According to a new study by Initiative, 60% of mobile Web use is taking place at home. As reported by MediaPost, this means that our smartphones are becoming “closer to the promise of being ‘always on’ devices.”

What is more interesting to me is that the study reports that 50% of the respondents reported using mobile Web while watching TV or listening to the radio, 39% while using Internet on their computer, and 34% while reading newspapers and magazines. Due to this, Initiative concludes “that marketers can use mobile to amplify messaging in other media.”

People are also demanding to do more on their phones than in the past, including shopping – Forrester Research predicts retail sales through mobile phones to hit $1.5 billion this year. As people increasingly change the way that they use mobile Web, the new habit of multi-tasking media consumption will impact how companies reach their target consumers.

How are you using your smartphone – as an ‘always on’ device, or for work purposes only?

Woody Allen said that tradition is the illusion of permanence. He may have been talking more about religion and kilts, but I think his comments apply well to our need to sometimes protect those things being improved upon (or cast aside) by technology innovations.

Case in point, I received one of those family-spams last week that listed the sad state of the world, as it related to technology taking things like our beloved TV and landline phones away.

I wanted to take a moment to break this family-spam down and turn, if you will, that frown upside down.

The Post Office

First, outside of getting passports and buying collector stamps immortalizing the Apollo Space Program, I don’t find myself visiting the post office too often these days. And with grandma texting; everyone (and their mother) on Facebook; and the proliferation of e-card companies, I don’t see society returning to snail mail greetings anytime soon. But on a serious note, how can we demonize the financial industry for its lack of fiscal responsibility while continuing to allow our tax dollars to be fed into a dead business model?

The Check (or Cheque)

So, the UK is planning to make physical “cheques” obsolete by 2018. Are we next! Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I wrote a check. These days I am all about the Debit Card. If I did write a check it would be because I didn’t have money in my account and was simply trying to buy a couple of days till payday. So, I guess what I am saying is, save the trees!

The Newspaper

One of the arguments here is that younger people just don’t read the newspaper these days. When I was young I read comic books and other things I hid under my bed. When I was in college, I read schoolbooks and journals. These days, I get various RSS feeds to stay in the loop on the things I care about. To that point, the word “News” comes from the word “New.” At 2pm there is very little that is new in a paper printed that morning. By the way, save the trees!

The Book

Just use some positive feedback and say to yourself over and over, “I lived through the transition from the LP Record to the CD. I lived through the transition from VHS to DVD. I survived the loss of the iOmega ZIP drive and have come to embrace the joys of USB dongles. I can survive this!”  If that doesn’t work, the good news is that bookstores aren’t going away tomorrow. You still have time to enjoy the sweet smell of paper and dead trees!

The Telephone

Seriously. Is anyone really waxing nostalgic about landline phones? Keep a corded trimline phone in your closet, and when society and our electricity fail, you can plug it in and get 911 for free. But if that happens, you better also have a more relevant trade skill ready such as metalworking or midwifery.

The Great Music Industry Corporation

If a lone guitar player struck a power cord in the forest would anyone hear? Producers have been pushing packaged music talent out to consumers since the dawn of the gramophone disc. The reason? The industry is filled with people “that just want to make art, man” so there is an inherit need for people that understand and expect to be paid for the business side of things. To make more money calls for more promotion (or exploitation). The digital world may make this more complicated for marketers, but it’s a hell of a lot less expensive and more immediate than pressing DVDs. Besides, if this really bothers you, you don’t need to buy it. And there is a lot of new music waiting to be discovered on any number of college, independent and Internet radio stations (support www.radioparadise.com!). Unfortunately, since everything is digital either way, none of this will save trees.

The Television

TV as we know it is dying. And that’s a good thing! Terrestrial TV is still free (for those that can get in a good DTV signal), but that isn’t helpful if trying to access all that great, original programming produced on HBO, Showtime, FX, etc. To get these channels today, you need to pay for dozens of channels you don’t want. Here is the good news. If you don’t want to pay for cable, satellite or FiOS, and have a little patience, then you can legally get access to great content via iTunes, Netflix and a number of online portals. This may not satisfy your need for MTV’s Jersey Shore or live sports, but you can always stop spending $4.05 per day at Starbucks to help pay the $50 for basic cable!

Innovation is an amoral and pragmatic force. It’s both sad and wonderful depending on where your standing. Yesterday, scribes lost their jobs to the printing press. Today, printing press operators worry about the impact of eBooks.

And tomorrow…we’ll see!

The one silver lining I just discovered while editing this blog, is that you can watch full episodes of Jersey Shore for free on MTV.com. But you can also use parental controls to block the site — if that’s how you roll!

Ever ridden in a car that drives itself?  I have!

I just returned from a trip to Palo Alto to support the Volkswagen North America team as they held a dedication and ribbon cutting ceremony for the brand new VAIL facility on the Stanford University campus. VAIL – theVolkswagen Group Automotive Innovation Laboratory— is a joint research and development facility that is a collaboration between Volkswagen and the Stanford School of Engineering.

