While technology for the young and techno-savvy abound, our country is getting older.  The baby boomers are retiring, and will be the largest elderly class in history.  Technology that addresses very simply the needs of the elderly I imagine will make a killing in the coming years, but I haven’t seen it as a “hot item” in web and business culture.

Simply technology will trump all others in this market.  Sites like Pandora, where all you have to do is type the name of a song or artist and it does all the rest will be money makes of this group.  Discovering new music that is similar to music you already like used to be difficult, and I would just give up if I had to sift through the garbage on the radio to find it.  Maybe I’m missing what software is designed for complete simplicity, but I haven’t seen targeted software for the elderly, or those not-so-tech-savvy in any place of prominence.  This seems like a very simple business case analysis, huge target market, easily definable needs.  What software or technology would you recommend?

I should say I don’t mean to characterize all baby boomers, or elderly as non-techno-savvy.  In fact many of the great technologists of all time are in that generation.  I will say that on average, they are less techno-savvy, and less willing to spend tedious time configuring technological devices and software.

As of this post I have 110 different user names and passwords to log into various websites, servers, applications, as well as other non-computer services.  Once upon a time I simplified this by making as many of them the same password as possible.  I found I was accumulating login information in my Outlook notes, random text files on my computer, in OneNote notebooks, and in Firefox’s password system.  Not all of them are for computers (PIN numbers for financial aid, PIN numbers for our cell phones, etc.), so there was not really one place they could all go.

Along comes KeePass, a very simple program that creates a secure place to store all of your login information.  You create one master password to encrypt them all.  While I’m sure there are several programs out there to do this, KeePass seems to be a standard fixture among geeks, and is open source.  I’ve found this cuts a lot of time out of my week, especially when paying bills online, or when logging into a web site that I haven’t logged into for several months/years but I know I have a login for (I don’t know how many times I’ve had to request my login information to be sent to me via email, or have my password reset).

A quick note on security:  it is not a great idea to (1) have the same password for everything, (2) have very simple passwords (such as words that would be found in a dictionary), or (3) have passwords laying around in random folders or emails throughout your computer.  This program assists with all these problems, allowing you to have different passwords (since you don’t have to remember every one off the top of your head), have more complex passwords, and to have one secure repository for all your passwords.

Another minor note on security, if you think the passwords you save in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Google Chrome are secure, they are not.  I could be wrong about IE and Chrome (but I don’t think so), but by default Firefox passwords are stored as plain text unless you choose to create a master password that will encrypt all your website passwords.  There are many extensions you can get for your browser to integrate with KeePass.

Lastly, I’ve found a handy trick for managing passwords across computers.  If you install Dropbox which synchronizes files across computers, you put the KeePass database in your Dropbox, and have access to your passwords at work and at home.  Using this option, I would recommend using both a master password for KeePass, as well as a “Key File” (basically a small file that is one long password) so that in the event your KeePass database was hacked from Dropbox, your passwords are very protected.

If you work in front of a computer you know the internet can be a distracting place, especially if you are working on something you really don’t want to be doing right now.  I’ve found myself trying to get a project done, and losing several chunks of time throughout the day to pay bills online, check Facebook, or just browse the news.

Someone brilliant soul out there has come up with what I think is a pretty good solution to this problem:  Leechblock.  In short, Leechblock is a plugin for Firefox that can block certain pages so that you cannot visit Facebook, Youtube, or any other distracting site during the business hours of your choice.  It can also limit the amount of time you spend on these sites per day (or week).  For example, if you want to catch up with people on Facebook for 20 minutes, without zoning out and losing two hours chatting and looking at pictures, you set the limit to 20 minutes a day and the plugin will not let you go past that.  You can also set it up so that you cannot change the settings during your business hours, so if you are tempted to turn off the blocker to do some shopping, you are stuck getting your work done.

For my setup, I recommend uninstalling all other web browsers if possible (or at least make them difficult to get to).  If it is too easy to switch to Chrome or Internet Explorer you will find that you just stop using Firefox during business hours.  I have several blocks of programs blocked during business hours:  social networks, news, online video, shopping, financial management, and then a catch all block of “other” sites.

For more information on Leechblock, Lifehacker has a pretty good writeup of the add-on, and you can download the add-on directly from here.

