Over time, great cities tend to inspire their own iconic comedies: New York's Seinfeld. Boston's Cheers. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Now Betas is the show that could put Silicon Valley on the comedy map - but only if you help.

Betas is one of the eight comedy pilots that Amazon has been featuring on its Instant Video page. If enough voters back Betas - or any of the other comedies - then Amazon will greenlight its development into a full-fledged original series, taking on shows like House of Cards and Lilyhammer on Netflix.

Betas = Heart, Surrealism And Desperation

To its credit, Betas integrates much of what made 1980s comedies great - heart, a touch of implausibility that borders on surrealism - and swirls it all together with the desperation and ambition of the Silicon Valley feeding frenzy. For many entrepreneurs, the right handshake seems to be all that separates them from poverty or untold riches, a cruelty that can instantly reduce months of work to ashes. Chasing that dream is frustrating. And funny.

Betas reminds us that Silicon Valley has become high school writ large: geeks may be the new jocks, but the popular kids still have all the money and dweebs are still dweebs. And owning all the toys is still the high score.

Betas begins in the sort of community workspace many techies could imagine working in, if they weren't, you know, working: Employees chase each other around with Nerf guns, others grind Cheetos into their keyboards. "Nash," the neurotic, socially inhibited engineer played by Karan Soni, can't take it. He freaks out and hides in one of the telephone booths the workspace has put against the wall, a quasi-ironic homage to older technology. Nash, despondent, tells his company's founder, Trey (Joe Dinicol), that the latest build of their Highlight-like social discovery app, BRB, bricked the phone.

"Who cares? Investors are making investments from napkin sketches made by high school dropouts!" Trey responds.

"I don't make napkin sketches!" Nash wails. 

The plot of the pilot revolves around a meeting that Trey is convinced BRB needs with George Murchison (Ed Begley, Jr.), who plays electric flute with Moby and slices his own "Ferrari of trout" with an Asian shortsword. Part of the reason is one-upping the team behind "Valet Me," a parking app whose sudden success makes the douche bag developers instant stars. Trey is convinced that the when Murchison hears BRB's pitch, he'll invest - and talks his way into Murchison's home using "Larry Page" as an alias.

The other members of the BRB team include Hobbes (Jonathan C. Daly), a bearded, jaded developer whose idea of relaxing is watching Webcam porn at a local laundromat, and Mitchell (Charlie Saxton) a pudgy dweeb whose biggest goal is to talk to Mikki (Maya Erskine), the cool Asian chick who's looking for just about anything to spark her empty life. "I would never say damp," Mikki muses. "It makes my vaj seem like the Dagobah system." 

Betas Brings Silicon Valley To Life

Betas may be a scripted comedy, but it feels a hell of a lot more real than Randi Zuckerberg's reality TV fiasco, Startups: Silicon Valley that debuted last year. Then, a cast of pretty wannabes partied their way from meetup to meeting to hangout to loft party, leaving everyone in Silicon Valley muttering, "What the hell is this?" Startups' worst crime, however, wasn't that it was vapid; it was just boring, and we'd seen all the tricks that reality series could throw at us before. It's hard to fathom how anyone got beyond an episode or two.

(See also Startups Silicon Valley: The Painful Truth Behind A Caricature Of Excess.)

The Big Bang Theory may hold the crown of TV's geekiest show. But BBT mocks geeky science culture - Star Trek, Iron Man and the ins and outs of academic life - without really touching on what makes a life in technology so great. Betas tosses you in the deep end; it assumes you know what "Series A" funding is, and who Mark Zuckerberg and Page are. Little touches - bumping phones to swap digits, for example - lend the series the "oh yeah, people really do do that" feeling. Silicon Valley will hit the big screen this summer, when The Internship looks inside life at Google - but do you really think a sanctioned look inside the Googleplex is going to end up all that funny?

(See also Geek Movies: The Top 10 Most Inspirational Films For Techies.)

Think Scrubs: Silicon Valley

Think of Betas as Scrubs Silicon Valley: the four members of BRB are starting at the bottom, hoping to climb to the top. In Scrubs, there's a natural progression: the young residents must earn their way up the medical ladder to become full-fledged doctors. What makes Betas so compelling is that Silicon Valley isn't like that. Instead, it's a roller-coaster ride: This week it's a funding deal, next week it's a show-stopping bug. What happens if Trey and the team accidentally leak their user information? What if they're hacked? Do they attract the attention of Anonymous? Does Microsoft make a pitch to buy them? Does IBM?

Look, crazy stuff happens in Silicon Valley every day. But there's no reason why we can't watch it on our TVs at night, too. So watch Betas. Vote for it. Let's make this happen, people.

Guest author Matthew Bryan Beck is editorial director of The New York Digital.

Everyone wants to work for a hot startup. They’re hip, fun and run by passionate, creative people with exciting, innovative ideas. But working at that awesome startup can come at a cost to your career and your sanity. Consider these points before quitting your safe, secure position at a big, established company:

1. The Hours Are Long

Young companies building a new product or service from the ground up run on small teams, limited resources and no time to spare. And they expect their people to give 110% to the job. Your social life outside the office will likely suffer, and the pressure to stay later and later can make you feel like a deserter if you need to leave the office on time for personal reasons. 

2. The Pay Sucks 

Unless you’re a senior executive of a startup, your compensation may leave something to be desired. The bulk of startup funding goes into the operations and product first, and the people second. For the amount of hours you can be required put in each week, the pay may feel inadequate. The tradeoff that startups offer is the cool factor - plus equity and stock packages. And there may be perks like free snacks and lunches, beer kegs, discounted gym memberships, yoga classes, flexible vacation time, ping-pong, etc.

3. Big Egos Rule

Startups are built on exciting ideas from brilliant minds, but those can also come with egos. Like any workplace, many startups have a pecking order. While most startups advertise a spirit of open forum and democratic exchange of ideas, you may have to earn your stripes before your input is valued and your ideas are implemented. Visionaries are, understandably, protective of their visions, and you may find yourself in a work environment that feels more like a tyranny than a democracy. (Note: Please make sure you're not the one with the ego.)

4. Distractions, Distractions, Distractions

Startups pride themselves on a casual, hoodie-and-jeans company culture, the antithesis of the stereotypical corporate suit. Open, collaborative, cubicle-free working environments foster a sense of community and togetherness. But the frat-house vibe can also be counterproductive and result in a lack of oversight and structure. In this kind of less-than-professional office, employees may get too chummy, spending more time on Facebook, socializing, coffee runs and cigarette breaks than getting work done.

5. You Probably Won't Last

Many new startups suffer from the revolving door syndrome, struggling to keep a stable team. Sometimes they hired the wrong people, but sometimes the person shown the door is you. A recent study of 20,000 new hires by research firm Leadership IQ found that 89% of the time new hires failed, it was for ‘attitudinal reasons’, not lack of skill. Make sure you are a good fit for the startup before submitting your resume. If you do get the job, make sure to bring (and keep) a good attitude.

So Now What?

Keeping positive, staying loyal and consistently producing high-quality work is the best way to impress any company. Working for a startup can be a sacrifice of time and money, but it's also a commitment that can pay off if the company grows rapidly. Many startup employees move on to form their own companies or parlay their experience into an in-demand calling card. If you think you have what it takes, don't let these warnings slow you down.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The other day, all of my memories were erased. Well, that's how you'd describe it in the marketing parlance of Memolane, an excellent social history timeline service that shut down late last week. Just a few weeks prior, the always-useful crime stats and community updates from Everyblock stopped flowing into my Google Reader. What the hell, Internet?

As the Web matures, the possibility that our favorite services might suddenly and unexpectedly shut down always looms in the background. It may be unlikely, but it's something to bear in mind as we spend more of digital lives in the cloud: This data isn't ours. We're handing it to some company that's storing it on their servers. If we're really lucky, they'll let us click an "export" button at some point and take it with us.

This isn't an entirely new phenomenon. Remember LaLa? The online music service was nearing Rdio-caliber levels of awesomeness before Apple bought it and shut it down. Since Larry Page took over as CEO, Google has been routinely cleaning house and closing less popular services while making the remaining ones more Google Plus-y.

