iTV is a streaming solution. There is no storage.

There will always be a large percentage of movie and music fans who insist on owning physical copies. But for the casual media consumer you will see a seismic shift towards these streaming on-demand solutions. Hell, to be honest I would certainly watch or listen to more streaming when I want mindless entertainment. I might not physically buy the latest Lady Gaga. But I might want my own copy of an Animal Collective album.

Since the spring of 2009 I have been unsubscribing from newsletters and promotional notices from different services I subscribe to on the web. Aggressively.

Every time one lands in my inbox. I scroll down, hit unsubscribe and follow whatever additional steps required.

Problem: Some of those companies seem to mysteriously start showing up again after sometime. I could SWEAR I’ve unsubscribed from them before. Sometimes 6 or 8 months later I start receiving promotional emails once again. Social media companies and services seem to be the worst offenders, but there are others.

Perhaps their privacy policy says it’s okay. Perhaps I’m not reading the fine print when I unsubscribe. I’m not sure.

So starting yesterday, September 1st 2010 I’m tracking my unsubscribes. I started a Google Document that tracks my unsubscribe dates, what list I unsubscribed from, the company, and what email address with which I was subscribed.

I will report my findings in 12 months.

Then yesterday I see a tweet online about a new co-working space called The Tink Tank (@thetinktank). It is right downtown, behind Izzy’s Coffee (@izzyscoffee) at 33 Carolina Lane.

I happened to meet up with Scott at Izzys Coffee and we walked over for a tour. There I met his dog Elsie as well as his fiance’ Jennifer. They run the space together (minus the dog probably).

While it’s a work in progress – they just set up shop – it is clearly a great location and space for us remote workers, creative types, and a convenient and ample meeting space for everything from Tweetups to meetups. There is a large welcoming space upstairs, as well as a full basement area that is also being turned into even more co-working space.

Scott and Jennifer were both super friendly and welcoming and are a great addition to the downtown scene. Definitely stop by and introduce yourself.

They have plans not unlike other co-working spaces. From single visit to 6 month plans, they have memberships to serve any budget. Check out the plans.

Online:
@thetinktank
www.thetinktank.com

Address:
33 Carolina Lane
Asheville, NC 28801 [map]

Clever phone number:
(828) 549-TINK [8465]

This has been my experience over the last couple months:

Twitter
Alaska Air and Delta Air both have Twitter accounts. I also use Travelocity fairly regularly, and they have a Twitter account as well. What a great way to keep up on the latest deals right?
Result?
Thanks to Alaska Air’s Twitter feed, I’ve learned a lot about the famous Olympic speed skater from Seattle. I’ve learned it’s Delta Airlines’ 80th anniversary of non-stop flight. I’ve watched a few people resolve some complaints, and I’ve even seen a few promotions for flights to Hawaii and stuff. But so far I have not seen any sort of financial incentives or flight deals that impact me directly. Mostly just a lot of chatter and clever quips.

RSS
Travelocity offers the ability to create customized RSS feeds that will only trigger when the cities and price point match my specific criteria. I wish Twitter did the same thing frankly. It’s something Dave Winer has been suggesting for awhile.
Result?
I set up my maximum amount of RSS notifications. But so far, I have not received ANY RSS notifications that matched any of my criteria. I only specified a slightly lower price point, but I have yet to be notified.

Newsletters:
I have subscribed to Orbitz, Kayak, and a couple other newsletters alerts. As I’ve asked different people about sites they use to get good deals I get recommendations of different travel sites, so I sign up in the hopes I can keep an eye out for more fare deals.
Result?
So far no good.

Admittedly, there are probably a couple things that make finding fare deals difficult for me.

• My home airport is a regional airport
  Asheville has a small regional airport. It kind of reminds me of the San Jose Airport. Well, San Jose circa 2003, since that is the last time I went through San Jose. Maybe it’s bigger now. So there aren’t a lot of people clamoring for an Asheville to Seattle flight, thus the scarcity of deals. My flights usually involve a shuttle plane from Asheville to Charlotte, or Atlanta, or some mid-west city like Chicago. Thus the added cost.
• TTL
  I have only been buying tickets a few weeks before my flight dates. As my work schedule solidifies and I can buy tickets months in advance, I think I’ll see a lot more flexibility in price.

Regardless, each flight is about 4500 miles each way. So my Frequent Flier miles are racking up. I’ll save my Frequent Flier Miles experiences for another post.

