Geek Gestalt

Thanks to a nonprofit called Samasource, refugees in Kenya are starting to find Internet-based work that can pay them triple what they could earn before.

(Credit: Samasource)

Workers stuck in the world's largest refugee camp are being given a chance to wield a mouse and keyboard as tools for digging their way out of poverty, and in the process, are helping out a series of small American companies looking to be more profitable.

The workers, many of whom have been in the refugee camp in Kenya for years, are toiling at new jobs--in which they do short, simple projects over the Internet--provided to them by an innovative San Francisco nonprofit serving as an intermediary between companies needing an efficient way to get small tasks done and groups of educated but displaced people with few other employment prospects.

The nonprofit, known as Samasource, has built a business model around the idea that there are some projects too small to make sense for American workers to do, yet perfect in scale and scope for refugees and others in the Third World. For example, one Samasource client, a solar panels repairman, engaged the company to get workers to scour satellite photos of American cities for houses with solar set-ups in order to generate potential sales leads.

And while such a dynamic may make some suspect exploitation of the refugees, a group of independent experts say that it is precisely these kinds of tasks--which can pay at least triple the wages of other jobs, assuming there are any--that can begin to help address the tremendous poverty found in so many countries around the world.

According to Leila Chirayath Janah, the founder of Samasource, the company is focusing on bringing jobs to the refugee camps in Kenya, as well as to impoverished workers in Pakistan, Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon, and India. For now, it is looking for American clients who need work done in one of five Internet-based service areas--often small tasks such as comparing texts or looking for copyright violations in pictures. "It's not displacing opportunities for Americans," said Janah, "but expanding what entrepreneurs can do with a limited budget."

Janah explained that to date, the best possible work available to many people in the refugee camp--which has more than 300,000 people living in highly cramped conditions, often for years--is pounding rock in a quarry for 50 cents a day. By comparison, she said, work done for Samasource clients can pay $1 to $2 an hour.

GiveWork, a new iPhone app from CrowdFlower and Samasource, lets users of Apple's hit device help out the Kenyan refugees.

(Credit: CrowdFlower)

On Tuesday, Samasource and a partner, CrowdFlower, released an iPhone application called GiveWork, that aims to make it possible for Americans with time on their hands to assist in making sure that the work being done by the refugees is accurate. The idea, explained Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, is that while many of the refugees doing work through Samasource are educated, there are cultural and language issues that may get in the way of getting each task done perfectly.

And that's where the iPhone app comes in. Biewald said that those using the app can spend some of their spare time doing the same tasks as the refugees, which can help ensure that the final product is accurate.

For example, Biewald said, one task might involve the refugees going through sets of Twitter posts or blog entries about a company, trying to identify which are positive and which are negative. In many cases, the workers in Kenya may be able to make the distinction, but from time to time, there might be something that is difficult for them to categorize. And that's where a helping hand from a user of the iPhone app could be useful.

This application of crowdsourcing to a larger issue is just the latest in a growing number of such approaches being employed in apps for the iPhone and other smart phones. Experts say that such devices allow large numbers of people to apply their excess time to issues or problems larger than their own.

No. 1 goal: Increasing wages

While the GiveWork iPhone app will bring some individual Americans into the equation, the bulk of the effort is being done directly through Samasource by the refugees themselves, many of whom have some education and have been longing for either something to do with their skills, or for the training to learn new ones.

An image of one of the increasing number of computer labs found in refugee camps these days. The labs are used, in part, as places for refugees to work at Internet-based jobs.

(Credit: Samasource)

Janah said that thanks to donations from organizations like the Danish Refugee Council, there are a growing number of computer centers with satellite dishes in the camps in Kenya and elsewhere, and that is quickly bringing the Internet into areas where people until now have largely been cut off from the global economy.

She acknowledged that some may view what Samasource and its clients are doing as exploitation of the refugees but said that far from that, it is a valuable merger of a potent workforce and companies that are able to pay people fair wages for tasks that likely wouldn't be economically viable in the U.S.

"The No. 1 goal is increasing wages," said Janah of the more than 10 years of economic development work she's done in poor countries around the world. "People are locked in situations...with zero jobs available to them. Over 500 workers in our system are eager to get any kind of work. It's the exact opposite of exploitation."

Part of it, she added, is that by giving refugees a chance to do Internet-based work, they are both learning valuable new skills and having a chance to connect far beyond the world they know.

And several experts in economic development contacted for this story agreed that the kind of projects Samasource is delivering into the hands of the poverty-stricken can make a big difference in the workers' lives.

"Internet-based markets actually seem quite promising," said Seema Jayachandran, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford. "If people are remaining at the refugee camps for several years, they can put their (education) to use. They don't have as much mobility as many workers, so in that sense, Samasource may have stumbled onto something powerful."

Further, said Jayachandran, while the Internet makes it possible for workers throughout the world to compete for projects, a company like Samasource may help skilled refugees build the kind of reputation that would make them attractive to American companies for future outsourcing projects. "That's the development goal," Jayachandran said, "that these jobs are going to lift the standard of living of the people" doing them.

