BuzzMachine

I wish I could preorder the new iPhone without having to worry about hype, wait, lines, and whether it’s in stock.

But here’s another idea, one I’m toying with for the book: What if I could subscribe to the iPhone as I subscribe to a magazine or newspaper? When the new edition is out, I get it. Perhaps one of the benefits of being a subscriber is that I’m guaranteed to get it before everyone else. Nya-nya. And unlike magazines, my old iPhone has value: I can trade it in like a car or sell it on eBay and in either case be assured that it will be used or will be disposed of properly. Apple can be guaranteed a loyal customer base for new products (saving on customer acquisition costs for them). These customers are also a built-in focus group; they can tell you what they want next. Publishers will tell you that subscriptions are also nice for cash flow. Meanwhile as a customer I can be assure I will always be up-to-the-minute. With technical and mechanical goods, I could also be assured of getting updates as I can get with software purchases: new software for the phone, a new radio for the car.

Perhaps the model here is not that I buy the gadgets. Maybe I lease them. This model is being pioneered, believe it or not, in office carpeting.

If the leasing/subscription model can work for carpeting and iPhones, what else could it work for? Clothes? Latter-day Johnny Cashes like Michael Rosenblum could get regular shipments of black shirts and pants. Computers? Sure but you don’t need to replace the whole box; you could send me a new hard drive when larger ones come out, stocked with new versions of my software. Kitchen cabinets? My wife is ready to replace ours.

Oh, I know you’ll argue that this defeats the planned obsolescence that is, admit it or not, at the heart of business models for manufacturers. But if we argue that in today’s ecology of links, relationships are more important than mass, loyalty is more valuable than turnover, and customer service is the new marketing, then there are new economics at work. Magazines try desperately to get you to auto-renew subscriptions through credit cards. Microsoft has been dying to switch to subscriptions for years. HP has long wanted to see you are low on ink via the internet and ship you new ink cartridges before you even know you need them. Why shouldn’t a brand built on loyalty like Apple be able to build a subscription business? Thoughts?

I’m forever in search of that thing that lets me come back to things later but doesn’t become a mess. Bookmarks quickly became a mess. Email is a mess. My tabs are a mess — I keep opening up new ones vowing to read that thing later, only to come back a week later and say nevermind. Instapaper (no apparent relation) is a very easy way to save something with one click, which I found via David Weinberger on Twitter.

The Guardian started up a new feature they call Webcameos: comment from people via webcams. They had me throw in two cents (which over there is worth less than one) on Yahoo-Microsoft. To make it, I used my Reuters/Nokia mojo camera-phone. Easy as pie.

Dave Winer has questions about using mobile phones in Europe. My answer (which I learned from Ken Rutkowski):

1. Get a local SIM card for GSM phone.*
2. Forward your US number to your Skype number.
3. Forward your Skype number to your European GSM number.
This way, people can call your local number and you can talk to them without paying international roaming. Calling the US won’t be cheaper on your mobile phone; for that, use Skype on your laptop while online.

* This requires that you have an unlocked GSM phone. Many GSM phones can be unlocked; just Google for those services or pay your provider for the privilege. I used a really old Nokia phone for years but got a web-ready PDA-phone in January so I can also get email on my phone — a godsend. Also, most providers in Europe sell pay-as-you-go SIM cards that don’t expire; that’s just reason No. 476 why their phone system is better than ours. The EU is also limiting roaming rates within Europe.

Also, Dave, find out whether you need an adapter on the plane for your laptop power. If you’re taking your MacBook, you have to buy that adapter from Apple and only Apple because it has the proprietary magnetic plug.

So I went to a large breakfast this morning thrown by the Newhouse School at Syracuse and The New Yorker (much more on that in a minute). Most of us were assigned tables and so I put down my briefcase and went off to schmooze, which is what one does at these things. I came back and my case was moved and chair occupied. I looked miffed — and various folks later hovered around to throw themselves on swords for this — but I was embarrassed to say why the chair mattered to me. It wasn’t because this was Table 8 and that enabled me to look down my nose at the poor sods at Table 10. It wasn’t because I was going to sit next to some media mogul and make a deal that would change my life and finances. It was because the chair was near an electric plug. We bloggers arrange our lives around wi-fi and plugs. To make my thought process even more pathetic, I then had to rearrange my route to the airport today so I could find someplace to recharge — because, you see, I didn’t want to be out one watt for the plane ride — or I contemplated going to the airport quite early to scope and stage out a precious plug there. Sad, isn’t it?

