computers, broadband, and social networking

If you don’t like the way carriers serve older adults, just wait, it could get worse.   A few months ago we learned that carriers are pushing tablets, ha! Just as tablet sales overall are slowing. Carriers obviously read that Gartner report about slowing tablet sales -- and then 'encouraged' us to add a tablet to a plan for $10/month for up to 5GB of data. How generous. That’s not a lot of movies, maybe 2.5 hours of streaming HD per month. But what plan? How to encourage data usage with wireless data plans? No problem, those have all changed, with AT&T following T-Mobile and Verizon aping AT&T. And all of this following the precedent long set in Europe – now the full price of the phone is disclosed ($650 for an iPhone!). You could buy the phone upfront, but not to worry – there’s a monthly installment plan for the list price phone.

First the numbers – good news, sort of. The latest in Pew posting headline in the news misleads. Period. Who’s Not Online -- about Internet adoption – reports the change in online use since the year 2000. The text works hard on enthusiasm and a bit of 'game over' in terms of saturation: 84% of adults are now online! Saturation for some groups! Considerably higher than in 2000!  Note the 'on the other hand' age-related caveat: "About four-in-ten adults ages 65 and older (39%) do not use the internet, compared with only 3% of 18- to 29-year-olds."  Education is a factor (more educated, more online, no kidding). Where you live (less rural, more online). But there’s the neon punch line: "Adults from households earning less than $30,000 a year are roughly eight times more likely than the most affluent adults to not use the internet."

Ho hum – another day, another few million records are hacked. Rant on. It’s a small hack really, only 4.5 million impacted by the UCLA Medical System cyber attack. But what a relief, the impacted individuals will receive identity theft recovery and restoration services and credit monitoring at no cost. That category of service firm is buying plenty of ads all around and may be one of the boom businesses of 2015.  Because of course the 4.5 million must be added to the 22 million Federal government individuals and the 80 million Anthem Blue Cross individuals -- for starters.  And the solution?  A new services industry emerges with vendors popping up in every flavor. As for fines for those that let the data get out of the bag? As for the notorious insurance industry leader, Anthem (first quarter net income $865.2 million) has received a fine of $1.7 million – but fines for data breaches remain rare.

Google forced the creation of so-called mobile sites?  Rant on.  Last week I published a list of Medication Management technologies that could be useful to baby boomers. Great. This week I looked at those websites a bit more closely, not squinting at my phone, but instead from my desktop PC. I selected a few of them – stared at the full motion video on the desktop sites, and ran their URLs through the Google Mobile Friendly-ness test. I also put in MobiHealthNews and Weather.gov (Google says not mobile friendly). The URL for Anthem.com  was deemed mobile friendly, but when searching via Google for Anthem.com, I was directed to an Overview page (not friendly). Then I look at the tortured feedback on Google’s own recommended forum about this topic: So many sites have been failing this test -- with their owners fixing and then pleading with Google to take another look.

Does anyone remember Y2K?  It happened just 15 years ago. The $100 billion in the US -- $350 billion worldwide -- that was spent to convert information systems to move from a 2-digit year to a 4-digit year, well, it seems so last century. The belief at that time: The move from the YYMM format of dates in all systems everywhere (all military, government, and commercial) in the year 2000 would create a "0001" January 1, 2000 date format that would result in disaster. Checks couldn’t be issued, military systems would fail, hospitals and power plants would shut down or off. This was preceded by sky-is-falling anxiety, particularly among IT people who bore the brunt of redirecting work to code this change.

Tech companies want consumers who can be herded forward.  There was the magic of the iPhone 6 and the 6-plus.  By the time those came out, the old iPhones were tired, maybe too slow -- Apple fans were eager, if not desperate for a better device. Then not so long after Samsung introduced its Galaxy S4 in May 2013, it announced the S5 in February 2014. The Samsung Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy Edge (and their updates) showed up this week -- hustled out the door to keep pace with media mega-hype of the Apple Watch. How wonderful and different are the new Samsung gadgets from the S3 and S5?  Wait for it – startup with a finger swipe, a curved edge and again imitating Apple… no removable batteries. Oh, so the new phones have a 12-hour battery life?  Well, you can charge the phone within 15 minutes to get 4 hours of life out of it? Not so good when the day is long.