No one knows that better than the American tech market, because we are constantly seeking things for free. The irony is that our constant search for free downloads, free games and free updates — sometimes to the point of illegally pirating tech — is what artificially drives up the prices we pay for that tech. If not for the billions lost through tech piracy, software, games and apps would probably cost a lot less than they already do.

But let it not be said that corporate America is ready to do away with the free tech lunch. According to Juniper Research, a tech marketing analyst group, advertising will be the magic wand that app-makers will wave to keep consumer costs down.

According to Juniper’s report, revenues for app makers from in-app advertising will hit $2.4 billion by the end of the year. By 2015, that figure will soar to $7.1 billion.

In-app advertising is viewed as a win-win because it enhances the revenues for app makers at the same time it makes an app a lot less expensive for consumers. Mobile users are increasingly less apt to buy apps for their devices when so many are available for little to no money at all.

But here’s the rub. While consumers like free or cheap stuff, they don’t like ads. According to Nielsen Research, the folks responsible for tracking TV ratings, more than half of all DVR owners fast forward through commercials when they watch recorded shows. Consumers don’t like ads, so it will be a balancing act for manufacturers and consumers to figure out where the tipping point will be. How many ads, and how intrusive the ads are, may convince consumers to go to a higher-priced app of a similar style in order to avoid the advertising.

Here’s what Juniper’s Charlotte Miller had to say about it.

“Mobile advertising gives marketers the chance to reach consumers on a more personal level than any other type of advertising,” Miller said. “Creating immersive and entertaining experiences to attract the attention of the consumer is essential for marketers wanting to take advantage of the massive increase in app usage.”

And she does have a point. We may not like ads that much, but we love the funny ads, or the interactive ads, or the ones that offer us chances to win prizes by videotaping vicious pranks we play on our roommates. American Express did a very successful, if not costly, campaign a few years back involving hybrid live-action/animated commercials for its cards starring Jerry Seinfeld and Superman. The commercials teased a longer version of the commercial on the AMEX site, and site visits quadrupled over normal levels.

So, keep an eye on your apps as time marches on. And check out the ads. If the app-makers follow the analysts’ instructions, you might like what you see.

Now, it was trippy enough for me when I was a kid watching Star Trek use their wireless communicators, only to grow up and have a smartphone that I can actually use to make a video call. But now, some deep sea researchers are suiting up in a big way, and it makes me feel like a kid again. They are approaching the exploration of the sea the same way NASA approaches the exploration of space.

Now, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the ocean covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, yet more than 95 percent of the underwater world remains unexplored. I love that little factoid. That’s why the SeaOrbiter was created.

The SeaOrbiter is a marine research vessel created by French architect Jacques Rougerie, and it mirrors the kind of self-contained ocean laboratory that has been depicted in science fiction for more than a century. It’s like a Starship Enterprise designed to go where no one has gone before, only underwater.

It’s a half submarine/ half sailing ship hybrid that was created to observe the underwater world without creating a man-made mess out of the habitat it was designed to study. It’s 58 meters tall, and rather than being propelled by engines, it will simply drift with the ocean’s currents, with 18 people living on board the special pressurized cabins, not unlike astronauts on the space shuttle.

I could describe more of it to you, but the Web site does a much better job that I could have:

SeaOrbiter is a new human adventure dedicated to the Planet.

It is part of the history of the great explorations of our universe led by illustrious predecessors and great adventurers such as Jules Verne, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jacques Piccard …

It also constitutes a new planetary challenge.

Its purpose is to foster the emergence of a new relationship between man and the sea by the awakening, awareness and action of all to meet tomorrow’s every requirement for a future based on the precepts of sustainable development, particularly related to the sea.

