BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • IOS 8 Warning: Look at your Privacy Settings

    Tuesday Update: I was wrong about Apple changing settings: see full Correction and explanation here.   Apple hates Google.  It REALLY hates Google. I have evidence. A few days ago I updated my iPad to IOS8. Today, as I was looking at email, a warning flashed across the device that roughly said: “Google is sharing…

  • Notes from Bergen

    Our two most precious currencies are time and attention.  Money, our more conventional currency, helps to focus attention and to make us chary of how we spend our time. I write this sitting in Chaos Coffee, perched at the edge of the University of Bergen campus and a block from Nygård Skole where W, my…

  • Is Netflix moving away from binge viewing?

    American culture’s long nightmare has ended. Breath can release from empurpling faces across this mighty land: we now know Chelsea Handler’s next move. This morning, Variety broke the story: “Netflix Announces Chelsea Handler Talk Show to Debut in 2016: Comedienne to create new talk-show format and specials for streamer, after seven-year run on E!” How…

  • Journey Back, Journey On: Watching my son rediscover a comic book 4 years later

    Saturday morning. Mom’s at yoga. Dad’s puttering downstairs. 13-year-old Big Sis is hibernating — those pesky teenagers. What’s an almost-9-year boy old to do? That’s my imagination of what W, my son, was thinking after I shushed him for the fifth time when he was playing in the open area right next to where his sister’s puberty-induced coma went…

  • From the Archive: Why does “on demand” feel so… demanding?

    A kind tweet today from my friend David Daniel reminded me of this post, first published October 1, 2006. A look through my site found it a casualty of a domain transfer, but the always-useful Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive brought it back from the dead. Original version (with original comments) can be found…

  • 2 Kinds of Wearables: Info display vs. creation, and how they work with time

    Note: I’m keynoting about wearables at the Brand Innovators Fashion Week event on Friday, February 14, 2014.  The kind folks at Brand Innovators have published this piece as a white paper. You can learn more about the event and download the white paper here. People talk about wearable computers in one lumpy category, but doing…

  • Short post about “My Facebook Movie” — from Charming to Cloying in 21 hours

    The first person I saw share “My Facebook Movie” was Terry Kawaja, 23 hours ago as I write this short post.  I clicked.  I smiled. I shared mine a few minutes later. Then I looked at those of two friends and stopped. This morning I saw that my wife had shared hers, so of COURSE…

  • UP, UP and away… How a wearable computer changed my brain

    Old dogs can learn new tricks.  So can people young and old.  Behavior is metamorphic, although we seldom recognize that plasticity in the moment.  Instead, we think the world changes while we stay the same, that our children are less responsible than we were at their age but that we threw crazier parties.  We think…

  • “Future Tweets: Amazon knocks out Ticketmaster” now live on Medium

    My latest Medium post — “Future Tweets: Amazon knocks out Ticketmaster” just went live on Medium.  Here are the first few paragraphs: After my eight year old son accidentally set the clock on my computer forward things got weird on Twitter. Tweets had the time signature from 2019 complete with links, but when I clicked…

  • Two Reasons iCloud Sucks

    I’m an Apple user and ordinarily a happy one, but iCloud is an abject failure. Here are two (of many) reasons why. Reason #1: You can’t get there from anywhere intuitive or convenient. Apple insists that you access your iCloud files either through the application or through a browser.  But I might not want to…