Another interesting element of this, she said, is that it can help remove some of the onus of helping the impoverished from aid organizations and create an economic incentive on the part of for-profit companies to do so.

That's an idea with which Michael Maltese, the managing director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, concurred.

Samasource "is challenging the dominant perspective," Maltese said, "which is that poor people...are to be seen as recipients of aid. But the approach that Samasource and other organizations are taking, to provide income-generating work, is, in my (opinion), a more exciting way to look at this."

And because, as Maltese explained, the average time someone spends in a Kenyan refugee camp is 17 years, "any effort to train them to access the global economy is positive."

To be sure, there are plenty of other organizations involved in outsourcing to third-world countries, like China and India. And, said James Davis, a University of California at Santa Cruz associate professor in computer science with expertise in economic development, the effects of years of such employment, in many cases, have done wonders to raise workers' standard of living. But most of the organizations engineering such outsourcing are for-profits, and are sending employment to a higher strata than is Samasource.

A sign crediting the Danish Refugee Council with donating computers for a lab in Kenya.

(Credit: Samasource)

By contrast, Davis said, Samasource has taken the traditional outsourcing model and asked, "'How far can we push this?'" In other words, he said, Samasource is building a bridge between small first-world companies with extra work and the "very bottom" of the economic ladder.

As a result, Davis said, he is "very excited" about what Samasource is doing.

He said that while other efforts, such as Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, have come along to distribute very small tasks to those willing to work for minimal amounts, people in places like Kenyan refugee camps are excluded because they don't have American bank accounts.

Davis also said there are precedents that show that what Samasource is trying can work. He pointed both to Txteagle, an effort by entrepreneur Nathan Eagle to get the millions of Kenyans with mobile phones to do small SMS-based tasks for money, and to reCaptcha, the effort to massively distribute to Internet users the task of deciphering jumbled words from scanned books.

But what Samasource is trying, Davis said, is different. The goal there, is "reaching (out) and trying to understand the bottom of the bottom."

Some day, Davis added, bigger organizations will come along and figure out how to bring first-world dollars into the hands of those at the economic bottom rungs. But that is a ways off.

Now, he said, "you need the charitable organizations (like Samasource) to go and source out how everybody is going to benefit all the way down."

On the left is the BGAN mobile satellite modem CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman used to get online from the middle of a national forest in Wyoming during Road Trip 2009.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

LAKE GRANBY, Colo.--The question was: is it possible to set up a functional workspace deep in the wilderness?

That's what I set out to do, as one of my last goals of Road Trip 2009. I planned on driving well into the mountains of southern Wyoming to see if I could get some work done far from any modern communications infrastructure.

To that end, I ended up driving south from Rawlins, Wyo., and headed into the Sierra Madre mountains, not far from the Colorado border. However, the campground there that I had intended to try out had been stripped bare of any trees as part of a program to try to manage a pine beetle epidemic that has plagued millions of acres of forest throughout the West.

Hoping for some shade, I abandoned the Sierra Madres and drove east, where not that far away are the Medicine Bow mountains. After trying out a few campgrounds, I settled on a wonderful, small U.S. Forest Service campground called Lincoln Park, where I was able to snag a sweet little shady spot alongside a creek.

The real question, though, was whether it had a clear view of the southeastern sky. That would be crucial for using the Inmarsat BGAN satellite modem I was depending on for getting online. Other parts of my experiment, including being able to print wirelessly with the HP Officejet H470 printer I was testing out (see video below), didn't require any particular kind of location, but if I had any hopes of being able to do research or file stories, let alone photographs, I'd need to be able to get online.

Cell service in the forest?
My first attempts at using the BGAN at Lincoln Park didn't go well. Despite there being a small stand of trees just to the southeast of me, the device seemed to indicate it was getting a strong signal. Strong enough to get online, at least. And at first, it did connect, albeit only enough to run an instant-message application. I couldn't get it to load a Web page, access e-mail, or do anything requiring any real bandwidth.

I was a little panicked because I had a deadline to meet and wasn't sure what to do.

Bemused at seeing a camper pounding away at a computer, a pack of tech gadgets nearby, the campground host came by to see what I was doing. When I told him, and said I was having trouble getting online, he pointed out that only about three miles away was a small bar and grill with Wi-Fi. It was after 9 p.m., so it was closed, but I decided to see if I could grab a little of the place's signal.

It turned out to be called The Place, and while they were closed, I got permission to sit in their parking lot and use their Wi-Fi. So for that first night, I was able to get my story and photos out, despite the frustratingly slow speed of the connection.

When I got back to camp, I was quite tired, so I retired to my tent. I pulled out my iPhone to set an alarm for the morning, and as I did, I noticed it had a signal. Indeed, I was able to make a phone call right from my tent in the middle of the forest. Who knew?

In fact, I was awakened the next morning by the phone ringing, a wholly unexpected development.