Then you have the thankfully rare scenario that some  unsuspecting Megaupload users were caught in last year when the feds shut down Kim Dotcom's cyberlocker. More recently, Yahoo acquired Pinterest clone Snip.it and subsequently slammed the doors shut. To be fair, that site was nowhere near as popular as Delicious, the social bookmarking service that narrowly escaped the swing of Yahoo's downsizing hatchet in 2011.

Expect More Startup Roadkill

Don't be surprised if this sort of thing happens more frequently as the Web gets older. Startups will either fail or get acquired, and the giants will keep fine-tuning their products as their business priorities shift.

In many cases, few will mourn these shutdowns. Nobody wept when the curtain rang down on Google Wave (although some of us are still bitter about the loss of Google Reader's sharing button).

But in some instances – see Everyblock – services with a substantial community can disappear overnight. When this sort of thing happens, it hopefully won't always be as thoughtlessly bungled as NBC's shutdown of Everyblock was. But happen it will.  

Memolane, We Hardly Knew Ye

Memolane was not a hugely popular service, but I loved it. The premise was simple: You plugged in your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and SoundCloud accounts (among many others) and it built a nice-looking timeline of your social media updates and content, going all the way back to whenever you first started using Facebook or Flickr. Mine went back seven years, so it was pretty interesting to scroll through.

You could also plug in any RSS feed, so I kept an archive of my ReadWrite stories alongside my photos, check-ins, tweets and other social content. If you live online like I do, your Memolane timeline would be pretty thoroughly detailed. 

My grandmother died in 1997. It was just a few months before Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the domain google.com. If I wanted to find out more about my grandmother's life, I'd have to dig into old boxes or ask my mother. I can't Google her. My grandchildren, on the other hand, will have as richly detailed a history as you can possibly imagine, right down to individual haircuts (thanks, Foursquare). Kids graduating high school this May will have an even more thorough digital biography awaiting future generations. 

Tools like Memolane allow us to start aggregating all the content and updates we're sprinkling across the Web, pulling them into a thorough and chronological timeline. Nobody cared about my Memolane but me. And even I didn't look at it regularly. It was just interesting to go back every once and awhile and reminisce about things that were happening in my life four years ago.

I could imagine my grandchildren one day scrolling through my Memolane timeline, wondering what life was like before Internet-connected neural implants and laser-shooting eyeballs. 

Memolane felt very personal. So when it shut down, it was a little weird. LaLa, Everyblock and other public services were one thing, but this was my history. I don't even get an export button? Apparently not. 

Fortunately, all Memolane was doing was aggregating content from other sources, all of which are still live. So I can at least partially recreate the experience on another service like TimeHop or Rememble. Easy enough. 

Still, these recent shutdowns offer yet another sobering reminder of something we already knew: It's not our Web, even when it feels like it is. So have fun and share as much as you please. But try not to get too attached.

Lead photo by Chris Gilson

One day you're going to see me walking down the street wearing Google glasses, maybe sporting an iWatch and probably doing something with an overly large cellphone. And you'll probably think I'm a giant douchebag. 

Is it because I'll be just one more over-connected yet socially oblivious American? Will you be jealous of how I have all these great gadgets and am always on top of information? Or is it just that I'll look like a massive tool?

Quite possibly the latter, and it's with that in mind that Google appears to be addressing the style gap raised by its much-hyped augmented reality Project Glass. According to the New York Times, Google is in talks with the boutique e-commerce site Warby Parker, which makes specialized stylish glasses, to produce more fashionable frames for its Glass frames. 

Google has plenty of work ahead of it to make Glass stylish for the masses. Right now, the glasses basically feature a camera-battery-processor rig attached to plastic frames and lenses. As in, yeah, that bulky thing on the left of the frames below. 

The challenge for Google and Warby Parker is to make the functional parts of Glass look cool. Does that mean redesigning how the glasses are put together? Or can Warby Parker find a way to take that existing pack and put it on frames in a chic manner?

The question of style is a new one for Google, which has historically focused on geeks and engineers. What's good for the geek is good for the Google gander.

That's changing with Glass. Google has seeded the devices to both tech enthusiasts and fashionistas. For example, Google has given a pair to Bobak Ferdowsi, the flight director for NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover mission. You don't get much more geek-chic than a NASA engineer. Yet Google also had runway models feature Glass eyewear during New York Fashion Week.

The strategy is almost Apple-esque. Apple has long tried to make sure that its products embraced both functional and aesthetic principles. An iPhone isn't just a cool smartphone, it's a slick status symbol. That focus helped Apple grow into one of the biggest and most successful companies in history.

As Google continues to expand its own lined of devices – such as Nexus smartphones and tablets and Chromebooks – it will need to navigate the function/style divide every bit as carefully as Apple has. Will Warby Parker will be Google’s solution to that challenge? Stay tuned.

In my quest to find love through my smartphone, I am starting to feel that I have embarked on a fool’s errand.

According to mobile analytics firm Flurry, there are a paucity of women using dating apps. Essentially, dating apps are for dudes. Analyzing the top 20 dating apps on Flurry’s platform, the company found that 64% of users are male. Things are even worse on Android, with 66% of users possessing a Y chromosome. 

The numbers are slightly more balanced for Apple’s iOS. Only 55% of dating app users are male in the Apple universe. These are great numbers if you are a women looking for a variety of men through these apps - but men will be fishing from a smaller dating pool.

From an age perspective, the primary users of these apps are those in their mid-20s and early 30s. Nearly 42% of Android dating app users are between the ages of 25-34, with the same age demographic comprising 44% on iOS. Millennials between the ages of 18-24 are the next largest age demographic, with 38% for Android and 34% on iOS.

Of course, the ratio depends on what dating app you are using. Anybody that has even casually browsed through location-based dating app Tinder may be shocked that nearly everybody that uses the app seems tobe between the ages of 18-20. Some are quite a bit younger (which should be illegal or something). 

To put the demographics in perspective, we are talking about millions of users here. The top 20 dating apps on Flurry’s system have 17 million users that registered 20 billion sessions (the act of opening and closing an app) in January 2013. If 36% of all dating app users are women, that still equates to 6.12 million users. Yet once you spread those users around varying geographic regions, the scarcity of ladies using these apps may be acutely felt by men looking for dates. 

Is this an epic fail for dating apps? If there is little gender balance, then the apps become basically unusable for the one sex while the other gets a variety of choices. 

Starting this week, I'm taking my dating life mobile. For you, dear reader. And science!

Navigating online dating has never exactly been for the faint of heart. Mobile is likely no different, despite the fact that there are now thousands of dating, flirting, connection and relationship apps available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. These apps are getting smarter all the time, having recently grown location awareness and, in many cases, hooks into your Facebook profile. (Whether those are good things or not is a separate question.)

(See also Happy Valentine's Day: Top Dating Apps For iPhone, iPad And Android.)

At the same time, there's still something vaguely seedy about a lot of mobile dating apps, which often enough seem to be facilitating stalkers, charging exorbitant fees or just inundating users with fake or misleading profiles.

Smartphones and tablets are supposed to make our lives easier - and sometimes they actually do. Is that the case when it comes to dating, one the biggest lifestyle categories on the Internet? I’m about to find out the hard way.

A Techno-Social Lifestyle Experiment

There's actually a deeper issue here. I cover mobile technology for ReadWrite, and so I make a point of living as much of my life via smartphones or tablets as I can. Mobile gadgets aren't just a bunch of specs and apps, cameras and wireless connections. They're portals for information and connection - powerful computers that have the potential to transform ordinary human behavior. My goal is to see whether and how this works in person, and to report back on the experience. 

So that's the big-picture rationale for subjecting my social life to the vagaries of sometimes sketchy-looking apps. But it's also true that I'm bored and single. And it's February in Massachusetts, a dreary month for New England. I've also long admired the slightly gonzo writer A.J. Jacobs, who in several articles for Esquire kept performing wacky experiments on himself. Like the time he outsourced his entire life.

Then there's the fact that my mother apparently wants me to meet someone. As was evidenced a couple of weeks ago when I got a call from a local dating service that she had signed me up for - without telling me. That was an awkward phone call.

Perhaps most important for many of our readers here, the market for dating apps is exploding. Last year, mobile analytics company Flurry reported that people were spending more time with social apps than mobile games, with most of that growth coming from group-messaging and dating apps. I thought about digging deeper into that trend at the time, but passed because I couldn't figure out a good angle for the story. I was looking at it from the perspective of data – how much time were people spending in these apps, what were they doing, how many were there? 

