contentious.com

"Your wireless company wants to lock you into paying hundreds of dollars a month for mobile voice and data service, and to accomplish that it will sell you a subsidized smartphone for much less than the company paid for it. Spending more up front for an unsubsidized phone, however, might save you money in the long run. PCWorld contributing editor JR Raphael compared the fees for an unsubsidized $529 Nexus One phone (and an à la carte contract with T-Mobile) with those for the iPhone 3GS and the Motorola Droid, which are available only with a two-year contract (from AT&T and Verizon, respectively). The cost savings over two years: $1350, thanks largely to T-Mobile's $80-per-month unlimited voice, text, and data plan (no contract required).

The Fix: Do the math. As more vendors move toward an "open" handset model, paying more up front can save you a bundle in the long run.

Darren Rowse's exit strategy: Get bought by Google. Not bad.

Engadget sounds skeptical about the German WePad Android tablet.

German Android table "WePad" is apparently striking deals with major publishers for content. We'll know more what's really going on 4/12.

"In the printed newspaper, you’re trading choice for trust. It’s harder to find precisely the stories you know you want, but you’ve got the opportunity to let the editor surprise you. It isn’t always the case, but the most surprising story I encounter in a given day is often something put forward by the “Old Gray Lady“.

"If it’s possible to engineer serendipity with ninteenth century technology, it’s certainly possible with the resources we have today. But it’s not easy. Most recommendation technologies – the algorithms Amazon or NetFlix use to suggest what movies you might watch next – are a form of collaborative filtering."

2009 SXSW session notes on discovery and serendipity in music. Lists a bunch of useful resources, tools.

"Twitter, social networks and services such as Stumble Upon have shown the potential for people-powered serendipity engines. Bizarrely, Darlin argues in his New York Times article that this is “group-think” rather than serendipity. He writes: “Everything we need to know comes filtered and vetted.”

"Does he think that newspapers and magazines are put together by magic or completely at random? They are filtered and vetted too. And our allegiance to a particular printed news source is often the result of those “existing prejudices” that Pete Marcus warns about.

"Our impression of offline serendipity is just an illusion, a way of turning the limitations of media bundles into a virtue.

" international writing event in which participants take on the challenge of writing 100 pages of scripted material in the month of April. No fee to participate; there are also no valuable prizes awarded or "best" scripts singled out.

"The 5 Basic Rules of Script Frenzy

1) To be crowned an official Script Frenzy winner, you must write a script (or multiple scripts) of at least 100 total pages and verify this tally on ScriptFrenzy.org.

2) You may write individually or with a partner. Writing teams will have a 100-page total goal for their co-written script or scripts.

3) Script writing may begin no earlier than 12:00:01 AM on April 1 and must cease no later than 11:59:59 PM on April 30, local time.

4) You may write screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, comic book and graphic novel scripts, adaptations of novels, or any other type of script your heart desires.

5) You must, at some point, have ridiculous amounts of fun.

"I read regularly about 20 different blogs or other filters, and each day through them I'm exposed to literally hundreds of articles and clips and conversations and songs and parodies that I had no idea about when I woke up that morning. I'm constantly stumbling across random things online that make me think: what is the deal with that anyway? And then an hour later, I'm thinking: how did I get here? I can't tell you how many ideas that eventually made it into published books and articles of mine began with that kind of unexpected online encounter.

"Yes, those initial starting points are filters defined by my initial tastes. But my taste is for surprise and novelty — and that's what they deliver. Serendipity is not randomness, not noise. It's stumbling across something accidentally that is nonetheless of interest to you. The web is much better at capturing that mix of surprise and relevance than book stacks or print encyclopedias."

Highlights from Retrevo's Findings:

– 59% of people said they found the shopping information they were looking for, when using a mobile phone.
– Only 8% of people said they did not intend to shop from their mobile phone
– Only 9% of people, over 35 years old, have responded to an ad on their mobile phone, compared to 20% of people under 35.
– 55% of people, ages 18 – 24, have used a mobile phone to aid in the shopping process.
– 52% of people, ages 25 – 34 " "
– 36% of people, ages 35, 44, " "
– 17% of people, ages 45 and up, " "
– 17% of people, ages 18 – 24, have made a purchase using their mobile phone.
– 15% of people, ages 25 – 34, have made a purchase using their mobile phone.
– 10% of people, ages 35 – 44, have made a purchase using their mobile phone.
– 3% of people, ages 45 and above, have made a purchase using their mobile phone.

Schmidt: "the current mobile ecosystem and its future incarnation are the result of three intertwining factors: computing power, connectivity and cloud computing. "The Internet is humongous. The notion of publishing and microblogging is an explosion that will drive networks further into everything we do," he said. "Today's generation doesn't call it a mobile phone; they call it a phone. That's a win for everybody sitting here."

"The mobile phone is the meeting point of these three trends, he said, and furthermore, any device that is not connecting in this way is considered not interesting, but lonely."

"…"mobile first" doctrine, as Google programmers are doing work on mobile applications and technology first, because "mobile apps are better apps" and that's what top programmers want to develop. "It's more specific, more human, more location-aware, more satisfying to them," Schmidt said."

"During a presentation yesterday about the future of news media with Clay Shirky, the idea of "a chatroulette for news" was jokingly mentioned by Chris Thorpe. Inspired by this, and knowing that we produce lots of interesting content that is never promoted on our front page, I decided to see if I could build something to help people discover this content.

"This is the result of that experiment: http://random-guardian.appspot.com Going to that site will give you a random webpage from today's Guardian. It's surprisingly addictive. It's just another way to find stories on our site."

"…I’m naturally hostile to the Tea Party as a political organization. What if someone created a roulette that automatically generated news content sympathetic to the Tea Party? And what if they found a way to key it to my news consumption patterns even more strongly, i.e., if somehow the roulette knew I was a regular New York Times reader and would pick Tea Party friendly articles written either by the Times or outlets like the Times (rather than, say, random angry blog posts?)

"I think this is interesting, because it would basically hack the entire logic of the web. The beauty of the web is that it can direct you towards ever more finely grained content which is exactly what you want to read. It would somehow know what you wanted even before you did. In other words, it might be the opposite of what Mark S. Luckie called “a Pandora for news.” And it would solve a very real social problem — or at least a highly theorized social problem [homophily)."

let's consider what new subsystems a "modern" Internet Operating System might contain:
- search
- media access
- communications
- identity and the social graph
- payment
- advertising
- location
- activity streams
- time
- image and speech recognition
- government data

quick overview of paypal, Apple, Facebook

"When we read a paper and find a good story that we couldn’t have predicted we’d have liked, we think that is serendipity. But there’s some reason we like it, that we find it relevant to us. Maybe that relevance is the unknown but now fed curiosity, maybe it’s enjoyment of good writing or a certain kind of tale, maybe the gift of some interesting fact we want to share and gain social equity for, maybe it’s a challenge to our ideas, maybe an answer to a question that has bugged us. In the end, it has value to us; it’s relevant."

independent media aimed at low-income communities.