UniTopic

Information is power, but does information — by itself — actually make people change their behavior?

Not often, says BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.

“For all the discussion and hype about living in environmentally friendly ways, few people are seeing information and then changing their behavior based on that information,” he said. “They’ve got many other things to worry about in their lives that are much more urgent than ‘Let me figure out how to stop driving to work.’ ”

So is all hope lost? Not exactly. A host of gadgets and Web apps aim, essentially, to guilt and peer pressure us into being better people — in spurts.

These “persuasive technologies” have various aims: Some want people to move more so they can lose weight (check out these health apps); others are designed to promote energy efficiency through neighborhood peer pressure.

The best examples, Fogg said, nudge people to do something simple that they wish they were doing anyway.

Here are five persuasive tech companies and products to keep an eye on. This list is based primarily on interviews with Fogg and University of Washington Ph.D. candidate Jon Froehlich, who wrote a paper titled “The Design of Eco-Feedback Technology,” and who is designing a prototype system to track and display home water consumption.

OPOWER

Think you don’t care what your neighbors are up to? OPOWER, a software company that promotes home energy efficiency, bets you do.

Instead of showing you a plain power bill, OPOWER collects energy data from the home and displays it in a chart that compares your energy use to that of your neighbors in aggregate. Such exposure causes 60 to 80 percent of people to change their energy behaviors, the company says.

The company puts a “smiley face” on the energy-consumption readouts of people who used relatively less energy than their neighbors.

The service is available through more than 30 utility companies, and users can get their energy data in online reports, through smartphones or on home display units. About 1.5 million people use the service now, said Ogi Kavazovic, an OPOWER spokesman.

“If we could take this nationwide — and there’s no reason why we can’t — we can take 3 million homes off the grid and have as much impact as the entire renewable [energy] sector,” he said.

An MIT fellow and NYU economics professor, Hunt Allcott, found OPOWER’s energy reports lead to about a 2 percent reduction in energy consumption, although those behavior changes may not last over time, the report says.

I move you

Imoveyou.com is the social network designed to persuade people to exercise more often by engaging them in quick “if/then” challenges with friends.

A user might type a challenge like this into the site: “I will walk the dog for 20 minutes if you will ride a unicycle around the block.”

The person who has been challenged is notified by Facebook, Twitter or e-mail, and can accept or reject the challenge. Fogg said the idea is likely to be persuasive because it encourages people to act as soon as possible, and it notifies them about the challenges wherever they are.

It also engages people in a bit of competition.

GlowCaps

Technologists have been working for years on ways to make people to remember to take their medicine on time.

Few have been able to persuade people to stick to their daily medication regimens more effectively — or more simply — than GlowCaps, Fogg said.

The idea is simple: A special cap fits on top of a standard pill bottle, and it lights up when the patient needs to take his or her medicine.

The caps are also Wi-Fi-enabled and send reports about how well a person is doing at sticking to his or her medication schedule.

The company claims that it is 86 percent effective at getting people to remember to take their doses, a figure that is “astounding” in the field of persuasive tech, according to Fogg. That number is based on a 50-person trial.

Withings - The Wi-Fi Scale

Weigh yourself on the Withings Wi-Fi-enabled scale, and if you choose, all of your Twitter followers or Facebook friends will be instantly blasted with your current weight.

Such public display of weight loss or gain could be incentive enough to get people moving. Or, if you’re not up for that, the scale can log your weight on a website only you can access.

It’s kind of like putting everyone on “The Biggest Loser.”

Hybrid car displays

Display technologies aim to change how people drive.

In hybrid cars, including the Toyota Prius and Ford Fusion hybrid, display panels that tell the driver how efficiently he or she is driving at any given moment.

The Prius plots this information on a bar graph, as current miles per gallon. The Ford Fusion goes a step further, causing a digital plant to grow (or die) on the dashboard screen as a person’s driving efficiency increases or decreases.

Fogg says these ideas are effective because they give people information on how to improve their gas mileage at exactly the moment when they’re empowered to do something about it: while they’re driving.

