Researchers find backdoor on ZTE Android phones

The summary is that “Two mobile phones, developed by Chinese telecommunications device manufacturer ZTE, have been found to carry a hidden backdoor, which can be used to instantly gain root access with a password, that has been hard-coded into the software.”

We’re awfully dependent on foreign manufacturing. In the 1980s, the concern was “The Japan That Can Say No.” Now it’s Chinese manufacturing OEM/ODMs embedding rogue code in our cellphones, routers, and other electronic infrastructure.

I don’t always agree with Alexander Hamilton, but he got it right in his “Report on Manufactures” in 1791:

Not only the wealth, but the independence and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation, with a view to those great objects, ought to endeavour to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the means of Subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defence.

The possession of these is necessary to the perfection of the body politic; to the safety as well as to the welfare of the society; the want of either is the want of an important Organ of political life and Motion; and in the various crises which await a state, it must severely feel the effects of any such deficiency.

He was right 220 years ago, and he’s right today. I hope that learning this lesson again only costs us economic pain and not something worse.

I’ve been invited to speak at the Atlanta Science Tavern on 13 June, 2012. I’ll be speaking on “Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas.” You can sign up to attend here.

One of the triggers for this talk was a BMW advertisement promising a hydrogen engine that “produces near zero emissions. Which means the exhaust produces water vapor, not carbon dioxide. So it reduces pollution and greenhouse gases and lessens our dependence on imported oil.”

That’s just silly, and I’ll explain why.

There are more silly ideas out there, most of them referenced by this Scientific American cover article from September 2011 on “How to Get All Energy from Wind, Water, and Solar Power by 2030.”

This is a deeply flawed (and dangerous) vision, but it’s attractive to a lot of well-meaning environmentalists. We’ll explore why it won’t work.

Bio:

Stephen Fleming is Vice President of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech, responsible for economic development and entrepreneurial support. He’s a GT graduate who has been a Bell Labs physicist, telecom exec, and successful venture capitalist before returning to Georgia Tech in 2005.

References:

http://www.businessweek.com/autos/content/may2006/bw20060505_260847.htm

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

Together, the two programs have involved 82 EI2 personnel (as RD team members, lead generators, business case team members, and mentors). The two RD teams reviewed hundreds of new revenue ideas generated by a very large majority of the organization.

To date, we have invested or committed $869K into RD projects, and have collected or invoiced $1,679K in new revenue (two thirds from Bill Meffert), with more to come. It’s working! In fact, since state funding has dropped from 45% of EI2′s budget to 33% today, revenue diversification has been a necessity, not a luxury. Both new proposals and new contract awards are up significantly. EI2 has never been static, but RD has helped us adapt to the changing funding environment. In fact, it’s been integrated into everyone’s annual performance evaluations!

Beyond the obvious revenue numbers… intentionally, the revenue diversification teams (and the subsequent business case teams and mentors) are drawn from every department in EI2. In fact, it’s one of the few activities where working across organization boundaries becomes routine. This interaction spun off the EI2 “Transformation Team,” which has launched several team-building initiatives, including our quarterly meetings, the monthly newsletter, periodic internal brown bag lunches, and this summer’s return of the long-lost annual picnic!

We decided not to launch the third RD initiative in January, since there’s nothing particularly magical about an annual cycle. We’ve spent the first part of 2012 continuing to invest in the first two sets of projects. But state funding isn’t going up anytime soon, so it’s time to do it again.

On July 1, we’ll start the third Revenue Diversification program. Logically, it should be called “RD3.” But last year, as a geeky joke, I started using “R2D2″ instead of “RD2″… and, somewhat to my surprise, people seemed to like it! So, this year, in defiance of my better judgement, we’re going to have “C3PO”: “Comprehensive 3rd Pursuit of Opportunities”. (Compliments and/or insults on the name should be flung towards Don Betts!)

Dana King Brewer and Johanna Kaiser have volunteered to lead this year’s program. They’ll be selecting their team over the next few weeks… if you’re interested in helping out, please let one of them know. Once again, I want a mix of newbies and old hands from all levels of the organization.

I’ve asked David and Charles — our elder statesmen of revenue diversification — to conduct interviews of participants from the previous programs soon after July 1. They’ll ask where we got their best ideas, how we could improve the process, and solicit suggestions on improving the implementation of the selected projects. Based on that review, Dana and Johanna may choose to reproduce the process we used in 2010 and 2011, or develop a streamlined version, or do something completely different. And I’m pretty sure they’re going to recommend changes to the informal “seed” program that I’ve talked about at the last couple of quarterly meetings.

Given other obligations, full implementation of C3PO won’t start until September 1, but we’ll still try to have the winning business cases selected by the end of the year. Once again, I’m counting on everyone in EI2 — whether on the committee or not! — to make suggestions and provide constructive criticism. Thanks for all your help and support!

    Stephen

I understand liver failure due to acetaminophen toxicity, and I think it’s a darned shame that it kills 200 people per year. Of course, half of those are intentional suicides who would find another way to die… and, remember, doctors kill fifty times as many patients a year with bad handwriting. Never mind. I commented:

I realize I have a minority opinion. (Nothing to do with the toxicity of acetaminophen… I simply reject the entire premise that the FDA should have the authority to regulate what is sold to American citizens. Once again we’ve chosen to trade freedom for the illusion of security. C’est la guerre.)

One commenter replied:

Anti-regulation libertarianism assumes an informed and active consumer, and the diabetes epidemic proves that you don’t have that in the real world – libertarianism is based on even more magical thinking than communism. I work in this space, run companies in this space, and trust me please – you wouldn’t want to give up the FDA. You certainly wouldn’t want your loved ones in a hospital if they weren’t doing their job (imperfectly, yes, this is the real world).

I confess to being a rational libertarian — not an anarchist, and not a disciple of the Ayn Rand cult. But I do think that, in most cases, adults should be allowed to make their own decisions as long as they don’t hurt others. That includes drugs. Prescription drugs. Non-prescription drugs (tried to buy Sudafed lately?). Megadoses of Vitamin C. Alcohol. Nicotine. Peach pits from Mexico. And the whole phylum of illegal drugs that I’ve never tried, don’t want to try, but which don’t seem to be destroying Amsterdam nor Portugal at the moment. Rack ‘em all up behind the counter, convince the pharmacist that you’re rational and have the cash, and walk away with a bag of whatever you want.

It’s just like I tweeted at the TEDMED conference two weeks ago when the Commissioner for Food and Drugs was on stage:

That doesn’t mean the FDA should be abolished… in fact, I’d increase their budget to speed up the testing of drugs and medical devices. But I would take away their police power to determine what may or may not be sold to adult citizens who haven’t been declared wards of the state.

What I would do is print a whole bunch of stickers, and enforce a law that anything that looks, smells, or is advertised to be even in the same neighborhood as a medical treatment should have one of these stickers. (See? I’m really NOT an anarchist!)

Black Label

First sticker: We’ve tested this stuff, and it will kill you. If you take it, you’re a damned fool. Hope your affairs are in order. Bye.

Red Label

Second sticker: STOP. We haven’t tested it and have no idea what’s in it. Could be anything from arsenic to angelhair pasta. Unless you have done your homework, taking this probably makes you as big a damned fool as someone taking the black label brew.

But anything — anything! — could be put on the shelves with a red label with no laboratory testing. That includes products from ethical pharmaceutical houses who are working through their billion-dollar FDA clinical trials (objective: green label), but want to make the product available early under red label.

Orange Label

Now things get interesting. The orange label is roughly consistent with completing today’s Phase I clinical trial. The product isn’t poison (at least at recommended dosages) and it doesn’t do any obvious damage.

Put it on the shelves with a big orange question mark, and the FDA should put all its data online for analysis and summation by the WebMD’s of the world. Maybe this is good for you, maybe it’s not, but some drug developers may choose to pause their clinical trials at this stage and not incur the Phase II/III costs until they get market feedback.

And, given what we know now, acetaminophen would likely get an orange label.

I could see an entire class of “orange-label” venture investors emerging… they provide enough capital to get to orange-label, start selling the product… and if a green-label company wants to scoop them up for a few hundred million dollars then invest a few hundred million more in a successful Phase III trial… well, that’s a nice exit, too.

Green Label

Green label: this is the good one! This signifies that the drug has met the same standards as a Pre Market Approval (PMA) after undergoing successful Phase I/II/III trials (many years and many millions of dollars).

Ethical pharma companies will still pursue this label for their blockbuster drugs since they can charge whatever the market will bear to those patients who will only take green-label drugs. (And there will be a lot of those patients!)