Getting BGAN working
Things were a little more relaxed now, as they should be in the woods. But I still had work to do, and assuming that I wasn't going to be able to get the BGAN to work, I drove back to the bar and grill and this time sat down inside and worked for a couple hours. However, this was definitely not what I had wanted out of this experiment.

I went back to the campground and, taking advantage of the cell phone service, I called my contact at Inmarsat to see if there was something I should be doing differently to get the BGAN working. We went through a series of diagnostics, but everything seemed like it was correct. The one thing I should do differently, he said, was try connecting BGAN to my computer while the laptop was shut down.

The advantages of working in the wilderness: stunning views of the Rockies, as seen from Lake Granby, in Colorado.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

I tried that from a picnic table not far from my site--this one had a clear view of the southeastern sky--and voila! There was the Internet. It wasn't as fast as I had hoped, but it worked, and I was able to get done most of what I needed to.

Another part of the experiment was to see if I could make phone calls from the forest using the Iridium 9555A satellite phone I had with me. Frustratingly, this really seemed inconsistent, just as it had been earlier in the trip when I'd tried to use it. I've used Iridium sat phones on previous Road Trips, so I wondered if I was doing something wrong. But I had a very clear view of the southern sky, the antenna was up and the signal seemed to go in and out. I got a call through, but it was not an ideal experience.

Moving on to Colorado
I had wanted to try this mobile office experiment in a couple of different places, so I set out in search of another campground. After a wonderful drive through Rocky Mountain National Park, I ended up on a hilltop at a campground overlooking Granby Lake. Tall Rocky Mountain ranges were visible in every direction, and the lake itself was absolutely stunning.

But true wilderness this was not. For one thing, I had four bars of Verizon's EV-DO signal. That meant that I could sit at my campsite and work without having to deal with any potential BGAN problems. Not that I had any when I tried out BGAN again, just to make sure I really knew what I was doing with it.

Still, I was fully off the grid. Well, as off the grid as you can be and still have enough power to last for a couple of days of rather heavy computing needs. And that meant that at Lake Granby, and in the Wyoming wilderness, I had had to plug my various devices into the Audi Q7 TDI I've been driving on Road Trip to recharge.

Ultimately, though, I'd say that while there were some false starts and some cheats--relying on a bar and grill's Wi-Fi isn't really the same thing as setting up a mobile office in the woods--the experiment was a success. I proved (to myself, at least) that it was possible to work deep in the woods.

And while I'd rather have been relaxing that whole time, I had work to do. But it was nice to be among the trees and creeks and lakes for a few days instead of in motels and on the road.

Click here for the entire Road Trip 2009 package.

A scene from early in Road Trip 2009, when CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman was charging up all the gadgets he'd brought along.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

RAWLINS, Wyo.--After staying in motels for 31 straight days, I'm taking Road Trip 2009 into the woods.

It's not that I'm going to stop filing stories and pictures. It's that I'm taking this opportunity both to (mostly) get away from people for awhile, and to see just how nimble my little collection of tech and communications gadgets makes me as a reporter.

So I'm heading into Wyoming's Sierra Madre mountains today, intent on hiding away in some little campground to enjoy the wilderness, yet still continue posting new stories and pictures. As such, I'll be porting: an Iridium 9555A satellite phone and Inmarsat's BGAN broadband satellite modem for communicating by phone and Internet; a fully charged MacBook Pro and the battery on the Audi Q7 TDI I'm road-testing to recharge from; a battery-powered and Bluetooth-enabled mobile HP printer to print photos; and a few more things, just for good measure.

Every time I write about bringing technology into wilderness, I get asked why I would do such a thing. The truth is, I would very much like to spend a few days camping with nothing much more for accessories than hiking boots and a good book, but I'm working. Road Trip is a full-time venture while I'm in the field, and so I'm trying, as best as I can, to mix reporting and retreat.

And also, of course, to test the equipment in order to see just how normal a working operation I can set up in conditions that are simply not used to seeing such things. Don't worry, for long stretches, I will turn everything off and be with nature.

I may, however, startle a few camping neighbors and see if they're interested in having photos of them out in the woods live-blogged, and if so, also instantly printing them up glossy photos. Hey, I'm a tech geek, and I write about tech geekery. I can't help myself.

Stay tuned for reports on how this experiment goes, and whether I'm chased out of the woods by tech-hating campers.

Road Trip 2008 included a stop at the Corvette assembly plant in Bowling Green, Ky. Road Trip 2009 will feature visits to factories, as well as to Air Force Space Command, the Badlands, the Firefighters Challenge, and much more.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

Dear readers: I want you. And I want you to stay.

For each of the past three summers, I've spent some time on the road, driving around different regions of the United States, reporting on some of the most interesting destinations I could find, and road-testing some of the coolest gear around. The CNET Road Trip has taken me through 17 states (and one Canadian province) in the Pacific Northwest (2006), the Southwest (2007), and the Southeast (2008).

The trips have been hits, but I have struggled to organically build an audience throughout each journey. Rather, it seems most people have tended to come across a story they liked, read it, and then left.

For Road Trip 2009, which will take me through Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota, I want not just to get you here, but to give you as many reasons as I can to stay. And that, I'm learning, means being much more proactive in keeping you engaged.