That makes it easy to change right away.

“It is giving you moment-by-moment feedback and triggering you” to do something about it, he said.

No one wants a dead plant on their dash. Someone might see it.

Here’s the truth about AT&T’s wireless network: On the whole, despite what you’ve heard, it’s not actually that bad. It’s just bad for the wrong people in the wrong places — mostly tech- and media-types in New York and San Francisco, California.

Those two cities in particular — and parts of other big cities, like downtown Chicago, Illinois — are sort of the perfect storm for AT&T.

There’s a huge concentration of Apple iPhones, owned by tech- and media-savvy folks who demand a ton of bandwidth, and love to complain loudly on Twitter and in the press. And there are tall buildings, landlords and construction processes that make running a wireless network more challenging.

That helps explain why there are so many dropped calls and pokey mobile Internet connections in those cities, and also why there are so many angry tweets and news articles.

And that’s why even Apple CEO Steve Jobs has come to AT&T’s side, defending how his partner has tried to beef up its infrastructure in its most troubled markets. At a recent press event, Jobs said that when AT&T wants to add a cell tower in Texas, it may only take three weeks. But in San Francisco, on average, it takes three years.

“No one wants a cell tower in their back yard, but everyone wants perfect reception,” Jobs said, according to a rough transcript.

The rest of the country, overall, isn’t such a mess for AT&T. How can we tell? One way is to look at AT&T’s customer turnover statistics to see if people are fleeing from AT&T and its supposedly terrible service. The reality is that they are not.

During AT&T’s second quarter, its monthly “churn” — the percent of customers who leave every month — was 1.29 percent. If you exclude prepaid subscribers, who tend to switch carriers or discontinue their service more often than average, AT&T’s monthly churn was even lower, at 1.01 percent. Those are both record lows for the company and represent improvement over the same period last year.

How do those stats compare to the rest of the wireless industry? You’d think that Verizon Wireless — whose network has a stellar reputation compared to AT&T’s — would have much, much lower churn. Not quite.

Verizon Wireless customers are indeed more loyal than AT&T’s, but barely. Its monthly churn last quarter was 1.27 percent, only a hair below AT&T’s. If you exclude prepaid subscribers, it was 0.94 percent — again, better than AT&T’s, but not by much. For comparison, Sprint was almost twice as bad, and T-Mobile was more than twice as bad as AT&T and Verizon.

If things were that bad at AT&T — and comparatively, that much better at Verizon Wireless — you’d expect a greater difference in their churn rates.

Another recent study leans in AT&T’s favor. A 3G wireless performance test carried out by PC World showed that AT&T’s network was almost always faster than its competitors, and that its reliability was on par. Both measurements showed significant improvements over its 2009 tests. But indeed, AT&T’s performance and reliability in New York and San Francisco weren’t as strong as in other cities, such as Seattle, Washington, or Baltimore, Maryland.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed similar things traveling around the country with an iPhone and 3G-enabled iPad. Last weekend in Maine, my 3G connection seemed much snappier than it typically does in New York. I was even able to stream a Netflix video to my iPad in a moving bus — something I can’t even do reliably when I’m stationary in Manhattan.

AT&T pours billions of dollars — between $18 billion and $19 billion this year alone — into trying to improve its network. For example, it’s going cell site by cell site to add more bandwidth to support faster speeds, a process that will continue through this year and next, an AT&T spokesman says.

Many of the carrier’s improvements have focused on New York and San Francisco. For instance, AT&T has doubled the capacity of its network in New York over the past year, and is in the process of doubling its capacity in San Francisco. It has also installed specialized indoor systems in high-traffic areas, including Grand Central Station and Yankee Stadium in New York.

As a result, mobile download speeds in New York are up 31 percent over the last six months, according to internal testing data. Blocked calls are down almost 40 percent in Manhattan so far this year, and dropped calls are down 23 percent, AT&T says.