If you don’t like this proposal, you could choose to be unaffected by it. Only buy green-label drugs, and you have the same level of nanny-state oversight and “safety” that you have now. (We won’t mention Vioxx.) Maybe you’ll choose to go to a hospital that only provides green-label drugs. Maybe your health plan only reimburses for green-label.

If you’re willing to do a little more digging yourself, and finding trustworthy sources, and weighing the risks, it’s not hard to see you taking an orange-label medication sometimes.

A smaller fraction will take red-label. And only the terminally-ill (including, sadly, the terminally mentally ill) would ever take black-label… either as a suicide pill, or in a last-ditch effort to kill a cancer or equivalent condition before it kills him.

Through the entire process, individuals (who are over 18 and not wards of the state) are allowed to make their own decisions. Some will make bad decisions. Some will die from those bad decisions.

“Think of it as evolution in action.”

And are those deaths any worse than the 10,000 Americans who die of bad handwriting per year… where the fix is so simple as to be laughable? Be careful criticizing the mote in my eye when you have a whole damn tree lodged in yours…

So it appears that a group of billionaires are going to announce the first asteroid mining company tomorrow. (You don’t need me to repeat the news here. Visit http://planetaryresources.com and follow their Twitter account @PlanetaryRsrcs.)

Buried deep in this site, you might stumble across a Letter to the Editor that the Washington Post printed on October 12, 1990 under the headline “Go Get an Asteroid”… 22 years ago. None of the ideas were original with me, but it’s one of the first discussions of asteroid mining in the mainstream media. (Seven years before “Mining the Sky” was published!)

Here’s the PDF .

Just for the heck of it, I’m going to reproduce the text here.

Go Get an Asteroid

I am concerned by the tone of Jessica Tuchman Mathews’s op-ed piece last week, “The Mars Extravaganza” {Oct. 5}. I am not going to debate whether sending Americans to the Moon and Mars is wise or affordable under current budget restraints. I am not going to deny that there are numerous challenges facing our environment (pollution, deforestation, extinctions, etc.), as Mrs. Mathews points out. But Mrs. Mathews falls into the environmentalist trap of asking, “Why should we spend all that money on space when there are so many problems here on Earth?”

The right question to ask is, “How can we best spend money to solve these problems here on Earth?” The surprising answer is: in space. Only through space-based observations can we understand what’s happening to this planet. More important, only through space-based industry can we halt and reverse the trends threatening our environment.

Are messy industrial processes threatening groundwater supplies? Move the industries to orbit and send down only the finished goods. Is open-pit mining erasing huge tracts of wilderness? Go get an asteroid, which contains far more nickel, iron and other metals than humanity has mined to date. Are burning fossil fuels polluting the atmosphere and contributing to CO2 buildup? Put solar power stations in orbit and beam down limitless quantities of safe, clean, unpolluting energy. Are Third World children dying from disease for lack of medicine? Build a pharmaceutical factory in the microgravity of orbit, where we can make life-saving drugs for a tiny fraction of the cost of Earth-based processes.

These activities, and hundreds more, do not require a trip to Mars, but they cannot be carried out by machines. Only the intelligence and flexibility of men and women in orbit can break the grip of Earth’s gravity and bring the bounty of space to all mankind.

America knows how to carry out these activities quickly, safely and economically. So do Japan, the Soviet Union and the Europeans. But we are hobbled by NASA, a bureaucracy beholden to its unreliable and obsolete Shuttle, its bloated Space Station Freedom and a host of other constituencies. If private industry were encouraged to begin the commercial and profitable use of space without the 1,001 regulations enforced by our government, then we could see astonishing gains in space technology — and in the benefits of space for the first, second and third worlds — by the end of the decade.

A vigorous and independent space program could be the best friend of the entire environmental movement. I encourage Mrs. Mathews to explore its potential benefits for the problems she deplores; she shouldn’t throw out this baby industry with NASA’s dirty bath water.

Stephen Fleming, Sterling, Virginia

With 22 years of hindsight, it’s kind of amusing that the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, and I was worried about the Japanese and not the Chinese. And the claims for the orbital pharmaceutical factory are still unproven. But I think the rest of it was right on target.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
the saddest are these: “It might have been!”
–John Greenleaf Whittier, 1856

My iPhone 4S home screen as of April 2012

It surprises people that, as a well-assimilated Apple fanboy, I didn’t buy the first generation iPhone. I was in the store on launch day, I had one in my hand, my credit card was burning a hole in my pocket… and I left without one. I used my Treo for nearly another year until the 2nd generation iPhone (confusingly named 3G) was released. I wasn’t waiting for the faster network connection or for the GPS chip, or cut-and-paste, although those were all nice. No, although I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I was waiting for the App Store.

Remember, I was coming from years in the Palm ecosystem, where third-party apps were a key part of the experience. I was utterly reliant on a couple of them (in particular, an RPN calculator… having been converted to the RPN Way by HP calculators in my youth, I simply cannot use “normal” calculators without an Enter key!). So the first-gen iPhone had lots of promise, but it wasn’t ready for me yet. Web apps looked interesting, but until developers got hold of a native SDK, I kept my money in my pocket.

Once the App Store was announced, I knew I was hooked. In fact, I bought my first iPhone app on July 10, 2008, the night before the iPhone 3G was released… yes, I had that much faith in Apple (and James Thomson, author of PCalc) that I spent ten bucks on an app without hardware that I could run it on!

And, although I didn’t know it, I was participating in an interesting experiment in app pricing. In the early days, I bought several apps for $9.99 or even more. Soon, those apps found their prices cut to $6.99, $4.99… or they were abandoned entirely. A few apps hovered about the magic ten-buck point, but most were driven down by the competition from free and 99¢ apps.

Lots of people have blogged about the race to the bottom, and I have nothing useful to add there… except that I never hesitate to buy a paid app if it looks like it does something I need, or even want. I’ve spent more than the price of that first iPhone in the App Store at this point, and I don’t mind. Software developers gotta eat, and I don’t mine supporting them with a couple of bucks here and there.

Of course, sometimes the app turns out to be less polished than I hoped, or buggy, or just doesn’t get updated when needed. So I wind up buying a lot of apps, experimenting with them, and letting them languish in a rear page, or delete them from my devices entirely.

People are always asking me “So, what apps should I get for my iPhone/iPad?” That’s hard to answer, since I don’t know your needs or your budget. All I can do is give you a list of the apps that I use, many of them daily, and frequently after downloading and trying a lot of competitors. (I think I’ve bought fourteen calendar applications, and I shudder to think how many Twitter apps. I’ve settled on what I think are the best.)

I’ve blogged about this before, but that was almost a year and a half ago (and again two years before that, which was even before the iPad)… and things change.

So, here’s my list of my favorite iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch) applications, as of April 2012. Click on any icon for a link to the official App Store description.

• Productivity
• Apple iWork Suite
• e-Books
• News / Information
• Photography
• Navigation
• Utilities
• Fun and Games