To be sure, the heart of what I'll be offering up will be a steady flow of feature stories and photo galleries from places like NORAD, Yellowstone National Park, a unique Mars research program, an innovative Wyoming wind farm, the highest paved road in North America, and much more. But I know there has to be more than that. And the tools at my disposal are powerful, yet complex.

With that in mind, I asked four power social-media users for tips on how to make Road Trip 2009 a regular destination for a sizable audience. And if one thing became clear afterward, it's that I need to step it up and do a lot more personal outreach than I've ever done before.

Very busy days
Not to make excuses for my past lackluster social-media usage, but let me give a little context for how these trips work: Each day, I wake up in a new motel and quickly rush off to an appointment. I spend the late morning and early afternoon reporting, and then usually drive several hours to the next town. I eat something and then I write and process photos for a few hours. Then I go to sleep. Repeat. For several weeks.

Sadly, this hasn't allowed much time for things like meet-ups. But to hear my expert panel tell it, I need to get beyond that, and just embrace meet-ups. Or tweet-ups, if they're organized on Twitter, as many are these days.

"I'm a huge fan of the tweet-up," said Laura Roeder, a social-media consultant. "I just moved to Los Angeles...from Chicago. I've met so many of my friends through Twitter and through tweet-ups."

And despite my limited amount of available time, Chris Heuer, co-founder of the Social Media Club, says tweet-ups don't have to take all that long.

"Say, 'I'm going to be here at this place, from 6 to 7," advised Heuer. "Or have readers come and meet you and (organize the tweet-up) for you."

I also told Heuer that another element of my Road Trips has traditionally involved road-testing a number of high-tech products, and that this year is no different. Among the products I'll have with me this time are an Apple MacBook Pro and iPhone 3G S, a LiveScribe Pulse recording pen, an Amazon Kindle 2, a Verizon MiFi and more. I'll also be driving a "clean diesel" Audi Q7 TDI.

Heuer said that given that, one good way to get people to come out to the meet-ups would be to bring the technology along with me so that people could check out all the gear for themselves.

Of course, not everyone is a big fan of the meet-up. I asked Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin what she thought of them, and she explained that she has tended to skip such gatherings on her many reporting journeys around the world. Largely, it seemed, she didn't feel that meeting up with readers added all that much to the overall experience, though she did say she organized a couple of them in Latin America recently.

Still, it's clear that doing meet-ups is a natural way to energize local audiences--and Heuer suggested that even if it's only local audiences at first, getting them interested in the trip, and the trip's themes, will have a snowball effect as they tweet and blog about coming together with me and other readers.

Among the many tools CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman plans to use to build an audience for his Road Trip 2009 project is Twellow, which allows anyone to search for Twitter users by city.

(Credit: Twellow)

I wondered, though, about how to get people in the cities and towns I'll be visiting interested in meeting up in the first place. And Heuer suggested using sites like Twellow, which allow you to find Twitter users by geography. Then, by interacting with some of the most popular Twitterers in each area, it's possible to engage them in helping to promote a gathering.

To Facebook, or not to Facebook
I wondered if Facebook would be a good way to organize the get-togethers, but found that, despite the social network's incredible success, the experts I talked to were mixed about its utility for this specific purpose.

"I honestly find Facebook a lot less useful than Twitter," said Roeder. "Twitter is much easier for more fluid, instant communications....I tell my (business clients) not to even worry about Facebook. To me, the core difference is that Twitter is all about meeting new people, and a lot of people don't use Facebook that way."

Heuer, on the other hand, said he'd actually turn to Facebook first, since the site's reach can be huge, and it offers specific tools for events. Clearly, the answer is to post meet-ups on both Twitter and Facebook, and hope that the two combined can create an echo effect.

Of course, I'm already using Facebook to some extent. I'm not afraid to admit that I'm a rank amateur when it comes to the massively popular social network. But a couple months ago, I started a Road Trip 2009 fan page. The response has been moderate, but not that bad, given that I haven't posted any new content to the page since then. But that is about to change. This story, for example, will be the first new post there, and every new piece of Road Trip content will appear there, as well.

That is, if I can be disciplined. Heuer cautioned against dropping the ball when it comes to utilizing Facebook. "The most important thing there is staying on top of it," he said, "and not dropping it after you start."

I agree. And we'll see how it goes.

Finding themes
One of the first people I talked to about expanding the reach of Road Trip was the futurist Jerry Paffendorf. An organizer of the Metaverse Roadmap Project, a very early Electric Sheep employee and generally a visionary thinker, Paffendorf asked me how I thought all the various destinations on the trip were tied together.

To date, I'd been thinking of the trip as concentrating on three major themes--environmental and energy research, military and defense, and America's natural wonders.

But Paffendorf said I needed to find a way to tie everything together, and that perhaps turning to my readers to help with that would be a good way to build an audience. He suggested asking readers, via the Road Trip blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, to suggest questions to ask the people I interview at each destination. That, he said, might create a dynamic where readers begin to feel like they're coming "on the trip" with me. So it's, "We're going to go on the road," not I'm going on the road.