The company has also complemented its strained 3G network with more free wi-fi hot spots for its customers, including a network recently installed in New York’s Times Square, one near Wrigley Field in Chicago and all Starbucks locations.

In addition to adding 400 percent more 3G capacity at AT&T Park in San Francisco, it has also doubled the number of wi-fi hot spots there. In those situations, the idea is that customers could hop on wi-fi to send emails or access the Internet, taking a load off cell networks.

To be sure, despite these improvements, the company obviously still has a lot of problems in New York and San Francisco. And because of the concentration of tech and media industry types there, we’ll probably see the “AT&T sucks” rants and “attfail” tweets for the foreseeable future.

At least until Verizon Wireless gets Apple’s iPhone. Then we’ll know if this whole mess is really AT&T’s fault or just the unique situation of having to support millions of iPhones in use at one time.

But in reality, things aren’t as terrible for AT&T as you’ve been led to believe. It’s just really bad in the wrong places, for the wrong people.

Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. reported stronger results than it had forecast, boosted by solid sales of games such as “2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa,” “Scrabble” for Apple Inc.’s iPad and digital add-on content for older titles.

EA, known for popular games such as the “Madden” football series and “The Sims,” also cut operating expenses and reaffirmed its full-year guidance. Its shares got a boost in after-hours trading as a result.

For the three months ended June 30, EA’s net income was $96 million, or 29 cents per share. This is up from a loss of $234 million, or 72 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier. Net revenue rose to $815 million from $644 million.

By a more closely watched metric — adjusted results that exclude special items and account for deferred revenue from games with online components — EA reported a loss and revenue decline. Even so, it handily surpassed Wall Street’s expectations for the second quarter in a row.

“They are starting to put out games that are selling bigger and bigger units,” said Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia, adding that EA was also moving in the right direction on the cost side of things.

The company’s past results had been dragged by high game development costs and titles that did not always live up to lofty expectations. CEO John Riccitiello has been working to slim down EA’s portfolio to high-quality games that make money, while pushing aggressively into new revenue streams such as Facebook games and digital add-ons for games sold in stores. He’s also been cutting costs, much through layoffs. EA had 7,750 employees at the end of the quarter, down from 8,940 a year earlier.

On an adjusted basis, the company posted a loss of $78 million, or 24 cents per share in the latest quarter, compared with a loss of $6 million, or 2 cents per share, a year earlier. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected a larger adjusted loss of 35 cents per share.

Adjusted revenue fell 34 percent to $539 million from $816 million, but topped the $502 million that analysts were expecting.

Lower development costs helped bring down EA’s operating expenses down 13 percent to $495 million during the quarter.

EA, which is based in Redwood City, Calif., also affirmed its guidance for the full fiscal year and said for the current quarter, it expects an adjusted loss of 15 cents to 10 cents per share on revenue of $775 million to $825 million.

This compares with analysts’ expectations of a loss of 10 cents per share on revenue of $816.9 million.

The company noted that with the first quarter wrapped up, it still has about 86 percent of the year’s revenue to go, which is one reason for not raising its full-year outlook prematurely. EA has been burned in the past by giving guidance that later proved to be too high.

The video game industry relies heavily on holiday sales — about 40 percent of its revenue is made in the last three months of the year. EA, for its part, would not make a profit in fiscal 2011 if it weren’t for the October-December quarter. That quarter, said Bhatia, will be a “big test for them.”

Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown said the strong quality of the titles EA is releasing is contributing to the company holding its outlook for the rest of the year even as broader consumer confidence is declining.

EA’s shares rose 73 cents, or 4.5 percent, to $16.91 in after-hours trading. The stock closed regular trading down 32 cents, or 1.9 percent, at $16.18.

Don’t panic, but we’re running out of internet addresses.

Not domain names — those website names that you see at the top of this page and which always start with some semblance of “http://” and “www.”

We’ve got plenty of those.

But, according to statements from prominent internet thinkers this week, we may run out of internet protocol — or IP — addresses in less than a year.