Productivity

	Free	both
Calendar	I’ve tested fourteen Calendar applications (paying up to $20 each for the privilege). With iOS 5, I’m back to the original built-in Apple Calendar. It’s not perfect, but it works. I don’t use the iCloud calendars; I juggle thirteen Google Calendars. Apple’s app makes a decent front-end to Google, but it’s faster than any other Google-compatible calendar and—critically—it’s always there. Other calendar clients just wander off into the weeds and stare at their navel occasionally.
	Free	Universal
Zenbe Lists	There are a zillion to-do list applications out there. This one keeps a position on my home screen for one fundamental reason: painless syncing from the cloud to multiple devices. The real-world use? My wife and I can share a single grocery list (and Home Depot list, etc.). If one of us goes shopping alone, we’re sure we have the most current version. I don’t understand Zenbe’s business model in giving this away, but I’d miss it if they stopped.
	$2.99 (each)	iPhone and iPad (separate apps)
Tweetbot	I don’t know… is Twitter a “productivity” app, or an “anti-productivity” app? Probably a little of both. What’s definitely not productive is downloading and testing twelve different Twitter clients. I’ve done that, so you don’t have to. Lots of them are good; some are very good. For my money, Tweetbot is hands-down the best of the bunch… on both the iPhone and the iPad. Pay for them separately; it’s worth it. You’ll never use the native Twitter client (or—ugh!—the Web interface) again.
	$5.99	iPad only
Noteshelf	Ever since Steve Jobs assassinated my beloved Newton 2100, I’ve been looking for a device that will allow me to take notes in a meeting. (And, yes, the Newton’s handwriting recognition was good enough to do that!) Typing is the wrong approach. But Jobs hated styluses, so the Inkwell character recognition software that’s buried inside of OS X has never been enabled for iOS. Which is sad, because the iPad has approximately a gazillion times the processing capability of the Newton! So I’ve tried a double handful of note-taking apps for the iPad, looking for something to replace my stacks of Moleskine notebooks. Nothing does handwriting recognition effectively yet (sigh), but Noteshelf is the best-of-breed in capturing digital ink. You can even send its images off to Evernote to do OCR if you want to. You’ll need a stylus, of course. I’ve bought ten of those. Currently, my favorite is the pricey Jot Flip, but even cheap $4 imports do the job. Tastes differ. Try to find a friend with a drawer full of styluses (no one stops with just one) and try before you buy.
	Free	Universal
SimpleNote	I can’t count the number of keyboard-based note-taking apps on the iOS platform. I love SimpleNote because it’s as simple as advertised. Doesn’t try to be all things to all people, but it’s a quick, easy, legible way of writing myself notes, and accessing them on other devices, including my desktop. And they’re a Y Combinator startup! I give them $12/year for “Premium” service, even though the free version meets all my needs.There are multiple desktop clients available to sync with SimpleNote’s server; I use JustNotes for the Mac, but others work as well.
	$1.99	iPad only
iA Writer	This one is iPad-only. Some of the design decisions in this app drive me crazy. But I love it for two reasons: The gorgeous custom font, Nitti Light, which is the most legible monospace typeface I’ve ever seen to on the iPad. And maybe it’s my teletype heritage, but I compose better in monospace. The expanded keyboard with cursor keys (yippee!) and other controls that may offend Steve Jobs, but which lighten my load every time I’m composing text. SimpleNote works well by staying out of my way for a few sentences at a time. If I’m typing more than half a page on my iPad, I want to use iA Writer.
	Free	Universal
Evernote	Theoretically, Evernote could replace both of the above apps. I find it too “heavy” to use for cranking out quick notes to myself, and the UI doesn’t match iA Writer for longer text. Where Evernote shines for me is in taking photographs (I’m particularly guilty of photographing the covers of books I want to buy) and OCRing them in the background so that they become searchable text. I suspect some low-wage English-speakers in India or China are chained to their workstations to type whatever they read in your photos, but I honestly don’t know. Synchronizes with an equally powerful client on your Mac or PC (or on the Web). There are paid options available if you turn out to be a heavy user.
	$9.99 (free trial available)	Universal
PCalc	As I said earlier, I waited to buy an iPhone until PCalc was available. I use it every day on my Mac, and now I use it every day on my iPhone. Gorgeous implementation… not a slavish recreation of my beloved and still-operational HP-15C (although those recreations exist; I’ve bought them) but a rethinking of what’s necessary in an RPN calculator and what can be hidden. (Oh, yeah, there’s an algebraic mode, too, but I’ve never paid it any attention.) Multiple “skins” available to get the appearance you’re looking for. Comparatively expensive for an iPhone app, but worth it. Pay the man. He deserves it.
	$4.99	Universal
PowerOne Financial	If I run into a calculation that’s too complicated for PCalc but not complicated enough to open a spreadsheet, I usually reach for PowerOne. It’s a distant descendant of the RPN calculator I used to use on the Palm, but vastly more powerful with customizable worksheets (things like Time Value of Money where you can actually see all the variables, not just stuff them into the stack like an HP-12C). My only complaint is that the interface is ugly; I wish Infinity Softworks would implement custom skins like PCalc did.
	$14.99	Both (single platform versions $7.99)
1Password Pro	I use a new randomly-generated password for every Website that I visit. So I need a secure place to keep them. After using SplashID for years on the Palm OS, I paid for both 1Password and SplashID on the iPhone. After a long period of using them in parallel, I settled on 1Password. Frequent updates, and a great Mac client that syncs automatically over Wi-Fi and integrates with Safari or Firefox on your desktop.
	$1.99	iPhone only
Favorites	Simple speed-dialer that sits in my Dock and lets me dial or text my most frequent contacts with one touch. Does exactly what you’d want it to, and nothing that you wouldn’t want it to. Probably overpriced but, seriously, can’t you afford two bucks?
	$4.99	iPad only
ReaddleDocs for iPad	I’ve said before that ReaddleDocs for the iPad is reason enough to own an iPad, and I still believe that. The ability to carry thousands of documents in a slim searchable slab has changed my life. Rather than having folders upon folders of paper printouts, I just forward any attachment (PDF or Microsoft Office… probably others, but those are the ones I care about) to my Readdle email address, and sync just before walking into a meeting. I’ve sold several iPads with this app. Good Reader has similar functionality, but until someone comes up with a better user interface (which, honestly, wouldn’t be difficult) or better customer service (which would be hard!), I love Readdle and use it every day.
	$4.99	iPhone only
ReaddleDocs	Readdle Docs for the iPhone synchronizes to the same cloud storage space as Readdle Docs for the iPad. It’s a less compelling experience just because of the inevitable limitations of the smaller screen. Where I’m likely to open a spreadsheet on my iPad and pass it around a conference table, I’m not going to do the same with my iPhone. Nevertheless, it’s nice to occasionally have access to documents when I don’t have my iPad with me, and Readdle serves that niche nicely. You have to buy them separately, which is an odd choice on the company’s part; I wish they sold a Universal version for 2/3rds the price of the two apps sold separately. Maybe someday.
	$4.99	iPad only
ToDo for iPad	How many to-do applications are available for iOS? Certainly dozens, probably hundreds. Most of them are pretty interchangeable. ToDo by Appigo is different. First, it’s gorgeous… someone really sweated the details on the UI, and it shows. Next, it integrates well between iPhone, iPad, Web (via Toodle-Do), and other services. Finally, the developers seem to pay attention to how people actually work, rather than trying to shoehorn us into “Getting Things Done” or any other system. I like it.
	$4.99 (free trial available)	iPhone only
ToDo	Bought as a companion to the gorgeous iPad version above, but really good enough to be bought just for the iPhone. Nicely done.
	$4.99 (free trial available)	Universal
Instapaper	What Readdle Docs does for attached files, Instapaper does for Web pages. Ever get into “tl;dr” (Too Long, Didn’t Read) mode when reading the Web? Instapaper solves the problem. Install a bookmarklet in your browser (desktop or iOS device) and, whenever you get to a page that’s too long, click “Read Later.” Instapaper magically figures out the part of the page you want to read (meaning, not the ads and the blogroll and the other cruft) and sucks it into the cloud. Sync your iPad, and all those articles wind up in local storage, so you can read them at leisure when waiting for a haircut or whatever… no network connection required. Beautifully crafted, obsessively supported. You need this app.
	$4.99	Universal
Consistency	This app is for repetitive tasks that need to be tracked, but that you don’t need to schedule on your calendar. Example: I need to oil my bicycle chain once a month, but if I’m a week early or a week late, it’s no big deal. Consistency is brilliant for things like that. I used to use the desktop version of this app and I like the idea a lot. I was pleased to find it available for the iPhone, so I bought it without doing my research. I’m mildly astonished to find that it doesn’t use iPhone notifications (badges, dialogs, sounds). And I’m disappointed that there’s not a “cloud” option to sync lists between my iPhone and iPad. I’d pay a modest amount for that.Considering it hasn’t been updated in years (Yoo-hoo, Sciral! There’s this thing called iOS 4 iOS 5; you might have read about it!), I guess we have to treat this app as abandonware. A shame, really, since I don’t know of anything else that works precisely this way.
	Free	Universal
WordPress	I don’t blog a lot away from my keyboard, but it’s nice to be able to fix a typo or approve a comment while on the go. After a rocky start, the WordPress app has matured to a solid client on both iPhone and iPad. If you have a WordPress blog (self-hosted or on WordPress.com), you need to check this out… at least until MarsEdit for iPad ships.
	Free	Universal
Skype	I don’t use Skype a lot, but it’s nice to have for that occasional international phone call. And it’s a nice multiplatform chat interface that most people will either have, or be willing to install. The iPhone client works well, and it’s free.