Joining the SeaOrbiter in thus:

• Participating in the great adventure of human exploration in the 21st century
• Boarding to explore the last frontier on earth
• Recognizing that human survival depends on preserving the oceans
• Meeting the global challenge for a better understanding of this universe still widely unknown
• Living under the sea 24 hours a day over long periods at the very heart of the oceans
• Residing in a nomadic underwater home wandering amidst the mightiest of gardens: the ocean
• Allowing better commitment from the younger generations with regard to the planetary challenges of tomorrow
• Promoting awareness for sustainable integration of the ocean in our attitudes and behaviors to come

Sailing with the SeaOrbiter is moving from:

• Discontinuous observation to continuous observation of the underwater world
• Erratic intrusion to a perfect symbiosis with the marine ecosystem
• Passive observation to proactive monitoring of the ocean
• Complex oceanic penetration to easy and permanent access to the underwater world
• A linear approach to the ocean to a real three-dimensional understanding of it
• The remote maritime adventure to a network of sentinels serving the Blue Planet

SeaOrbiter hence allows:

• Implementation of a change in relationship between man and the ocean
• Development of a planetary educational plan concerning the oceans
• Establishment of an international scientific research and technological programs
• More sophisticated understanding of the mechanisms linking the ocean and the earth’s climate
• Testing of human behavior and ability to live in space related underwater extreme environment
• Emergence of new vocations and new expertise
• Production of interactive multimedia programs accessible to all

Is this a cool time to be alive, or what?

Of course, nothing eventful happened on New Year’s Day, except for an epic hangover.

But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some tech blunders over the years that weren’t real whoppers. Technology is a very detail-oriented process, and when you skimp on it, or go on the cheap, you usually wind up getting what you pay for. Here are some examples:

Houston, We Have a Problem — In 1962, Mariner 1, the first U.S. spacecraft sent to explore the planet Venus, went off-course shortly after launch because of an error in its guidance computer program. The error was small: a wrong punctuation character in one line of code. The result was large: instead of going to Venus, Mariner 1 went into the Atlantic Ocean. Disappointed Venusians have been inconsolable since.

I Want That Click Back! — Juan Pablo Davila worked for the Chilean government-owned Codelco Company. In 1994, while trading commodities via computer, Davila accidently typed “buy” when he meant to type “sell.” After realizing his mistake, he went into a frenzy of buying and selling, ultimately losing approximately .5% of the country’s gross national product. His name thereupon became  a verb, “davilar,” meaning “to screw up royally.”

Tech Support for Spies — US Intelligence officials recently released reports on some of the snafus in the Russian spy community. In one instance, a secret agent needed a replacement laptop. In order to get it, he had to first send it to Russia via Rome by a courier who changed passports along the way, then returned to the United States — a process that took three months. Apparently the machine received custom modifications while in Russia. When it was delivered to the spy who would use it, he was told that if he found any problems, they could be taken care of in six months. And I get cheesed if I have to wait 10 minutes on hold.

Steve Jobs Said You’re Doing It Wrong — When the iPhone 4 got released back in 2010, there were a number of reports that if the metallic ring around the phone is blocked, signal will be minimal. This resulted in a number of people attempting to contact Apple to find out what the problem was. The result was a tweet from Apple’s Steve Jobs who seems to tell the brave gadget fan to “Just avoid holding it in that way.”

Don’t MESS With My Games! — Sony admitted being hacked into and losing over 100 million PSN users’ personal details in 2011, even going as far as to offer free game downloads.

The problem was so large that Sony offered everyone affected two free games download from a list. The PlayStation Network still hasn’t completely recovered for this astronomical blunder. To this day, Sony still has no idea where the data went. I have this image of Bill Gates sitting in his bunker, wringing his hands and shouting, “Fools!”

So, the next time your system crashes, don’t feel so bad. Even the big boys break their toys, sometimes.

Now, that’s not to say that the couple have been without their relationship issues. The anonymity granted to users of the Internet has been a problem since Day 1. Using a screen name to protect one’s real identity has been blamed as the root cause of everything from Internet stalking to cyber-bullying and just about every rude behavior that exists in between.