IP addresses are numbers assigned to all of the devices — computers, phones, cars, wireless sensors, etc. — that log on to the internet.

According to the blog ReadWriteWeb, the internet is changing and evolving so quickly — with so many new types of devices connecting — that we’re running out of numbers to assign to all of these Web-enabled electronics.

“The main reason for the concern? There’s an explosion of data about to happen to the Web thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data,” Richard MacManus writes on that site.

“Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.”

Only 4 billion internet addresses are possible under the current system, and those will all be exhausted in less than a year, John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, told ReadWriteWeb.

In a recent statement on YouTube, internet luminary and Google exec Vinton Cerf makes a similar prediction.

“We are at a cusp, I think, in the IP address space for internet,” he said, noting that, if nothing changes, a “black market” for these internet addresses may develop.

So what should we do about this numbers shortage?

Well, make more numbers for starters.

Our current system for assigning IP addresses, which look like a series of four numbers with periods between them, can only handle 32 bits of data.

But, to accommodate the sprawling nature of the Web, internet researchers are working on a new version of the system — called IPv6, for “version six” — which would allow many more IP addresses, with each holding 128 bits of info.

On The Atlantic’s website, Alexis Madrigal writes that the situation is somewhat similar to what phone companies faced in the 1980s and 1990s: We ran out of new phone numbers, so we had to add digits.

“The problem is essentially the same: you only have so many unique slots, and those slots eventually run out as phone numbers proliferate,” he writes.

But the current situation has proven more technically complicated than that.

Researchers have been working on IPv6 for more than a decade, but according to reports on the matter, adoption has been slow.

Now, some writers are comparing the situation to Y2K. They say we need to act now to shift to the new system or the internet might stop working.

Madrigal, for one, says he’s optimistic the internet won’t break because of a lack of IP address numbers.

“There are undoubtedly a swarm of issues leading to IPv6 underdeployed,” he writes. “But that’s actually good news because it means there will be plenty of ways to fix the problem when everyone swings into action.”

In this tech-saturated world, few things are more annoying than car navigation systems that yell at you for making a wrong turn.

“Re-CALC-ulating,” the system says in that condescending robot voice, as if it is offended by having to rethink the route.

“Turn left at … [sigh] … recalculating …”

Such interactions lead people to think GPS devices are nagging them, said Mark Gretton, chief technology officer of TomTom, a GPS maker.

“The main interaction you have with the device is a series of commands, so that starts the tone of the relationship right from the start,” he said. “It’s ‘Do this, do that, turn right.’ ” And it doesn’t help if the computer sounds snippy, he said.

Despite advances in “text to speech” technology, current computer voices can still be socially tone deaf. Car systems are bossy. E-readers read to us aloud, but they don’t know what they’re reading, so Shakespeare can sound just like a monotone reading of a spreadsheet.

None of them can get intonations, pauses or emotional context quite right.

Farhad Manjoo, a tech columnist at Slate, compared the Amazon Kindle’s reading voice, for example, to “Gilbert Gottfried laid up with a tuberculin cough” and “a dyslexic robot who spent his formative years in Eastern Europe.”

So what gives? With more than a decade of voice research under our belts, why can’t computers speak our language — or at least sound a bit more human?

Well, they’re trying, tech researchers say, but these machines face a striking number of technological hurdles in their efforts to sound un-robotic.

Complex speech patterns

The most obvious reason the computers have trouble is that human speech is almost infinitely complex. There are about 40 phonemes — or basic sounds — in the English language, but there are seemingly limitless combinations.

To try to get computers on the right track, voice technologists record human actors reading all kinds of wacky sentences, which are designed to elicit as many phoneme combinations as possible.

Computers store all these sentences in a database, chop them into sounds, and then remix them to make any possible combination of words.

The result is intelligible, but it’s not quite human.

A super-high-quality computer voice might require 40 hours of voice recordings in order to sound nearly human, said Andy Aaron, a computer speech researcher at IBM.

That’s just for one voice, one accent.

Computing power

Aaron said computers that have lots of voice data to pull from can sound, at times, nearly human.