Apple iWork Suite

	$9.99 each	Universal
Keynote —– Pages —– Numbers	These three get special treatment. Keynote, Pages, and Numbers together form Apple’s iWork suite… originally for the desktop, and redesigned to launch with the iPad. I have my issues with these three apps, but they’re still worth the money. First off, they ought to be named “Keynote Light,” “Pages Light,” and “Numbers Light”… Apple did a good job of focusing on the 80% of features that everyone really needs, but sometimes one of the 20% they eliminated will really bite your project in the butt. In particular, I keep running into limitations with Keynote (master slides, complex animations, fonts, and complex groups) that badly break certain of my slide presentations. Next, the process for getting documents from the desktop version of iWorks applications into and out of the iPad Apps is just hostile. It takes about ten steps, none of which intuitively leads to the next. This is very “un-Apple” and I hoped that iCloud would fix this, but it’s just not ready yet. But, for now, if you think that having iWork on your desktop and on your iPad means you can edit the same document in both places… you’re wrong. You can create a document on your desktop, export it to your iPad, and (most) things will work… but if you make changes on your iPad, you need to export it back to your Mac as a new document. No synchronization, no audit trail, no acknowledgement of cloud-based workflow at all. Ick. All that being said, it’s really cool to walk into a room carrying just your iPad and a VGA dongle, and running the whole presentation from your touchscreen. Major ego boost.

E-Books

	Free	Universal
Kindle	I’m one of those weird people who bought a Kindle after buying an iPad. Different screen technologies, different use cases. I love them both. We’ve bought a lot of books on Kindle, and it’s great to have them with me wherever I go… including the amazingly-capable screen on the iPhone 4/4S. Synchronization is painless, and the feature set is more than adequate.
	Free	Universal
Stanza	Oddly, the best e-book reader on the iPhone or iPad is made by Amazon, but it’s not Kindle. It’s Stanza. Formerly a standalone company (Lexcycle), Amazon bought the developer in early 2009, and I was terrified that it meant the death of this superb application. But they released an iPad update more or less on schedule, did a full-blown Lazarus after iOS 5 broke the app, and have clearly not abandoned the product. It’s a better reading experience than Kindle, with a more mature set of interface options (it’s been around longer!), and it integrates into a wide variety of paid and free e-book sources. I tend to want to buy everything that Toni Weisskopf at Baen Books publishes, and Stanza makes that painless. Maybe too painless. Hook it up to Calibre on your desktop, and you can easily see how I have over 300 books on my iPad.

News/Information

	Free	iPhone only
The Weather Channel	Another of those ecological niches where I’ve downloaded at least six free and paid apps. The Weather Channel isn’t just the hometown team here in Atlanta; I think they’ve built the best app. (There’s a paid upgrade, but I haven’t felt the need to buy it.)
	Free	iPad only
WSJ	I gave up on my dead tree subscription to the Wall Street Journal years ago, but I missed it. Now I don’t miss it anymore. The first release of this app for the iPad was absolutely terrible, but they’ve iterated rapidly, and the current version is great. Everything you need so that you’re no longer sitting there looking stupid when someone asks “Did you see the article on such-and-so in the Wall Street Journaltoday?” Now, if they’d just get rid of their obsession with fully-justified typography. Hint: Ragged-right looks better on narrow columns!
	Free (with paid print subscription)	iPad (iPhone version also available)
The Economist	I used to be addicted to print magazines… at one point, I was receiving over 50 per month. (I read fast. Really, really fast.) The Internet killed that little habit, and now I enjoy letting print subscriptions lapse, but one that I never hesitate to renew is The Economist. The iPad version is gorgeous and, if you have a paid print subscription, you get the entire magazine online every week. It downloads to local storage so you can read it on the plane without Wi-Fi. Perfect!
	Free	Universal
AJC	Sadly, the local paper has seen better days… a 50% drop in print subscribers will do that to you. And now that it’s moved to Dunwoody, the Atlanta Journal Constitution seems to be becoming the “North of I-285 Journal Constitution.” But there’s no substitute for the AJC when you want to find out about a local city council meeting, or the schedule for the Peachtree Road Race. (And their Twitter accounts are great!)
	Free	Universal
Flipboard	Flipboard is a Twitter client, but it’s also a lot more. It scrapes multiple services (your choice) and reformats stories into a customized online magazine. Beautiful UI; this is the simplest way I know to kill time while feeding my brain, as long as I have a Wi-Fi connection available.
	$2.99 (free trial available)	Universal
Regator Premium	Another hometown team (Decatur, Georgia), but with a national reputation. Regator hand-selects blog feeds from your topics of interest and presents them in a constantly-curated collection. This is where you’ll find those stories that’ll never make the New York Times… or, occasionally, where you’ll find big stories before they make the New York Times.
	Free	Universal
TED	TED has been called “the new Harvard.” I don’t know if I believe that, but the TED talks are extraordinary. Their self-description: “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world. TED presents talks from some of the world’s most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus and music legends.” I don’t usually have the patience for videos or podcasts, and I wish TED had a text transcription but these are good enough to be worth an exception.

Photography

	$1.99	Universal
AutoStitch Panorama	Can’t get everything you want into the camera frame? Take multiple photographs and stitch them together into a (vertical or horizontal) panorama. Better UI than Photoshop on your desktop, and it runs on your phone! We really are living in the future.
	Free	iPad only
SmugMug	I have set up picture-sharing free accounts on Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, Ofoto, and probably others. But I cheerfully pay for a SmugMug account because it’s just better. My only complaint is that not enough other apps integrate with it, I guess because of the smaller user base… but those users are vociferous fans, and include many professional photographers who use SmugMug galleries in their day job! The iPad app is a delightful way to browse through your photos and show them off to others.
	$3.99	iPad (iPhone version also available)
Photogene	It’s not Photoshop, but it’s amazing. The range of photo manipulations you can perform on a handheld device would have been dismissed as impossible only a few years ago. I’ve downloaded lots of photo utilities, but this is the one I keep launching when I need to fiddle with a photo. (Wonderful fact: if you’re on Wi-Fi, photos taken with your iPhone can be edited on your iPad within seconds, due to the magic of iCloud. So don’t be that guy holding the iPad up to your face… you look like a dork.)
	$0.99	Universal
ColorSplash	A one-trick pony, but what a cool trick! Convert your photos to black-and-white, then “paint” the color back into place for selected regions. Great user interface, and you wind up with striking photos to save or share. Yeah, you can do this in Photoshop, but not as easily, and not nearly as enjoyably! Spend the buck.
	$0.99 (free trial available)	iPhone only
JotNot Scanner Pro	Another one-trick pony. Take photos of documents (receipts, business cards, or full-size sheets of paper) and JotNot will square them up and crank up the contrast to make them surprisingly legible. I’ve emailed people photographs of documents rather than finding a fax machine, and it worked beautifully.

Navigation

	Free	Universal
MotionX GPSLite	A surprisingly good free navigation program. All sorts of downloadable maps, with waypoints, tracks, and more.There’s an HD version available for the iPad that’s even prettier.
	$39.99	Universal
TomTom USA	I have a standalone Garmin GPS that I like, but I can’t imagine buying another one. TomTom works without a network connection (important in rural Georgia!) to give you turn-by-turn navigation based on an internal database. (Which is enormous, by the way… you need more than a gigabyte free on your device to install this app.) Good user interface, with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, and a few you might not.
	$5.99	Universal
GoSkyWatch	Go outside at night. Look up. What the heck is that star? With GoSkyWatch, you have a planetarium inside your iPhone. Point it at the sky, and you can instantly figure out “Oh, that’s Vega! Cool!” Uses the accelerometer
	$0.99	Universal
Star Walk	Both StarWalk and GoSkyWatch are now universal applications, running on iPhone and iPad. Maybe it’s just my personal experience with the apps, but I tend to default to using GoSkyWatch on my iPhone, and StarWalk on my iPad. StarWalk is utterly gorgeous… a few missing features, but you won’t care. Usually three bucks, on sale today for a buck. Buy it.
	Free	Universal
Google Earth	Possibly the greatest toy ever. If you’ve used it on your desktop, you’re still not prepared for how utterly magical (hat tip to Steve Jobs) it is on an iPad. It’s free. Why haven’t you downloaded it?