I was asking the wrong questions.

Unless you're an OkCupid junkie, dating apps aren't about objective sets of data. They're about the most subjective things in our lives: our relationships, connections, friends, love and hate. 

(See also Big Data, Better Dating; How OKCupid Helps Users Find Their Perfect Match.)

I figured the only way to really understand this burgeoning part aspect of the app economy and mobile ecosystem was to take my dating life completely mobile. Call it a social experiment. 

To be honest, I'm a little frightened. 

The obligatory front-camera "selfie" you see on every dating site ever. Ground Rules

I have to set some parameters here, or this type of experiment could completely take over my life. So here are my ground rules:

Parameters

• I will actively use dating apps for at least one month to meet actual people.
• I will use a variety of apps (Android and iOS) to get a good sense of their depth and variety.

What I Will Do

• Approach each connection with an open mind and respect.
• Apply the rule of “half your age plus seven” to how old a date has to be (nobody in their late teens or very early 20s). 
• Notify dates that I am writing a series on dating apps. 
• If I make a meaningful connection and start a fledgling relationship with someone I meet, I'll terminate the experiment.

What I Won't Do

• I won't actively use the dating apps to just look for a “hookup.” No trolling for sex on my smartphone.
• I won't recount much in the way of specific details about my dates. Yes, I'll share a few anecdotes here and there, but if you're looking for salacious gossip, click elsewhere.
• I won't do anything to endanger my physical, emotional or financial safety.
• I won't lie to make myself look better or misrepresent myself in any way. 
• I won't ignore possible connections in real life that didn't originate on my smartphone.

The Apps I'll Be Using

I chose the following apps because they represent a good cross section of new, interesting, location-based, social and traditional approaches. I won't be using any traditional websites affiliated with the services, should they exist. For instance, when I use eHarmony or Match, I'll only use those sites through their apps and over email to my phone. Here they are:

• Let’s Date – Popular new app that allows to browse anonymously for connections.
• Tinder – Location-based app that allows you to see who's nearby, their pictures and snippets from their Facebook profiles.
• eHarmony – There should be at least one traditional dating site in here to provide a counter to mobile-only apps.
• OkCupid – It’s free and has a decent app.
• Blendr – Among the several sub-tier dating apps in contention, I'm going with Blendr just because it looks the least troll-y. 
• Martini (if applicable) – Group dating app that just came to the Apple App Store.

What To Expect

First, I fully expect at least one of these dating apps to hack my email or Facebook profile. There's been a recent profusion of apps transmitting passwords inappropriately, and I'm just betting that one of the apps I use will get me hacked - kind of like getting a digital STD.

Then there are the normal online dating experiences. I expect that I'll meet people that look nothing like their photos and act nothing like their profiles would suggest.

I expect my friends, family, readers and social media followers to completely make fun of me. It's OK. I'm laughing at me, too.

Last and most definitely not least, I expect to have fun.

Am I crazy? We’ll see if I make it through the month soon enough. 

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Editors Note: This is part one of a series on the best strategies for limiting noise, junk and distractions in your digital life. 

We're halfway through January and many people are very much still in how-can-I-improve-my-life mode. If joining the gym or deactivating Facebook hasn't made you feel like a better human yet, here's another idea: The Digital Purge. 

It's been four years since Nicholas Carr wrote his famous story in The Atlantic about whether Google (and by extension, the Internet) is making us "stupid." That article, along with his book The Shallows kicked off a huge debate about the effects the Web is having on our brains, particularly our ability to think deeply or retain information. Since then, with the rise of smartphones, our attention has become even more fractured. The flood of information has become even more constant and overwhelming - and it affects more and more people all the time. 

Fortunately, there are ways to minimize the noise. One thing that would help many people is a periodic purge of all their feeds, subscriptions, emails, notifications and yes, even friends. Not every button will be painless to click. But your brain will feel better for it. And email is the perfect place to start. 

How To Take Control Of Your Inbox 

Even if you've been fairly organized about email - setting up folders or tags, utilizing stars and color-coding - chances are your inbox has outgrown your best efforts to tame it. 

If you're like me, you look at your inbox with one agenda in mind: process it. See if you have any new emails, read them, respond to the ones you starred earlier, draft new messages. Seldom do we take a step back and think about what our inbox looks like and why. 

So many apps, social networks and commerce sites make the same ballsy, if not outright obnoxious assumption: If you're signing up to use this product, you want us to email you all the time. And even if you don't, we'll keep that box checked by default and hope you won't notice. You want push notifications on your phone? Just click "OK." Trust us. 

Screw all of that.  

Plenty of sites and services that are no doubht bombarding your inbox right now. They need to be zapped. Is Facebook telling you every time somebody likes your vacation photos? Does Twitter fill you in every time anyone does anything anywhere near one of your tweets? Don't you constantly check these services anyway? Wait, a random high school acquaintance joined Pinterest?? I wonder what kind of cupcakes they're pinning. 

You don't need those emails. In 15 minutes you can go through and unsubscribe to most of them, zapping anything that doesn't lend itself to a more productive or fulfilling life. For some, you'll need to navigate the original website's notifications settings (try not to get distracted by Grumpy Cat on the way). For others, the "unsubscribe" link is right there at the bottom of the newsletter, as required by law. Many times, it actually works properly, too!

When It Doubt, Go Nuclear With Filters

To nuke the rest, set up a series of rules (this works differently depending on your email provider). In Gmail, it's easy. When you're viewing an offending message, you can click the "More" button in the upper right and then select "Filter messages like these." From there, you can tell Gmail to archive, mark as unread or delete any message with a given sender or subject line. Likewise, if there are any messages you definitely don't want to miss, you can set up a filter that will automatically star them. 

Limit Your Exposure To Email 

But here's the real issue: If you're habitually checking your email dozens of times per day, stop it.  For most of us, the amount of attention we pay our inboxes each day vastly outweighs the value we realistically derive from it. 

Ironically, not checking your email it requires conscious effort, since we've trained our brains to expect a never-ending flow of messages, one of which just might be that super-important opportunity we've been waiting for. 

Our brains need to be re-trained. To do this, we need to turn off the god forsaken email notifications and set aside specific chunks of time for dealing with email. Of course, productivity gurus have been telling us this for years. But it's worthless advice unless we actually do it.

But here's the key. It's not enough to re-train ourselves. While we're at it, we need to re-train those with whom we communicate via email so they no longer expect immediate responses to every message. Surprisingly, a growing number of employers are actually encouraging this practice, especially after hours. (See Why I'm Joining The Movement To Stop Answering After-Hours Email.) 

They know that constant email interruptions aren't good for productivity. We need to learn that lesson as well.

Lead photo by Liz West. 

I first noticed something was off when I went to pay my rent one month. The window for a timely online transfer of funds was closing, so to get the money to my landlord in time, I'd have to do something unusual. I took out my checkbook, grabbed a pen and started writing the date. 

It felt weird. My hand cramped a little, churning out numbers and letters with the slightest - but still noticeable - discomfort. My handwriting sucked. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't actually written anything by hand in a long, long time. Just a few years earlier, I kept a paper journal by my bed and would buy three-packs of Moleskin notebooks for brainstorming, sketching and jotting things down. What happened? 

Over the course of the last four or five years, several little computers have found their way into my life. Bit by bit, my professional and creative existence made the transition to an entirely digital universe. At my old job managing digital publishing for a newspaper, the iPad soon replaced my spiral notebook in meetings. Then I left the print world to work on the Internet full-time. I could even sign my freelance contracts with my finger on an iPad.

Who needed paper? Isn't the future amazing? Look, more tweets. Wait, what was I saying?

Our Pixel-Based Lives

Before long, my documents, journal, blog post drafts and photos were living in some cloud-based repository that was readily accessible from any of my devices, at least one of which I kept by my bedside (supplanting the paper journal, magazines and alarm clock with apps). Instead of keeping a "to do" list on paper, I tapped important items into the Reminders app on my phone, which automatically synced with my iPad and laptop, each of which would then buzz with a notification at a time and even place of my choosing.

It's all pretty miraculous if you think about it. But while this digital transformation introduced heretofore inconceivable levels of convenience and productivity into my life, some things can get lost in all that digital noise. At the very least, I should be able to comfortably write the goddamn date.  