But the issue is that not every computer has an entire server farm waiting to process every sentence it would like to say.

Mobile phones and GPS devices, in particular, just don’t have enough computing power or storage space to thumb through mountains of voice files in order to sound as realistic as possible with current technology.

The result: Corners are cut in the name of workability, and some of the nuances of the spoken language are lost, said Gretton of TomTom.

This will improve as computers continue to get faster and able to store more data, he said.

Parts of computer voices are also generated entirely from equations and models, not actor-read sounds.

Those bits act as filler, and cut down on database sizes, too.

Speak thy heart

Another major problem for talking computers is that it’s somewhat difficult for them to replicate the sound of human emotion and inflection.

This, however, is a major topic of speech research, and the technology appears to have made some strides. People who record the sentences that are the grist for computer speech sometimes are asked to read in different emotional states. Computers can pull from these sounds if they want to flip the pitch of a computer voice up at the end of a sentence, for example, in order to ask a question. Or they pull from higher frequencies to sound happy or excited.

IBM Research has posted a demo of this on its website in order to show the differences between emotive and robotic computer voices.

Take this example sentence:

“These cookies are delicious.”

Listen to that sentence as read by a computer with no emotion.

Here it is again, spoken by a computer using a system called Naxpres, which tries to take emotional cues into account. Notice that the voice perks up at the end, as if the computer is saying the cookies are “de-LISH-ious.”

It makes some difference.

Emotional context

But copying the sounds of human emotion is only half the battle. To really make computers sound more human, the machines have to understand what they’re reading — at least to some degree — so that they know when to inflect.

This part of computer science is much more challenging, said Aaron.

Consider another sample sentence:

“I say tomato, and you say tomato.”

Most people would have heard that line before, and would automatically pronounce “tomato” as “to-mah-toe” the second time, said Aaron, of IBM.

But not a computer.

“How would the computer know that those two words are supposed to be pronounced differently?” Aaron said. “It’s only real-world knowledge that can tell the computer that those two words are supposed to be pronounced differently.”

The same applies to emotions and inflections. It’s difficult for a computer to know how to read a passage of text, and what emotions should apply.

“If you read a passage to somebody, you’re obviously going to read it a way that does justice to the content,” said Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance, a company that develops speech technologies.

“If you’re reading a technical report, you’re probably not going to read it in a way that’s much different from a computer, but if you’re reading a poem, it’s a different kettle of fish,” he said. “You’re really trying to communicate a lot of emotional meaning through the pauses you introduce and through the pacing and such. That really requires a pretty deep understanding” of language.

‘You want to punch them’

As it turns out, the best computer voices may be those that sound exactly like the person who’s listening. If a computer voice matches your mood, your speech patterns, your accent and your tonal range, you’re less likely to be annoyed by it, researchers said.

How well a computer voice matches the listener’s mood is not just a matter of preference — it’s a matter of safety, said Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor who studies computer voices.

In a 2005 study, Nass found that these emotional mismatches may actually be dangerous in driving situations. Sad drivers who get instructions from happy computer voices — and happy drivers who listen to sad voices — are more likely to have accidents, he said. The emotionally confused drivers are also less likely to be able to pay attention to the road.

So, if you’re having a groggy sort of morning, instructions from a GPS device that sounds like a caffeinated cheerleader might just push you over the edge.

“If you think about it, when you’re happy, you want to be around happy people. But if you’re sad, do you really want to hang around chirpy, happy people saying, ‘Let’s turn that frown upside down?’” he said. “No. You want to punch them.”

Sejnoha, from Nuance, said his company has developed a prototype computer voice system that listens to a person speak and then tries to mimic it.

Gretton, from TomTom, said his company hasn’t looked into matching drivers’ emotions to the voices of their navigation systems yet.

But one interim solution, he said, gives drivers many options when it comes to the voices of their computerized companions.

TomTom offers a range of downloadable voices — from the fictional Darth Vader and Homer Simpson to celebrities like the rapper Snoop Dogg.

