It’s simple: now that the iPhone 3G is subsidized, AT&T is treating it like every other phone they carry. Let me explain:

AT&T subsidizes the price of every phone it carries, by about $200. So that RAZR phone you got a few months ago for free was actually about $200. You’ve probably seen these un-subsidized prices if you’ve ever damaged a phone and had to purchase a new one at full price.

The idea is that AT&T will make up that $200 over the course of your two-year contract. So about $8.33 per month goes toward paying down that subsidy. When you get toward the end of two years, you’ll be eligible for an upgrade, which is essentially the ability to purchase a new phone at the subsidized price, as long as you commit to another two-year contract.

Maybe not the most ideal plan in the world, but it keeps the apparent cost of mobile phones low, and gets people in the door.

When the original iPhone came out, the arrangement was unique: AT&T wasn’t going to subsidize a cent of it in exchange for some flexibilities they allowed to Apple (such as at-home activation). Since there was no subsidy, AT&T lifted the “upgrade” policy for existing AT&T account holders, and allowed them to purchase the iPhone at the standard retail price everyone else paid.

But the iPhone 3G is indeed subsidized, and so the upgrade plan is back in effect. If you currently use a phone subsidized by AT&T, and you aren’t currently eligible for an upgrade (you aren’t nearing your contact’s two-year anniversary), you will need to pay the full, un-subsidized price for the iPhone 3G. In this case, that works out to either $199+200 or $299+200, hence the $399 and $499 prices.

If you already own an iPhone, AT&T doesn’t need to get back their lost subsidy, so you get to pay the standard $199/$299 price.

Hopefully, this clarifies things a bit.

That’s cool, and I know that people ask for and do this kind of thing all the time (I know that Thomas mentioned the other day on Twitter that he does), but it always feels awkward to me. Introducing someone in person feels easy and natural, and I never have any problem doing it, but I’m never quite sure how to go about doing it via email.

For those of you who do, I have a few questions:

• Do you ask Person B for permission before making the introduction?
• Is it short and sweet, or do you tell each person a bit about the other in the email?
• What the heck is the subject line?
• When you’re the recipient of the introduction, at what point do you remove the middle-man from the conversation?

I’d Googled around a bit looking for guidance, but didn’t find much, so I hope maybe the lazyweb method might actually work better.

I don’t have the answers, necessarily, but I definitely feel like I have to address this, and maybe just writing this will help. This past weekend, I had a three hour burst where I missed a friend’s film screening, another friend’s birthday party, yet another friend’s birthday, realized I wouldn’t get to the gym that day (I’d been good lately), I’d screwed up dinner, I’ve not yet returned my CableCards to Comcast since the last move, and been remiss on returning a close friend’s call for two months. It was an awesome little stretch of time.

It probably comes down to organization in one sense or another, but treating non-worklife like a project manager has just always seemed a little uptight to me. I have a gut feeling that I want to be accessible or available to my close friends, family, and girlfriend whenever, so scheduling and tasking myself to meet up with someone for coffee just seems impersonal and overkill. Are you marginalized if your friend takes out a notebook to remember to meet up with you?

Some of my friends are list-maniacs. I imagine them waking up and making a list of everything that needs to happen that day, and they probably don’t stop until they’ve at least addressed everything on the list. Super-productive people, those list-maniacs, but also a little OCD, no?

I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping things straight (notice, I said straight, not necessarily organized) at the office. But should the other facets of my life function like a business? Maybe the answer is yes, and I need to just adjust how I think about it and fall into line. Maybe the alternative is ditching things entirely, which isn’t an attractive option either.

Or maybe I just need to look into Provigil. That’d be super unlike me, but the benefits are getting tougher and tougher to overlook :P

I talked for a little bit about treating the web as an interface (rather than a canvas), and when and how to break the rules (like when markup validation really matters, etc). The students asked some good questions, and generally knew the answers to my questions, which was very impressive. Most of them had read A List Apart, they all knew XHTML’s basic rules, they talked about the separation of presentation from content, and they use JQuery to do their interactions. This was no Dreamweaver class.

