$*(&$@ Technology!: When the Future Fails Us

I'm a nerd: grade A, certifiable, techno-whiz type nerd.

I've been building computers and writing software since I was a kid. My fiancée can attest to my late nights spent trying to figure out a complex spreadsheet or learn a new programming language that I want to understand. I think I can't really do my job as an investor well if I can't thoroughly understand the technology I'm investing in. So, my habit is luckily aligned with my best interests.

However, at times—even for someone like me—technology is as much nemesis as friend. Sometimes things just don't work.

It is those days—the ones when I want to toss my phone off a high bridge—which most frustrate me. We're supposedly this super-advanced society, exploring space, heading toward cures for cancer, improving life around the world, and my computer still crashes at least once a day.

But those same days also give me the most hope for the future, because it's in those moments that it's most obvious that we've only just scratched the surface of what's possible. For all we've managed to accomplish in the past few decades, it's but a mere preview of what's to come.

Let me show you what I mean, by way of a few of the most frustrating examples from my holiday weeks, what they can teach us about the potential of a product or a company, and the barriers that stand in front of continued progress.

Catching a Plane to Nowhere

It started like just about every other trip I've taken in the past few years. This time, I was headed to Puerto Rico to do some research on tax incentives, shop for a home, and maybe soak up some of that warm island sun in the process—a helpful bonus, as it was only 8° F. at home.

Three hours before my flight was scheduled to depart, my phone buzzed. The news was bad: flight canceled.

The recorded message from US Airways was much appreciated. I knew my problem, and it even told me how to solve it: call the 800 number. So I did that… but why the message, which rang from the same number, couldn't have kept me on the line and connected me is a puzzle: one that will become a recurring theme in this story.

While waiting on the obligatory hold (a paltry 18 minutes), I popped open Google Flights and determined that every Friday there are at least two alternative flights ahead of my canceled one. I had the rep put me on the earlier of the two, and I dashed to the garage and burned rubber for the airport. My travel mate would meet me there, we established, via that wonderful Bluetooth rig my car came equipped with.

I arrived at the airport, checked in, sat down in the departure lounge, and… that's when technology began to fail me.

Sitting in the airport waiting for the earlier flight (which was now delayed itself), my phone buzzed. One of my apps had sent me a notification. I slid down the drawer, clicked on the notice, and…

According to TripIt—whose premium service I subscribed to a few weeks earlier, knowing that my new island home would require much more air travel of me—my flight was canceled. The original one. Only it had been two hours since I learned that, I was already rebooked, and I had already forwarded my updated flight info to TripIt's service, which added it to my itinerary instead of replacing it. I was apparently going on two flights at once, my digital travel companion thought.

On a lark, even though my problem had been solved with no help from TripIt, I decided to click the "Alternative Flights" button that the app presented to see what my new digital travel companion could do.

It was about 12:30 p.m. at this point, and my replacement flight was scheduled for 1:30 and delayed until 3:00. My connection was scheduled to leave the next airport at 5:30 p.m. The flight options I was presented were:

• 6:00 p.m. departure
• 8:00 p.m. departure
• Next day departure
• And not a single option for the connecting flight it would make me miss!

Not only was the app far too late to help me, my $50/year couldn't even get me software that grasped the concept of a connecting flight.

As the kids say: FAIL.

My experience with TripIt Pro mirrored my previous trial of the same product about two years earlier (I held out hope it had improved, as I am always one to vote for the start-up with a good idea). In retrospect, it's pretty obvious why.

TripIt occupies a market vacuum.

On one side, their key partners have no reason to want to work with the self-styled middle men. Airlines would rather notify you than have to pay TripIt commissions on rebookings. Expedia, Travelocity, even old-fashioned agents have no incentive to support it either—TripIt just disintermediates them too. Google is launching competitive services, as travelers are a prime advertising target (want to know the best restaurants near your hotel? I know a few that would pay to be on that list) and would happily forego those costs, presenting TripIt's partners with a better alternative. No partner will ever jump to make sure TripIt knows things first.

On the other side, TripIt, as a low-cost middle man, has no incentive to really help me.