Paffendorf also told me about a really cool project Flickr had done not long ago, commissioning a company called Uncommon Projects to build them a series of bikes complete with cameras that automatically take, geotag, and upload pictures on the go. It seemed like that would be a great addition to the car I'd be driving, especially since I'll be driving through some of the most beautiful country in the United States.

Unfortunately, after talking with Uncommon Projects, I discovered that commissioning something like that would cost several thousand dollars--money I don't have.

What I do have, however, is a bag full of things to give away to readers, things like Flip video cameras, Showtime DVD sets, and a series of video games. I can imagine handing them out to people at meet-ups, or to people who suggest the best things to go visit in a certain town, or maybe who offer the best question to ask my host at a military installation or national park. Or maybe I can offer a chance to have your picture posted on my blog, live, with awe-inspiring natural beauty as a backdrop, far from any normally available Internet signal. I want to get readers excited, and I want to give back to them for their attention.

Boing Boing's Jardin, for her part, said that when that popular tech culture blog has given away things like iPhones or iPod Touches, people have indeed gotten excited about the contests.

"People get jazzed about cool stuff," Jardin said. "But it's not just the device that's going to get them excited. The device is part of it, but so is the experience....(Giveaways) will pique their interest, but you have to have other stuff going on."

And, dear readers, that is something I feel very confident about. I may have a lot to learn about utilizing social media to build an audience, but at the very least, Road Trip 2009 will offer you an intriguing picture of some of the best that America has to offer.

On June 21, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

While it may seem normal to have several Net-connected Macs among a small group of people, this is the first time such a scene happened at the off-the-grid, mountaintop home of CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman's in-laws.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

NICE, Calif.--As a San Francisco-based Internet junkie, I can't count the number of times I've been in groups with almost as many wirelessly connected Mac laptops as people.

So the scene in front of me shouldn't be new: four people, three connected Mac laptops.

But there's something completely novel going on: I'm visiting my in-laws at their off-the-grid, mountaintop house in Northern California, about four hours northeast of San Francisco. And I can say with absolute certainty that this is the first time such a scene has played out here.

How do I know? Because it's been less than two weeks since my in-laws, Tyler and Donna, had Internet installed on their property for the first time--in their case, the only available option was satellite--and it's been just hours since I personally set up their wireless network. In other words, Wi-Fi is a newly arrived house guest, and judging by the concentration on their faces, the occasional smiles, and the superlatives coming from their lips, it's a very welcome one.

For years, my wife and I had been trying to get her parents to cotton to the idea that their lives, at 4,000 feet, surrounded by national forest and steeped in the necessities of growing most of their own food, could be improved by getting online. But they'd gotten by just fine, thank you, for more than 30 years, without even a television.

Now, suddenly, there is a Wi-Fi network set up in their house, and I could see my in-laws' lives changing before my eyes.

For example, Tyler said excitedly to me one morning during my visit that he'd figured out how to use e-mail and the Web to do many of the things that used to require him to stop at the post office and get stamps.

"That's the end of snail mail for me," Tyler told me. And, he added, no more catalogs would be cramming their P.O. box.

Yesssss!

Working so much better now
My wife and I had conveniently--and coincidentally--managed to time our last visit to the mountain with the HughesNet satellite installation. But as I wrote previously, those first baby steps didn't go so well.

Thanks to glacially slow initial download speeds, the unexpected realities of a 200MB daily download limit, and the necessity of loading countless Windows updates onto their 2-year-old, Internet-chaste PC, we had retreated the mountain almost embarrassed by how badly it had gone.

This is the screen HughesNet customers can use to get up-to-date information about their Internet connection.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

So, I set out to make it all better by bringing them a refurbished MacBook, pre-configured at home with everything they'd need for a happy Internet life. I even unhooked my home Wi-Fi network and donated it to the cause.

After a less-than-stellar first attempt to get his in-laws online for the first time from the off-the-grid, 4,000-feet elevation house they've lived in for more than 30 years, CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman and his wife are returning to the mountain this week with a new Mac to help make the process better. And what could be better than a great view to go with your Internet?

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

Could a Mac be what it takes to get my in-laws to love the Internet?

Last week, I had the very rare opportunity to help get my in-laws, who live off-the-grid at 4,000 feet in the middle of a national forest, online for the first time and, my wife and I hoped, to instantly end more than 30 years of their being cut off from media innovations.

As I wrote afterward though, their initial experience was quite a bit less than stellar, mainly due to the vagaries of navigating what seem like fairly restrictive download threshold policies implemented by their satellite Internet vendor, HughesNet: After hitting the download limit of 200 megabytes in one day--which I'm certain we actually didn't hit--the connection slowed to less than 2Kbps.

But there were other problems, too, that had to do with what it takes to make a 2-year-old Windows machine that's never been online safe for play dates with the Internet. And for my in-laws, who had no experience whatsoever with downloading security updates, and XP Service Packs, and virus protection, I can only imagine how daunting it must have seemed. Even for me, a longtime computer user--albeit a Mac loyalist--it was confusing.