Students doing great work

Above all, it seems like Jeff gives his students the freedom to do projects that touch on their weaknesses, but also play to their strengths. In the end, you have a few dozen students who are not only engaged, but have a feeling (if not legit experience) for how to do quality work on the web. Even if they never work directly on the web, they’ll have a feeling for the value of quality work if they’re ever hiring a web designer or development shop in the future. Either way you slice it, it creates greater demand for producing good quality products online, which can’t be bad.

At the other side of the building, when I was meeting colleague Jeff Hanson, his class was learning about the advantages and disadvantages of allowing your system to tap into its swap-based virtual memory. Students were asking him about I/O throughput and other things I never thought I’d hear in a public high school.

Of Course

There’s always a question about whether or not this kind of thing should in fact be taught in a high school. And of course, English, math, history, and the rest of the liberal arts are legitimately more important to a high school diploma than computer work is, in my opinion. But every school has electives, and this is a fantastic program to allow interested students to learn, early-on, how to create things on the web. If every school had this type of program alongside art, music, and home ec., or allowed students to take the more sophisticated classes in lieu of calculus (honestly, I haven’t had to integrate since my last math course), that would be fantastic.

So who else does this?

As I was leaving, Jeff Brown asked me if I knew of other programs in the area that are doing the same type of thing. I didn’t, and he didn’t seem to know about too many himself. Are there other schools in the DC region that are trying a curriculum like this?

If not, how can we change this? I was very involved with my school district when I was back in Pennsylvania, but I haven’t the foggiest clue about how it works down this way. It would be great to get secondary school web instructors together, not just to share ideas among each other, but to share ideas with and learn from others who are working in the industry. It would be great to develop the skeleton of a common curriculum (which, I think, Jeff and his colleagues have done a great job of producing so far).

And how can I help?

But if so, I want to help out. That could mean talking to a class like I did at Damascus today, helping to work on a curriculum, or maybe convincing Brian to host a field trip to see what we do at Viget. Or anything else I haven’t thought about.

In the past few days, a few people have approached me wondering what I thought of PodCamp DC, which is ostensibly an unconference centered around podcasting and related techniques. The problem, it seems, is that PodCamp DC eschews the vast majority of the tenets of a BarCamp, while still parading the “camp” brand.

Full Disclosure

You know what they say about throwing stones in glass houses. Full disclosure: as an organizer of BarCamp DC, we did break some rules too, but we tried our darnedest to balance the rules with the incredibly high demand we found after announcing the event. I’ll defend all of those decisions, even in retrospect, but it wasn’t conferment to the platonic form of a BarCamp in the purest sense.

Is it a BarCamp?

So anyway, here are a couple of the problems one might have with PodCamp DC using the “Camp” moniker:

The schedule is already set

Not only is there already a detailed schedule, but there’s already a lineup of speakers to fill those slots. BarCamps are built around a lack of structure in, first and foremost, the schedule and the content. In almost all cases, the schedule is created that day. In many cases, all attendees participate as a speaker in some sense, though that seems flexible. In this case, it seems, most attendees will see this event structured in the same way most real conferences are structured.

Sponsors have big skin involved

Sponsorship levels are priced as high as $5000. This isn’t friendly support from an area company, this is a significant marketing strategy on the part of the sponsor. There will be sponsor logos on the stage, sponsored pieces of the official podcast and video, etc.

Should we care?

I don’t know. I know some other people are flat-out pissed about this. Maybe it’s that I’m not all that into podcasting as a strategy, so I don’t sweat it too much. But, if I’m playing devil’s advocate for a moment, here’s why I can imagine some people being a bit put off:

It reflects poorly on DC

We can’t exactly say that DC really gets it and then have a major event that uses a brand name and violates most major tenets behind that brand. I know that if I were from outside the area, and I saw this event, with the Camp on the name, I’d probably think that the region was a little JV when it came to the web. Since this is one of the community’s current challenges, it’s certainly not helpful to have stuff like this setting the mission back.

It might turn a profit

At $5000, $2500, or $1000 per sponsor, this event could legitimately be profitable. If someone profits significantly off the BarCamp name without adhering to the requirements, that could be grounds for being significantly disturbed.

