I have a son – my wife has requested that I use only his first initial in this blog, and I respect that, so I’ll just call him “T” – who started using an iPad back in February at the ripe old age of 8 years old. My daughter, M, was six at the time. My wife and I are having a third child, due at the end of April, who will likely go through her formative years not knowing that there were once handheld devices that didn’t have touch screens.

But none of this is news. Let’s back up for a minute. When I was eight (Yes, for a blog about innovation, I spend a lot of time dwelling in the past. I realize the irony. Thanks for your contribution), I was pestering my father every ten minutes to work his magic on the computer and turn the C-prompt on the screen of our ancient IBM into Math Blasters (or some such). That was our first computer. Shortly thereafter we got a Macintosh II, which I could operate on my own, to a degree. My brother was born in 1990; he had a computer in his house every day of his life.

So my son is in the same situation that I was in as a kid – old enough to use revolutionary, bleeding-edge in-home technology practically from its inception, with younger siblings who would likely never know a world without it. We are both fortunate in that regard – our births timed perfectly with the adoption curve of the Next Big Thing.

But let’s not forget who built a world where that kind of thing is possible. My father – an admitted gadget-guy and the supplier of the part of my genetic code that makes me crave innovative technology – built that world for me.

Not him alone, of course. He worked for a series of companies that drove innovative work, who built machines that did things no one thought possible – things that had been outside the scope of human imagination in the not-too-distant past. But he brought his work home with him, to some degree, and that had a definite impact on me.

I’m writing this only because it just dawned on me how impactful my father has been in my career tack. I don’t want to say that I’m following in his footsteps, because we both took very different paths to get where we are today. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that had my father chosen a different career path – if he had stayed in the Air Force, for example, or had taken a job selling shoes instead of cash registers when he got back from Korea – I likely wouldn’t be so hell-bent on driving technological innovation.

So when my son is searching for apps in the app store, I smile. I smile not because I want him to be like I was when I was his age, but because I know I am doing my part to create a world where he could follow in my footsteps, if he so chooses. I tell ya, I’m incredibly happy with where I am right now, and I’m excited for what the future holds, both for the world and for my family.

“Making the world a better place for our children.” We hear that all the time, don’t we? It’s usually tied to some activist issue or other, requiring us to be big-picture thinkers about the future of the planet or the economy or politics. We just kind of assume that technology will take care of itself with respect to making the world a better place. There’s all kinds of economic incentive to drive technology forward, after all. But we rarely think about the impact that what we do today has on the ways our kids are able to interact with each other and the world in the future.

I wrote yesterday about the ability of new technology to expand the outer limits of our imagination. If you believe that, then you must also believe is that what we’re building is not simply new technology. It’s a vehicle that will carry us into places we haven’t even considered possible. And we won’t be driving that vehicle – our children will.

When I think about it, I realize that my father’s old Mac II wasn’t just a cool piece of technology. It was a stargazing platform. It was a point of reference for me, and the basis for endless daydreams. “Well, if my computer can do this,” I would think, “then maybe it can do that. And maybe a thousand computers could do that. And wouldn’t that be cool?”

I sometimes wonder what my son thinks will come next, and how closely his vision and mine are aligned. I wonder what he thinks a computer should do, how it should operate. If he could draw a picture with crayons and make it come to life, what would he draw?

Maybe I’ll ask him to draw it when I get home tonight. On the iPad, of course.

–MS

I want you to think about the calculator. Not long or hard; I just want you to think about it. And not a big, fancy graphing calculator, either – one of the little ones you keep in your desk drawer. Think about what you use calculators for, the people you know who know how to use them, the myriad different functions a calculator performs, and so on.

Now imagine that it’s the most advanced piece of technology the world has ever known.

I like to think about those kinds of things – the periods of time when something as mundane as a pocket calculator was on the bleeding edge of human achievement. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Could the inventors of the calculator have possibly imagined the iPhone and all of its intricacies? What was the outer limit of human imagination as it pertained to technology at that particular time, when there was only one working calculator of any size or description anywhere in the world?