While my wife and I were on hand the day Hughes came to install the satellite, we had only that one day up on the mountain to help get things set up properly. But given that we ended up wasting hours trying, and failing, to download those security patches and virus protection packages, we weren't able to get much done before we had to leave. We couldn't even get their new Gmail account working.

But we have a plan. And it involves a computer that simply doesn't require security download after service pack download to be safe online.

Monday, a new (well, refurbished) MacBook arrived at my house, and over the next couple of days, my wife and I are going to load that computer up with as much necessary and fun software (starting with OpenOffice) as we can find, and then cart it back up to her parents' with us later this week. In addition, we're going to bring them an Airport Extreme so that they can use that new computer wirelessly all around their mountaintop property.

After all, while they may not understand the sense of freedom that a wireless Internet connection provides, we hope they will soon realize that sitting on their deck, looking down over the treetops at their stellar view, is a much better place to be online than stuffed into the tiny windowless office where they have their PC.

As for Hughes, after I contacted them last week to comment for the story I was writing, I was told by someone in their public relations department that the company would do what it can to help my in-laws. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but sure enough, the in-laws did get a phone call from someone in tech support, offering to work through any residual issues.

Originally, that call was supposed to happen Monday, but I suggested that they postpone it until Thursday when my wife and I will be back up on the mountain, so that we can help diagnose the problem and describe it to the technician.

That's important since, as I wrote previously, my in-laws don't have anything to compare their online experience to, and therefore would likely have trouble describing exactly what the problem is. But I can: Even before being booted to under-2Kbps speeds for supposedly going over the 200MB download threshold their account allows, the top speed they were getting on their 1.0 Mbps account was about 13 Kbps. Hardly high speed. So, we'll have to see if Hughes can do something about that.

Still, on Sunday, as my wife and I were hanging out, spending a little time online, an e-mail popped into her in-box. It was from the in-laws. And for us, having spent the last nine years working hard to get them to embrace the Internet as a way to stay in touch with us--and the rest of her family--it was a rather big moment.

If you have suggestions of important software that we should put on their new Mac--especially if it's free--please send them to me by Tuesday evening.

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman's in-laws live at the top of a mountain, are off the grid, and have missed the last 30-plus years of innovations in media. On Monday, they got satellite Internet installed. This is the view of their new dish from the deck of their mountain-side house.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

NICE, Calif.--This was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Imagine getting to introduce to the Internet a couple of otherwise-normal 60-somethings who, having lived off the grid at 4,000 feet in the middle of national forest, have missed more than 30 years of media innovations.

That's what I did earlier this week, with my in-laws, Tyler and Donna. They're perfectly nice people. They just have never used the Internet before, haven't watched TV, really, and even their cell phone is turned off most of the time to conserve their limited solar power.

I've been coming to visit them for nine years, and there were countless conversations with them during which my wife and I, both Internet junkies, rhapsodized about its virtues. We gushed about Google. We raved about Second Life. We couldn't stop beating Wikipedia's drums.

We'd get weary nods and, "It sounds great, but we don't really have any use for the Internet."

For my wife and me, that was nothing but further motivation to get them online.

A couple of years ago, we replaced the ancient desktop computer on which they did their accounting with a new PC that we joked was the planet's healthiest Windows machine, having never been anywhere it could meet a virus.

We also began bringing them DVDs, and they fell hard for "The West Wing" and "The Wire." But it was my wife's masterstroke--getting them a Netflix subscription--that probably won them over.

They had no way to manage their Netflix account, so we did it for them. They'd get the movies at their P.O. box, 45 minutes away, watch them, return them on their next supply run, and repeat.

Two installers from HughesNet putting the finishing touches on the satellite dish.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Setting up their queue was beyond surreal. They'd seen nothing. Not "Goodfellas," not "Pulp Fiction," not "Gladiator," "The English Patient," "Traffic," or "Chariots of Fire." Hardly anything. Do you know anyone like that?

The last time we visited, Tyler asked me to find out how much power a satellite dish, a modem, and a wireless router used. He wasn't sure that their power system was up to the task.

It was, though, and last week, as we were getting ready for a visit, my wife said, "By the way, they're getting satellite Internet installed on Monday."

Our incredible toy
I'm a geek, so I don't mind telling you how eager I was to show off our incredible toy. Despite being avid readers, radio listeners, and now movie fans, my in-laws still had no idea that the world was coming to their door. On Monday.

Some friends visited the mountain with us, and they also got excited about introducing my in-laws to the Internet. Over the weekend, we made a list of Web sites everyone agreed they had to visit: Snopes.com, NYTimes.com, NPR.org, BBC.co.uk, Huffingtonpost.com, Google News, PostSecret, Craigslist, Flickr, BurningMan.com, Epicurious.com, TED.com, and others.

But on Saturday night, we asked them what they wanted to explore first. In my mind, it would be something fanciful. Maybe a site about science or history or politics.