Keeping One Foot In The Analog World

When I first met my girlfriend, we would cowork from cafes together. Even though she runs a popular local blog in Philadelphia and spends much of her time on the Internet, I noticed that she hadn't taken the digital plunge quite as deeply as I had. As I typed away on my laptop in the cafe, periodically referencing a propped up iPad, she closed her MacBook's lid and cracked open a Moleskin notebook and started writing down important-looking notes. She even had a paper-based planner, eschewing the cloud-synced, location-aware multi-device wonders of iCal and Reminders in favor of something decidedly more old school. 

By this time, I had already resolved to hand-write things more often. And when I did, I found I was better able to focus on the task at hand, far away from the dinging notifications, crowded inboxes, social status updates and ever-proliferating browser tabs. Watching another digital citizen put a pen to paper and get things done just as effectively, if not more so, just confirmed what I already knew: Life wasn't meant to be lived entirely in some company's cloud. And when it comes to productivity, we need more than apps. 

The Science Of Writing Vs. Typing

A few years back, there were a bunch of stories in the press about the science of writing things by hand. As it turns out, our brains work differently when we form letters with a hand-held implement - and we learn more effectively than when we type. This makes total sense. I've long noticed that when I'm writing in a paper journal, it mentally feels different than when I'm typing out my thoughts on a computer. I thought it had something to do with the more focused nature of paper vs. connected devices. As it turns out, there's more to it than that.  

Explains Lifehacker: 

Writing stimulates a bunch of cells at the base of the brain called the reticular activating system (RAS). The RAS acts as a filter for everything your brain needs to process, giving more importance to the stuff that you're actively focusing on at the moment—something that the physical act of writing brings to the forefront. 

Meanwhile, a series of studies conducted in the last few years have indicated that students learn more effectively when they form letters and shapes by hand as opposed to doing so digitally. 

Technology has a way of augmenting our imperfect brains and making us more productive. Personally, I still prefer to have a notification ding with a reminder to do something I committed to several days ago. In some ways, all this tech does enhance our increasingly complex lives. It makes it easier to navigate, harder to lose track of things, more convenient to stay in touch and nearly effortless to discover new places. 

But just like it's still nice to curl up with a book made of trees or play a vinyl record, there's still room for the analog in our productive lives. Sure, that IFTTT recipe connecting your Evernote account to Dropbox or Gmail looks awesome. But don't forget to pick up a pen from time to time. 

Lead photo by puuikibeach.

This morning, for the first time ever, I jogged in silence. Other than my own rhythmic panting, my sneakers hitting the pavement and the urban soundtrack that my brain has long filtered out, I heard nothing as I ran across my neighborhood. For once, there wasn't music playing. 

Normally, I stream music from Spotify on my iPhone, but today the app -- or my data connection; I wasn't sure which -- was not cooperating. After waiting for "Connecting…" to disappear from the top of the application and for the track names to turn from grey to black, I force-quit Spotify. Then I fired it up again. And again. Same thing. I started my run without music, figuring I'd check back with Spotify in a minute or two to see if anything had changed. It hadn't. 

Running in silence was actually kind of nice, but it got me thinking. Do I really want to keep my music in the cloud? Suddenly, I was cut off from most of the music I listen to day to day. Sure, I could start searching for songs on SoundCloud or YouTube, but stringing together more than one track would be too tedious to do while trying to run. I do have several songs favorited on SoundCloud, but they're a random assortment of things and streaming them back to back probably wouldn't suit my situation or mood. On Spotify, I had entire albums starred and a playlist I made specifically for running. And now, if only for 45 minutes, I was locked out of it all. 

It was my own fault, mostly. For the past 15 months, Spotify's mobile app has been my chief source of music while I'm on the go. It's been a pretty good experience, on the whole. I actually let Spotify replace my iPod and haven't used iTunes to manage or sync my music since last summer. Other than predictable scenarios like flying in an airplane and riding the subway in New York, that experience had never been truly interrupted until today. Maybe I shouldn't be relying so heavily on the cloud for music. 

When I got back to my house, my phone connected to my home WiFi network and my music loaded instantly. The issue, it turned out, was with my phone's connection, not the Spotify app. In fact, my excessive music streaming is almost certainly leading AT&T to throttle my (grandfathered) unlimited data connection, which uses 33 GB per month. The biggest plan they offer new smartphone owners is 5GB. Yikes.

The Net Has Altered Music, But Let's Not Store It There

My phone wouldn't use so much data if I was storing all that music locally, which is actually something Spotify allows subscribers to do. Premium subscribers can sync tracks from its massive library to their devices (much like you can with Rdio), as well as transfer their own local audio files, iPod-style. The latter feature is one thing that sets Spotify apart from its competition. Unfortunately, every time I've tried to sync my playlists and transfer my own MP3s from the Spotify desktop client to its mobile app, I've run into problems. I'm not the only one. After I went back and forth with their support team, reinstalled the app and re-synced everything twice, the issue persisted and I gave up. 

Did AT&T throttle my connection? Did Spotify screw up its mobile app? Are my phone's OS and apps up to date? Did I try force-quitting the app and reconnecting? The mere fact that these variables exist suggests that the Internet isn't the best place to store our music. Not now. Probably not ever. 

The future of music is not, dare I say it, in the cloud. Instead, our music collections will be both Web-hosted and locally-stored and, like our books, both digital and analog. As long as a data connection can be interrupted -- by a subway tunnel, a natural disaster or a dictator -- keeping our most cherished things on some company's servers seems like a bad idea. 

We might, for example, stream from Rdio or Spotify to our phones, sync whatever will fit on those devices, keep a bigger-capacity iPod (or perhaps a Pono player) as a backup and hang onto some favorites in a physical, often analog format. Even if most of what we listen to is piped to our speakers over the Internet, we're still going to want to own some meaningful segment of our music collections. I don't care how fast and ubiquitous the networks get. They'll never be failproof. 

See Also: Screw The New iPods: We Need Better Music Players

If digital music's future indeed isn't primarily cloud-based, Apple doesn't appear to see it that way. The company that revolutionized music consumption with the iPod is in the process of phasing out its high-capacity classic iPods in favor of iOS-based devices that max out at 64 gigabytes of storage. When the new iPod Touch was announced last month, our own Jon Mitchell eloquently bemoaned this state of affairs, decrying these smaller and inherently cloud-dependent devices. 

By no means am I contemplating the end of my Spotify subscription. Aside from the annoying syncing issues, the service is excellent. Its third-party app platform offers some of the most promising glimpses at how we'll discover and interact with music in the future. But while I'll continue to stream music to several devices every day, I'm looking to the cloud as a supplement to -- not a repository for -- my music collection.   

Photo by Niki Odolphi

In January, The New York Times wondered aloud why Apple did not make the iPhone in America. The story heaped a torrent of commentary and scrutiny on Silicon Valley’s most valuable company. Whether you think manufacturing in the U.S. is right or not for Apple, Cadillac is proving that American-made technology can compete with the best.

The new Cadillac ATS was designed to be a luxury car world-beater - a tall order that required catching up to the likes of BMW’s 3-series and Mercedes’ C-class. But the folks at General Motors took a unique approach to the job and the ATS definitely arrives at the head of its class.

What Cadillac did is often overlooked in Silicon Valley. To help design the Cadillac User Experience (CUE), the company assembled a team of designers, engineers and software developers to shadow drivers while observing them in their natural habitat.

This “contextual design” technique required team members to accompany actual consumers, an eye-opening experience. The shadow team was able to identify several different driving styles, which were categorized under a pseudonym. One type of driver, dubbed “Spencer,” always needed to check text messages immediately, while ‘‘Emily” liked listening to music, whether on her phone, iPod or flash drive.

Cadillac spokesperson David Caldwell tells me, “We took a hard look at what carmakers call 'infotainment.' Everyone’s doing that, that’s sort of par for the course. We took a bit of a riskier approach: Is there something we can do that says ‘hey these guys are doing something different?’”

Enter A New GUI

What became clear quickly is that most drivers are distracted by a myriad of bells, beeps and whistles emitted by our digital lifestyle tools. So Cadillac engineers set out to develop a less invasive type of user interface, one that communicates via seat vibrations.