In some Internet communities, the poor conduct anonymity enables is enough to turn people off and prevent them from logging on, and some sites are getting wise to it (finally!).
That’s why YouTube is starting to transform its user interface with regard to the comment sections that reside below their millions of online videos. Tired of the rudeness, profanity and divisive behavior typical of the open comment sections, YouTube is introducing the concept of users being identified not by their screen names, but rather, their real names.

According to Wired, Dror Shimshowitz, head of product at YouTube, recently revealed, “We’re working on some improvements to the comment system, so hopefully we’ll have an update on that in the next few months.”

Well, some of those changes are starting to take place.

When you comment on a YouTube video now, a window will pop up with the title “Start using your full name on YouTube,” which will prompt you to login to your Google+ account and use that account as your YouTube identification.

Now, let’s say you don’t want to do that. You can still refuse, but then a second prompt will pop up and ask you “Are you sure?” If you click that you are sure, you are further prompted to write an explanation of why you don’t want to use your real name. How’s that for pushing the issue?

Now, I imagine some of the reasons they get are reasonably ridiculous, such as “I work for the government” or “I am the wind — the wind has no name,” but the reality of it is that YouTube is simply trying to reduce the ability of people to act the fool on their dime and their servers.

But the new move toward making people put their names next to their comments harkens back to the days when the only way you could share your opinions with people was if you put your name next to your words. Before the Internet, a newspaper’s Letter to the Editor’s section was the only place you could sound off to a public audience. In those sections, it was required that you signed your real name, and many newspapers to this day will actually verify that the person who signed the letter is the one who actually wrote it and sent it in.
But the Internet is a bastion of freedom, if not outright anarchy. I have heard many use the analogy that the inmates are running the asylum, but the truth is that no one really runs anything.

The community of opinions on the Internet is more like a force of nature without any rhyme or reason. It’s just there and will always be there as long as people have points of view to share.

But there is a genuine ethical drive with YouTube’s new interface for comments. They aren’t forcing people to reveal who they are, but they are trying to make people think. Would you have written what you’re about to post if everyone who read it would know who you are? Are you willing to stand behind your words? Would you say what you are about to post to someone’s face in person?

Some will answer no because they legitimately fear recriminations from others because the substance of their opinion is unpopular. However, that’s not who YouTube had in mind when they created this interface. My bet is that they are targeting Internet trolls, those nameless, faceless dipsticks who use rude, boorish behavior as a way to stir up the pot and amuse themselves at the expense of others.

Since the debut of the iPod, Apple has found a way to debut a new product almost every holiday season that has people lining up at the Apple store every year. It looks like this year will be no different.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Apple will be presenting a smaller sized iPad, currently being referred to as the iPad Mini, which will sport a screen smaller than 8 inches. The current iPad is about 9.7 inches, and has not seen a screen size change since its launch. The souces said that Aple was working with LG on the display and has signaled its manufacturing partners that they want to have the first shipments ready at the end of the third quarter of this year.

Bloomberg Business News reported that the smaller and cheaper iPad might be announced in October. Other industry analysts believe that the iPad Mini will likely retail at around $199, the same price as the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 tablet.
n June, has a larger 10.6-inch display, but pricing has yet to be announced. Windows division president Steven Sinofsky said the device will be “priced like comparable tablets.”
Surface is also expected to debut on store shelves this fall in time for Christmas.

Now, I don’t want to be a spoilsport, because I love new tech probably more than most. However, I just want to point out that it’s not like there is a lack of wireless tech out there.

Let’s see, we currently have:

Laptops — Still the poison of choice for business and personal use.
iPads — The more fully featured version of the modern tablet that is becoming the standard for high-end personal and business use.
Tablets — Though the main difference between the basic tablet and the iPad is the operating system, Apple’s suite of cloud-based tools is more comprehensive than the Galaxy and the Nexus, though both Android and Google are a very close second with their firmware.
iPhones and Smartphones — Am I the only one who is befuddled by the fact that making a call seems to be a secondary function of the smartphone. I mean, sure, you can take photos, trade pics, download and listen to music and text until your thumbs are the size of cucumbers, but doesn’t anyone want to talk on the phone anymore?