Even if I'd gotten my notice from TripIt on time, there was still little advantage to having my Pro membership. I'd booked my flight through US Air direct, so I had to change it with them. That's the rule. Had I used Expedia, I'd have needed to use them instead. TripIt had no power to control my experience, and I'd paid them so little they had no incentive to help me. $50 would only cover a few phone calls to an agent who would struggle to help me—which is why they don't offer them.

Had I been able to book my trip with them, it might have been a little different. But they don't offer that service. And if they did, they'd be competing against giants who would not only ignore as they do now, but try to stomp them out.

$50/year and no spot in the food chain leaves TripIt with little to offer someone like me. But, I'd happily pay a specialized agent $1,000+/year to get something like what TripIt offered in theory—a concierge who calls me and takes care of everything for me when travelling goes awry. But that's something no $50 app will ever be able to provide. It's just far too labor intensive.

As it stands now, TripIt "Pro" does little more than send me texts, and leaves me to spend my own valuable time chasing down a solution. Not very "Pro" to me.

So I've cancelled the service and continue to search for a better alternative that will give me—and I'd pay handsomely for it—real proactive help with my travel management. That company would quickly land enough customers and revenue to buy up (or copy) TripIt's useful little itinerary application, and use it as a loss leader for their actually helpful service.

Or maybe TripIt will wise up and realize they are stuck in the mud between markets. There are certainly enough smart investors involved that it should have happened already.

(To add insult to injury, upon returning from my trip and trying to cancel the service, I was greeted to TripIt's oddly unfriendly "no refunds" policy. Gee, thanks for giving me a bad product and then trying to keep my money. A little nudging of customer service fixed that. But these are the times I am glad to work for a company that stands behind its excellent products with unconditional guarantees. Try any of our products, and if you don't think it's worth every penny, just send us an email and we'll refund every penny. That's how it should be done, and be wary of any company who doesn't stand behind what they sell.)

Thankfully, my replacement flight took off in time to catch the connection. In fact I was double blessed, as the connection itself was delayed while we were in air, making for a comfortable stroll to the connecting gate, instead of the usual mad dash.

The final leg even landed an hour earlier than expected, a blessing and a curse I found out, as technology reared the ugly side of its Janus-esque head again.

The plane pulled to the gate, shut off the engines, and sat there waiting for a sky bridge.

5 minutes, no bridge.

15 minutes, no bridge.

30 minutes, still no bridge.

From the tiny window in the exit door at the feet of my bulkhead seat, I could see what the increasingly agitated flight attendant could too. Someone at the end of the bridge waving their arms wildly. Trying to get the attention of the captain.

After about 45 minutes the captain came on the intercom and told us what one of the passengers behind us on the plane had already pointed out, sheepishly. The guy with the key to operate the skybridge, the airport supervisor, was on our plane. But, they couldn't bring out the skybridge to get it from him. (I kid you not, this really happened.) The only other key was a few hours away apparently, on the ring of the assistant airport supervisor, sleeping the day away at home after long night shift.

FAIL.

Why? Human error, sure. Pure idiocy, yep. But ultimately, it was rooted in using technology to solve problems that don't exist.

After an hour of laughable ineptitude on the part of dozens of ground and air personnel, they finally figured out a solution:

• Drive one of those catering cars with the scissor lifts up to the rear door of the plane.
• Open the door and pass out the keys to the guys in the truck.
• Close it and wait while they drive the key back to the terminal.
• Use the now recovered key to get the skybridge to the plane, finally.

It worked. But, according to the wonderful flight crew who laughed with us through the debacle, it violated about a dozen laws.

As would have the simpler solution: just rolling stairs out to the plane like you'd find at a smaller airport. Instead of that easy answer, they chose the route that would at least keep us cattle in the pen and prevent one from wandering off onto a runway or whatever it is the skybridge is mean to prevent…

In general, why airports don't simply use stairs and a few overhung walkways is beyond me. Its cheaper, easier, faster, and less likely to fail.

Technology is not always an improvement. It must make things easier, simpler, faster, safer… in some measurable way better, or its just unnecessary complication, and thus operator error waiting to happen.

From there, my trip's technology fumbles stacked on top of each other. In the interest of brevity, I will only summarize them until we get to the trip back home.