You might call it “BUI,” but GM prefers the less colloquial Cadillac Safety Alert Seat. The Alert Seat is able to tell a driver whether an object is nearby on the left by triggering a pulse on the left side of the seat.

Cadillac also joins another innovative force in technology: the open source movement. The CUE system runs on a triple-core ARM 11 processor and uses a Linux platform so developers can help keep the architecture fresh with new extensions.

CUE powers both an 8-inch capacitive touch screen, reportedly the first non-resistive display in an automobile, and a second, 12.3-inch fully configurable instrument cluster mounted behind the steering wheel.

Another automotive engineering feat was the addition of haptic feedback. There’s a proximity sensor, which brightens the display when a driver’s hand approaches the system’s user interface and a touch screen that provides both pulse feedback and the ability to swipe and pinch.

Living In America

That producing a product as complex as a car with its myriad of alloys and steel and hundreds of technology features is not a trivial procedure is underscored by this Esquire article, How to Build an American Car, which breathtakingly describes the production process.

So would Apple benefit from building the iPhone in America? There are two trends to consider here. First, it’s increasingly likely that volatility in the oil business will cause fuel prices to double in the not-too-distant future. That will make shipping even a high-value iPhone from China via FedEx a less attractive proposition.

Another is that increasingly the added value in any consumer product is software. And in this area, America still out-shines the rest of the world although domestic educational obstacles and the ascent of India may diminish that advantage.

Still though, I’m happy to see that once-considered-dead General Motors can not only match global competitors in engineering but also reinvent an area where automobiles will increasingly have to shine - the human-machine interface. Don’t believe me? I have just one word to say, iDrive.

Happy motoring America, and please contribute software innovations for the automobile and computer revolution to our Spigit innovation crowdsourcing engine.

If your image of a computer geek is a scruffy, awkward kid in T-shirt and jeans, you may want to think again. The biggest technology adopters may well be the affluent over-50 powerhouse known as the Baby Boomer.

The Economic Juggernaut

Eighty million Boomers live, work and spend in the United States, nearly a third of the population. If you add the previous generation, the number of 50-plus Americans is 98 million, a segment of the population that's expected to grow 34% between now and 2030, when nearly half of the nation will be aged 50 or over, according to a recent study from The Nielsen Company.

That is a huge economic force, one that has been shaping the U.S. private sector for a long time. But unlike previous generations, where the members "age out" of active spending and societal influence, the sheer size of the Boomer generation means that it will continue to be a force for a long time to come. By the middle of the 21st century, Nielsen reckons, there could be around 161 million 50-plus citizens in the country.

Already, this is a generation heavily influencing technology, just from it's buying power. 41% of Apple customers are Boomers, the Nielsen report states.

"From a practical standpoint, new technology helps them stay socially and intellectually connected with their contemporary world. Psychologically, it helps them to validate their self-image of being experiential, progressive and perpetually youthful," the report stated.

Techno-Boomers' Online Landscape

It's not a good idea to plug all Boomers in as ultra-savvy in all things tech. Like their children and grandchildren, they are selective in which elements of technology they like to use. Nielsen paints a picture of "techno-Boomers" -- a subset of the senior crowd who are far more likely to own an electronic reader or an iPhone than the rest of their generation, who tend to gravitate toward desktops and laptops.

These techno-Boomers, like their kids in Generation X, are 40% more likely to own an iPhone. Curiously, they are much less likely to have a movie download subscription, something unpopular throughout the entire Boomer generation. (Generation X and Millenials are apparently more apt to plunk down for movies online.)

But Boomers as a whole are online. A lot. Boomers represent a third of all online and social media users. Another third of the generation, 29 million according to Nielsen, are heavy Internet users with 8 million of them spending over 20 hours a week online.

"Internet users over the age of 50 are driving the growth of social networking as their usage of the social net has nearly doubled to 42% in the past year. 53% of Boomers are on Facebook," Nielsen reported.

Just after the iPad tablet was released in 2010, wave after wave of anecdotes came out about how fast seniors were adopting the new platform so readily. While the iOS interface was designed and built for the smaller iPhone device, it is probably no accident on the part of Apple's design team to come up with an interface that requires such a small learning curve to operate, making it very marketable for the over-50 crowd.

Just as it has always done, the Boomer generation again represents something new in the U.S. economy. Rather than declining in spending and population as has other generations, Boomers will only continue to grow as Generation X starts to join them in 2015 when the oldest GenXer turns 50.

And right now, even before this growth, Boomers alone are expected to account for nearly $230 billion in sales of consumer packaged goods, or 49% of total sales, this year This buying power indicates the out-sized influence that Boomers will have on consumer-facing technology.

Image Courtesy of Shutterstock

“Dear @BarackObama: Our homework's done, our rooms are clean, we did our chores. How about you do something for us now? #obama4grownman” tweets Rookie Magazine, the year old online teen publication Friday.

Rookie Magazine, which has attracted a readership of all ages and genders, is best known for its “Ask a Grown Man” YouTube series featuring celebrities fielding questions from teen girls on everything from relationship, fashion and school advice.

Banking on the President’s penchant for unusual outlets as part of his “under the radar” and “unusual” campaign media strategy- from local radio hosts to the President’s recent and historic Reddit AMA - the teen magazine has taken its campaign to Twitter with the hashtag #obama4grownman.

"I just decided to start a Twitter campaign to ask Obama to do Ask a Grown Man with no expectations beyond that it would be fun for me and our staff and that it would be funny and that it might get us five new Twitter followers," said Rookie editorial director Anaheed Alani in an interview with the Guardian about the Twitter campaign.

Twitter campaigns, believe it or not, have a higher than expected success rate. Just two weeks ago, Twitter personality and Community superfan @rare_basement appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson after repeatedly tweeting at him. “Honestly, I didn’t think this would work” said rare_basement on-air to an exasperated Ferguson. (Rare_basement happened to be in the neighborhood, as she was hanging out with the cast on the Community set - a feat also set up through Twitter.)

But it did work, and chances are, Rookie’s #obama4grownman will work too. Its founder and editor-in-chief, after all, is the sixteen-year-old Tavi Gevinson, the child prodigy of our digital age. 

Gevinson’s original blog Style Rookie - started when she was 11 -  propelled her to Internet fame and caught the eye of top designers who courted her with front row seats at various Fashion Weeks by the time she was 14.  Rookie Magazine was founded in 2011, and has left many a seasoned journalist in awe. 

It’s not hard to believe that Malia, Obama’s oldest daughter at 14, probably reads the site and would think her dad cool for doing Ask a Grown Man. #justsaying. 

Every Major League Baseball season has a whopping 2,430 regular-season games that are played from April through October - not counting spring training or the playoffs. That is a lot of baseball. And of course, you'd like to use your PC or tablet to watch some of those games, right?

No worries. MLB is happy, within restrictions and for a price, to make the entire schedule available to you, through its MLB.tv website and the MLB At Bat 12 app. And if you can't pony up for those, or simply want to go in another direction... well, you'll find plenty of options on the online gray market.

HD Quality - But Such Restrictions!

MLB.tv, for the money (which isn't as bad as it has been in prior seasons), is a very good deal – as far as it goes. At $84.99 per year or $19.99 per month, you will get the basic MLB.tv package; that gives you the Major League schedule in high defintion on your computer, with one feed per game, pause and rewind controls, and the ability to watch multiple games simultaneously with picture-in-picture, split screen or mosaic views.

But you don't really want this package. For a mere $15 more per year or $5 per month, the MLB.tv Premium package expands that universe substantially. For starters, it allows you to watch on any iOS or Android device. HD baseball on a current-generation iPad with the Retina display? Stunning. The extra $15 also covers the cost of the At Bat app for your devices, which also feeds you MLB news, radio broadcasts of any game from both markets (if you're feeling old-school on a summer night in your backyard) and in Spanish when available, video highlights, stats and more. It allows you to access both teams' broadcasts of any given game. Xbox Gold subscribers will find it available via their consoles – effectively substituting for the Extra Innings TV package that MLB sells to cable subscribers – and you can use a wide variety of other devices if you subscribe, including Apple TV, Sony's PlayStation 3, Roku, Boxee and some others.

Pretty perfect setup, right? Not so fast.

Unfortunately, you have to consider Major League Baseball's ridiculous blackout rules. If you're spending that $100 per year for the convenience of tracking your hometown team when you're away from your TV, you just wasted your C-note, because that's the one team you're never allowed to watch.