"Oh, something about fava beans, I imagine," Tyler said.

On Monday, HughesNet sent two installers, and then, after nine years, it was game on.

In the in-laws' little office, where their PC lives, I sat down to work on getting the machine secured.

We're buying them a Mac, but for now, my eyes were on the prize: the latest Windows security updates. But the connection speed they were getting was painfully slow, around 13Kbps. Windows Service Pack 3 is more than 300 megabytes--more than eight hours of download time away. We had to leave long before that.

I decided to forgo SP3 and instead install AVG, a free antivirus package. But the connection was so slow that the download failed. Twice.

The screen on the computer of one of the HughesNet installers as the satellite Internet connection was being set up for the first time.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

I was embarrassed and frustrated. To diffuse the situation, we decided to turn the focus to picking a Gmail address. They suggested a series of what to any veteran Internet user were obviously unavailable names: Tyleranddonna, Donnaandtyler, Beautifulmountain. Using my MacBook Pro and an EV-DO card, we finally found something.

I also decided to download AVG on my Mac. That, too, was painfully slow--we were at 4,000 feet, far from town--but it worked, and I copied the AVG file to their PC via a thumb drive.

But AVG needed its own updates, and so it went looking for them. I noticed that the download speeds had slowed even further, now to less than 2Kbps.

Slowly but surely?
This was ridiculous. They had signed up for a 1.0Mbps connection, which, I read, promised downloads of more than 500Kbps. They were getting 1Kbps.

I called HughesNet, and a technician told me that the account had surpassed its "Fair Access" limit. It turns out that satellite Internet users get only so much bandwidth per day--in my in-laws' case, 200 megabytes. Go over the limit, you get dial-up speeds for 24 long hours.

The technician told me that there was nothing he could do about it, despite my insisting that there was no way they'd passed 200 megabytes. A supervisor confirmed that he had "no mechanism" to lift the limit for the day, even when I explained that I had to leave soon and that I absolutely needed to finish downloading the security patches before I drove off the mountain.

In the HughesNet pamphlet that had finally lured Tyler and Donna, a footnote I now discovered really concerned me: "Based on analysis of customer usage data, Hughes has established a download threshold for each of the HughesNet service plans that is well above the typical usage rates."

CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman's father-in-law sits at his computer, looking at his Internet connection for the very first time.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

This was alarming, as one of the things my wife and I were most excited about was the idea of her parents being able to . This vision now looked endangered.

"In order to arrive at our Fair Access Policy, Hughes conducted an analysis of HughesNet customer usage and then established a download threshold for each plan that was above average usage rates," Hughes wrote me in an e-mail Thursday. "Certain activities are more likely than others to exceed the daily download threshold, such as continuous downloading or viewing streaming-media content such as audio or video programming."

Users do get unlimited high-speed downloads from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. EST. Long after the in-laws would be watching streaming movies.

This was not good. What worried me more was that even watching YouTube videos might quickly put them over the top. The Hughes e-mail, though, seemed to dismiss that worry: "Activities such as viewing Web sites, checking e-mail, watching short streaming-media presentations, i.e. YouTube, and automatic software and antivirus updates are not likely to exceed the download threshold."

Back on the mountain, I decided that, slow speeds be damned, I was getting them online before my wife and I departed.

So I pulled Tyler over to the PC and sat him down.

This would not be so simple. After all, he had no experience with a browser. He didn't know where to click, or how to enter a URL, or how to tab between fields. There's a huge learning curve here for my wife's folks. They need Internet for Dummies--and now.

We booted up Firefox--I had downloaded it for him, as I would never let Internet Explorer set foot in their house again--to head to Google (see the video below, which evolves slowly).

Starting with the basics
I showed him where to type, and a little while after he typed in "Google.com," he got his first look at the search engine's wonderful, spare home page.

It was a moment of truth: What would be the first thing he would look up? Would it be FDR? The Vietnam War? Barack Obama?

Nope. It was fava beans. He hadn't been kidding earlier.

Before we knew it, Tyler was on EveryNutrient.com, a good site, it seems, to learn about the nutritional value of fava beans.

After a little more browser 101--explaining that words in blue are usually hyperlinks, and how to use the back and reload buttons--we hopped over to Wikipedia. More fava beans.

But things went downhill when we tried Gmail so that Tyler could send his first-ever e-mail--can you remember when you did that? The site wouldn't load. The connection was simply too slow.

My wife and I had built this moment up so much in our minds over the years that we were clearly more excited than her parents. Yet Tyler was frustrated. And that was crushing.

Looking for a graceful way out, we adjourned from Gmail and moved into their living room to talk.

We asked them what they were looking forward to using the Internet for. And again, practicality won. Donna said she wanted to be able to get better fire information than she could on the radio, which makes sense, since they live in the middle of a forest.

I said there were always real-time maps online during fires.

"That's exactly what we want to know," she said.

Tyler added, "That'll be tremendously helpful."

They also said they were excited about investigating the various weather sites, since they are deeply subject to the whims of their environment. And, yes, they expect to spend a lot of time reading up on nutrition.