It doesn’t jive with the license

If it’s legit, it appears there’s actually a license for using the PodCamp name. There are six rules required of those licensing the name, and at least two of them are being broken in this case. Rule one, requiring that all attendees be treated equally, is broken by having a set of speakers already in place. Rule three, that all attendees need to be participants, is broken by the same rule.

So, worth being pissed?

I dunno, you tell me. Are you going? Does it bother you? Does it bother you that other people are bothered?

Not Just Good Press, but Savvy Press

The amendment is about the need for positive press. Nick writes about how the Washington Post consistently writes about how the exodus (slash collapse) of AOL is really the death knell of the DC tech community. The real problem isn’t that they don’t believe in the existing community, it’s that they don’t really get how the web works these days. They’re still stuck thinking that it takes a $1M seed and a $5M series A round to really do anything worthwhile. Instead, they don’t realize that the web doesn’t require millions anymore, it takes thousands.

The Post presumably looks at that fact and concludes that a smaller investment yields a smaller business, fewer jobs, and therefore less impact on the region, and there may be a few seeds of truth to that. But the flip-side is that the region can sustain dozens or hundreds of these medium-sized businesses, and the loss of any one, two, or ten of them would end up having a relatively minimal impact on the region. Lighter, more nimble tech businesses in greater numbers is way better for DC than an AOL or two, as we can see by the “impact” of their exodus.

The Real Problem: Quality

This is the more dangerous part of my post, and I consistently hope to be proven wrong when I make this case, so please comment if you disagree.

The DC region produces a lot of really bad web product. The way I feel about much of what I see coming out of the DC web scene is the way most Americans outside the Beltway feel about the government: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There are a lot of people in DC who strut around and promote themselves, drop names, and tout their l33t skillz, but are in the end producing things that folks in SF, Europe, or anywhere outside the Beltway would consider lame. It’s not just the Congressmen.

I blame the government, in large part. Our government has set the standard that, inside the beltway, return on investment really doesn’t matter, and I don’t need to list examples, since it’s definitely not just a web problem. If you’ve worked on a web project for the government, you know even more what I mean — because of privacy concerns, cookies aren’t allowed, so you can’t track site use with industry-standard analytics products (like Google Analytics); designs are approved, changed, modified, etc. by a committee of folks all competing with each other, yielding a bland look and feel and a yawn from the audience; the concept of building a community site is foreign or overly risky for most government employees.

And we all know DC is an insular community. The Beltway is a bubble, and folks inside of it often forget or don’t notice what is happening outside. Whether you work on the Hill, on K street, on Mass Ave, or at a non-profit, you really do more or less the same thing, so there aren’t exactly a wide variety of perspectives.

As a result, the non-profits and other NGOs in the region feel this trickle down, since a lot of what they do is lobby the government. They see the lousy government products online, and when they can get something better, that’s a victory. The problem is that if the Government produces sites that would merit a D grade, the non-profits are happy with a C, and they spend thousands or millions of dollars to get it.

As a result, the practitioners in the area are the perpetuators of this trickle-down. Government workers have cushy jobs where little is expected, little required, and the pay raises are almost guaranteed. They have no incentive to improve at their craft, and those who do aren’t appreciably rewarded. For those in the private sector, it’s perhaps worse: they get a lot of money and happy clients when they do average (as in “a C is average”) work, and then continue to rest on their laurels. They just need to be slightly better than what the government can produce, and they’re achieving the local industry standards.

Consequently, we have viral video campaigns that cost tens or hundreds of thousands getting only dozens of submissions, we have facebook applications that yield only dozens of installations, and we have websites that don’t even satisfy the best practices of eight years ago. These sites win awards given by insular political conventions that don’t know how big a waste of money they were: a waste of taxpayer dollars and donor dollars.

Meanwhile, outside the beltway, folks who work on the web look at what is produced in DC and either shake their heads or don’t pay it any attention. I’m fortunate to work at a place where we are constantly pushing against that DC pull, and doing work that can be respected anywhere, but that environment sadly seems to be more rare than it is common.