That's right: MLB blacks out every single game that your team plays, whether on the home or away feed, based on your geographic location as they very expansively define it. Live in Boston? No Red Sox on the iPad for you. How about, say, Kearney, Neb.? You're 325 miles of driving time away and in another state entirely, but you won't be watching any Kansas City Royals games on your Android phone. At least the blackouts don't affect you when you travel; they're based on where you are, not where you live.

Residents of the New York City tri-state area, Chicagoland, and the Bay Area get the double whammy: Two teams in each of those markets means a double blackout. (How amusing for San Jose residents: The Oakland A's would love to move there, but the San Francisco Giants have continually blocked the shift, claiming territorial rights. But for your viewing purposes? Both clubs own that market.)

MLB pulls this stunt in other places, too. For instance, Columbia, Mo., is smack between St. Louis and Kansas City. Which team gets blacked out? Both, of course.

But nobody beats the Toronto Blue Jays for territorial rights – they're blacked out everywhere in Canada.

The blackouts extend beyond local games, too: Any game being played at the same time as a national Fox broadcast on Saturday or ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball is blacked out on your MLB.tv subscriptions. And your subscription doesn't include postseason games, which fall under a separate package.

Still, MLB.tv is a fine deal for baseball fans who want to watch the rest of the major leagues online or on a mobile device. For many, that's a real draw; the ability to hear the legendary Vin Scully calling a home game for the Los Angeles Dodgers ought to be worth a hundred bucks all by itself for any true baseball fan. And it's a godsend for fans who don't live in the same town as their favorite teams. Fewer blackouts and not many other options to see the games.

But the blackouts unavoidably suggest that Major League Baseball, for as much service as it provides, is still more concerned about its broadcast deals and corporate partners than its viewing customers.

Skirting the Barriers

So, you may be stuck at work somewhere and unable to call up your hometown team on your computer. Or maybe your budget doesn't allow for the MLB.tv package. Or you just feel like sticking it to The Man (in this case, MLB Commissioner Allan “Bud” Selig). Can you still bring up your team's game on your computer?

Sure, but as with our look at how to watch the 2012 UEFA Euro 2012 soccer tournament, you're going to have to hit some dodgy websites that host less-than-legal streams of the games you want. You'll get far lower quality and have to steer through a host of junk to see the game you want. And before you start, you really need to read our common-sense rules for how to navigate such sites without ending up with unwanted software, malware or other needless headaches.

If you're still not deterred, you'll find the usual passel of sites that will feed you streams of pretty much any game in return for enduring their pop-ups, overlay ads and other revenue clutter. A Google search for “streaming baseball online” does the trick nicely – and unlike the soccer-specific sites that proliferate worldwide, most of the websites in your search will also bring up host links to a wide variety of other sports. (Just in case you really wanted to see a cricket match instead.) There's also a catchall site, streamtvguide.com, that acts as a portal to a wide range of streaming sites for sports feeds, as well as movies and TV shows.

We dialed in a recent St. Louis Cardinals-Detroit Tigers game to check out a couple of the sites. VIPbox.tv promised a long list of sports events, and it linked to a Flash feed of the Cards-Tigers game that came in neatly enough once we'd cleared a host of junk ads and inadvertently downloaded two software installers. (The latter prompts a new common-sense rule for dealing with these sites – on PCs, don't enable Auto-Run for downloaded software.) This site also promised the whole day's schedule for Thursday and Friday. Stream2watch.me pulled in the game with a better quality feed, but doesn't seem to have nearly as many choices.

Be aware, too, that the unauthorized landscape is very fluid and many sites don't stick around for long. For the UEFA 2012 soccer championships, we pointed you to FirstRowSports among other choices. When we clicked on StreamTVguide's slightly different link to them, up popped a Department of Homeland Security takedown notice for the domain name. The Man wins sometimes! FirstRowSports still exists with the .eu link, though, and will happily serve you the baseball game of your choice, among other sports.

If you're seeking certainty, ease, quality and extras, though, $100 for a whole season of MLB.tv is more than worth it. As long as you can live with those annoying restrictions.

Lead image by Photo Works / Shutterstock.com

You might think your existing broadband Internet connection is fast enough. It’s not. When it comes to Internet speeds, more is always better. That’s why we all owe some sincere gratitude to the intrepid men and women who bring truly high-speed Internet into our homes.

This post is a message of sincere appreciation - a love letter if you will - to the cable guy who recently upgraded the Internet connection in my San Francisco home. Whether you know it or not, you’ve made my life better in so many ways.

I’ve had broadband access at my home since DSL came to San Francisco in the 1990s. So I didn’t think getting faster service would make all that much of a difference in my life. Boy was I wrong.

My family and I just upgraded our cable Internet service from about 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps. And then we bought a new Wi-Fi router to extend that service to all our wireless devices. Now, 10Mbps isn’t that slow, and 50Mbps is far from the fastest service around (heck, ReadWriteWeb’s headquarters clocks in at an awesome 100Mbps). But I am still stunned at how much the change is affecting how we all use the Internet. And how much I want to hug the Astound cable guy who brought it to us.

Easy Upgrade

Compared to the early days of broadband, the process was amazingly simple. The Astound technician came out to our 115-year-old Victorian with a new Cisco DPC3010 cable modem (actually showing up in the first half hour of the promised 4-hour window!) The tech replaced our old unit and checked out the cabling in less than an hour. Bam, the speed of our hardwired connections instantly quintupled! No fuss, no muss.

Except that the increase was only visible on wired connection, not the fleet of smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices where we do most of our work (and play). They got a bump to about 20Mbps. Faster, but suddenly pokey next to the wired connections.

Even though we had a relatively recent Belkin router using the modern 802.11n Wi-Fi specification, it simply couldn’t keep up. The tech - remember how much I love him? - recommended getting a new router that supported the DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) 3.0 standard. And because we have a mix of Apple, Windows and other devices in the house, my spouse decided to choose simplicity over economy and we splurged for an Apple AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi router.

Although its $179 price is almost double that of competing devices with similar specs, it was by far the easiest router to install and configure that I’ve ever used. Everything was up and running within five minutes, with none of the false starts and geeky questions I’ve encountered setting up other wireless systems over the years. I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I can’t say I missed the headaches.

More importantly, though, suddenly every device in the house was testing out at 50Mbps downloads. 

Faster Everything

The conventional wisdom holds that just about any broadband connection is sufficient for browsing the Web, and that faster connections don’t really provide much benefit in this regard.

Thanks to our cable guy, I can confidently state that conventional wisdom is dead wrong.

Web browsing at 50Mbps is noticeably faster and less annoying than browsing at 10Mbps. In most cases, pages begin loading faster and images show up along with the text, not a second or two later. Downloading large files, from software applications to data sets to high-resolution images is now something we do in real time, rather than a process we start and let run in the background. 

If general browsing got a mild boost from the faster speeds, working with Software as a Service (SaaS) applications delivered over the Internet enjoyed a serious kick in the pants. Gmail and Google Docs suddenly seemed almost as fast as email or productivity software running on a local machine.

Better Streaming

Perhaps the biggest, most noticeable improvement came when consuming streaming content. At 50Mbps, YouTube and other online videos leap into action, instantly jumping ahead with plenty of buffer room. Nice to see on the desktop, but positively intoxicating on an iPad or other tablet, which now seems seamlessly connected to the entire Internet. (I murmur soft words of thanks to the cable guy every time I watch anything on a tablet.)

I now find that I want to have the iPad close at hand at all times, because it’s just so darn easy to watch anything online as soon as I can type it in. Just as important, I’m now wondering why I need a tablet with 64GB of storage space when I can grab stuff from the Net just as quickly. (That makes my new Google Nexus 7 tablet seem more inviting.)

Not surprisingly, that holds true when using streaming media services - whether on a computer, iPad or big-screen TV. Services such as Hulu or HBO Go perform almost as well as our satellite TV service - and our Apple TV box delivers a more TV-like experience than ever before. If it weren’t for live sports, I’d already be considering cutting the cord. (I worry that the cable guy wouldn't like that, though.)