The 8,000 suqare foot facility features seven bays, a full machine shop, driving simulator, two conference rooms and a presentation room. Oh, and did I mention the six vehicles on display, including the robotic Pike’s Peak Audi TTS Coupe (Shelley), the Solar Car “Apogee,” the hydrogen fuel cell-powered Touran HyMotin and the Clean Air Audi A8.

Opening remarks were made by Dean Jim Plummer of Stanford School of Engineering, followed by remarks by David Geanacopoulos, EVP for Public Affairs and General Counsel of Volkswagen Group of America, and Dr.Karl-Thomas Neumann, Chief Officer for Electric Traction at Volkswagen Group.

The ribbon cutting and formal dedication was done by honored guest, German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In Chancellor Merkel’s speech, she commended the VW Engineers and Stanford students at VAIL for their collaboration in developing automobiles of the future. She took a tour of the VAIL facility and got a chance to interact with some of the Engineering students and learn about the projects they are working on.

Also in attendance to catch all the action were press and analysts from outlets like Associated Press, Reuters,  Autoblog, Bloomberg News, CNet, Fast Company, MarketWatch, Gartner, San Francisco Chronicle and Technologizer.

After touring the VAIL facility, Chancellor Merkel helped out with a demo of the Autonomous Vehicle, a car developed by VW/Stanford that drives itself with a tap on an iPhone (yes—apparently there’s even an app for that!). The demo was with Junior 2, a robotic Volkswagen Passat, which we watched pull out of a driveway then back into a parking spot with nobody behind the wheel.

One of the highlights of my day was getting to sit in the backseat of Junior 2 and taking a test drive. It was bazaar to see the wheel move on its own and see the minor adjustments that were made according to the trunk full of lasers and sensors. I think my car insurance rates would go down if I could drive with the help of Junior 2 more often…

Here are some photos I took:

The Solar Car, “Apogee” which raced across Australia (north to south) last fall going up to 180km/hr powered completely by solar energy.

Junior 1, a robotic Volkswagen Passat with the on-board sensors, computing hardware and artificial intelligence software to drive in urban traffic without any human assistance. Check out all those wires, bells and whistles!

Shelley, the Pike’s Peak Audi TTS coupe that drives itself at the limits of handling and friction to help researchers develop and refine control algorithms that can improve driver safety. This fall, the team hopes to test it’s ability to hold the road at high speeds on the famous Pike’s Peak mountain race course.

We live-Tweeted during the event and the Tweets can be found @Volkswagen. In addition, here are some stories with great photos and video that have run so far:

Technologizer

Fast Company

Bot Junkie

San Francisco Business Times

Market Watch

Stanford University News

Here is a video of my new friend, David Hoffert,  Ph.D. Student, Mechanical Engineering Researcher and Dynamic Design Laboratory Kunzel Fellow at Stanford Universtiy,  who spent time speaking with me about his work on Shelley.

How to Program a Message on Your MEDEA Bottle from Medea Spirits on Vimeo

I was quoted in a PRWeek story by Aarti Shah today (“Google’s China move affirms reputation“). The article focusses on the Google brand and how its decision to “not censor” search and move their operations to a Hong Kong server might impact their brand reputation.

I think the simple answer is: only in good ways. Why? Because they stayed true to their Philosophy and chose to not compromise. Regardless of how you might view Google’s business overall (selling advertising and collecting data about people), you won’t be able to corner them for being hypocrites!

But this does bring up an interesting point not being debated as much right now:  Why go into China in the first place? Did they really think this wasn’t going to be an issue?  Google is a smart company, with some of the smartest people in the world.  Naïve isn’t  a word I would use to describe them. But let me table that for another day (and another blog)!

What I think is most interesting is how this act will impact mobile-focused companies doing business in China that rely on Google to help monazite their products and services.  For example,  OEMs like Motorola are breaking ties with Google in China. This is most likely a pragmatic act of  solidarity with the Chinese Government as Google might not be available in China in the near future anyway…so why not hedge their bets?

But to understand fully the implications here, you have to remember that Google isn’t just a web search being used on LAPTOPs and PCS. Google today is about mobile phones, mobile search, and location based services.  When looking at the global usage numbers these are consistently the big drivers in mobile data traffic. This is why people PAY for data plans.

The “818? 310. Nice.” line in the movie “Swingers” was classic, but 13 years later it’s beginning to show its age.

This isn’t just because the real estate market has moved all the good girls to The Valley in Los Angeles. It’s because as more and more of us cut our land lines (at home and in the office), move from job to job and city to city, we have started to cling to that one number that can follow us anywhere: our cell phone number.

In fact, since I moved to Seattle, I have met half a dozen people that live here but have decided to hang onto their out-of-state cell numbers.

I can relate. I am keeping my old, out-of-state number too! But my decision was based on the fact that where my cell phone company could give me a new and shiny area code, they couldn’t put a message on my old line to let callers know my number had changed. I have a lot of long standing media relationship, and having them get a dead line wasn’t going to work.

Well I just nabbed my new Google Voice number and this is all going to change. I now have a single number (with an area code of my choosing) that I am putting on my business cards. One number, and each caller (friend, client, media, wife, bill collector) will be routed not only to a special message, but also to any number I choose.