I thought it was interesting that one of the first TV ads to debut the iPhone featured a video-call, where both callers could see each other. Very futuristic, but it doesn’t take into consideration the reality of the modern phone call. If we’re at the office, that’s fine, but if we’re home, do we really want people to see us unshowered, unshaven and in sweatpants? Nice feature, very cool — I probably would never use it.

But this holiday season, we hop back on the rollercoaster again. For all those people who couldn’t wait for a smaller iPad and bought a Kindle or Nexus, I’m truly sorry. But don’t feel obligated to buy an iPad Mini. Next year, Apple will make something else you can’t live without.

And I’ll probably be one of the first to buy it.

According to Trend Micro, a maker of antivirus protection for computers and other devices, Android malware attacks are growing every month, and they are about to get downright catastrophic.

The firm said at the start of 2012 that it had found more than 5,000 malicious applications specifically created to hammer Google’s Android mobile operating system. However, in recent months, that figure has swollen to nearly 20,000, but that’s not the worst of it.

By the end of the third quarter of this year, Trend Micro estimates that the figure will be above 38,000 in malware attacks. By the holidays, when everyone is buying smartphones as gifts, the number of malware attack programs will be in the 130,000 range.

Trend Micro called it a Malware Pandemic, dwarfing any kind of malware trend it has seen in the mobile space before. Now, keep in mind, Google Play — the giant’s new online games platform that launched as a companion to Google’s other cloud apps — has already been tapped by malware purveyors as a favorite hangout. In addition, Trend Micro went on to report that more than a dozen malicious apps for the Android were downloaded more than 700,000 times before Google saw fit to remove them from the platform. Now, these weren’t just annoying pieces of backlinks to Web sites. Some of the malware is pretty nasty in what it does: some steal data, some use your GPS device to track your mobile device, and some simply throw ads at you. Some of the malware programs can configure your phone to ring premium rate numbers and even worse, steal your personal data right from your phone. So, for Google to be creating another seemingly safe haven for malware makers, it’s going to amount to a big fat black eye in the industry by the time the buying season rolls around.

So, from bad to worse — Android users make up more than 50 percent of the mobile market share, according to ComScore.

Here’s what Micro trend’s research director had to say about it:

“The growth in Android malware demonstrates sustained and focused criminal interest in the mobile platform and particularly in the Android operating system,” said Rik Ferguson, Trend Micro’s director of security research and communications.

So, let’s be careful out there. If you don’t need a new app for anything on your Android, don’t download anything for the time being until Google has this all sorted out.

Or, you could just get an iPhone. Yeah, I’m a MAC nerd, but I’m just sayin’.

It was an IBM compatible PC with 64K of RAM and a whopping 40 megabyte hard drive. Oh, and it had a 300 baud modem. And if I wanted to upgrade my RAM to 128K of RAM, I would have to pay $300 just for the memory chip, and another $75 per hour to have someone install it (if I didn’t just do it myself).

Today, if you want up to 7 gigabytes of free memory, all you need is the Internet and the Cloud.

That’s why Google has now entered the online storage war, started by services like DropBox and Microsoft Skydrive, with their new service Google Drive. The offering offers you as much as 5 gigabytes of free storage space, but then you can upgrade to a premium membership that costs you some money, but provides upwards of 50 gigs of Cloud-based memory.

It stacks up right in the middle in comparison to Dropbox (which provides 2 free gigs) and Skydrive (which sports a full 7 gigs for free), and since it’s just been released, I haven’t had a chance to test-drive it, yet.

The way these services work is that they let you store any file on the Cloud as if it were a folder on your hard drive. The only difference is that it is stored on Google’s servers. So, if you ever get the blue screen of death on your computer, your files are safe on Google Drive and accessible from any computer with an Internet connection (which these days is pretty much all of them).

Now, Google is no stranger to the Cloud, having launched Google Play, a cloud storage service for music and movies, and Google Docs, a cloud service for the company’s own suite of Microsoft Office replacement software.  However, Google Drive is a stake in the ground that they want a piece of the Cloud money being gobbled up by DropBox and Microsoft.