I’ve looked around online for more tips and tricks on finding flight deals. Usually I end up being pushed to a HubPages or Squidoo lens, or some lame Top 5 Airfare Tips blog post, which just end up trying to get me to click on an ad or affiliate link. Boo.

Does anyone have any tips on finding online deals? What has worked best for you?

Working on a lot of stuff that will involve Jennifer Saylor and Jason Sanford in the near future. It will be good for Asheville bloggers. Since so many people seem to have latched onto social media here, to the detriment of their blogs, we have some cool stuff in store to get our awesome wonderful bloggers back to creating the great original content we all love. Stay tuned

I will be heading out of town on Thursday for a trip to Juneau Alaska. It is work-related and I’m very excited to be a part of what appears to be a great team of developers. I will also be visiting some family and even have a 24 hour layover in Washington so I can hang with my dad. Hopefully they will still have some great turkey leftovers.

I’m taking a couple audiobooks with me on the trip. I have What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis, as well as Good Omens by Neil Gaiman. Additionally I grabbed some great literary lectures from The Learning Company. They are 30 minute lectures on the evolution of literature from, well, the beginning of time. While some of it is generally review for me, there are some great insights and additional information that have filled in a lot of gaps for me and given me new directions and book titles to read in the future. Next up is some Homer (Odyssey and Iliad), then a lecture on Chinese Classical Literature. I can’t wait!

I have some podcasts I regularly listen to that are going to be on rotation on the way to Alaska. Figured I would share:

• This Week in Google
  Naturally I’m a fanboy of Google. I will elaborate my reasons why in a future post, but Leo Laporte, Gina Trapini, and Jeff Jarvis are the hosts that most regularly run the show. Sometimes they have guests. Last week Matt Cutts was there. There’s a lot of real world and not-so-real-world speculation that happens, as well as real hands-on stuff you can use to get the most out of Google tools.
• This Week in Tech
  Another one hosted by Leo Laporte. This one is in the same format as This Week in Google, but covers a broader spectrum of tech items and usually has a stellar rotation of guests.
• This Week in Startups
  Jason Calacanis is one of my favorite entrepreneurs and his regular rotation of startup guests that he interviews are quite wonderful.
• You Look Nice Today
  From the site: “You Look Nice Today is an audio-based Journal of Emotional Hygiene, staffed by lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies (Merlin Mann).”
  Basically it’s just really funny and they deconstruct smart and silly stuff that I also think is smart and silly. Deceptively smart junk food for the mind. The kind of guys I’d like to meet and hang out.
• Chicken Pop Pod
  A local (Asheville North Carolina) podcast about 80’s and 90’s pop culture.

For those of you that want to follow what could possibly be the future of blogging, Dave Winer has been writing about his creation of the nextgen blogging tools. My interpretation is that he wants to allow people to post from one place to multiple destinations, (Twitter, your blog, Flickr, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr, etc) but still be able to pull it all back together into one consistent timeline. It’s interesting to follow the successes and challenges he is encountering in the process. Read this one first, and then this one.

I tweeted this earlier today, but I thought I would share here as well. This is an old post from Jason Calacanis on the “startup depression”. There are some great insights into the ups and downs of startup life, as well as some great motivational advice. I think it’s required reading for pretty much anyone – even if you’re not a tech person. I hope you enjoy it.

Closely related to the Asheville project listed above, I’m working on a great little app for local blogging communities that should be live in a couple months. I’ll give more details as they’re worked out. Updates will be posted to BlogAsheville as well.

Right now this blog is going to primarily be where I blog about tech stuff and keep an updated bio and resume. I will be pulling over old entries from the old Insight blog soon.

Makoviney.com will still be the family blog. In fact, there’s some tech entries there I will move over here as well.

DonMak.com has seen several lives. Originally it was a home for my music and songwriting, but since those items have moved back on the priority totem pole, it’s just a placeholder for now. Six letter domain names are in short supply, so I guess I’ll just hold it for the time being.

Makovision.com will continue to be a more formal place for tech information. Less opinionated and more hands-on tutorials and advice. It will also experience a new layout soon that I am working on, which will provide a simple interface and promote my services for things I’m passionate about, like project management, SEO, writing, and internet marketing.