Utilities

	$0.99	iPhone 4
Flashlight	I have no clue how many flashlight programs there are for the iPhone. The earliest zillion of them just turned the whole screen white. This was the first of a new generation that lights up the (incredibly bright) LED of the iPhone 4 camera flash. Sucks up your battery if you leave it on too long, but it’s brighter than those keychain flashlights, and you always have it with you. There are free ones out there, but this one is nicely done and well worth a buck.
	$12.99	Universal
PrintBureau	Perhaps the most misnamed app in the iTunes Store. Yes, it manages printing… I can print directly from my iPhone or iPad to my wireless inkjet printer. (Apple has AirPrint. PrintBureau works with more printers.) But it also handles cloud storage, and acts as a Wi-Fi hard drive, and has an email client, and probably makes julienne fries. I can’t keep track of everything this app does, but it’s a heck of a lot more than printing. (To print, it runs a helper app in the background on your Mac or PC, which is irritating, but it doesn’t take too many resources and has never crashed my Mac.)
	Free	Universal
Dropbox	Two years ago, I wrote “Apple, will you just buy Dropbox and put iDisk out of its overpriced misery?” Well, iCloud has killed iDisk, but Dropbox is doing just fine after turning down Steve Jobs’ offer. As far as I can tell, Dropbox has become not only the default cloud-storage service for iOS devices, but is darned near the file system that iOS tries to hide from you. What’s the difference? iCloud syncs your data (for apps that support it), Dropbox syncs your files (ditto). Normal people would probably be content with iCloud. I need both. Integrates seamlessly with your desktop (at least on the Mac; Windows and Linux versions exist, but I’ve never used them). A great way to move files back and forth, to make backups from your portable device, to share files with other people, whatever. I pay them for the 50 gig option, but normal humans should be satisfied with the free 2 gigabyte storage.
	Free	Universal
JungleDisk	I back up all of my Macs to JungleDisk, all the time. My files live safely on Amazon’s S3 servers. If someome steals all my computers, I’ll be angry, but I won’t be out of business. (Yeah, I have the ridiculously-long S3 keys printed out in my fireproof safe.) The iOS app lets me browse and manage those files… including occasionally pulling down a new version of a presentation that I forgot to move to Keynote for the iPad. Amazon S3 isn’t free, but the JungleDisk app is.

Fun and Games

	Free	Universal
Pandora Radio	What’s there left to say about Pandora? All the music in the world, streamed to your device, free, and in (to my ears) great quality. The only drawback was that you couldn’t run it in the background, but that’s been fixed by iOS 4.2. This ought to be burned into the ROM of every iDevice in the world. (And every dashboard. Luckily, the Chevy Volt plays Pandora seamlessly when your iPhone is plugged into the USB port.)
	Free	Universal
Netflix	At first, it was just cool to manage my Netflix queue from my iPhone without firing up a Web browser. Then they implemented streaming, and changed the world. Watch thousands of movies and TV shows on your phone or iPad, connect it to an external TV set, pause and pick it up later… yep, this is exactly the way it’s supposed to work. No wonder Blockbuster is in Chapter 11. Or that we disconnected our cable TV service, and don’t miss it.
	Free	Universal
SoundHound	Whenever you’re out somewhere and hear a song and wonder what it is… run SoundHound and give it a try. If there’s not too much background noise, it’s amazingly accurate at identifying prerecorded music, and will instantly show you lyrics and a link to buy the song in iTunes. They claim to be able to identify songs that you hum or sing into the mike, but I’ve had pretty poor luck with that. There’s a paid version if you use it frequently, but the free version seems adequate for most needs.
	$4.99	Universal
Myst	It’s back! The game that sold a lot of color Macintoshes (yes, kiddies, Macs used to be black and white) migrated to the iPhone in fine form. The same puzzles, the same music, and the same backstory that we obsessed over back in 1993. (I basically spent a week over Christmas that year solving Myst.) It’s arguably even better with a touch interface. There’s not a separate iPad version, but the graphics look fine in 2X mode. (Warning: the app is huge, so make sure you have a gigabyte free before purchasing it.)
	$1.99	Both (enhanced iPad version available)
Romi	If you’ve ever played Rummikub, you instantly understand Romi. If you’ve ever played a rummy card game, you’ll understand in about thirty seconds. Nice interface (needs custom skins, though) and intelligent gameplay. Excellent execution for two bucks. The iPad version is identical except for higher-rez graphics.
	$1.99 (free trial available)	Universal
Word with Friends	I was so excited when Electronic Arts released Scrabble for the iPad! I bought it immediately, and it played exactly like the cardboard version. Exactly. There was a cool feature where you could “flick” tiles from your iPhone/iPod Touch to the main iPad screen, but basically, you needed to be sitting around a table with the other players. So, for four players, you’d be using $1300 worth of electronics to replace a ten-dollar board game. EA (and Hasbro/Milton Bradley) managed to miss a technological revolution named “the Internet.” Newtoy — a tiny company in McKinney, Texas — did it right. They published a modified version of the Scrabble board (to avoid copyright issues, I’m sure) and connected it to the Internet. Now you could play a Scrabble-like game with friends or strangers anywhere in the world… and asynchronously, so you didn’t have to try to coordinate schedules. If you’re both online, you might complete a turn within seconds; if not, the next turn might be hours or days later.Absolutely brilliant, absolutely addictive, and an absolutely wonderful way to spend time. There’s a free version with on-screen ads, but send NewToy two bucks. They deserve it. Update: Zynga, the Farmville people, bought Newtoy and promptly hit WwF with an ugly stick, then doused it with a bucket of evil. I still use it, but Zynga sucked all the joy out of it.
	$1.99 (free trial available)	iPad only
Words with Friends HD	Same feature set as the basic version, but even more beautiful (and easier to play) on the big screen. Again, a free ad-supported version is available but, if you play as often as I do, it’s worth two bucks. (My screen name is ‘stephenfleming’; feel free to challenge me. I will crush you.)
	$19.99	iPad only
Acid Solitaire	I bought this set of three solitaire card games during a brief promotional sale for five bucks. I know $20 is a lot for an iPad game, but it’s beautifully done. I’ve experimented with a few other solitaire games from other developers, but I’m glad I have this one to play. (My wife developed carpal tunnel syndrome from AcidSolitaire… you have been warned!)
	$0.99 (free trial available)	Both (enhanced iPad version available)
Angry Birds	Saving the best for last! This is the most expensive dollar I ever spent… I’ve spent over thirty hours playing this game, which, at my loaded labor rate, it…. (mumble, mumble, mumble) a lot of money. You know the drill… you use a slingshot to fire various kinds of birds at fantastically-unlikely “forts” protecting evil pigs. Silly. Instantly accessible. Difficult to master. I’ve gotten three stars on every level (including the sequels, Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Space), and all the golden eggs, but I tend to get compulsive. (Which is why I usually don’t play computer games!) The iPad version has better graphics and it easier to play, but accomplishments on the iPhone don’t unlock higher levels on the iPad (or vice versa). Similarly, Apple’s GameCenter treats it as a completely different game, so achievements on one platform won’t translate to the other. I bought both, but found myself playing more on the iPhone just because I always had it with me. I hope Rovio fixes this someday, once they finish wallowing in their Scrooge McDuck money room!

This turned into an absurdly long blog post (over 9,000 words), but I hope it’s useful to someone. Avoid “tl;dr” and try it in Instapaper!

And for those who have plowed all the way to the end… a screenshot of my iPad home page, to show what I really use. Click to embiggen. I like the out-of-focus Ramblin’ Wreck as a background. Go Jackets!

First, we found him exploring the electric car corner of the auto show: two Volts, one Tesla Roadster, an original Honda Insight, four Nissan Leafs (Leaves?), and a Prius that has been hacked into becoming a plug-in hybrid. He posed next to Cissa’s brand-new Volt, and answered a few questions that we had (details below).

Later, we went indoors, where Bly spoke about the Chevy Volt. Micky is an experienced and accomplished speaker. He spoke for over half an hour with no notes, and I suspect he would have done just as well without his PowerPoint slides also.

Takeaways

Some possibly-incoherent notes typed on my iPhone while Bly was talking:

Bly leads a team of 3000 engineers; 1800 in Michigan, and 1200 around the world. The Volt, and its follow-ons, are a major investment by General Motors, and he claims that electrification is “redefining the automobile.” This isn’t a skunkworks or hobby project. This is GM’s major bet on transitioning to building cars that are not 100% dependent on petroleum.

Gasoline-powered cars have made a lot of progress. According to Bly, in the last 30 years, tailpipe emissions have been reduced by 99%, mileage has increased by 130%, and safety has increased by 70%. The average car today has 30 onboard computers to optimize performance. But there are political, technical, and economical reasons to move away from internal combustion and mechanical systems to electric and electronic systems. World petroleum demand would require bringing six new Saudi Arabias online by 2030, which isn’t going to happen.

General Motors is a big believer in the Volt architecture. Bly made a big point of emphasizing that the Volt is not a “plug-in hybrid”… it is an “extended range electric vehicle” (EREV). (Please have any religious wars over terminology elsewhere, not in my Comments section.)

Low-light photo of one of Bly's PowerPoint slides. Sorry about the quality.

Batteries are lousy. And “gasoline is an amazing substance.” The very complex, very heavy, very expensive, very state-of-the-art battery underpinning the Volt stores the equivalent energy of one gallon of gasoline. General Motors evaluated 155 suppliers and tested 60 different battery formulations before settling on their partnership with LG Chem. In his words, “There are liars, damned liars, and battery suppliers.”