For my wife and me, it was time to leave. But I felt sheepish.

I had had such high hopes for this experience, and instead, it had been deeply disappointing. I couldn't even bring myself to ask what they had thought about their initial experiences on the Internet.

But it will get better. We'll go back soon to make sure.

During his keynote address at CES Thursday, Ford CEO Alan Mulally--along with several other Ford executives--emphasized that the car giant is interested in being a leader in in-car connectivity.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

LAS VEGAS--Ford on Thursday announced a series of innovations aimed at giving drivers more a higher degree of Internet connectivity as well as a slew of tools devoted to helping them get to where they're going in the most efficient way possible.

The car giant's new initiatives were unveiled as part of CEO Alan Mullaly's keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show here. And while some of the technology Mulally and a series of subordinates discussed was part of Ford's previously announced and available Sync partnership with Microsoft, much was all-new.

Mulally began his talk by touting the fact that Ford is nearing 1 million Sync-equipped cars on the road. Then he set the tone for the keynote by explaining that the company's major technological goal for the near future of its vehicles is to load them with as much connectivity as possible, all in a bid to bridge the gap between drivers' homes and their ultimate destinations.

One surprise early in the address was the unexpected arrival on-stage of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who gave his own keynote talk Wednesday evening here.

Ballmer was really just window dressing, though, for an hour-long advertisement for the latest elements of the Sync program and the ways Ford hopes to bring a never-offline state of existence to the owners of its vehicles.

Highlighting the Sync partnership between Ford and Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, joined Mulally on stage during the keynote. Click on image for more photos.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

"We are a car company," Mulally said, "but we are learning to act like an electronics company."

Connectivity was definitely the watch-word Thursday as each Ford executive to speak talked about a different piece of the puzzle that the company is working on to make sure its customers are always-on.

First up was Derrick Kuzak, Ford's group vice president for global product development. He explained that the company's goal is based on three things: beamed-in connectivity, such as from satellite; brought-in connectivity, such as from drivers' own cell phones; and built-in connectivity, such as dash displays.

And all together, Kuzak said, Ford wants to build a platform for drivers that emphasizes speed, scale and affordability.

Kuzak talked about one innovation the company has been working on at its Virtual Test Track Environment, or Virttex, called MyKey. This, he said, is a technology designed to promote safe driving habits for teenagers by allowing parents to program an ignition key to limit a car's top speed, as well as the volume of its sound system.

Another advance Ford is promising is the ability to synchronize applications from mobile devices like Apple's iPhone with the car. That would mean, apparently, being able to run applications like Pandora, via the iPhone, by using control buttons on the car's steering wheel. Similarly, it should be possible for drivers to get access and manipulate their Facebook or MySpace accounts using voice commands.

Later in the keynote, Jim Buczkowski, Ford's director of electrical and electronics systems engineering, explained how the company plans to incorporate human machine interfacing (HMI) into its cars. The first application of that, he said, would be something called SmartGauge.

So, for example, a driver of a Ford with this feature would find him or herself coached by the system on how to get maximum fuel efficiency out of their hybrid vehicle.

This, of course, is essentially hypermiling, but with an educational assist from the vehicle itself.

Buczkowski also unveiled a futuristic prototype of a car dash that is packed with smart digital features, as well as an avatar companion known as the Emotive Voice Activation (EVA) system.

EVA, Buczkowski explained, would allow drivers to speak voice commands and basically interact with the car, getting intelligent directions--including those between point A and B that are most fuel efficient--as well as recommendations for music appropriate for any given situation and much more.

Much of what was on display Thursday seemed like it wouldn't be ready any time soon. But on the other hand, it was a fascinating glimpse of what is surely just around the corner, not just for Fords but for all vehicles.

And it's interesting to see such advanced technology coming from a company that has seemed in other ways to be anything but ahead of the times.

Still, with a company as large as Ford, there is bound to be some cutting edge thinking, and it was definitely on display Thursday.

One of the first things I did on my Road Trip 2008 project this summer was report on the landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It was great to watch the shuttle land, but I was a bit disappointed I hadn't been able to make it to Cape Canaveral just a couple of weeks earlier to watch the launch.

Well, it turns out that all I would have needed to do to see the launch would have been to fly by. At least, that's how it seems, given a video that's going around the Web right now that purports to have been shot from an Air Canada flight that just happened to pass close enough by Kennedy Space Center for a passenger to shoot video of the shuttle rocketing into the sky.

It's not 100 percent clear that the launch in the video is Discovery, which went up on May 31. But it seems likely, given that that was the last shuttle launch and the video only just went up a few days ago.

Either way, it's a pretty cool video, and one of the things that's compelling about it--other than the fact that it's a space shuttle launch filmed from miles above the ground--is that you can get a very good sense of just how fast the shuttle is going when it blasts off.

Next time there's a launch--this fall, in fact--maybe I'll find out what flights might be in the vicinity at the time. On the other hand, given how hard it can be to book tickets on flights serving popular destinations on impacted dates, I might not be the only one.