A Solution

So, as much as I’d like to just rant away and leave it at that, I suppose I should propose a solution. In fact, I have before, in person to some in the community, and it’s been reasonably well-received. But maybe by posting more broadly, we can kick the idea around a little bit more.

The idea is a trade association for web practitioners in the DC area. This is an opportunity for folks who produce high quality work to associate with others who believe the same and associate themselves with a brand of sorts. It would be exclusive, but the only requirement would be that you produce quality work that meets or exceeds industry standards, as determined by a membership committee. I’d hope we’d have hundreds and thousands of people. Membership would be a credential, demonstrating to clients, employers, and your mom that you do high quality work on the web.

The organization can do other things that would support the community too. It could assist community organizations in finding venues and sponsors. It could help match funders with entrepreneurs, or freelancers with gigs. It could sponsor events itself. It could lobby the government to raise its standards. It could work with the Post. There are all sorts of ways it could help make the DC community stronger and better.

Dumb Idea?

Probably. But maybe you’re interested in it too. In the comments, shoot the idea down, let me know if you want in, and let me know if you want to help.

So now, one week after launching, we are almost full, which is pretty fantastic, since this was a little bit of a daunting experiment for us. We’re actually charging money for an event, which is a change for us, which means we actually feel some need to live up to the expectations of people who pay real money. Not only that, but it’s also on a weekday, which breaks our normal tradition of having things after hours or on weekends. Would people like the speakers? Would people get the time off or take the day off? Would people be turned off by the lack of direct metro access? Would people even hear about it?

Keeping It Small and Simple

Just like a webapp, we decided that going for a 600-person conference was not something we wanted to take on and risk right away. Renting a huge venue, catering major meals, and just dealing with all the extra logistics in a massive event like that didn’t seem too friendly to our after-hours availability. We settled on keeping it to around 75 people, which was around Refresh’s size, so we would know what to expect.

Don’t Spend a Ton

We figured that space, food, and speaker expenses were among the biggest financial risks at a typical conference, so we were determined to limit these as much as possible. Viget’s new office has a great space that worked out well for Startup Weekend and a few other events, and could hold our target size, more or less, so it was great that Brian agreed to let us use it for the day. The biggest downside is that it’s about 15-20 minutes walking time from the Metro, but we may be able to wrangle someone into running a shuttle for us, so that could yet be solved. Overall, it’s a great space, and we’re lucky to have had this taken off our shoulders.

Likewise, speaker expenses tend to be the result of flying in dozens of people, putting them up in hotels, and feeding them, not to mention any speaking fees. By making this a truly regional conference, with speakers from the area (and maybe a friend or two from elsewhere along the east coast), we could drastically reduce all of these. And since we know that there is some great talent and speaking ability in the area, we didn’t have to worry about getting interesting talks and smart speakers lined up.

Diversify the Audience

The one risk we did take was scheduling the event on a weekday. We did this largely to try to draw a different kind of crowd from the usual faces we see at every weekend event in DC. Our fingers are crossed that we’ll see a decent number of people from larger agencies, and perhaps some of the AIGA crowd that hasn’t really flirted too much with the Refresh crowd. So far, things on this front are looking great.

And after all, salaried employees don’t really get paid for Leap Day, so why not do something really useful and fun with it?

Finding Great Sponsors

To cover other things, we need to rely on finding great sponsors. Viget already took care of the space, and AOL’s AIM Design Group has jumped in to sponsor a big chunk as well. We have a few others in the hopper who we’ll hopefully have signed on in short order, and that gives us a ton of breathing room.

Fingers Crossed

Hopefully, we’ll run out of tickets sometime in the next week or two, we’ll have all of our sponsors lined up, and we’ll be able to have an amazing event three weeks from now. Hopefully, you’ll be there (you’ve registered already, right?), and either way, we hope you’ll let us know what you think of it.

If all goes well, come springtime, we’ll be kicking off the DC Developer Talks. Same idea. More Code.

Several days ago, I asked a friend of mine to dig up a particular type of email that I was confident she received all the time, so that I could see how they typically look. She responded saying that she certainly gets them, but she almost always deletes them. Why? To keep things tidy, and because she doesn’t expect that she would ever need them again.