BloggingMuses.com was once the #1 songwriting blog on the web and has been dormant for almost a year now. It unfortunately fell victim to the same issues as DonMak.com. There’s lots of useful information there, and it still generates a little revenue, so I’ll just leave it online for archival reasons.

I’ll continue to use other third-party services for the time being. I’m finding my Posterous account to be a fun treat now and again when I remember to check back. It’s convenient for posting photos as well, because I can post them to both Twitter and Facebook with my celphone in one fell swoop. I’ve tried other services, but really enjoy it the most. I also enjoy looking over my listening history at Last.FM, which gets scrobbled from multiple places.

I found a fun little item called TweetCloud that does some text analysis of your tweets over a period of time. Here’s mine from the last year. Who knows how long the service will be around, but it was a fun little distraction.

During that nebulous span of time spent worrying about connectivity I did a little poking around. I began worrying about the whole waiting for my insured replacement thing. Then I got to wondering if I should just upgrade from my Blackberry Curve (which I still love) to the lusty Droid I’m looking for (sorry bad and overtly obvious Star Wars reference). Then I started wondering about cel phone plans, data plans, minutes, extra features, etc.

So I perused the Verizon site, looked at some gadget sites and gleaned more information about the Droid, it’s features, and possible future iterations. During that time it became overwhelmingly clear to me that Google’s ultimate goal is free cel/data connectivity everywhere, and cel phone carriers should be worrying about it RIGHT NOW.

One indicator coincidentally is an area most of us in the tech field refer to when attempting to predict trends – the automobile industry.

The other day I was watching Antique Roadshow and someone brought in a set of third party armrests for a Model-T Ford. Third party armrests you say? Yeah. It turns out when the automobile industry exploded globally, a ton of third party companies sprang to life around it. Some of these became huge companies that are still around today, offering aftermarket parts and accessories. Other companies disappeared when the Goliath automotive industry began incorporating their third party accessories into their new automobiles at no additional charge.

What I think we will see in the future is many large companies being swallowed by Google offering competing services for free. They have already shown a propensity for doing such a thing with the free GPS functionality incorporated into the new Droid OS.

The free Google Voice, plus the recent Gizmo5 acquisition is another fine indicator. Gizmo5 and Google Voice have already worked closely over the last year to make completely free VoIP calls. Unfortunately it required a ridiculous amount of steps and processes to get it to work. I predict Google is going to make this process significantly easier in the short-term. In the long-term I predict it will be completely seamless.

How will Google finance something like this?

Do I even have to say?

With Google’s latest acquisition of AdMob I think the answer is pretty clear.

Advertising.

Some people are skeptical of this. They ask, “How often have you clicked on a mobile phone ad?”

But consider this:

• Apple, Kindle, and others are creating a perception that mobile access doesn’t necessarily have to be “phone only”.
  Many mid-sized and portable devices will continue to proliferate in the market. People will be connected all the time and it won’t just be cel phones.
• Cel phones are increasingly offering a more luxurious browser experience.
  As this continues to be refined and tweaked we will see more opportunities for mobile ad placement.
• The concept of ad placement and clickthru behavior is still evolving.
  I agree with the skeptics to an extent. I have NEVER clicked on a mobile ad. Hell, I’ve never even clicked on an RSS ad in my Google Newsreader. But one thing is clear. The battle for the mobile desktop is on. The computer desktop battle is pretty much over. With the exception of highly specialized programs (like audio workstations and rendering programs) everyone with an application worth having on a standard computer has developed, or is developing a web-based equivalent. And often even a mobile equivalent.

This is just a stream of conscious post with little in the way of supporting facts. It’s not a new thought, since it’s been posited many times before. It just seems so imminent now and I’m excited!

I’ll post more as expand my research.

Update:

Someone asked me how I thought Google could monetize voice phone calls.

As you may or may not know, Google already offers voice ads. As I poked around the web for more information on these ads, I came across this article in the Royal Gazette which posits something similar to what I think would work (and what I would deem acceptable advertising for a free service).

I would love to hear an ad on my free Android phone while placing an outbound call. As far as clickthrus, I would love to have the option of pressing a number for additional options.

“Press 1 to have more information sent to your GMAIL address.”

“Press 2 to have a SMS text message sent to you with more information.”

“Press 3 to have a sales representative from this company contact you during business hours today.”

I would LOVE this! I wouldn’t care if they served ads based my Google Profile, or based on my Google Voice message text matched up to the phone number I’m calling. Whatever.

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