Users can also read a set of test sentences and have their own voices transferred into the GPS — so that they’re, in effect, bossing themselves around.

Perhaps it’s a little less tempting to yell at the computer if the computer sounds exactly like you do — or as close as technology allows.

It is usually the simplest expressions that take off like wildfire. Everyone’s been talking this week about “double rainbows,” based on a goofy home video recorded more than six months ago.

In early January, Paul Vasquez, also known as “Hungry Bear,” spent an hour videotaping, and marveling at, a beautiful double rainbow at Yosemite National Park.

Some 3½ minutes of his “rainbowing” were caught on tape, and it’s Vasquez’s reaction to the rainbows — not the rainbows themselves — that’s drawing viewers.

“Hungry Bear” oohs over the double rainbow, asks existential questions like “what does it mean?” and eventually sounds like he’s going into hysterics — perhaps laughing, perhaps crying, or maybe doing both. Some observers think he sounds orgasmic, or stoned.

Why are we just talking about it now? Two words: Jimmy Kimmel. The ABC late-night host tweeted a link to the double rainbow video to his 90,000 followers over the July Fourth weekend. Within a week CBS News and other outlets were interviewing Hungry Bear. The original double rainbow YouTube clip has now racked up more than 4.8 million views.

The sheer speed of this meme is pretty impressive, especially since there is already a double rainbow song available on iTunes. The “DOUBLE RAINBOW SONG!!” is a two-minute, auto-tuned song with the repeated refrain, “It’s a double rainbow. What does it mean?” Its website says all proceeds from the song go to Hungry Bear and Yosemite.

By this time next week, there will definitely be another “double rainbow” parody going viral on the web.

See CNN.com iReporters’ pictures and stories of double rainbows

Apparently, Hungry Bear already had some interesting adventures before he encountered the double rainbow. Urlesque.com has a great history of Hungry Bear’s colorful life, which includes time spent as a cage fighter. It seems like the big guy is both a lover and a fighter.

So what, exactly, can we learn from this “double rainbow” phenomenon?

In pure numbers, it shows that as Twitter, Facebook and other social-networking tools become more ubiquitous, memes like this will grow faster — and, perhaps, die faster, too.

It takes longer to read books on a Kindle 2 or an iPad versus a printed book, Jakob Nielsen of product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group discovered in a recent usability survey.

The study found that reading speeds declined by 6.2 percent on the iPad and 10.7 percent on theKindle compared to print. However, Nielsen conceded that the differences in reading speed between the two devices were not “statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability” — in other words, the study did not prove that the iPad allowed for faster reading than the Kindle.

A total of 24 participants (10 is about average for a usability survey) were given short stories by Ernest Hemingway to read in print and oniPads, Kindles and desktop PCs. Hemingway was chosen because his work utilizes simple language and is “pleasant and engaging to read.”

The narratives took an average of 17 minutes and 20 seconds from start to finish — enough time to get readers fully “immersed” in the stories, Nielsen explained.

After reading, participants filled out a brief comprehension questionnaire to make sure no one had skimmed through a story. Users rated their satisfaction with each device; the iPad, Kindle and printed book scored 5.8, 5.7 and 5.6, on a scale of 7, respectively, while the PC received an average score of 3.6 — due, in part, because reading on a PC reminded readers of work.

Participants also complained about the weight of the iPad and the Kindle’s weak contrast.

As Nielsen notes, the satisfaction ratings on the survey are promising for the future of e-readers and tablet devices. However, I can see universities and businesses taking less kindly to e-readers if further studies prove that they handicap reading speed.

What do you think of the results? Do you prefer to read on an e-reader, tablet or in print — and why?

It’s summertime. Like many people, you may not have enough time for an extended vacation in which to devour a juicy full-length novel.

But, if you can steal a few moments for a mini-vacation, you can find some excellent summer reading material right on your cell phone. And you don’t even need a fancy smartphone with a pricey data plan capable of running an e-reader app (Kindle, Nook, Stanza, etc.) to do it.