When was the last time you were really glad you deleted an email sent to your personal address?

While I definitely don’t need the vast majority of messages I have archived, I do find myself looking back through those archives once in a while. A few weeks ago, I had to reference some technical documentation I’d written for a Linux consulting firm back in 2000, and there it was. It’s also useful to find contact information or to recall that name just barely outside of mind’s reach. My email ends up being a catalog of much of my research and correspondence, and that seems pretty valuable, at least valuable to me.

In these days of massive disk storage, even at hosting providers, it should be quite easy for most people to store all of their email for at least a couple of years. My archives back to 2003 come in around 2GB or so. My archives prior to that are gzipped, since I very rarely touch them, and use about 1.8GB. In all, I could probably maintain a decade of email, and I get a substantial amount of it, within 10GB.

Certainly, there are some types of email that would simply be a waste to archive — spam, bac’n, and other automated messages that you probably didn’t even want to get the first time would fall into this category, and perhaps messages on a few mailing lists that are archived online in multiple locations. Archiving business email for an extended period may introduce some liability, so I can understand those circumstances as well.

So if you delete email beyond these exceptions, why? Have you ever regretted that, and if so, did that trigger a change in your practices?

Last month, that situation changed when I received my Ooma. The idea is this: you pay once for the Ooma VoIP unit ($399 right now), and never pay subscription fees for unlimited domestic calling. The Ooma hub, like most consumer VoIP devices, plugs into your network connection and into your phone. You can buy additional “scouts” for $40 that will allow you to connect other phones in your house to the Ooma system. Though it doesn’t apply to me, you can also connect your own bare-bones landline to Ooma, which will ensure that you can place calls during power outages and guarantees a real 911 experience.

Features

What you get with an “ooma line” is basically what you get with two fully-featured landlines. Call waiting, caller ID, three-way calling, voicemail, and unlimited domestic calling are all features you generally expect from a $40-50/month landline plan, and you get all of those. Additionally, the voicemail is accessible anywhere you have a web browser through Ooma’s website, and you really have two lines. If you receive a second call while you’re on the line, you can either pick it up via call waiting, or the call will ring any other phones connected via scouts, where someone else can pick it up concurrently. If someone is talking on the first line, all other phones have the option of picking up on the same line or picking up the second line and making a second call.

Quality

VoIP generally gets a bad rap, with complaints about call quality being the major gripe. I haven’t experienced any of this with Ooma. The calls feel exactly the same as if I were using a landline, and all of the features work perfectly as well. There is no appreciable delay or latency while on calls, and I haven’t heard a single moment of garbled audio. I tested the system both from my office and from my home, and it had no problem navigating either firewall for both incoming and outgoing calls, and took just moments to set up.

To add to all this, the Ooma product itself is quite well done. The scouts and hub all act like traditional answering machines, where you can play messages without dialing into voicemail, trashing or saving them as you like. They also allow you to select a line for calling, forward an incoming call to voicemail, or turn on a privacy mode that forwards all calls to voicemail instantly.

The online features of Ooma (through the Ooma website) are pretty nice, too. In addition to being able to listen to voicemail from “any” modern web browser with flash (iPhones, of course, need not apply), Ooma can notify you via email or SMS when you receive a new voicemail. This has already come in handy a few times when we’ve gotten a message during the day and were able to respond before getting home and finding out we had a message (though we also have a good excuse if we don’t respond!).

Price

Given that the service life of the Ooma unit is 3 years, you’re essentially paying no more than $11/month for the hub, plus $1.11 per month for each scout. The longer that Ooma unit lasts, the less you’d effectively be paying. For most people who have a fully-featured landline, the Ooma unit would be paid for within a year, at which point you would be in the black from then on out. For those who have mobile plans with a lot of minutes, and use a decent number of them while at home, this could allow you to drop down a notch or two, and the unit would pay for itself in a similar amount of time.