Better Backups and Sharing

All of the members of my household rely on Dropbox to sync and share files, and some of us even pay for extra space. And one of us relies on Apple’s iCloud to sync huge chunks of data among many devices. But syncing all that data to new devices used to take hours, and it churned through much of our 100GB per month data cap. No more. At 50Mbps down and 6Mbps up, those syncs and backups happen much faster. Syncing and backing up to the cloud now seems like a much more reasonable option than it used to.

Upload speeds are often the Achilles' heel of cloud services, but 6Mbps is fast enough to help ease the bottleneck. Still, if the cable guy wants me to buy him chocolates, it would be nice to have upload speeds closer to the downloads.

Bigger Data Limits

When you add up all this stuff, it’s pretty clear that my family is likely to churn through a lot more bandwidth every month - and we were already incurring fees by exceeding our old plan’s limit of 100GB per month. The new plan ups our data transfer limit to 300GB per month, but with the extra speed encouraging all these new uses, we’re actually worried we may blow past that figure as well!

We made the switch because we cycle through a lot of data in our house, and it seemed to make sense. But I think we were all surprised at how much a five-times boost in speed changed the quality and quantity of our Internet usage. I’ve become an instant convert to the idea that the future of the Internet requires that everyone get not just broadband, but really fast broadband.

I hear that Verizon FiOS now offers up to 300Mbps. A week ago, I would have said that’s ridiculous. Now I’m wondering if those speeds will ever be available in San Francisco (if not from FiOS, which apparently won't be built out any more than it already has been, then from another provider). Sorry cable guy, I appreciate how much you’ve done for me, but if the phone company guy shows up with six times faster service, I’m going with him.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Google I/O Developers Conference is hardly a button-down affair. Even during the day, attendees sport more T-shirts than ties, more shorts than suits. And at night, after the “serious” business is done, the 6,000 attendees take tech to its funky party extreme. Check out these images of the scene.

The Google I/O after-hours party was held in the same space as the keynotes earlier in the day. But the sober rows of chairs were replaced by high-tech spectacles, tech toys and gearhead games.

Entertainment was provided by Train and Paul Oakenfold, but besides the bars (complete with Android beer taps), there were plenty of other distractions and a host of noshables, including sloppy joes and tiny cupcakes.

Diversions included giant metal alligators, mechanical bull riding contests, giant roller balls and golf simulators, plus flying robot battles. Perhaps the artiest touch was a huge metal sculpture of a face, with individual control stations for various parts, from eyes to lips.

But the longest lines seemed to be for this Android-themed mini-golf course:

Other old-school amusements - including skee ball - were competing back-to-back with fancy flight simulators.

Of course, it wasnt’t all fun and games. This machine gun was placed ominously near a bunch of more mainstream video games.

All photos by Fredric Paul, taken with a Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone.

Bill Gates is wiping out deadly diseases and Nicholas Negroponte is bringing technology to remote corners of the globe. That’s great, but when was the last time either of those guys wound up on TMZ?

No, the uber nerds we really want to emulate are the guys with awesome technical chops and even more awesome lifestyles. The goal is to work hard and play even harder - to create great stuff and make big bucks while driving a Ferrari to work and dating supermodels in the evening.

Think it can’t be done? These 10 super geeks are doing the things we wish we were doing instead!

Being Ethical Is a Business Advantage

“Given a choice between brands of comparable quality, a large percentage [of consumers] will choose the company they see as giving back or making the world better,” says Shel Horowitz, author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. With so many businesses today weighed down by a reputation of greed and lack of ethics, “those that clearly stand out as ethical have a decided advantage,” he explains.

That’s the path chosen by Mark Drake and Stephen Woodcock, the successful founders of imSMB, a Web hosting and design company. But they wanted to give back as well as prosper, so they created WebsiteHostingCampaign.com, a Web hosting company that donates $55 of each client’s Web hosting fees to charities listed on the site. “What better way to invite new businesses to host with us and service businesses that truly care about helping others?” Woodcock says.

“Small businesses want to give back - it’s rewarding and just feels right,” says imSMB co-founder Mark Drake. The charities, carefully selected by the founders, range from stopping animal cruelty to helping returning veterans.

Horowitz advises that differentiating yourself in the marketplace, especially for startups, is crucial. “If you’re just another widget-seller, there’s no reason" for customers to use your business, he explains. “However, if you can make your customer feel validated in his or her choices, or see themselves as better citizens of the world, you can leapfrog.”

Gardening and Volunteering

Being socially responsible also came naturally to the founders of SpareFoot, an online marketplace for self-storage unit reservations. “We saw great opportunities to give back to the community and work with fantastic organizations,” says co-founder Chuck Gordon. Gordon and Mario Feghali started SpareFoot in 2008 while they were both still in college. While looking for a place to store his belongings while he studied abroad in Singapore, Gordon realized people needed help finding affordable places to store their belongings. When he returned from Singapore, he and Feghali created the website, which is now the largest online storage directory network.

SpareFoot has raised its socially conscious profile by getting involved in gardening to raise produce for a children’s home, volunteering at a low-income elementary school, sponsoring an event to raise money for cancer-related causes, and offering a $5,000 college scholarship.

Making the World a Better Place - with Ads

When ad agency co-workers Shaun Walker and Reid Stone were laid off from their jobs, they knew that starting a plain old traditional ad agency wouldn’t cut it in today’s ultracompetitive environment. “Reid and I envisioned a new approach for advertising. HERO|farm is about more than doing work; it’s about doing our part to make the world a better place for everyone,” Walker says. The philosophy the entrepreneurs laid out for their new ad agency: “Do great work for good people.”

A cornerstone of HERO|farm is to do at least one campaign per year pro bono for a nonprofit, as well as to work with clients who have admirable missions of their own. “This approach makes our work more meaningful and enjoyable, eliminating the age-old ‘Is it 5 o’clock yet?’ syndrome,” Walker says.

But does it really matter to your clients or customers if you’re running a socially responsible company? Walker thinks so: “Clients like to know that you’re about more than just the bottom line. Connecting your work with a worthwhile endeavor makes it not only meaningful to those who work on it, but also more appealing to those who view or experience it.”

It’s crucial, however, to market these attributes so they don’t get lost in the clutter. “People will always care about social issues,” Walker says. “The key is making your message relevant or beneficial to them in some way, which is why we like to use guerrilla marketing as much as possible - intersecting with the public in unexpected, meaningful ways.”

What works for HERO|farm? “One of the best lessons for any company is to make the brand as humanistic as possible - meaning, give it a personality that people can relate to,” Walker says. “Why not stand out? If you’re not trying to change the world for the better or having some kind of positive impact on it, all you’re doing is taking up space.”

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

When the 10-minute video of middle-school students cruelly taunting an elderly school bus monitor went viral, people responded with outpourings of anger and kindness. But what is the Internet’s role in this incident?

Basically, the Facebook video entitled “Making The Bus Monitor Cry” (eventually posted on YouTube as well) took an all-too-common incident and made it an exceedingly public issue. The four boys and their families have received threatening messages, and a fundraising effort for victim Karen Klein neared $500,000.

A Perfect Storm of Bullying

The incident itself, though, has nothing to do with the Net. Doctor of psychology John Grohol, chief executive and founder of PsychCentral, says a number of factors were likely behind the opportunistic bullying.

First, Klein was alone and vulnerable. And many children have no respect for seniors, Grohol says. “Whether it’s because they were never taught it, or believe the older people have nothing of interest to offer them or relevance to their lives, it’s not clear.”

Second, kids are increasingly quick to exploit an adult with no authority over them, Grohol says. “Just plopping an adult into a moving room of 60 kids isn’t going to have the same effect it might have had 30 or 40 years ago.”

Parental control is also an issue, as parents increasingly side with their children rather than with schools in disputes. As of this writing, none of the boys had been taken by their parents to Klein to apologize in person.

Why Did the Video Get Posted Online?

But why would these kids post a video of the incident online? A mob mentality can lead bullies to believe that they can’t be fingered individually, Grohol explains - no matter how many people know of their actions.

The incident took place in Greece, N.Y., and the town’s Central School District is considering the proper punishment for the boys. Many people on the Internet believe it should be harsh. But no matter the repercussions here, incidents like this - and their dissemination on the Net - are merely symptoms of larger changes in technology and society.

