About 2-1/2 months ago my beloved and trusty, and just under one-year-old, iPod Touch died. I left it in the front-left cargo pocket of a pair of shorts, didn’t tell my wife it was in there, and didn’t remember until it was in the middle of the soap cycle in the washing machine. It was squishy, loaded with soap and water, and dead.

Much consternation on this, trust me. I’ve got a history with gadgets. I left the last Palm I owned, I think it was an enhanced Palm Vx, in the seatback of an airplane. I was on a flight from Vegas to Portland and it was in the seatback of my initial airplane, bound for Los Angeles. Never recovered, of course.

But back to the iPod Touch.

So with the Touch full of white bubbles — you could even see them under the screen and hear them squishing around when you squeezed the iPod gently — I sat it down next to me as I Googled how to save a waterlogged iPod Touch and asked my brother in law what he did when something similar happened. The answer I kept coming across: Put it in a bag of rice and let it set for a few days. Do not turn it on or try to reset it. The rice may absorb the water out of the iPod. 

Please, I thought. This is ridiculous. The rice is going to lure the water OUT of the inside of the device? Seriously? The truth is, while skeptical, I was also hopeful and knew I had nothing to lose — the Touch was dead at this point. No pulse. So I borrowed a bag of sand from the Obergs, our great friends in Beaverton with whom we were staying, put the Touch into the depths of the rice, said a prayer, did a funky dance the instructions described, and went on with my vacation. (Okay, the prayer and the funky dance were added for dramatic effect.)

Then I waited.

Nothing doing for the rest of the vacation (which took us through July 5). Nothing doing when we got home. Nothing doing for so long that I, yes, bought a new iPod Touch and gave my son the dead one to just mess around with. I also gave the dead one to Conner to do whatever with. (Side note: Why no iPhone, you ask? Company-issue Blackberry.)

Fast forward these 2-1/2 months.

Lori and I went to my 12-year-old son Conner’s school open house last night while he and our other three boys stayed home. When we came home and I dropped my stuff off in the office, sitting on my desk was “Conner’s” iPod Touch. The old one. I hadn’t thought about it in at least a month. So, with a glimmer of hope, I clicked the power button. Nothing. I left it on the desk and went to bed.

Friday morning comes. Another beautiful, sunny day in Temecula. The sprinklers were spritzing my grass just outside my office window, the birds were chirping, it was calm and serene. I click “Conner’s” iPod Touch power button again…why, I don’t know. Nothing, again. The thought pops into my head that, even if it was ready to start working again, a full 2-1/2 months later, surely the battery would have drained by now. So I plug it into the USB adapter attached to the family laptop. And I go about my business.

To keep this short story long, let’s just say that after about 30 minutes of looking over sales numbers and replying to a couple emails, I had totally forgotten that the thing was even sitting next to me UNTIL THE APPLE LOGO SUDDENLY APPEARED ON THE SCREEN. Are you kidding me???? I left it plugged in so it could finish charging completely, updated the OS to 3.0 like my replacement iPod Touch, synced it with my laptop, and VOILA, folks, we have an iPod back in action.

Was it the rice? Was it the 2-1/2 months of patience? Was I being rewarded for the glimmer of faith I showed? Was it fasting and prayer? Oh, wait, I said I DIDN’T pray about it, didn’t I? Was it some magical thing Conner did with it during the time I turned it over to him, thinking it was dead?

We will never know. But I do know one thing: what once was dead lives again. Of course, my wife's comment was: "So...you know what I'm thinking, right? Can you take the new one back?" Gotta lover her.

I can now introduce my son to his own iPod Touch loaded with Rush, Boston, U2, The Replacements, Paul McCartney, ELO, The Outfield, Neil Diamond, Kiss, Ace Frehley, AC/DC, Little River Band, Journey, Jackson 5, The Ramones, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Buddy Holly, Cheap Trick, George Strait, Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, The Clash, Cat Stevens, the Bee Gees, and other classics I’m sure they’ll grow to love.

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I need to have a digital camera with me for moments like this...

High atop a hill in San Marcos, California, the Palomar Pomerado Hospital is being built. Still in the early construction stages, the project is, to use Jerry Seinfeld's words, nothing more than a cross-beam girder system. But what will it be down the road? A banner at the site proclaims: The Hospital of the Future.

Hallelujah. At a time when no one agrees on what the entire healthcare system should look like, somehow we know what the hospital of the future looks like, or at least where it will be.

To me, though, a hospital is symbolic of the healthcare system. Meaning, it could be stocked with the coolest, most innovative, advanced, precise technology in the world; staffed with the most service-minded, trustworthy, compassionate and competent medical experts in the world; and offer the cleanest bathrooms anywhere in North San Diego County.