Here are some of the things it can do:

• Screen calls before you accept them
• Hear voicemails as they are being left
• Automatically transcribes voicemails and deliver them to you via text, email, etc.
• Allows you to automatically forward both calls and texts to any phone number
• Allows you to create separate greetings depending on who is calling (e.g., my wife is from Germany and her family gets a special voicemail from her in German)
• Most importantly, gives you the ability to separate your business and professional lives with one phone number (and one cell phone)

To get a Google Voice number — go to www.google.com/voice and sign-up for a phone line. If you don’t mind having a random area code, you can put in words or expressions to see if you can nab a vanity number. I won’t put my number here, but I will say that it includes the words: ski and fun.

Our pal Aarti Shah has been roaming the great Pacific Northwest over the past several days. Aarti is the Bay Area bureau chief for PRWeek, but her beat extends well beyond Silicon Valley. She covers the technology beat for the PR industry’s leading trade publication and was in Seattle to visit with MWW Group and several other Brand-X agencies.

While she doesn’t cover technology exclusively, Aarti is one of those reporters who understands the challenges of 21st Century tech PR. She listens well, asks tough questions, works hard to break stories and isn’t shy about calling for a timeout when some flak starts to max out her BS meter. But she also understands that the best reporting usually results from well-developed relationships, rather than pushing an agenda or asking a million questions. Last night was a great example of that.

We spent time chatting about various topics over dinner and wine at Purple in downtown Seattle. We only talked shop for a couple of minutes — traded a few rumors, dished some gossip, and so on. Sometime, somewhere, Aarti and I will have some news to talk about, and the relationship will be there to ensure that we both make the most of that opportunity.

A couple of weeks ago I was at CTIA in San Diego with my client Samsung Mobile to launch a new phone. We had some issues with WiFi, which is to say it wasn’t working! Between needing it to power Internet for some pre-release phones and for media to file their stories — let’s just say: AWKWARD. It actually all worked out beautifully and we had a great event. But while I was there, Greg Kumparak at MobileCrunch.com was nice enough to let me borrow one of his five MiFi connections to fiddle with. This device is amazing. It fits in your front pocket (or back pocket if that’s your thing) and delivers about 30 feet of EVDO RevA or HSDPA speeds — which would have been perfect for our booth-side event.

I made an immediate note to self: buy several of these for team and have them at every event in the future. You should too!

Over the past two weeks, we’ve helped our client Volkswagen with the celebration of VAIL – the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory – on the Stanford University campus. (VW has the largest presence in Silicon Valley of any automaker and clearly is an industry leader in automotive innovation and technology. Need some proof? Check out Volkswagen’s ERL.)

Part of the work included talking about super-cool demonstrations of autonomous cars – cars that drive themselves. This morning, we sent out photos of “Junior,” the famous driverless VW Passat developed jointly by VW and Stanford. That prompted this response from a reporter at The Wall Street Journal:

“Thanks for the information. The Highway Patrol has been calling mine ‘the driverless Passat’ for years.”

My good friend Mr. Biggs over at Crunchgear.com just wrote a novella about (my words) the future of on demand programming vs. the bloated channel line-ups most of America is forced to purchase with cable.

While I agree that this is ultimately a losing scenario for cable companies, I think that the majority of Americans are still in the rosy glow of HD programming and HD On Demand that there is still time for cable companies (or telco companies) to look at changing how they do business. But how should they evolve?

Telco companies are certainly evolving to bring more choice into the market. But as much as I love AT&T UVerse, at the end of the day (no offense to the engineering marvels here), it’s just an IPTV version of what cable is offering. Same content, same channels, but with some nice multi-room DVR controls.

But it’s still just a box. A box that does not play well with other content services — not to mention my own personal content.

So I have a TiVO and the future promise of a hacked Apply TV to solve some of these issues. However, I am not a case study for the average American.  Most American are still discovering the joys of time shifting with their cable (or telco) DVR.

So there is still time to evolve. But not much time. As more and more of the Gen-Y are getting jobs, their first apartments, and getting married, there better be some changes — because they will  will gladly choose iTunes On Demand to get their shows pushed to their TVs than pay for 200 channels they don’t want.

When Cable first arrived, people never thought people would pay for what they got for free (read this great article on the history of cable television). Well they did. And over time, the networks have lost a lot of power to the original “paid” programming offered by Showtime, HBO and others. And cable became the 800 pound gorilla in content distribution.

So what’s keeping things from evolving as fast as we are? When talking about cable companies, a lot of this is technology driven, a lot of this is copyright (see my previous post on copyright/drm and content), but a lot of it is that the modern cable company is a giant network of regional operations, mom and pop acquisitions, and nightmare processes for rolling out new programming — not to mention the customer service issues. It’s a monster with many heads where even something simple can not be simply integrated.

This gives a leg up to AT&T, which has brought to market the first IPTV offering with its remotely controlled home network. A network that update itself and easily role out new services. Lets give them a chance and see what happens!