Those four kids may learn their lesson, and they aren’t likely to put their misbehavior online again anytime soon. But you can bet plenty of other kids won’t get the message.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg

Do you covet the new retina MacBook Pro? That screen has to be seen to be believed. With an ultra-high resolution and millions of pixels, it needs a worthy wallpaper to look as stunning as possible. Here are the best places we've found to download desktop backgrounds and other visual candy that can do justice to that 15-inch 2880-by-1800 resolution display.

Read more: Apple’s New MacBook Pro Is the Best Laptop You Can Buy - But You Probably Shouldn’t Buy One

RWW's Eliot Weisberg shares his impressions of the MacBook Pro with Retina display.

InterfaceLIFT is a long-standing wallpaper site with a great selection, and it now has retina-ready options.

WallpapersWide.com is one of the best and broadest retina wallpaper sites we've found. It has tons of categories and thousands of pages to choose from.

WallpaperFX also has a well-organized selection. Here's its 2880x1800 retina display section.

Here's an entire site dedicated to high-resolution wallpapers of varying quality.

If you already have a MacBook Pro with Retina display, you've already got these, but here are Apple's retina-sized Mountain Lion wallpapers.

Tomas Laurinavicius has a great blog post of 40 very high-resolution wallpapers to peruse.

And we found two retina-ready Flickr galleries that will probably be of interest:

• Space photos
• Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 wallpapers

And, of course, you can always search Google for Retina display MacBook Pro images.

These aren't exactly wallpaper, but we found an amazing gallery of Renaissance paintings in super-duper-high-definition that is a great way to show off the new machine's visual excellence.

Finally, check out this gorgeous, navigable 26-gigapixel image of Paris. If you go full-screen, you can grab whatever part you want for a retina background.

How To Set Your Wallpaper

Once you find a hi-res image you like, you can crop or resize it in Preview (the built-in imaging application) to 2880-by-1800 pixels. Just make sure the image you're starting with is bigger than that, because increasing the size of the image will make it look nasty on that Retina display. If you don't want to bother cropping, you can also just set larger images as "centered" when you select your wallpaper in your Desktop & Screen Saver system preferences.

Friday, June 8, is one of those days that rolls around every two years on which productivity throughout much of the world is going to take a gigantic hit. That's because the Euro 2012 tournament gets under way, and it'll capture the attention of every serious soccer/football fan around the planet. And we do mean "planet" - this competition among 16 European nations is second in quality and importance only to the World Cup, and even non-European fans will be tracking it avidly. Many will be watching it online - and here's how.

Let's face it: You can't take the entire next month off to watch all these games. (If you can? We want your job.) So online viewing of some sort is going to be indispensable for seeing the action while somehow simultaneously fending off your boss and getting your work done. And not everyone will be able to rely on the most legal methods to pull it off. Whether you're patched into a legal network or looking for an illicit stream, it's not that hard to find the games you want online or on your mobile device.

All Aboveboard

If you're tapped into one of the broadcast networks in a major country that has the Euro 2012 rights, you should be in good shape for seeing these games on your computer, tablet or phone. In the United States, that means ESPN, which is the sole rights-holder for the tourney. And you couldn't be in better hands for getting online access, given ESPN's continuing push to become ubiquitous on every device you might own, short of an original Kindle. ESPN3.com is your computer's portal to all of the Euro 2012 games, and you won't need to be at home and patched into your cable box to get it, either.

If you're away from that, ESPN3 will simply ask you to log in with your cable provider account first; once you've done that, you should be good to watch. The navigation is easy enough: Links for all of these games are likely to be on the home page, but you can also click the "Soccer" drop-down tab and choose the appropriate tab (Live Now, Upcoming or Replay).

Your phone should be just as simple to use for watching the tournament, now that ESPN has gradually extended access to its WatchESPN app for iOS and Android, originally available only to Time Warner customers, to those on Verizon, BrightHouse and Comcast. Comcast users with Android devices haven't yet gotten the updated app for streaming, but Comcast iPhone users and everyone else can fire up WatchESPN and find a game in real time with relative ease. AT&T U-verse subscribers can access games by using their mobile U-verse app and choosing ESPN Mobile TV. For replays, using any of the methods to access ESPN3 (which is one of the WatchESPN channels) is your ticket to entire game rebroadcasts - and if you have an Xbox Gold subscription, you can do that on your TV, too.

The situations are fairly similar in other countries where rights holders have websites and apps available. In the United Kingdom, the BBC and ITV have split the broadcast rights, and each network will be streaming matches online and through phone apps. (ITV just upgraded its iOS app Wednesday to allow for live streaming on phones, just in time for Euro 2012.) Australians can see all of the matches via Setanta Sports's Setanta-i online stream, with SBS picking up selected games for free broadcast. English-speaking Canadians will have to pay to see the games on TSN.ca, but TSN Mobile TV is free for Bell Mobility or Virgin Mobile subscribers on iOS, Android and Blackberry; Francophones have options through RDS. Wikipedia's comprehensive list of international rights holders should help you figure out what your options are in other countries.

A Little Bit Sketchier

But let's say that you can't get to a legal source for the tournament; maybe you don't have the right package, or you're one of those people who's chosen to bag cable and go entirely wireless with your life. Can you see these games at all?

Answer: Of course you can. A host of websites tap illicitly into satellite streams of worldwide soccer matches, often with several different links to feeds, and bring them to your computer. Every hardcore soccer fan ends up dealing with these sooner or later; even if you're paying for a cable or satellite package that brings you Fox Soccer Channel and GolTV in the U.S., those channels don't carry every single game you'll ever want to see. How else were you going to watch New Caledonia clinch a stunning 2-0 upset of New Zealand in the Oceania region World Cup qualifiers?

So, people turn to one of the many streaming sites. Understand, though, that - pretty much as with any illegal music/movies download site or other below-the-lines website - you're entering a sketchy world that can include popup pages, overlay ads, NSFW images and, yes, even viruses or other malware. Go into this with your eyes open, and try to follow these rules:

• Have your antivirus software on at all times.
• Use a popup blocker; it'll improve the experience dramatically.
• Don't install any software; these sites mostly are running Flash video, so you don't need the iLivid Download Manager (a ubiquitous choice) or any of the other offerings with which you'll be confronted.
• Don't pay any money. These sites will be happy to grab your credit card number in exchange for "HD video" that may or may not exist. Don't go there; if you want an HD experience, you should be using one of the legal methods, anyway.
• If you get one of those helpful "Malware Detected!" warnings, close your window or tab immediately and try the next site.
• If things go really haywire, be ready to force-quit your browser (Force Quit under the Apple menu on a Mac after you Command-Tab out of the application; Ctrl-Alt-Delete on a PC to kill the process on a PC).
• Click carefully. You'll be getting ads overlaid on the embedded video, and accidentally clicking on one can have 40 tabs opened on your browser before you know what's hit you. Make sure you actually hit the X or Close tab.
• And when you actually make it to your game video, try to run as few applications or other browser pages as you can. Your stream is bouncing around the globe before it gets to you, so you want to smooth out the experience as much as possible.

That said, it's entirely possible to find a video stream of a Euro 2012 game without suffering any mishaps. A Google search of "streaming football online" will bring up a plethora of choices. (Yes, "football"; don't forget that your stream is coming from countries that couldn't care less about the NFL.) I tested a few of the top results, FreeFootball.org, First Row Sports and 12thPlayer.com, and was able to watch game video with fairly minimal effort or problems at all three sites. 12th Player has the advantage of a clean interface without ad or popup clutter, and although FreeFootball does have those issues, that site has always been reliable in the past. Take your pick.

One caveat: Don't expect a great experience trying this on your phone, if you can watch at all. The iPhone will yell at you about Flash video, and that's if you even make it to a video - popups were a huge problem in my tests of the iPhone. The iPad is also going to hit you with the Flash issue. Android phone and tablet users may have a slightly easier time of it, but for the most part, you're better off using these sites on a computer.

Unlike ESPN3, these sites aren't likely to offer you replays on games. But it's still possible to see those if you're willing to download torrented game captures. Open services such as The Pirate Bay or membership boards like Demonoid are good bets to have captured game videos, in formats ranging from AVI to full HD-quality .ts MPEG Transport Stream rips (playable with the cross-platform VLC video player). With the popularity of this tournament worldwide, finding well-seeded torrents shouldn't be too tough within a day of any given game. And Usenet users might have some luck with the alt.binaries.multimedia.sports group.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Sportscenter image courtesy of ESPN.