These days, more fiction is being published not just electronically, but specifically with small screens and wireless connections in mind. These short works are different from e-books, because they’re meant to be read directly through your phone’s browser or even via text messaging.

This phenomenon started nearly a decade ago in Japan, but it’s now spread to U.S. mobile audiences.

Here are a few options to check out:

CellStories.net: If your cell phone has a web browser, chances are these short works of fiction (about 5 to 10 minutes of reading time each) will display reasonably well on your phone.

This free publishing project by Dan Sinker features works in several genres by several authors — with a fair amount of work that’s offbeat or slightly bizarre. CellStories are specifically not available for computer-based reading; you can access the stories only from a phone.

Sinker explains: “Why would you want to read something amazing while sitting at a desk? Instead, grab a beer and sprawl out on the couch, or take your lunch break under a shady tree, and then read. Much better, right?”

TextNovel.com: This is a rich resource to find, discuss or publish your own serialized English-language cell phone novels via SMS text messaging or e-mail. Novels are free, but text-messaging charges apply. TextNovel.com, founded by literary agent Stan Soper, also runs contests for text novel fiction writers.

Figment.com: This teen-oriented cell phone publishing project has not yet begun, but it sounds interesting.

Co-founder Jacob Lewis recently explained, “Figment will offer a place for teens to engage with peers, with authors, and with content. They can read a serialized novel by a friend down the block or a short story by their favorite author anytime, anywhere on their computer or their mobile phone. They can write a haiku or a 90,000 word novel while riding the bus to school. They can pick and chose, share and exclaim, write and review.”

On Figment.com, you can sign up for projects announcements and a private beta.

Hours after its iPhone 4 went on sale to excited crowds Thursday, Apple found itself responding to complaints that holding the phone by its metal edge causes mobile reception to suffer.

The company’s response, in a nutshell? You’re holding it wrong.

“Just avoid holding it in that way,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote in an e-mail that was making the rounds on the Web on Friday morning.

An official statement from Apple expanded in less pointed language than Jobs, who is known to occasionally answer e-mails from customers himself.

“Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas,” Apple said in a written statement.

One of the new phone’s vaunted features is its sleek design — nearly 25 percent thinner than its most recent predecessor. That’s achieved, in part, by snaking the antenna through a metal band around the edges of the phone.

The Apple statement, like early user reviews, said that putting a cover on the phone also reduces interference.

“If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases,” the company says.

The iPhone 4 — with its dual cameras, high-resolution display and glass-backed design — has received mostly positive reviews since its release. But by late Thursday, tech blogs and other websites were filling up with complaints about the reception issue.

On CNN’s iReport, several contributors noted the problem.

Keith Taylor of Sarasota, Florida, submitted a video review that initially said gripping the metal band made reception slightly worse than that of the iPhone 3GS.

Hours later, he wrote a follow-up saying that “the reception problem is very real” and that it improved when he bought a protective cover for the phone.

Share your thoughts on the new iPhone 4 with iReport.

The reception issue is chief among complaints that surfaced in the day since the iPhone 4 went on sale in Apple stores and other outlets.

There have been some reports of the phone’s glass casing cracking easily and of its “retina display” screen, billed as one of the sharpest in the industry, scratching even after only a few days of wear and tear.

iReporters share iPhone mania

Other owners of the new iPhone have reported that the display has an annoying yellow tint, although most have not noticed that.

Forget about the little old lady digging through her cluttered purse in the supermarket checkout line.

Thanks to smartphones, e-mail and sometimes-scary economic news, denizens of the digital world are now the ones clipping coupons — even when there’s not an actual piece of paper involved.

With services such as the iPhone app Scoutmob and e-mail offerings such as Groupon and Living Social Deals, experts say it’s now hip to be cheap.

“The advent of digital savings tools coupled with a challenging economy has taken couponing mainstream,” said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com. “All sorts of people, including what we call the ’sophisticated couponer,’ are proudly aboard the couponing bandwagon.”