Dropbox has some unlimited plans with its professional service, but unlimited space costs about $795 per year. It’s a little expensive for the static users, but if you need scalable solutions for a large enterprise, it might just be the way to go.

Otherwise, if you give Dropbox only $100 a year, you’ll get about 50 gigs, about half the size of a standard OEM hard drive on a laptop these days. Meanwhile, Microsoft Skydrive only wants $50 per year for 100 gigs of space, double that of Dropbox.

The Google pricing for business services is below, with the prices falling over and under some of the competition, depending on what you’re looking for.

So, why keep buying memory sticks or upgrading your hard drive? The Cloud is here to stay, and depending on how much you’ve got to store, it might be a very cost effective way to keep your data safe.

The cake is in the oven.

Spy phrases can be fun, and you can make them mean anything. In fact, “John has a long mustache” was a real code phrase, one of many broadcast to the French resistance on the eve of the D-Day landings and all meaning the same thing: Invasion within 24 hours.

But we wouldn’t want to be forced to speak in code on a daily basis, but a recent move by Skype might have some folks rethinking that concept.

The company that is known for making video voiceover IP calling available over the Internet has recently made a major change in the way it routes calls through their system. The company is now routing calls through central servers called supernodes, instead simply facilitating calls through the usual Internet hubs. The change is rumored to have been made after being prompted by the U.S. government.

“Reportedly, Microsoft is re-engineering these supernodes to make it easier for law enforcement to monitor calls by allowing the supernodes to not only make the introduction but to actually route the voice data of the calls as well,” Tim Verry, from the website ExtremeTech, wrote recently. (Supernodes are third-party computers that act as a sort of directory service for routing calls.)

“In this way, the actual voice data would pass through the monitored servers and the call is no longer secure. It is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack, and it is made all the easier because Microsoft — who owns Skype and knows the keys used for the service’s encryption — is helping.”

Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist who sits at home trying to hack government sites while wearing pyramid hats made out of aluminum foil, but I can see where this development might open up some interesting scenarios. For instance, let’s say you have a name that matches one of the hundreds of thousands of names on Homeland Security watchlists, kind of like all those babies and octogenarian grandmothers who wind up being detained by TSA at the airport. Now, let’s say you have Skype and relatives in a foreign country, like India or Pakistan, and you use Skype to contact them because it’s cheaper than international long distance rates. Do you think there might be a chance that your chat about how drunk Uncle Harry got at the family reunion will be misinterpreted as code, and sent to a government cryptographer for deciphering?

I’m not sure, but I doubt the parents of the infant who was detained by TSA saw it coming, either.

Any sense of privacy in the information age is a bit of a fantasy, anyway, but it does chill me a bit when I read some of these stories. Neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights specifically mentions any kind of express right to privacy, but I have to harken back to the words of Benjamin Franklin — “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Marco Arment, the creator of an app called Instapaper — an app that allows users to save Web pages offline so they can read them offline later — reported on his Web site that he was hit by an onslaught of emails this past week by people who had downloaded the latest version of his app but we surprised to watch the app crash as soon as it was loaded.

“Last night, within minutes of Apple approving the Instapaper 4.2.3 update, I was deluged by support email and Twitter messages from customers saying that it crashed immediately on launch, even with a clean install,” Arment wrote on his company’s site. “This didn’t make sense — obviously, Apple had reviewed it, and it worked for them. My submitted archive from Xcode worked perfectly. But every time I downloaded the update from the App Store, clean or not, it crashed instantly.”

Like any good techie, Marco spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what was going wrong. After many hours, he pinpointed the problem: a seemingly corrupt update being distributed by the App Store in many or possibly all regions.

now, Marco wasn’t the only app developer whose microchips were in a bunch over this. The app developer of GoodReader, an iPhone app that is like Adobe’s document reader on mobile device steroids, had a bone to pick. They also sifted through the mess, coming up with a 24-step process to fix the app launching issue.