Along the way over a week of driving to the far corners of the moderately sized Caribbean island, combatting its 3.5 million residents in traffic, 3.49 million of whom appear to live in a 10-mile radius of Old San Juan:

• Google maps sent me to the wrong destination three different times, despite triple checking my spelling.
• Apple maps did the same, twice.

As a result, I was late for or missed at least four meetings.

At the end of my trip, a friendly hotel concierge finally explained why. Apparently, the local government decided to completely change their addressing scheme, which the map makers use to make their software, but cannot get anyone in the country to actually use the new format. So the software assumed the world was one way, and it simply was not.

(If you do find yourself in Puerto Rico, I highly recommend against using Google Maps to find your way around. However, I've found most dedicated GPS devices do an excellent job, as they force you to use the modified address format and don't just point you to the other side of the city.)

Luckily, the street signs around San Juan are great, and we found our way back quite easily each time.

• The time on my Kindle, android phone, and MacBook all changed automatically. Only one of them correctly. (If you need evidence that Puerto Rico is still a more refined bureaucracy than the US mainland, look no farther than that they don't observe the ritualistic idiocy of "daylight saving time", which saves as much daylight as using a bucket with a hole in the bottom does water.)

And so on, just like that, right up to the flight back home. That one took the cake.

It too began with a buzz from US Air, who told me my flight was again cancelled. This time I got their email first, which told me I could rebook for one, two, or three days later, at no charge, if I just clicked that link. Don't tell Olivier (I doubt he has the time to read this), but I took the three-day option. Though I fit a number of important meetings into that span, so it was time well spent away from the office.

Back to that email. I clicked the link and was presented with a menu of alternative flights. I clicked on one, tried to book it… ERROR. Tried again… ERROR. Hmm. Called customer service. "We'd be happy to help with that. For a $70 fee. Or you can do it online for free." Back to the browser.

Switched to Firefox after five or ten failures in Chrome. Voilà. Booked. Confirmation email received. Even forwarded it on to TripIt to keep in their handy offline folio app—even if the Pro service stinks, I am a glutton for using these gizmos.

Three days later, of course, in what should have been a very predictable event to me, I couldn't check in to my new flight. Just given an error code of some obscure variety, and thankfully a phone number to call.

"Technical support here."
 "Hi. I got the error 'ticket not synchronized' and it told me to call you."
"Oh, I can't help with that, let me transfer you to reservations."
[…one hour on hold, using my headset in the middle of an expensive dinner…]
"Reservations. How may I help you?"
"Technical support said you could fix my 'ticket not synchronized' error."
"Your flight was never cancelled, sir. You don't have a ticket. After we sent that email your flight was resumed and took off that day. You missed it."
"But, I got a confirmation."
"No, you didn't."
"Um, yes, I have it right here."
"Give me the code on the top."
"Okay, it's 99999999ZZZZZ."
"Oh, you do have a ticket. But only to Philadelphia. Not to Burlington. You weren't allowed to do that."
"But my confirmation goes to Burlington."
[…half an hour or so of key clicking, grumbling (the customer service rep explained that she couldn't just call me back once it was fixed because "the computer won't let me make outbound calls")…]
"Sir, you really should have called to do this. The website always messes these up. You have to call."

"But……."

FAIL.

Eventually, the woman, who very obviously held a severe contempt for the average customer, was able to fix my reservation and put me on a flight to the place I actually wanted to land. But not without telling me six or eight times that I was wrong and the computer was right.

As technology pervades our lives, we are increasingly at the will of it, not vice versa.

It reminds me of a previous trip I took to Philly to visit family. For that trip, I searched for flights to Philly and they came up at $800 round-trip. So I looked at Newark, NJ, a little further away. $250. Much better. But one-stop instead of direct. Where was the stop? Philly. <Sigh>… same flight for the first leg.

So I called customer service and asked them to give me the first-leg only, $250. Nope. Computer won't let us do that. OK, I wanted to let you sell that seat, but I'll just book the trip and walk out in Philly. That's not allowed sir. And if you miss your connection your return will be cancelled when it takes off. <Uggghhh> Fine, I'll rent a car and drive back. Book me a one-way to Newark. That'll be $300, sir. Whatever. Here's my credit card.

Airlines all suffer systemically from the same problem that millions of businesses do every day. They are the tools of their tools. They can only do what the computer says, even when the logic programmed into the computer is wrong. Gone are the days of human judgment in many fields.