I’ve always complained about printers, somehow in the last 15 years they really haven’t improved much.  They are cheaper, they now use USB instead of the parallel port, and they now have a bunch of features that also don’t work.  However, they are unreliable, contain expensive ink, and did I mention they are just unreliable?

In a recent post at Gizmodo, I found someone who had expressed the same sentiment in a much more detailed and hilarious style than I ever have been able to.  Here are a couple of points I find particularly funny and true:

First let me give a brief description of what a “network externality” is from Economic Theory.  Many products benefit from having others use the same or compatible products.  For example, there is no benefit to being the only person in the world with a fax machine, the benefits of having a fax machine depend on having many people own a fax machine and having a compatible standard to send messages between them.  The more people you want to send messages to that have fax machines, the more benefit you receive from the product.  The same could be said for services such as text messaging and instant messaging.

For many years one of the biggest difficulties in owning a Mac vs. a PC was in compatibility.  For example, a majority of the software and hardware devices were not compatible, and thus you had to buy special hardware and software that you could not easily swap with friends.  While previously Mac used SCSI hard drives and RISC processors that were very different from interfaces and processors used by PC’s and thus caused many compatibility issues, the emergence of USB has a universal standard for devices on both PC and Mac as well as the adoption of Intel processors in Macs has lowered these network externalities by making hardware (and subsequently software) much more compatible between the two.

I prefer a PC for many reasons, but the biggest for me is still these network externality reasons.  I use fairly esoteric software that is not widely distributed and built for Macs, mostly for research and statistical analysis.

In a recent conversation with a college student they seemed confused by why there are compatibility issues since “everyone they knew used a Mac.”  They were somewhat astounded to discover that Mac is far less than 10% of the market, roughly 6% as of this writing.  When your peer group is hip college students, Macs may indeed be ubiquitous, but in the real world, especially businesses, PC’s still continue to dominate.  Which brings me to wonder whether this “niche” market of college students perceive high network benefits from their friends owning Macs, and thus assume the network externalities of owning a Mac are greater than a PC.  In their case it may be true for now, but not later when they graduate and enter the real world, or have to run software other than Word, Safari, and instant messenger.

Are we in for (A) a group of very disappointed college graduates in the future, or (B) a change in greater marketplace as students and other artists and hipsters demand more compatibility from their Macs.  Software already exists such as Boot Camp and Parallels for Mac to run Windows applications, but my thought is that if you buy a Mac and still have to buy Windows, something is wrong.  You are not running an alternative system, you are running an additional system.  You are paying for two operating systems, with all the difficulties and problems of both.

Every futuristic movie or book  that includes some kind of year in the title should receive some kind of acknowledgment when that year finally arrives.  In 2001, our predictions about an intelligent computer taking over the mission and having space exploration to distant planets did not quite arrive as in “2001:  A Space Odyssey.” This year, following the 2001 tradition, is of course a much lesser known Stanley Kubrick fictional work, “2010: The Year We Make Contact”. While it may be possible that this will be the year we encounter alien life, I’m willing to put a few dollars betting it will not. Of course, we have the year yet to determine what the future will look like.

While the previous two movies were released in the 1980′s, film makers have apparently decided that movies that begin with years in the title do well, however, they are less ambitious about how far into the future they are predicting.  The book 1984 was written back in 1949, while the new movie 2012 was just release this year.  Perhaps this works as a good marketing ploy, you better see this movie soon before its futuristic visions don’t come true and you lose the suspension of disbelief.

I will soon be putting together a Windows Home Server from a spare computer and parts, and consolidating hard drives into that, in doing some reading on the new product I came across this ad gimmick from Microsoft, an entire children’s book explaining to children why there is a server in their home.  Apart from laughing historically about this for a few minutes, I feel like there is possibly a market here.  We have children’s books to describe animals, sounds, shapes, and colors, but where are the children’s books to discuss with them the important lessons they will need to know before kindergarten, like when to send a text message vs. an IM vs. an email, or how to configure your firewall?  Perhaps children’s authors should team up with the tech people and educate our children early on about these important issues.

I recently added my two cents to a panel of students discussing the pros and cons of having children while in graduate school. The website is for doctoral student in Organizational Communications and Information Systems (OCIS) within the Academy of Management.

See the posting here.