Better yet, go back even further in time. Imagine a world where numbers systems were non-existent and the concept of math was just a tickle in the recesses of some ancient human’s brain. In a world before the abacus, a calculator was pure delusional fantasy – the brainchild of a madman, nothing more.

And yet, I can’t help but believe that the person who originally conceived the idea of the calculator actually did exist long before the first ancient mathematician put stylus to papyrus. Imagine being that guy, the one who said, “You know, some day I’d like to have a machine that tells me how many sheep I’d have if each of my seventeen ewes had two lambs.” Imagine how crazy that might have sounded to you, even though right now you’re thinking, “51 plus R, where R equals the number of rams.”

I said in The Big Disgusting Thing that technology makes life easier for everyone. But that’s really just the practical part of it. The other part – the metaphysical part – is that technology gives us the opportunity to expand our imaginations.

I think about the entirety of human consciousness like a geographically accurate map of the known world, circa 1400 AD. There’s a whole lot of black space – you’ve got most of Europe, parts of Asia, a little bit of Africa, and a couple of odd islands in the mix somewhere, but most of the globe is largely unexplored. It would be difficult for a cartographer to imagine what the southern tip of South America might look like, even if he knew it was there, wouldn’t it?

But then you go exploring. And when you land on the coast of Brazil, you get a sense for what the coastline might look like. Your map has expanded. And as you travel up the coast, you get a better picture of the way this new land is shaped. You can imagine what the coast looks like for the next twenty miles north or south of you at any given point. And the same holds true as you travel inland – you crest a hill and see a valley of dense forest the likes of which you’ve never seen, and you can imagine that a similar sight lays in wait for you at the top of the next hill. Your imagination is expanding.

And so it is with technology. Our achievements in HTML5 and CSS3, for example, redefine what we know is possible for web design. With that technology as our launching pad, we are welcome to imagine the next evolution of web design – an evolution that might have been impossible to conceive at the inception of HTML4.

Or was it impossible? If The Big Disgusting Thing in this country is its abundance of troglodytes, then The Slightly Smaller Disgusting Thing might be our propensity for discounting the voices of the crazy innovators – those people whose minds operate on the outer rim of what we consider to be imaginable.

Of course, part of that is understandable. We’re inclined to shut out the voices of people who are solving problems that we ourselves don’t experience; we are perhaps even biologically hard-wired to do so, to filter noise from signal so that we can better do whatever it is we need to do to survive. But somewhere buried in our genetic code, I believe that there is a sequence of molecules that tells us to keep pushing the boundaries of our imaginations, to keep evolving, and to keep creating, and to keep relentlessly pursuing those solutions to problems that don’t even exist yet.

Am I suggesting that everyone listen to the sycophantic ramblings of the bleeding-edge-technology elite? No, not necessarily. Yes, there’s value in listening to the likes of Robert Scoble, and in reading TechCrunch and CNet, and in buying lunch for young entrepreneurs with really cool ideas. But none of those are real solutions to the big problem, which is that there are a lot of people trying to solve today’s problems, and not enough people working on solutions to next year’s problems – and frankly, that kind of thinking seems to be roundly discouraged.

Our imaginations have grown quite a bit since the calculator, but many of us are still content to dwell in the realm of what we know. And sure, that’s practical; no one will fault you for using the technology available to you to make your life easier without a second thought to what could be. But there’s a larger story here, one that dates back to stone tools and has so far progressed to things like artificial intelligence and semantic technology. And that’s the story I want to be a part of. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. That’s where this blog and I are headed.

And if you want to join me, I’d be happy for the company.

–MS

I try not to be a hard ass. I do. And I’m pretty good about reigning it in when it comes to people doing stupid stuff. For example, if someone came to me and said, “I’m going to put my finger in an electric pencil sharpener,” I would call that person a “big, steaming pile of stupid,” though such a moniker is clearly well deserved. Instead, I’d say something along the lines of, “Well, why are you going to do that?” in the hopes of coming to a peaceful endgame that doesn’t involve the complete destruction of a perfectly good office appliance.

