traffic on the Internet is actually this back conversation. This may have been a great feature to have in the early 80s when email clients didn’t really exist as we know them now, but it’s just silly these days. We already have the back-conversation because we’ve been in it. We need a “Show Me This Conversation’s History” button that constructs the conversation flow from our records.

Attachments

Email 2.0 should not permit anyone to send attachments. You read that right. Emails are a lousy distribution method for sending large binary files.

Anyone who’s used an online upload service, like drop.io, can see where this needs to go. Rather than attaching a video file (or whatever) to an email, where that file literally travels with the email en route to its recipient, the Attachment button should instead place that file on one of these systems.

This has a number of benefits. Since attachments will live elsewhere, those attachment-hosting services can add more value. File conversions can happen on the fly. Send a Word DOC file, and I can download it as an Apple Pages document, PDF, ebook reader, or whatever I want. No more “I can’t open this file! Can you export it as a blah blah and send it again?”

We’d also have more control over the security of the attachment. Attachments can self-destruct after they’ve been downloaded. Or you can set them to only be downloaded from a certain IP range (within your company, for instance). That way, even if someone steals your notebook computer and gets into your email, they won’t be able to get access to critical files that were sent to you.

Action-Oriented Emails

This is a common workflow for me:

1. Send important email that I need an answer for.
2. Promptly forget about it.

Email needs to provide a reminder service that’s optionally tied to a specific date. If I email my agent and I need to hear back from her by Friday, the only way I can be assured that I’ll keep this email active is by putting a note in RememberTheMilk.com or writing myself a reminder.

This should be built directly into email. When you send an email, you should be able to set a date when you want the email to “bubble back up” from your sent items if you haven’t heard back from the person at the other end. When you do hear back from them, a simple “Close this thread OR Set a new bubble-up date” prompt would make me far more efficient.

Gootodo.com claims to offer this kind of functionality — bcc’ing 4D@gootodo.com will have the service send you the email back four days (“4D”) later. It’s rudimentary and, um, doesn’t seem to work. At least when I’ve tried.

What email functions do YOU wish existed?

UPDATE: November 12, 2009
Has the Twitter brand death-spiral begun? ComScore today released numbers showing that visits to Twitter.com declined eight per cent. Why visit Twitter.com when its API lets anyone access tweets from anywhere? Has the death spiral begun?

———

Perhaps the most difficult part of forecasting technologies’ pace is discerning which technologies will be short-lived fads and which will become ingrained in our lives. Often, millions of dollars are at stake — should the I.T. department hold steady or invest in a promising solution that may indeed become the next Pointcast. It’s not an easy game and for that reason many technology commentators steer clear of any kind of forecasting.

But despite the infrequent unpredictable breakout hit, technology’s growth curve is actually quite predictable. (The oft-misquoted Moore’s Law is probably the most well-known reliable long-term trend in computer hardware.¹ )

There is indeed a tipping point in technology timelines — the moment when a fad evolves into being a secure part of our lives — and it is the point at which a technology becomes invisible. Not literally invisible, of course, but practically invisible in our day-to-day lives.

The Thermostat Test

Think about your home thermostat. When you actually stop to consider what it does — measure the room temperature and automatically adjust the heating/cooling automatically — it’s actually quite an amazing technology that’s had a large impact on our standard of living.

One can imagine the attention the invention received when it was first in use in the late 1800s. Today, though, it’s pretty much invisible in our lives. Sure, you can see it, but when was the last time you actually thought about your thermostat? Nobody has come to your place and stopped to remark about “that awesome thermostat” of yours. It’s simply slipped into the wider growing conscious of the technology around us.

This, then, is the litmus test for tech fads and technology’s influence in our lives. When a technology blends effortlessly into our daily living and becomes essentially invisible to us, it secures a permanent place in our environment.

And this is how Twitter will die.

I’m not suggesting, of course, that we’ll be without the ability to tweet any more, just that the mechanism by which we do so will become so ingrained in our lives that we may not even know it as “Twitter” in the future.

Consider the ways Twitter has evolved beyond being a hyped-up web site:

• Facebook completely redesigned its site to become more “Twitter-like” (much to the chagrin of its user base)
• Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users interact with their Twitter followers only though mobile-phone text messaging
• Dozens of mobile applications exist on nearly every cell phone to provide direct access to Twitter’s functionality
• Long-term Twitter API holdout LinkedIn has caved into member pressure and, as of today, now provides a way of tweeting directly from its site

As more developers take advantage of Twitter’s API, the need for anyone to go to Twitter’s actual web site lessens. Now, we access through phones, airport and mall kiosks, and even toilets. A small industry is developing around linking ‘real life’ to Twitter. An inexpensive do-it-yourself kit hooks everyday appliances to Twitter so they can tweet about their daily energy consumption. And, in what screenwriters would call a beautiful “envelope ending,” modified thermostats can now tweet their average temperature points.

The Looming Death of the Twitter Brand

Contrary to the opinions of most tech pundits, in the coming years I expect the Twitter brand will decline in mindshare. Consider that most venture capital money is historically speculative and short-term in nature; V.C.s quickly grow tired of funding rounds devoted to building mass brand awareness, a very expensive strategy. This is partly why many buzz-attracting tech brands of the past today operate happily in the background, quietly earning consistent returns without the brand front-and-centre.

In fact, this trend toward invisibility is already happening to Twitter — newscasters tell viewers to “send a tweet” today, not “Go to twitter.com and send a message” as they used to. The act of tweeting will stay with us now, even if the brand fails.

As Twitter becomes less a web site and more simply a platform for short messages, the more its brand will recede from our mind. If history is any guide, this will be the point at which Twitter, as we know it today, will disappear. Its feeder parts, like cell phone apps and social networking sites, will then devour its functionality, pushing its growth into the stratosphere, making it immortal.

Twitter will die. And, in so doing, will live forever.

1. Moore’s Law, which has proven very accurate, supposed that the number of transistors that could be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double about every two years. It is frequently misquoted as suggesting that the price of technology will halve and the processing speed will double every two years.