It has been hell being without my beloved Treo for a week.

I realized that my Treo is my new cigarette. I smoke the thing. It’s not crack. It’s nicotine: a sneaker, day-to-day addiction. I use Treo at all the times I used to smoke: while eating, while walking, while driving (only at stop lights), while talking on the phone (but not to you), while in the bathroom (I admit it). No, Treoing after sex is not oddly satisfying.

In London, my Sprint Treo won’t work, so I used an HP Ipaq. It’s just not the same. The Windows interface is like smoking an unfiltered; it hurts. I couldn’t get the email to work sending my email; thank goodness I could grab all my mail with Gmail and use that instead. I was going nuts having to lift its lid and use that damned stylus. And it just doesn’t look good; it’s like a man smoking a Virginia Slim.

I’m glad to get back home to my Treo. And my family.

In December, I wished that the One Laptop Per Child project would sell the laptops to us at wildly inflated prices to subsidize laptops for children elsewhere. I suggested $500. Now the BBC reports that they are considering selling us two laptops with one going to the developing world — a less wildly inflated price. Count me in.

Just before the Apple iPhone is supposed to be announced, the Observer says Orange is working on a Google phone.

I love the One Laptop per Child project (David Weinberger takes one for a spin here) and think the criticism of it motivated by PC nitwittery (’you should solve every other problem the poor have before giving them a laptop’) or competitive greed (’how dare you make an inexpensive machine with inexpensive software?’) is ridiculous, even offensive.

My only complaint about the laptop crusade is that they won’t sell them to us rich people. I think they should — at wildly inflated prices. Sell me a $100 laptop for $500 and thus I’ll buy laptops for four children somewhere in the world. That beats a PBS pledge gift.

And let my school district, which is rich, buy them for $300 each, giving each child here a machine to use in school — which they don’t have now — and thus subsidizing laptops for schools that could not afford them. The Robin Hood gambit. I’ll bet the investment my school makes now in classroom machines and laptop carts is equivalent. And there are fringe benefits: The school could save on textbooks by putting curriculum on the network. The students could all now work in collaborative tools — class wikis. The town gets the start of a mesh network. And the students get tools they should have. My son is lugging an 8-pound Dell around to class (we don’t want to bang up the more precious, working Mac) so he can take notes and the teachers love that he does; they’d like to see every student taking good notes and being connected. At CUNY, we got every student a Mac laptop and I can tell you it’s great working without technology barriers to learning.

This also changes the competitive landscape for the PC business. Machines will get cheaper and use more open software to do so, which will put them in more hands.

Most important, this changes the economics of scale for the laptop crusade, too. The more they can make, the cheaper they will be to make (they actually cost about $150 each now). Demand is a good thing.

To start, I’d take 100 of these great machines and sell them on eBay as a benefit. I have no doubt that early adopters would stampede to get their hands on the things and help spread the technology they adore to the world. The bidding starts at $1,000. How’s that for a markup?

TiVo is lighting lots of little fires under the explosion of TV. Two new blazes today: Saul Hansell reports that with the purchase of $25 software, users will be able to watch video from their computers on their TVs, via their TiVos — competing with Apple’s coming iTV. And TiVo is announcing a deal with One True Media to allow you to send your videos to a friend’s TiVo.

Except convergence ain’t easy. Hansell outlines the issues: To download and play things directly off the TiVo box, you have to convert video to MP2. The new TiVo setup forces you to download the video to your PC and play it to the TV from there; this widens the scope to MP4, QuickTime, and some Windows Media. But it cannot play Flash — which is what YouTube and other such services use — and cannot play movies with copyright protection. It’s Beta-VHS hell multiplied tenfold.

The simple fact is that we want to watch our stuff wherever we want to watch it. So the consumer electronics, media, and internet industries need to get their acts together to enable this. I fear this will take time. Look how long it is taking to get a 39-cent iPod plug built into car stereos.

We’ve been moving furniture all day, from my son’s old room to my old office (I’m lucky enough to have a new one at home). My wife got these nonstick furniture sliders (kind of like these) that she insisted — “I saw it on TV” — would make it a breeze to slide heavy dressers down the hall. I was dubious. I often am. But damned they didn’t work, beautifully. Like skating on ice. I confessed my mistake to my wife; I was amazed. And we thought the same thing at the same time. “You going to blog this?” she asked. Of course.

The last thing I wanted to wake up to was the image of Walt Mossberg on the toilet.