Chris Ziegler

From United Airlines:

United in 1953 introduced “Executive” all-male passenger flights. The men enjoyed free gifts such as cigars, which the stewardesses often lit for them. […] The popular Executive flights flew 10,500 segments, with a load factor of 80 to 90 percent, from 1953 until they were discontinued in 1970.

128 BPM. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Dug through some awesome old material for this one. It’s trancier than usual, so break out the glowsticks.

Really pleased with how this one turned out. And if you like it, let Digitally Imported know that I should have a monthly slot on the Progressive channel. Kthx!

When Twitter made sweeping changes this week — changes that I find largely unhelpful, and in some cases, counterproductive — it really drove home for me that a service I consider to be a fundamental part of my day-to-day internet activity is a privately-offered venture, accountable to no one but itself and its investors. That’s not a new revelation, I understand, but it was my personal “ah-ha” moment.

And that’s fine, that’s the way innovation works in a free-market economy. And there’s nothing to prevent a competitor from coming out of nowhere and ultimately eclipsing it, just as Facebook did to Friendster and MySpace. My concern, rather, is with the tendency of governments and international organizations to focus not on the overwhelming power and ubiquity of popular services like Twitter to disseminate information and organize people — as we’ve seen time and time again recently in the Middle East and in the Occupy movement — but rather on the power of the internet itself.

And the internet is powerful. But considered in a vacuum, it’s a road without cars.

The UN’s Human Rights Council issued a groundbreaking report earlier this year arguing that the internet is protected under article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in that it “has become a key means by which individuals can exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression.” It’s about as close as the UN could come to flatly declaring the internet a basic human right without explicitly saying so as it possibly could. What the Council failed to recognize, though, is that the internet is only a vehicle for opinion and expression inasmuch that the products and services exist to facilitate it. The FCC regularly makes the same mistake in expressing its goal to bring broadband to unserved and underserved areas of the US.

And that got me to thinking, exactly where is the line between “the internet” and the privately-operated services that are connected to it and make it useful? And what can’t you do on the internet in the absence of private innovation and support? I think it can be boiled down to three very critical things: searching, indexing, and online data persistence. As it stands today, none of those things can be effectively accomplished without companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Basically, anything that makes it really easy to get your message in front of a lot of people in a reasonable amount of time requires the help of a corporation. (Email is one of the few services that doesn’t need a lick of private investment, and that’s because it doesn’t require search, indexing, or online data persistence to function — it can work point-to-point. But it also isn’t effective at disseminating information to a wide audience.)

Again, I’m not arguing against an open market. It’s hard to look at the internet as a whole today and say that the free-for-all model hasn’t done extraordinarily well for us. But what I’d like to see is for the UN go a step further and define, in generic terms, the types of capabilities that have bore themselves out to be critical to advancing causes and bringing about change: microblogging (Twitter), public contact management (Facebook), web search, and so on. The mere capability for a bunch of computers to communicate with one another — which, on some fundamental level, is all the internet is — isn’t in itself a basic human right, simply because it isn’t useful to the average human. It’s the combination of the internet and the services that live on it that make it such a powerful, world-changing tool.

Beyond that, I don’t know. The idealist in me thinks that these “basic” services, once defined, should be globally socialized in a very generic and completely open way, allowing unrestricted innovation in the private sector on top of them. For instance, Twitter would plug into an open microblogging system and offer branding and additional (proprietary) capability on top of it, rather than controlling the microblogging system itself — it would be the car, not both the car and the road. Of course, the realist in me understands that’s a completely unreasonable notion.

I’m open to your ideas on this one.

Yesterday, I posted some quick thoughts on the Galaxy Nexus in The Verge’s Android Army forum after having received the phone on Friday. Some commenters have pointed out that my long list of complaints (I dock the screen, camera, and battery life, among other things) is at odds with my assessment that it’s the best smartphone I’ve ever used.

It’s a fair question. How can that be?

I think it’s a testament to the fact that we’re a long way from “the perfect smartphone.” In fact, I don’t actually believe we’ll ever get there, since our expectations keep moving. If you had debuted the Galaxy Nexus in 2008, it’d be considered a perfect 10, for instance — but today, our official review scores it “a mere” 8.6. This time next year, it could be a 7.5. Who knows? Everything is perceived in the context of current technology, of the competition, and of how heavily we’ve come to rely on our mobile devices.

Now that I’ve had the phone for about 48 hours, my opinion hasn’t changed: this is the best phone I’ve used, period. It’s a photo finish with the iPhone 4S, but I’d give the edge to the Galaxy Nexus. Most users would be delighted with either phone (excluding Android and Apple loyalists, of course). My complaints also haven’t changed: the screen is a little funny, the battery life concerns me, the battery cover is finicky, and the camera could be quite a bit better. But the holistic experience — the overall experience of using the phone for an entire day, for productivity and entertainment alike — is as good or better than any phone I’ve ever used. And that’s ultimately the measuring stick that I need to use to judge it.

Could the Galaxy Nexus be better? Yes. But if it couldn’t, that means I’m out of a job.

How about this?

1. The FTC and FCC require major AWS divestitures totaling at least 25 percent (about 8.5 million) of T-Mobile’s subs.
2. MetroPCS and Leap Wireless finally get around to merging, an idea they’ve been toying with for nearly half a decade. Total subscriber base, roughly 15 million.
3. The combined company purchases most or all of AT&T/T-Mobile’s divested markets. That brings them to somewhere around 23 million.

It doesn’t quite restore the power balance (T-Mobile is somewhere in the neighborhood of 33M subs at present), but it brings us close: two national “premium” carriers, two national “value” carriers. MetroPCS and Leap both already make extensive use of AWS, so there’s some harmony here.

AT&T regularly gets taken to task by media and the public at large for service problems and customer service woes. A lot of the grief is justified, but I wanted to share an absolutely surreal customer service experience that I had with Ma Bell yesterday.

As you can probably imagine, I swap carriers, lines, and devices nonstop. It’s my job, and although I do get review units, there are inevitably situations where I simply need to go out and sign up for a line myself. Such was the case with the Elevate 4G recently when I needed to run some LTE tests in Chicago, and when I was done, I returned it to the store and paid my restocking fee (I think of it as a rental fee).

I’ve done this a few times, and AT&T has a habit of “forgetting” to retract the ETF if you return the device and cancel service within the 14-day window. So when I got my most recent bill for $240, I knew exactly what had happened, and I called in to get it cleared up.

Me: “Hi, I just returned a device and canceled a line of service within the 14-day return period… the bill is for $240, but it should be $90. I’ve had this happen before, I just need you to take off the erroneous ETF and I can settle the $90.”

AT&T: “So you’re saying you disagree with your bill?”

Me: “Yes.”

AT&T: “Okay, not a problem, sir. I’ve gone ahead and zeroed that for you.”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

AT&T: “Your balance is zero, sir. You don’t owe anything. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Now, let me be clear — I called into the regular AT&T customer service line, same as everyone, and this gentleman didn’t know who I was. Even if he did know, he wouldn’t just pardon my entire bill out of the blue. I was expecting a fight and perhaps 30 minutes of my time to be wasted, and instead, my entire concern was immediately resolved (and then some) to my complete satisfaction.

It was just a random gesture. Obviously, I don’t think it’s AT&T policy to forgive bills if you call in and complain, but empowering customer service reps to unexpectedly delight customers (and believe me, I was unexpectedly delighted) is a huge win. What’s someone going to do after this happens to them? They’re going to tell friends and family what a great experience they had.

Clearly, AT&T has an uphill public relations battle — as always — but this sort of viral awesomeness is an interesting approach.