A recent survey by Harris Interactive showed that coupon use, particularly online coupon use, has spiked among a nontraditional population — those who are urban, well-to-do and tech-savvy.

In the survey, six out of 10 adults with household incomes over $100,000 said they had used a coupon in the past six months.

Four out of 10 of them said they got that coupon online — a rate nearly twice that of people who made $35,000 or less.

Keila Kirkpatrick said she started hearing friends talk about Groupon, a location-based service that deals out a daily bargain in subscribers’ hometowns, along with a punchy, fun e-mail description of that deal.

“I signed up to see what all the buzz was about, and turned out that they had some really good deals,” said Kirkpatrick, 23, who had recently moved to Washington to work for Americorps.

Since then, she’s used Groupons for a Korean restaurant that she’d never tried and Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

For the online coupon companies, encouraging that sort of urban exploring is part of the sales pitch.

“Our point, simply put, is to help you be a better local,” says Scoutmob’s website. “The only way to really get to know your city is by getting out, being curious and exploring the scene for all its worth.”

Scoutmob capitalizes on the rise of mobile social networking apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which let people “check in” to locations, alerting their digital friends to their whereabouts. Its original aim was to, in effect, create flash mobs at participating businesses which would offer a coupon for a short time, usually 24 hours.

But recently, many have extended their deals, allowing users to better plan social outings based around current offers.

The Scoutmob app runs only on the iPhone. The phone’s screen, in effect, acts as a user’s coupon.

Scoutmob co-founder Michael Tavani said the Atlanta-based company has spent almost nothing on marketing, with word of mouth spreading the app’s popularity in the 12 U.S. cities where it’s available. (Scoutmob’s website shows a 13th that will be familiar to fans of “The Simpsons,” the fictional Springfield).

Between 1,500 and 2,500 people claim a Scoutmob coupon everyday, Tavani said. Then, those “mobsters,” in the lingo of the application’s regulars, plan “mob hits,” visits to a spot by sometimes as many as 25 people at once.

Scoutmob doesn’t release its total number of subscribers.

At Groupon, the growth has been swift and strong, from about 400 subscribers when they started in November 2008 to roughly 5 million in the United States and another 1 million in Europe, according to founder and CEO Andrew Mason.

Groupon, which makes its money on revenue-sharing with the businesses it features, is active in 50 cities in the United States and 60 in Europe.

“It just resonated well with consumers,” Mason said.

He points to a recent deal for a boat tour in Chicago, Illinois. Groupon and the tour company expected to sell a few thousand tickets, total. Instead, they sold 20,000 in the first few hours.

“If you think about any other advertising medium, it wouldn’t have done that for this company,” Mason said. “That’s the power of the social commerce we’ve created.”

He, too, links the success of digital coupons to the emergence of online social-networking — calling Groupon an extension of the “friending” functionality that sites such as Facebook and Twitter have popularized.

“The holy grail is how can we make e-commerce social,” Mason said. “Usually, [a coupon] is a pretty solitary, one-to-one experience. But we’re helping consumers discover things.

“Somebody sees a screaming deal on paintball and, instead of buying one Groupon, they’re telling 10, 20, 30 of their friends and sharing it on Twitter and e-mail and Facebook.”

Heather Sokol does just that, as well as spreading word of coupons she likes on her “frugal blog network,” Inexpensively.

“When I find a deal worth sharing, I tell Inexpensively readers, friends, family and Twitter or Facebook,” said the Indianapolis, Indiana-based blogger.

One potential concern, as these coupon applications grow in popularity, is that they could end up being too much of a good thing for some participating businesses.

The price cuts offered are sometimes steep, and a small business swarmed with eager subscribers could be trading some significant profit losses in the short term for potential customer gains in the long term.

“Our platform is not right for every business, especially smaller businesses that can’t handle the traffic,” said Scoutmob’s Tavani. “[But] businesses that are scaled to serve many customers are ideal customers and loving the new customers we’re driving them.”