To bring the battery pack into production, GM built the largest battery testing facility in the world. He showed some great pictures (which I didn’t capture well with my phone) of batteries being tested on fire, underwater, and when being rammed into concrete barriers. The Volt batteries aren’t perfect, but he claims they’re the best ever placed into a production vehicle.

He tackled the NHTSA issue head on. “255,000 cars catch on fire in this country every year. One Volt, after being intentionally crashed and then left for three weeks without following published safety procedures, caught on fire. If you had been trapped in that car for three weeks, you’d have died of starvation or thirst a long time before you were threatened by fire!”

The 1.4 liter engine in the Volt eliminates range anxiety. He used the example of driving 1300 miles from Detroit to West Palm Beach. In a Corvette (he has seen not only the next Corvette, but the next next Corvette!), it would take two days, with an overnight stop in North Carolina. In a Chevrolet Volt, it would take the same two days… the first 40 miles on battery power, then the remaining 1260 miles on gasoline. In a Nissan Leaf (or, to be fair, a Chevy Spark) pure electric, it would take about 18 days! “With the Volt, there’s no need to change your life around your car.”

He finished by saying “We’ve had some really crappy TV commercials” but that the current owners of Volts were almost bizarrely happy with their cars. In his summary, he stated without hesitation that “In ten years, all of us will be driving some sort of electrified vehicle: hybrid, EREV, or pure electric. All of us.”

Questions & Answers

Bly then went on to handle a surprisingly lengthy, detailed, and wide-ranging Q&A session. He obviously already knew about the March sales figures (which turned out to be a record-setting 2289 Volts sold, double February sales and nearly four times January’s disappointing 609 units), but he couldn’t talk about it before the formal announcement two days later.

Why doesn’t GM have a small diesel engine?
To meet current emissions requirements, you need a chemical factory strapped to the back of a diesel engine. Emission control adds about $10,000 to the cost of a diesel vehicle, and it just doesn’t make economic sense for small cars.

Will the Volt architecture be extended to other vehicles?
Absolutely. The Cadillac ELR is nearing production. GM has already shown a minivan based on the Volt platform in Shanghai, and other models are in development. But you probably won’t see a full-size SUV built on the Volt EREV architecture anytime soon. Doubling the battery pack would cost too much.

How much will it cost to replace the Volt battery in 10 years?
We don’t know. (Major points for honesty!) But lithium cells are driving down the cost curve much faster than we thought possible. In 2008, Li-Ion energy densities were $1000/kilowatt-hour. Now, it’s $500/kWh. And the Department of Energy projects $200/kWh by the year 2020. So, in ten years, your current Volt’s battery will be replaced with something better and 80% cheaper.

What happens when you put a Volt into a landfill?
GM is already working with “second responders” (a new phrase for me) to prepare for scrapping volts. One of the leaders is the unfortunately-named Toxco. (Seriously. Would you name a company “Toxco”?)

What’s it like to travel with a Volt?
Hotels are already advertising to attract EV owners with conveniently-placed electrical outlets for charging. A few are installing 240V “Level II” chargers. In response to a follow-up question, GM has no interest in subsidizing those Level II chargers. Micky believes in a free market, and figures that market demand will convince the hotels to do this themselves. “GM makes cars.”

Won’t the gasoline in the tank get stale?
The Volt went back to a sealed steel gas tank to prevent vapor escape of volatile fractions. Even if your driving stays within electric capacity, the engine will start every six weeks just for maintenance purposes, to burn off some gasoline and to keep the parts lubricated.

Does the Volt qualify for single-occupancy use of HOV lanes?
Yes. Indeed, it just got qualified for HOV use in California… and the Prius just got kicked out!

Why isn’t the body built of carbon fiber?
Carbon fiber works well for race cars. For a production car, it’s still terribly expensive. And the nature of carbon-fiber layup leaves you with 30-40 percent scrap material that cannot be recycled. Waiting for a breakthrough, but for now, they’re minimizing weight with metal, not composites.

What about the Better Place model of swapping fully-charged batteries?
It won’t work. “Shah Agassi (CEO and founder) is a friend of mine” and the idea sounds good, but it’s impossible to scale. The cellphone industry sells 500 million batteries a year, and no one has figured out how to make those interchangeable yet. Cars will take longer. The logistics and economics of warehouse-sized battery-swap facilities add up to a business case that just doesn’t work. (Smugly, I note that I came to exactly this conclusion in my blog post in October 2010.)

What ever happened to the hydrogen fuel-cell “skateboard” design?
The HyWire concept has a lot of promise, and Micky’s team “looked at it for the Volt, but went a different direction.” It’s great for weight distribution, not so great in crash protection. He’s very skeptical about hydrogen in an automotive environment. “We will not be shipping a car that uses cryogenic fuel.” (Ahem. More smugness here and here.)

Is there enough lithium in the world to build all these batteries?
Lithium is being be mined in Bolivia, Brazil, Afghanistan, Russia, China, India, North Dakota, and Canada. There are known supplies equivalent to building 50 million Volts… and we hope to have that problem! Those taking lithium medication have no need to worry.

Will all these plug-in cars shut down the national electric grid?
The grid can currently handle 100 million plug-in vehicles. Again, GM hopes to have that problem!

Upcoming Goodies

In sidebar conversations before and after the presentation, I learned a few more bits and pieces to look forward to in future Volts.

My biggest disappointment with the car is the lack of a sunroof. Bly said “Not in the 2012 models.” The clear implication is that we’ll see it in 2013 models…

Also in 2013, Volts will have body-colored roofs as an option instead of the all-black roofs today.

The USB port will provide a very slow trickle charge to an iPad, but not enough for the iPad to admit it, so the display says “Not Charging.” Later this summer, there’s a fix coming so that new cars will double their output current. Existing Volts will be able to get the new circuit as an upgrade.

He understands the frustration with requiring the stereo to be turned on if you want the nav, climate, or energy status displays. A fix is coming. Cissa also demonstrated how, with long fingernails, it’s necessary to rest your hand along the top row of buttons to get the angle right, so she’s always pressing “Climate” or “Auto” by accident. He agreed that there needs to be some sort of shelf or lip there.

We talked about having the center screen be a full AirPlay client (so that iPhones or iPads can mirror their display over Wi-Fi). They’ve made it work in the lab, but have serious concerns about driver distraction and safety.

Trivia

Turns out that after pressing the remote “Unlock” button twice (to unlock first the driver’s door, then all doors), holding down the button lowers all the windows. Nice for cooling off the car on a hot day. It’s probably in the manual, but I didn’t know it.

No way that I would have known this, but the first 1000 Volts have slightly different screen displays, including showing the VIN number on screen.

Conclusion

Micky Bly is clearly a helluva, helluva, helluva engineer, and I’m glad that Georgia Tech can claim him! I appreciate all the time he spent on campus, and his endless patience and good humor in answering our questions.

After my post on the JOBS Act last night, I got an email from a friend with a good question. As I composed an answer, I realized it might be of general interest, so I’m putting it here.

My Friend Asks:

I’ve been sort of following the JOBS act over the past few months, and just saw your post. I’m trying to figure out how this will impact [redacted], and how to best align ourselves to benefit from the new law. One of David S. Rose‘s comments concerned me. He stated that several investors are of the opinion that going the crowdfunding route might make it harder to raise more traditional angel/VC money down the road, but he didn’t explain why. You know what he’s talking about?

The reason I ask is that when things are ready to actually push on [redacted], we’re likely going to need to raise $2-5M worth of investor money. However, being able to raise $50-150k in the near-term might make it a lot easier for us to get to that point (and also increase the odds that we’ll survive the ups-and-downs of the bootstrapping process). David’s a smart guy with a heck of a lot of experience, so if he’s making warnings like that I’d like to try and understand why he’s concerned, not just brush it off.

My Answer:

Looking at history, Rose is right. Traditionally, venture capitalists don’t want to invest in a company whose capital structure is cluttered up with a bunch of small individual investors. Having to get shareholder approval from dozens of Common stock shareholders is time-consuming and complicated.

But.

The passage of the JOBS Act means that thousands of startups are asking the same question you’re asking. I believe that norms will have to change.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think there’s a middle ground that would make both sides happy. Once the JOBS Act provisions take effect, round up the $50K-150K from individuals (including those who would not have passed the SEC’s “qualified investor” test). Take all of their investments and collect them into a single LLC with a single manager (not a company employee or close relative!) that everyone can trust. Move forward with building your business.