But I’ve gotta say it. You people are trying my patience.

Okay, that’s not fair. You’re not really trying my patience, average Joe Reader. I suppose if you’re reading this, it’s not really you I’m mad at, anyway. I’m mad – mad, mind you – at the number of people who are honestly and whole-heartedly without a clue when it comes to technology and what it will do for us. And I’ll tell you why.

But before I do, let me stop a minute to clarify something. People say they’re mad all the time. They say they’re “furious” at how much gas prices have gone up. They’re “upset” that the Red Sox fired Terry Francona. I’m not either of those things. I’m stark raving bat-shit angry. I’m someone-just-kicked-Bruce-Banner-in-the-johnson angry. That’s how angry I am.

There. Now that I have that out of my system, I’ll tell you why luddites make me angry.

There’s a very strange misconception out there, and it goes something like this:

Horseshit.

You know what makes you a better husband? Being a better husband. And that involves becoming a more caring person, being emotionally supportive, listening better, compromising, communicating more fluently, seeing things from your spouse’s perspective, and so on. Being a better husband has nothing whatsoever to do with technology, and technology is not preventing you from being a bad husband. Only you can do that.

There’s a really gigantic difference between snubbing your family and using technology to augment your life. The difference is so dramatic, in fact, that I can’t believe anyone in their right mind could ever make the case that the two are even remotely related to the same problem.

Here, let me illustrate with a few quotes that you’ll never in your life ever hear anyone say:

• I should really stop using my blender so much and spend more time with the kids.
• My wife and I agreed that our cars were too much of a distraction, so we decided to ditch them for the weekend.
• Honey, could you put the computer away for a minute and help me find a good chicken recipe for dinner tonight.
• If I threw away my cell phone completely, I’d have so much more time to talk to my friends and family.

…et cetera.

Now, let me be clear. If the internet is weighing you down with all its craziness, go ahead and ditch it for a weekend. There will be plenty of pics on icanhazcheezburger.com just itching to be chortled at when you’re ready to come back. But while you’re away, please – for the love of Tim Berners-Lee – don’t go around telling people you “unplugged” for the weekend. Because that’s disgusting.

The Big, Disgusting Thing in this country of ours is the mass of people who refuse to acknowledge that mankind has spent the past several thousand years developing tools to make life easier. You hear about them all the time: the 50-something who never bothered to set up an email account, the college professor who is inaccessible via Facebook, the middle manager who doesn’t know how to copy and paste text from a Word document.

Can you imagine being a caveman and not knowing how to sharpen a spear? Or not knowing how to skin an animal and wear its pelt for warmth? Or not knowing how to make a fire?

Can you imagine being ignorant of the mode d’emploi of a fountain pen? Or choosing not to switch from your slide-rule to a calculator? Or refusing outright to acknowledge the tremendous benefits of having electricity pumped directly into your home?

No, surely not. And yet these people likely existed, every one of them filthy savages.

Every. Last. One.

Yes, I’m throwing down the gauntlet here, to a degree. Your cell phone and your laptop and the internet represent some of the greatest achievements in technological history. They are your method of connecting with a network of information so vast that it was once literally beyond the scope of imagination. And there are those stalwarts – a few members of Congress come to mind – who would thwart our attempts at doing exactly what mankind has been doing for millennia: making life easier for ourselves and each other. Technology is the portal through which we might gain a larger perspective on the world around us. It is a tool for learning the best lessons that history has to teach us. Armed with that, how could we ever achieve less than our potential?

There is knowledge out there, friends. Avail yourselves of it.

This is a quick-and-dirty (and by no means comprehensive) overview of some of the things that come with your Google+ Business Page. If you haven’t done so already, you should create a page for your business, even if you think you’ll never use it again.

Setup is a breeze. There’s nothing complicated about it. Select your business category, fill out the fields, and voila, you’re in.

When you sign in to your personal G+ account, this is what you see:

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