And none of that would matter if it still takes me 45 minutes to complete all my paperwork before getting any medical attention when the hospital isn't even busy.Or if my insurance claim is denied, or only 50% paid when I thought it would be 80% paid.

My insurance is actually fine. I'm happy with it. I'm worried that my premiums will go up, actually, if there's a public option, as my fellow employees may choose to opt for that rather than our company-provided program, and this is multipled across countless other businesses, making it more difficult for my insurer to cover the costs of medical care for the rest of us.

What I'm saying is, though our system isn't working and we don't really know what it's going to look like in 180 days, it's ironic to see a hospital that's not even built yet hailing itself as the hospital of the future. It will be a hospital IN the future, I guess we all know that. But THE Hospital OF the Future, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun-social-media-aug16,0,3140196.story

Update: Another important article to read, if you can be even partially open-minded about the Twitter tsunami can be found here: http://www.workthesystemblog.com/2009/08/everybodys-talkin/.

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I've just fully appreciated today how the Evernote + Lifehacker's Texter combination makes for a killer, streamlined contact manager. Create an Evernote "Contacts" notebook. Create a Texter text replacement shortcut (or "hotstring" as the app calls it) that sets up the "fields" you'll want to add info on for each contact. I used Contact, Company, Title, Email, URL, Address, City, State, Zip, and Notes. 

Then, each note is a separate contact. Add tags to each contact that define where you know the person from and for other context. Start adding your contacts. Attach files to those contacts. Attach pictures. Very cool stuff here. 

And considering the free version of Evernote allows to upload 40mb of data, you shouldn't really run into space issues running a contacts Evernote database by itself. 

Voila. More to come on this as I explore...

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Okay, so we’re looking for specific examples from the social media expert crowd — again I use the term loosely, but not insultingly or sarcastically — for turning old industries into more creative, faster industries, using social media and creative marketing. Here are the first four on the docket for transformation, below.

Now, some of these have started dipping their toes in, with Twitter accounts, for example. But the question is this, what can companies in these industries do, particularly the local and regionals who go up against the nationwide behemoths, to leverage social media in a smart way? How can they differentiate themselves in old industries not typically given to creative marketing?

When I say “a smart way,” I don’t mean simply to be cute or clever. I mean effective, results-oriented, that sort of thing.

1. Office Supplies
Yes, there are the Office Depots and Staples of the world. We all know them. And for all intents and purposes, they’re the same store. And yes, you can scoot on over to Twitter for all the best Depot Deals. But what if you’re High Plains Office Supply in Goodland, Kansas, going up against Topside Office Products? Do you startup your own office-products-only version of Woot?

2. Waste Disposal
Republic Services and Waste Management are the biggies nationwide. What should they do? And what if you’re trying to differentiate from them, as a local provider, like Burrtec Waste in California or Deffenbaugh in the Kansas City area? Do you needsocial media?

3. Promotional Products
Some still call it “trinkets and trash,” as small businesses and individuals push pens, notepads, calculators, mousepads, apparel, and everything else with your company logo on it. May seem low-key to you, but this is a fierce, old industry built off people making a high number of cold calls and closing deals ruthlessly. The story linked in the previous sentence is legendary. But what do you do here? How do you add value? Beyond simple, face-to-face deal-making, how do you stand out leveraging social media?

4. Merchant Credit Card Processing
What can be said about this industry? It’s a door-to-door, floor-to-floor proposition. “Do you want to process credit cards as a business? Our rates are $X and Y% of every transaction plus a monthly equipment lease rate of $Z.” Social media experts: work your magic with these folks. What can they do, beyond placing stock photos on their websites? If you own one of these businesses could you care less that Twitter exists? Or FriendFeed? Or blogs? Or…

Alright, the challenge is out there. What would you do with these industries, if you were called in to consult?

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Tweet or die.
 
There's a growing trend by social media experts, and I use the "experts" term loosely, to declare that companies who ignore social media in their marketing mix will soon be extinct.
 
My thinking is that, while there may be some industries that need to be particularly social-media cozy, there are dozens more that are home to companies who could and may choose to do nothing -- I repeat, nothing -- for another five years plus with social media and not feel the pinch, let alone face extinction.
 
So, over the next several posts here at Ponderous, I thought I'd list 24 of these industries. Maybe more if I think I'm on a roll. And as a lone, outside-the-social-media-expert space guy, my posts may fall on deaf ears. But I'm anxious to hear what free advice any expert would give the players in these industries should stumble across this series of posts.
 
One last note. I list these industries knowing full well companies in them can advance their causes by utilizing YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Ning customer ommunities, wikis, open-forum services like Get Satisfaction or UserVoice, employee blogging, podcasts, or other tools. But they'll survive without them for the foreseeable future.
 
Up next: industries 1-4.

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