Of Course…

I have to make at least one critical remark: Ooma has a strange dial tone, which is basically like a regular dial tone on acid — add a ring modulator and the sound of wind to a normal dial tone, and you might have the idea. That’s not necessarily bad, but when the connection is made at the beginning of a call, there’s a small fleeting echo of the tone audible to both parties. It occasionally prompts the other person to ask what it was, at which point you tell them it’s because you have an Ooma. Good marketing, but kinda cheesy. It’s not disruptive, and most people don’t ask, but I should mention it.

It’s Nice

Obviously, I’m pretty thrilled with how it’s worked so far. I’ve told my parents to replace their line with an Ooma setup, and I think they are actually going to do it, keeping their landline on a minimal (think $7/month or so) plan for the 911 and the old phone number, since Ooma can’t port phone numbers (yet) without you keeping the old line. If you could stand to save some on your phone service, or want an inexpensive way to have a landline in your home, it’s probably worth a shot.

Disclaimer

And no, I’m not being paid for this review ;)

Since moving to DC after college in Maine, my college friends have become among my best. I sang for a few years with Alison and Lauren, and brought Lauren in to work with me when I was at Grassroots, and now we meet up at least once a month or so over dinner for great wine and great conversation.

Alison has spent her still-young career as a journalist writing for financial publications, covering bonds and government regulations (as I understand it). Apparently, she’s damn good at it, but she has long wanted to be a food writer. One night, as we were discussing such things, she proposed starting a food and wine blog with Lauren, who loves her wine. Her goals were to generate a bit of a portfolio and hopefully attract a little bit of attention to either get a job writing or editing a food column/magazine/whatever.

I put on my “I think about this kind of thing all the time” hat and suggested that rather than launching a food blog (Technorati says there are at least 50,000 of those), that she instead launch a little online magazine. Not only would she be able to write, but she could also develop her abilities as an editor and publisher as well, and the publication schedule could keep her motivated moreso than the often fluid/non-existent publication schedule of a blog (obviously, I speak from experience).

Three days ago, we launched the first issue of The Humble Gourmand, which is a monthly (though it may become bi-weekly) online food magazine for the younger, urban demographic — complete with features, recipes, reviews, a wine column, and a blog. I produced the site front to back, and Alison and Lauren wrote the content, with Alison of course taking on the publisher/editor responsibilities.

Even though it’s only been three days, it’s already been a success in almost every way. We’ve had a few hundred visitors, who average about six pages per visit (even organic google referrals average four pages per visit), and we’ve gotten incredibly positive feedback. Several people have volunteered to write articles for an upcoming issue, which can help expand the geographic base for reviews. Most importantly, Alison has been offered opportunities to write for major publications… about food!

From the perspective of a web designer/developer, there were a few interesting things about this project:

• I did it end to end. Since becoming a strategist at Viget, I haven’t gotten to do as much of the designing and developing as I had in the past, so it was nice to be back in the saddle again. I have to admit, some of my IE6 bug-hunting chops were a bit rusty. Hopefully, it’s easy on the eyes, and not devilishly broken.
• I used Django. I’ve been watching and toying with Django for months now, but hadn’t actually done anything of real substance with it. This is exactly the type of site that Django was made for, and it’s been working out swimmingly. I don’t feel like I have many JV hacks in my code, even though I’m pretty much a newbie, so that speaks volumes for the Django book by Adrian and Jacob (seriously, it’s great to have in hard-copy), as well as the rest of the Django documentation. The CMS, which was a major part of most of my PHP-based projects, took up about 1% of my time on the project. After launch, I realized I hadn’t made an RSS feed for anything. Five minutes later, we were all set. It’s great.
• We used Mingle. For project and task management, we’ve been using Mingle, which is geared toward agile-like processes, and it’s been nice. It was recommended in a Viget context by Clinton, and we gave it a go here. Going forward, we may use it for the actual content parts of the site, which could be a cool way to work toward both publishing and development goals. Best of all, since there are only a few of us, it’s free.

We’ll be doing more with it in the coming issues, and it should be a nice fun side project for a while.

I encourage you to check it out, subscribe to the feed, comment on things you like, send private email about things you don’t like, etc. ;) Suggestions are always welcome.