When the time comes to raise a Series A, the capital structure remains clean: founders, employees, and one LLC holding Common stock. You only need the signature of that LLC manager to issue new shares of Series A. I don’t think that’s going to turn away any venture investor who you’d want to have in your deal.

[Standard disclaimer about how this doesn't constitute legal advice and you should pay a good securities lawyer to set this up correctly.]

Now, you’ll have to protect those Common shareholders against cramdown and unnecessary dilution, but that’s not a new problem. And, again, as the JOBS Act ripples through the startup funding ecosystem, I hope that those norms change as well. VCs won’t ever grant full anti-dilution to these early Common investors, but I hope that some sort of reloading occurs… maybe something similar to what employees get, although perhaps at a lower ratio. There’s no sense in killing the geese that lay the golden eggs.

At the end of the day, the best way to prepare [redacted] for venture investment is to build great products and delight your customers. If that involves taking small individual investments… take the money.

I was asked to write “a few sentences” about the JOBS Act for another website. Since I found myself with over 500 words, I decided to post it here.

In today’s political climate, it’s hard to believe that a major bipartisan reform has passed both houses of Congress and — as I type this on Wednesday night — is scheduled to be signed by the President tomorrow. The JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act is one of the first victories of a new class of politically-active entrepreneurs, angel investors, and venture capitalists. And, although no bill is perfect, the JOBS Act should lead to expansion opportunities for many small businesses… and, yes, to more jobs.

U.S. securities regulations are written for big companies. For successful ones, like GE and Apple. And for failed ones, like Enron and Worldcom. But little companies have to play by the same rules. That makes it incredibly difficult for small companies to raise capital, to reward their employees with equity instead of salary, and to build their businesses in the early years. The Kauffman Foundation has shown that all net new job growth since 1980 has come from companies less than five years old. The JOBS Act is aimed at helping precisely these companies.

Part of the act loosens some of the complex disclosure requirements which can be difficult for a fast-growing company to maintain when it exceeds 500 employees. It makes it legal for an entrepreneur to stand on stage and say “I’m trying to raise money” without violating SEC rules. These are good changes. It’s not appropriate to regulate a tiny company the same way we regulate GE.

Most controversially, the JOBS Act enables “crowdfunding.” Today, unless you meet the SEC’s “millionaire threshold,” you are forbidden to invest in private companies — that is, those companies who do not have their shares listed on a stock exchange like Nasdaq. Tomorrow, that will change. You will be able to invest up to 5 or 10% of your annual income (depending on income), up to $100,000/year, into a small private company.

And that doesn’t necessarily have to be a Georgia Tech startup creating a hot Internet security technology. It can be in your cousin’s landscaping business, or in the struggling Cuban restaurant down the street. The laws prohibiting these investments date back to 1933. It’s time to adapt them to current reality.

Will some people lose their investments? Absolutely. Will there be fraud? As surely as the sun rises in the east. But markets always involve risk (and, sadly, markets have always attracted a small number of fraudsters). I have a lot more faith in free markets that I do in SEC regulators trying to apply thousands of pages of regulations to small businesses that can’t afford platoons of lawyers on retainer.

Silicon Valley investors have played a big part in lobbying for the JOBS Act… but I think it will eventually have more of an impact on those of us who are happy to live in the rest of America. A startup in Silicon Valley can, eventually, always find money. That’s not true for a startup in Atlanta… or Albuquerque, or Alaska. Loosening the constraints and letting more Americans get involved in investment decisions will be a good step towards making more growth capital — and more growth — available to everyone.

But I also read “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” by Bob Lutz, who knows more about the automobile business than anyone alive… and who proudly declares himself to be the father of the Chevy Volt. And I read his defenses of the Volt against right-wing smears here and here and here.

And I saw that the NHTSA ended its Volt safety investigation by stating that “no discernible defect trend exists.”

And I saw that the Volt (under its European badging as the Opel Ampera) just won European Car of the Year… the first American car ever to do so.

And, as an engineer, I like the idea of plug-in hybrids. As I’ve stated elsewhere on this blog, I don’t think pure electric vehicles make sense for most people. Not now. Maybe not ever. But plug-in hybrids eliminate “range anxiety” while letting you run 100% electric for short trips around town.

So I was rooting for this awkward underdog of a car, but wasn’t really involved. But, through an odd series of circumstances, we found ourselves with a Chevy Volt as a loaner car last week while Cissa’s car was being repaired.

It’s a great car.

Not “It’s a great car, considering it’s electric.”

Or “It’s a great car, if you’re an environmentalist.”

Or “It’s a great car, if you want something to put your Obama bumper sticker on.”

Just… “It’s a great car.”

First Impressions

First, it’s a real car. Not a golf cart, not a wannabe like the egg-shaped fiberglass GEMs that are best used for parking enforcement, not a barely-satisfactory vehicle like the General Motors EV1 of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” fame. (I rode in an EV1. Trust me, you didn’t want one.)

From the outside, the Volt looks a lot like the Chevrolet Cruze. There’s less of a family resemblance in the interior, but the American-designed Volt inherits the Cruze’s headroom and legroom. I’m 6’4″, and I’m completely comfortable sitting in it; I can even cross my legs in the passenger seat. By comparison, I cannot sit in a Prius, even a Prius V, for any length of time… my head pushes against the roof, and my knees are up against the dashboard.

The Volt dashboard is a bit overwhelming at first. There are two iPad-sized screens; one in front of the driver, and one in the middle stack. Even though the middle one is touch-sensitive, it perches atop 38 hardware buttons (maybe to avoid comparison with BMW’s much-reviled iDrive). It all takes a little getting used to. Knowing that normal humans are not going to read a 424-page owner’s manual (plus a 108-page navigation supplement), Chevy thoughtfully tucks a 16-page summary into the glove box. You should read that; you’ll learn some things.

(I read the big books. But I don’t claim to be a normal human.)

Driving the Volt

The Volt comes with wireless keys and pushbutton start, which I personally think is a solution in search of a problem, but all the cool kids are doing it, so….

But when you punch the big blue button, the dashboard breaks out into a kaleidoscope of images, the stereo makes a Star Trek “powering up” sound… and then SILENCE. The car is ready to drive, but the engine hasn’t started. And, unlike the Prius, where the engine starts by the time you’ve merged into traffic, the Volt’s engine won’t start for 30 or 40 miles.

Originally, the Volt was positioned as a series hybrid (as opposed to the Prius, which is a parallel hybrid). Series hybrids are a logically-simpler architecture, where the drive wheels are driven by an electric motor, and an internal combustion engine is used only as a generator to charge the batteries. (And the electric motor can “run backwards” to charge the batteries when braking or coasting.)

Series hybrids aren’t new… every diesel locomotive is designed this way. Ferdinand Porsche built series-hybrid automobiles over 100 years ago. But it’s hard to get all the pieces working right in a package smaller than a locomotive… so hard that even GM relented and settled for a mixed design where the gasoline engine helps drive the wheels at highway speeds. (But, from personal experience, I can testify that the Volt will happily cruise above 80 mph with the gasoline engine off. Um, I think I just used a public forum to confess to breaking the law. Oops.) But, even so, the architecture of a series hybrid is so much simpler that I have to believe they’ll dominate hybrid cars in the future. (Here are some other plug-in hybrids: a gaggle of Fisker Karmas. They cost more.)

Separately, the Volt is the first mass-produced plug-in hybrid. That means exactly what it sounds like: you can plug it into the wall socket to charge the batteries. A Prius gets all its power from burning gasoline in its own engine; it just does so more efficiently than many other vehicles of similar size and weight. The Chevy Volt can do that too, but it can also get power from your local utility… meaning you don’t spend money on gasoline.

In our first week of driving the Volt, we travelled 221 miles and burned half a gallon of gasoline.

Of course, we had to pay for electricity. But Georgia Power can generate electricity a lot cheaper than your Prius can. In fact, you can sign up for a time-of-day pricing plan where you pay 1.25¢ per kilowatt-hour. “Your mileage will vary” but the Volt gets about 5 miles per kWh, meaning you’re paying Georgia Power 0.25¢/mile. (Read that carefully. Not 25 cents per mile. A quarter of a cent per mile.) Looked at another way, ten cents of electricity at cheap overnight rates will run your Volt for 40 miles.

At today’s prices, ten cents of gasoline will run your comparably-sized 36-mpg Chevrolet Cruze about one mile.

40:1 ratios get my attention.