Except when the lawyers step in. My flight back from San Juan did eventually take off, and it was a pretty new plane. One of those ones with an interactive TV in every seat back. I like those, since I am far too large to use a laptop in those tiny seats. Alas, they announced we were not allowed to use the TVs. They worked fine, but US Air decided to stop offering them, because they couldn't yet figure out how to charge for them after the big merger. Instead, the technology just sat idle, reminding us cattle of our place in the minds of airline executives.

I can laugh it all off though, partially because my travels are always filled with such tails of minor, frustrating, but ultimately harmless technological woe. Like the time the guy in front of me tried to board with his mobile phone boarding pass from Toronto to Montreal (a flight I'll be taking yet again on January 16, as I return from the CanTech conference, which if you are in the area you can find out more about here)… only to discover he'd drained his battery texting while we waited for the plane.

That small hiccup in the digital boarding pass idea delayed boarding for 10 minutes while the gate agents figured out how to proceed. Apparently the computer didn't know how to deal with that one, either.

But mainly I can laugh it off because the frustrations are miniscule compare to the amazing things we can do with technology today. On that same trip to PR alone I was able to…

• Download at least three new books to read by the pool in the morning—before getting to email, meetings, and the like—and at night before bed. Without leaving the hotel. And with less space and weight in my luggage than a single paperback.
• Make calls from the quiet beaches of Palmas del Mar to San Juan, California, Canada, and Europe.
• Send my kids photos of the same beaches via SMS/MMS, after having talked to them on their mom's Bluetooth on the way to the ski hill a few thousand miles away.
• Pull up satellite images of my location to find the best walking path to meet fellow PR expat newsletter authors Scott and Gordon at the end of an unfamiliar road a few miles down the beach, right on my phone. (Are you an 'ex-patriot' if you move to a US possession and don't need a visa or even a passport? How about 'outlander'? No, repats.)
• Stitch together a 200+ megapixel, 3-D, panoramic photo collage of one of the nicest homes on our tour using the same little android phone, by just spinning my camera around in a circle a few times.
• Deposit some checks I'd gotten from the mail on the way out the door from the airport lobby by just snapping a photo of the front and back.

…and probably ten other certifiable miracles by the standards of 1983, let alone the millennia that proceeded, all of which I've subsequently forgotten about in favor of griping about how poorly designed software, and incompatible business models, lead to everyday struggles with the very miracles we take for granted.

We live in an amazing age for technology. It's more exciting today than at any other time in my own life. And it's on the cusp of getting a hundred times better.

For example, take a sneak peak of the future that Santa dropped under the Daley family tree days ago: the Xbox One. For those not into video games the way my kids are (all right, fine—I play one on occasion too), you might not have seen the future of the living room just yet. So, here's a taste of what it looks like…

Now, when I walk into the kids' playroom while they are playing games, a little pop-up appears on the screen saying simply "Hi Alex!" along with my photo and color of choice. Same when Abby heads in too. My Xbox is watching me, and I don't find it creepy at all.

In fact, I love it. Because now I can just sit down and say, "Xbox, Snap Skype. Call Pop-pop." No fumbling with menus, trying to find that option buried ten layers down. Instead, I just speak a magic incantation and strike up a video chat with my parents while the kids continue to play their games. A nine-hour road trip from their grandkids, I am sure Grandma and Pop-pop appreciate the expensive new toy.

Further from the facial recognition and voice commands, the system can play games of incredible complexity, stream movies and music, search the web, and do all sorts of other stuff from a comfortable 10-foot distance on the recliner.

It's a preview of a day when your computer is throughout your home, knows what room you are in, and can project the weather forecast on the wall as you fumble for your morning joe and mumble, "Computer, show me the weather." Or answer the question, "Who won the Eagles game last night?" Or "How many emails did I get last night, and who are they from?"

We've been talking about days like this since the PC first landed, but this year it just took a HUGE step forward.

Still, this miracle box is not free of faults, either.

Setup of the system took over three hours. Talk about a buzzkill for the kids.

First, it had to download a massive update before it would even turn on.