The upshot is that Apple had the bug fixed for InstaPaper within a few hours of being notified by Marco. However, other apps were still suffering launch issues far beyond that point. The issue at hand seems to be the makings of a perfect storm — too many apps being developed for key devices, and firmware updates not being able to keep up, or being released without proper quality assurance testing.

This is a problem for consumers, because we have already bought into the indispensability of our handheld electronic devices. Hardware manufacturers work to make them incredibly functional and convenience, while app developers keep coming up with more mission critical tasts that we can accomplish with them. In some cases, they are absolutely critical to our being able to do business. For instance, a new credit card clearing app on the iPhone is now in wide use on convention floors, enabling vendors to accept credit cards without unwieldy rented credit card machines. Imagine having a line full of customers at a convention and not being able to process their payments because of a software issue. It’s not a pretty sight.

So, there needs to be changes on both sides of the fence.

Manufacturers like Apple need to pay much closer attention to updates, to ensure that they actually enable — instead of disable — new apps. App developers need to be careful not to move too fast. We want them to move fast, make no mistake, but not so fast that the firmware updates aren’t left sitting in the dust calling “Wait for me!”

And consumers — we need to wait a little longer before downloading the hottest, newest apps, until bugs like this have an ample opportunity to work themselves out. You wouldn’t marry someone on a first date (unless you were in Vegas), so don’t link a mission critical business function to a phone app until you are sure that it is up to carrying the load.

According to a study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 65 percent of Internet users and tech experts believe that by the year 2020, most people will have adopted the “mobile wallet” as the way they handle day to day transactions that are typically handled via cash, credit or debit cards.

The good news is that leaving your debit card at home won’t make a difference anymore, but leaving your phone home will.

One of the more popular transaction apps, Google Wallet, is paving the way for this transformation, and the writing is already on the wall, even if you don’t believe the Pew study. According to comScore, a digital marketing intelligence research company, 38 percent of smartphone owners had used their mobile phones to make a purchase of some kind. This coincides with the results of an earlier Pew study that found one-third of all smartphone owners use mobile banking apps on a regular basis.

Of course, what this means for privacy, security and identity theft fears is that in the future, if you lose your cell phone, you’re screwed. Virtually, that is.

Now, I know from my experience with tech trends that one new tech milestone always serves to spawn another one, so we should expect a wide range of quadruple-encrypted smartphone security apps to emerge as the mobile wallet starts opening around the world. In fact, these advances have been emerging for years on the other side of the world. As we in the West marvel at Google Wallet and get a kick out of buying concert tickets with our smartphones, China has already paved the way for a world that might eventually use their smartphones to pay for, well, everything.

In China, the tech has been driven by the lack of infrastructure. Villages and cities are not like the urban areas and suburban areas of the United States, all pushed up next to each other geographically. China’s provinces are spread out across a vast land mass, so the Chinese never really bothered building vast arrays of fiber optic cable or phone lines. The distance between cities — and the vast expanse of nothing in between them — made it almost senseless to try. However, as soon as cell phone technology emerged, the Chinese found it very cost effective to create a network of cell towers and routing stations that literally connected the country in a wireless manner that would seem like time travel to the future for those of us in the U.S.

In China, people pay everything through their cell phone bills — groceries, gas, utilities, bank loans, restaurant tabs — everything. This is their way of life. A cell phone in China is not inexpensive, either. It still costs roughly $150 US, which is what the average worker in China makes in a month. With something that cost prohibitive, it would seem like a grand leap of faith to expect Chinese citizens to buy a phone. It would be like our smartphones costing thousands of dollars, instead of next to nothing, depending on our call and data plans. For them, the cell phone is not a luxury — it is a necessity of life.

So, stand by and set your phone passwords to maximum. The mobile wallet is coming to a smartphone near you. Now all we have to do is figure out how not to leave it on the coffee table when we leave the house. Maybe we should attach it to our car keys.