So why aren’t we all driving electric cars? Because we still don’t have decent batteries, even after billions (and billions and billions) of dollars of R&D. The very best pure-electric cars have only 100-mile range, even under optimum conditions. And when your battery is dead, your car is dead. And it’s dead for a long time. You can’t just hitch a ride to the corner gas station and trot back with a five-gallon jug. You’re in for a close encounter with a tow truck, then a long charging period at the nearest charging station, wherever that may be. Which is why pure-electrics like the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Roadster, and others are just oddities. Range anxiety.

Plug-in hybrids eliminate range anxiety. If we want to drive to Savannah, we’ll drive to Savannah, and buy some gasoline along the way. When we get home, we’ll plug it back into the wall, and go back to electric-only commutes around town. Right now, we’re using the regular 110v charger that comes with the vehicle. That takes 10 hours to charge the battery, so it’s basically an overnight operation, which works fine for us. For additional geek points, I’m thinking of installing the optional 240v charger. That runs off the same sized circuit as your electric clothes dryer, and that charges the vehicle in 4 hours. I can’t actually think of many circumstances in which that would make a meaningful difference in my life, but…. “MORE POWER!”

And, yes, I’m perfectly aware that, in Georgia Power’s service territory, I’m driving a coal-powered car. Two-thirds of the electrons pumping through that cable came from burning the fuel of Satan. But 21% of that power came from nice clean nuclear plants, and that percentage will rise when the Plant Vogtle expansion comes online. In sane countries like France (and I can’t believe I just typed that phrase), 80% of electric generation comes from nuclear power, which means things like cleaner air and prettier countrysides. In the meantime, don’t fool yourself into believing that any electric vehicle will do a lot about CO2 emissions. (Electric cars will reduce particulate emissions, since Georgia Power can afford expensive stack scrubbers that won’t fit on your car.)

Back to the Volt: in one of those unsung-but-painful behind-the-scenes advances, most major electric vehicle manufacturers (including BMW, Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Tesla, and Toyota) have signed onto the SAE J1772-2009 standard, meaning you can have a single cable that fits into every one of those cars. Imagine if public charging stations had to have GM plugs and Toyota plugs and Tesla plugs, and… ouch. The Volt even puts a nice LED flashlight into their plug so you can easily connect the cable in the dark. One of those nice touches which convinced me that a bunch of smart engineers in Detroit finally got the chance to build a car the right way, not just the cheap way.

Other Impressions

What all the specs don’t convey is the spooky silence of driving the Volt. Since the engine doesn’t kick in until you’ve driven forty miles (which, for Midtown denizens like us, can mean days and days of electric-only operation), you get used to wafting down the road in complete silence. There’s even a funky “Pedestrian Friendly Alert” on the turn signal, just to let people know you’re there. (I’ve always thought cars should have two horns: one to say “Hi, here I am!” and another to say “YOU IDIOT!” The Volt, finally, does.)

Unfortunately, you can’t enjoy this silence with the windows down. Anywhere above neighborhood speeds, lowering a window creates a weird fluttering pressure variation that makes you feel like a helicopter is hovering overhead. I guess that, after all those wind tunnel studies, it was a tradeoff that GM decided was worth making. Disappoints me, but I’m a fresh-air fiend in my car.

And you certainly can’t enjoy the silence with the sunroof open… because there is no sunroof. This is my biggest complaint about the car, actually. I guess the mileage zealots decided that having a sunroof open would play hell with fuel efficiency… but couldn’t they have put in an immobile glass panel? (With a sunshade, of course.) Wouldn’t have weighed more, wouldn’t have affected aerodynamic drag at all, and would have made the interior seem much airier. Two model years after introduction, Chevy shows no interest in a sunroof. Maybe they’re still planning to pave the roof with solar cells, but I haven’t seen that, either. Sigh.

The center stack system demonstrates a lot of development effort. The touchscreen navigation and climate control are far superior to the Toyota interface (we cross-shopped multiple Toyota and Lexus models). It comes with a trial subscription to a traffic information service that worked well in Atlanta; no guarantees about rural Saskatchewan.

Ditto for the well-thought-out iPod/iPhone interface… which lets you play your tunes, charge your phone, and access other apps, all at the same time. (By comparison, the Toyota iPod interface just freezes the iPhone screen… and scrolling through your playlists requires dozens of pokes at the dashboard touchscreen instead of the Volt’s fluid scrolling with a physical dial.) You can record 30 gigabytes of CD music to the built-in hard disk, which is nice. It even lets you pause live radio (just like TiVo) with a 20-minute buffer. That’s cool.

Bluetooth integration with your iPhone is flawless.

The only weirdness is that GM’s engineers apparently decided that, if you ever want to have any center-screen function on, you also want to have the stereo on. So if you just want to silently watch power flow from your battery to your wheels and back again through regenerative braking, you have to twist the volume knob to zero. That’s silly. (Maybe I should put an MP3 of John Cage on repeat.)

And, bizarrely, the thing plays DVDs. Only while you’re parked. Apparently, this is a big feature in Japan and Europe (where you can play them while driving). Here in the U.S., I can’t imagine a circumstance where I’d say “Hey! We’re home! Let’s pop in a DVD and watch a movie here in the garage rather than walking fourteen steps to our big-screen TV!” Ah, well, it doesn’t hurt anything.

The backseat is… habitable. It’s definitely a four-seater car, because the ginormous battery tunnel runs down the center of the car. No way to put a fifth person in back, even in a child seat. Great cupholders, though.

The hatchback is big enough for a trip to Costco, not big enough to move all your worldly possessions. (Unless you’re Andrew Hyde, but he’s nuts.)

Other nits: No rear-window wiper. Definitely noticeable during pollen season. I assume it was nixed for aerodynamic reasons. There’s a very low air dam in the front bumper which scrapes our driveway. Aerodynamics again. No spare tire (although there’s a sealer/inflation pump). Weight savings. All engineering tradeoffs that I’m sure were vociferously debated in the GM Design Center. I might have made different decisions, but I’m sure these weren’t made casually. The car is too well thought out.

Finally, the Volt lease comes with free OnStar… and a nifty iPhone app that lets you remotely monitor the battery, gas tank, tire pressure, and even lock/unlock the doors and honk the horn. Major geek points. Why can’t all cars do this?

Financial Terms

In general, I don’t like leasing unless you can write it off on your taxes. I don’t even like making car payments. I buy cars for cash. But, with the Volt, things are just too fuzzy. First, the car costs too damned much. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but $45,000 for a four-door sedan that doesn’t have a Maserati or Bentley badge just bugs me.

From a PR standpoint, the misreporting of the NHTSA tests has been a nightmare. And, politically, the GOP attacks aren’t helping. GM just stopped the production lines for five weeks due to weak demand. (Way to kill off American jobs, guys! Proud of yourselves?) If the worst happens and GM pulls the plug on the Volt, what’s a used one worth in five years? Zero?

Technically, no one knows what years of heavy use will do to these lithium-ion batteries. We know they’ll lose capacity; the only question is “How much?” And there is happy handwaving about repurposing used Volt batteries for electric-grid power balancing, but that may or may not happen. So what’s the residual value of a car that’s half battery when the battery is half-depleted? I don’t know.

So there are just too many uncertainties for me to write a check for this car. Luckily, GM is way ahead of me, and is offering a heavily-subsidized leasing option. It’s widely advertised as “$2500 down, $350/month.” Of course, that’s for a stripper model without the fancy nav system and backup camera and all the other toys that you really want. And it doesn’t include taxes and all the silly fees that the U.S. dealer network insists on charging. But it’s still a great deal, and I wish more people knew about it.

Taking the Plunge

After a week, our loaner car needed to go back home… and we realized that we would miss it. Cissa’s 2003 Pontiac was getting a bit tired after years of noble service, and it was time for a new car. We spent a few evenings shopping the competition, and finally decided that a Volt needed to live in our garage. Our loaner had over 4000 miles on it, and black leather seats. (Chevy really pushes the black leather. Apparently, none of their engineers have visited Georgia in the summer.) But we found a white car with beige leather seats and all the toys at Superior Chevrolet in Decatur… where the Internet sales manager happens to be a friend of mine from high school! To his credit, he’d noticed some of my Twitter posts about the Volt and emailed me pictures of the one on his lot… which led directly to the sale. (Daniel Hudson, (770) 595-5624. Tell him I said hi!)

(Yes, the huge stickers on the side are removable.)

We got a good deal, and we get a warm fuzzy feeling from supporting not only all the assembly line workers, but all the engineers and marketers and corporate managers who have put their butts on the line for this car. I think it’s a major step forward, and I’m proud that Cissa is going to be driving one. I hope you can look past the jokes and consider buying leasing one for your family as well.