I just celebrated my first anniversary at my third agency in NYC, Converseon. They have given me the entrepreneurial freedom to build a profitable division with a growing client SEO roster including 3 in the Fortune 100 in only one year. That has led me to wonder how one exactly goes about recognizing a good fit. One unlikely question I would ask in the future is which corporate team sports, if any, the agency plays.

I didn’t know people had fantasy football trophies. Cropped from a photo by Beth and Christian Bell.

Most coworkers who were into sports at my first company in NYC were primarily football fans. The most organized league we had was fantasy football where we competed online against each other. Occasionally we would assemble an informal outing to the park and throw the pigskin around. But again, we only played against our colleagues. So too was the mood around the office. Football is an amazing game of strategy but very insular. Similarly, we built some amazing technology ahead of its time but did not connect much with the greater community at large.

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The fact that a citizen can take another person or organization to court has been one of the bedrocks of American tradition. Unfortunately, as with any system, there will be some people who take advantage of it and risk ruining things for everyone else.

Someone’s coffee was hot. They sued. Now people joke that they could also sue if the coffee was not hot enough, but I bet someone has actually tried that. Cropped from a photo by David Thompson.

The first time I remember hearing about a court case that I found to be ridiculous was the infamous woman who sued McDonald’s due to scalding hot coffee. I have a little more sympathy for her after finding out some of the myths, but she still did spill it herself. In the 20 years since then, we have been increasingly met with legalese wherever we turn from lawyers who attempt to protect their clients from liability. Most disclaimers are common sense labels, e.g. keep plastic bags away from babies, and probably do some good.

Disclaimers really begin to change perceptions when they are spoken, however. Turbulence is a good example of this. Airplanes have had fasten seat belt indicators for decades so they don’t get sued if someone bumps their head.

You are typically forced to sit down and fasten your seat belt, regardless of other possible consequences. Cropped from a photo by Daniel Williams.

A similar sign like this elsewhere would merely provide advice, but announcements remind passengers that they must obey posted placards on-board (the only time I ever still hear the word, placard). However, flight attendants are stuck with a kind of semi-authority so they vary in their enforcement. I have seen some stand near passengers and shame them into sitting back down. Some delight in their new-found power and threaten people in coach until they submit. Yet as one flight attendant said on my recent United flight to Denver, “We are not police.” Then the other crew members proceeded to remind every other passenger who stood up that they were required to say people should remain seated, though they did not intend to actually stop any passengers from getting up. Flight attendants did the right thing and covered their ass while letting common sense prevail in the air for once.

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Netflix took a calculated risk this week in forcing a large number of their subscribers to make a choice that they already declined once. Attempting to bucket their consumers into costly physical media stalwarts versus more profitable instant downloaders, people now have to choose to receive discs by mail for $8, movies online for $8, or pay for both at $16.

They already gave users an option to go online only for a savings of $2 over the new combined plan of $10 just a few months ago. By entirely eliminating the middle path for everyone, they risk losing a large portion of their subscriber base.

Even telecom companies, which routinely rank at the bottom of many customer satisfaction surveys, have never raised their rates by 78% in one year (from $9 > $16). Though some subscribers will doubtlessly succumb, it is a bigger risk for Netflix than it would be for other companies. They are raising prices for everyone on the plan at once because they do not lock anyone into contracts and are not giving any bonuses for loyalty.

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Now that every company is beginning to develop its own eReader or tablet, you should stop and think about the features that will really be important to you rather than being swayed by the technology envy that leads to an unfulfilled life and short-sighted incrementalism. Let’s weigh the options.

1) Functionality

The iPad could be the future of board games, but not reading. Photo from Engadget.

The iPad has been heralded as the second coming. Indeed it can do almost anything (as long as it’s one thing at a time). However, don’t most people with an iPad already have a laptop? Why do you want another one? Who cares if it can play music or audiobooks? Don’t you already have an mp3 player or a phone for that? Maybe it will be handy as a big remote control or a new way to play board games. Perhaps it will work for textbooks, so you could watch a science experiment or test a mathematical formula. But it will not change the way that adults will read who do not need such bells and whistles.

2) Usability

Eventually screens will be both flexible and interactive. Photo from SlashGear.

CrunchGear reviewer Matt Burns is desperate to keep his terrible keypad on the Kindle. I still appreciate tactile feedback on phones, game controllers, and keyboards but is it really necessary on a book? You can swipe to a new page very easily, and only need a few buttons. Plus, eInk screens smudge a lot less than glass.

3) Legibility

The Notion Ink ADAM, Amazon Kindle, and Pandigital Novel compared in direct sunlight. Photo from Good eReader.

This was the feature that drove me to wait over a year for a tiny independent startup called Notion Ink to release my namesake, the ADAM. It is almost impossible to read LCD tablets like the iPad in bright sunlight. It is even harder to see eReaders in the dark because eInk does not light up. The ADAM combines both technologies into one screen so you can (kind of) read in any lighting. Then I started thinking… I never read in the dark, so what’s the point of that?

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