Then, adding my account to it involved at least 7,863 steps (OK, maybe about 20), many of which don't apply to the top user of the console, my eldest son Sam. He doesn't have an email address for an Xbox Live account (be wary of any boasting by MSFT of increased Xbox Live sign-ups; you MUST sign-up for Xbox Live just to use the system). He can't verify his email with a text—no cell phone.

And if it took me that long, I can only imagine what most other people think. I know my Microsoft ID. I linked it with my "gamertag" already. I use Windows 8 and am now used to the whole ID concept (once called a Passport, then a Live ID, now a Microsoft ID, which is maybe your Hotmail login, but Hotmail is now gone and called Outlook.com, but you might use your Gmail to log in to Microsoft…). I'm ahead of the curve on all that, yet I still had to supply a backup phone number, and receive a verification email just to turn on my ridiculously expensive and now increasingly annoying miracle box.

Worse still, that account verification process had a massive bug in it, where clicking the link took me to a blank screen. No error. No confirmation. No spinning cursor. Just a blank white page. Knowing my way around a computer like few others, I was able to recreate the request and modify the obviously bad characters in the URL emailed to me and make it work. But only after 30 minutes of experimenting.

Of course, there is no place for me to report such a problem in the app—they are all written as if they work perfectly every day. Nor could any mere mortal have dealt with the problems on their own. For most, it would have led to hours on the phone with Microsoft, if a number could even be found, and/or a return to the store. Even I came close to taking the whole $700+ bundle of games and hardware back to the shop at one point.

But then I finally made it to the home screen, cracked open a game disc, and slid it in to let the kids play.

Installing game. Check back in 20 minutes.

Miracle box my #$%! Frakkin toaster!

Technology sure isn't perfect. At times, it is downright infuriating. Sometimes, it is just fundamentally broken.

But when it works, it is AMAZING. Right now in my home, I can watch virtually any movie or TV show made in the last few decades, in any room of my house, at any time I want. I can download any of hundreds of thousands of books in seconds to read on a custom-tailored device. I can do email from my desktop, my laptop inside or outside, my smartphone, even my TV if I see fit.

And that's just my tiny little world. The miracles happening in the broader sphere of technology are absolutely mind-blowing.

In 2013, we saw the first mass marketing of a temporary genetic off switch: A treatment for the previously almost insurmountable heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia—a variant of which is now in testing for diabetics and others with a predisposition to heart disease that is showing effectiveness rates unheard of by any treatment to come before.

The first molecular disruptor cancer treatments are now in wide use amongst some of the most aggressive forms of the disease. New delivery technologies are making chemotherapy less toxic, and allowing molecular treatments to cross the blood-brain barrier for the first time ever.

Synthetic life forms and computational biology are opening the veritable floodgates of medical research, allowing massive-scale simulation and testing, systematic discovery of new treatments, ethical alternatives to animal models, and human dosing studies.

Scientists have shown that network capacity hasn't even come close to its limits, moving from photonic signaling to quantum tunneling and potentially allowing unlimited amounts of bandwidth in the near future. But Comcast will still find a way to raise its rates every three months.

A thousand more such miracles of nanotechnology, biotechnology, software, hardware, and human ingenuity have seen their way out of the lab or into the market in the last year alone.

It's exactly those kinds of technologies that lead to Casey Extraordinary Technology's remarkable investment track record last year (and every year since we launched). All those examples are citations from our portfolio companies or ongoing coverage. If you haven't tried CET yet, you're missing out. Take it for a risk free trial for a full 3 months and see how we're turning remarkable technology into exceptional profits.

Best of all, it is just the beginning. Like the Xbox One is a mere preview of what's to come for the home in the next few years, these kinds of developments are only scratching the surface of possibility. Intelligent systems like autonomous robotics and even driverless cars are now within reach. New fields of study like lipidomics, proteomics, quantitative biology, and even quantum mechanics are emerging with new marketable technologies in their wake. The future is very bright indeed.

We can only hope that regulators like the FAA will not take 25 years to allow us to listen to a music player on takeoff and landing. Or that the lawyers telling the car companies that driverless cars are lawsuits waiting to happen don't add 20 extra years to the time to market. And that those building the technology take the care to think through their designs better.

Here's to an amazing 2014, with more Xbox Ones and less TripIts. Happy new year, my fellow technophiles.

Alex Daley
Chief Technology Investment Strategist
Casey Research