When does a personal technology - a computer, a smartphone, a watch - "grow up"? There is a slow but continuous process I have observed with every new personal computing technology. Stage 1 - Child: The new technology provides unprecedented flexibility. It allows you to do just a few new things, but its real appeal is allowing you to do old things on the go. It does so by being a mobile accessory to, or child of, existing "

Pricing is one of the most important - and mysterious - parts of a business. Price too high, and you lose customers; price too low, and you leave lots of profit on the table. An entire price consulting industry exists, with great leaders like Patrick Campbell of Pricing Intelligently. One important rule of thumb is that input costs should almost never determine the price of a product. What your costs do is have two effects:

Yesterday, I read an article which claimed that 30% of people have never backed up, while the overwhelming majority are way behind on backups. In the early 1990s, about a year into my very first job out of college at a large global financial, I ran the server backups. Yes, in retrospect, I wonder what they were thinking giving that level of responsibility to the inexperienced kid I was. Either way, it was a great learning experience.

The Internet has been abuzz for the last week about a hitherto little-known clause in Samsung's "Smart TV" privacy policy. The news was most prominently covered in the Daily Beast, here. The Daily Beast includes a link to the entire privacy policy, but the important element is: Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.

"The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer." - Peter Drucker No matter how many times we say it, we forget it. We get caught up in operations, or competition, or marketshare, or share price. Yet a business, like a life, has a purpose: to create and keep a customer. I might add, "to keep that customer profitably satisfied." Earlier this month, a very well known Apple developer, one of the "

Apple's philosophy for technology is, "just make it work." I had one of the early pre-iPod mp3 players. It was a great piece, lots of battery life, played every format out there at the time... and within a year I had replaced it with an iPod. Transferring music to this player and managing it was just an enormous headache. With iTunes and iPod, it "just worked". Fast forward to the year 2014.