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.

j'aime Le Jersey Shore

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!

• Nintendo Wii will be streaming Netflix. At this point the only place Netflix doesn’t have a streaming deal is with my Microwave. But although it will be standard definition, this will be a great addition to our Family Wii room – 

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• Medea Vodka’s programmable bottle. I don’t even like Vodka and I’d buy this — http://www.medeaspirits.com/home

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

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?

Google Android devices will suffer in China without Google services

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.

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!