New, inexpensive (under $150) cellphones for the holiday- 2008

Thanks to industry newsletter FierceWireless.com for this helpful overview we’re offering to parents looking to buy that first cellphone as a gift. These are the “new” phones that have just come on the market at various price-points. There are, of course, free phones as well, depending on the contract you sign.

Starting with the least expensive (just considering the phone price only)…

Click on the link under each label for more details about features.

Motorola VU204
Verizon Wireless- $29.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=2

Pantech Slate
AT&T Mobility- $49.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=4

Samsung Rant
Sprint Nextel- $49.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=8

Motorola i576
Sprint Nextel-$70 (with a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=1

Pantech Matrix
AT&T Mobility- $79.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=3

Blackberry Pearl 8130
Alltel- $79.99 (after $100 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=5

Samsung Propel
AT&T Mobility- $79.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=7

UTStarcom Quickfire
AT&T Mobility- $99.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=10

Samsung Highnote
Sprint Nextel- $99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=6

LG Rhythm
Alltel Wireless-$119.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=0

Samsung Sway
Verizon Wireless- $119.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=9

Wild Card
Virgin Mobile USA- $89 (pre-paid service details at http://www.virginmobileusa.com/rates/minute.do)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/slideshow/pics-holiday-handsets-under-150?img=11

Survey: Why parents are texting their kids

Survey Shows Parents Are Learning to Text From Their Kids; Children Like Privacy, Cool Factor, Efficiency of Texting

A new survey released on Oct. 8 announced that, “Many parents view text messaging as a convenient way to stay connected with their children. The survey, conducted by Synovate for AT&T, “sought to better understand how and when parents text with their children and vice versa.”

AT&T’s survey came to the same conclusions at we did about texting and parenting.

“Text messaging has proved to be a powerful tool to help parents and kids close the communications gap,” said Alecia Bridgwater, director of Messaging for AT&T’s wireless unit.

“Not only does text messaging allow parents to enter their child’s world, but it provides an unintrusive way for families to stay in touch throughout the day as needed, whether it’s coordinating schedules, sending reminders about doctor’s appointments or just texting a ‘thinking of you’ message.”

WuduPlz was designed to help adults with texting. And who do adults often text? “Parents text most often with their children. Seventy-nine percent of parents surveyed said they text with their children most often to tell them to come or phone home, representing the most common type of parent-child text message,” according to the survey.

The AT&T press release quoted a mother of three as saying, “Texting is sometimes the easiest way to keep track of my kids,” said Janet Sturley. “They’re so much more likely to respond quickly to a text message, and it’s the most convenient and inexpensive way to keep tabs on them. I’ve become extremely fluent in the language of text.”
Some 73 percent of parents think that their children are more likely to respond to a text message. Half of parents surveyed had the impression that texting  makes them a “cool” parent.
The survey noted that “children like the privacy of text messaging (65 percent), the cool/hip factor (49 percent) and that it’s a better use of time than calling (48 percent).”

http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=26157

Young Adults: What U see (probably) isn’t (thankfully?) what you’ll get

“Consensus is emerging that an 18-year-old is not the same person she or he will be at 25, just as an 11-year-old is not the same as he or she will be at 18. They don’t look the same, feel the same, think the same, or act the same,” says A. Rae Simpson, the program director of parenting education and research at MIT’s Center for Work, Family and Personal Life, and the creator of the Young Adult Development Project.

Research gathered, analyzed and published this summer by her at MIT suggests that the years from 18 to 25 should be regarded as a specific developmental period with its own characteristics, milestones and limitations–a time of both stunning accomplishment and chilling risk as young adults are propelled into full maturity.

Many parents are using WuduPlz to communicate with their older children. This makes sense, according to Simpson’s work. Older children need the guidance of parents at times, too.

Still, it’s tricky. “I’m hearing from a lot of people in their 20s because they are feeling huge pressure to get it all together and make their mark,” Simpson says. “And that’s really unfair. There’s an enormous amount that happens after 25 or after 30 or after 40–some of which can’t happen any earlier.”

She bases her conclusions in part on research that indicates that some important developments in the prefrontal cortex of the brain don’t occur until the early 20s.

But she also considers cultural factors: Today’s American young adults are attending school longer, delaying marriage and often living at home due to economic pressure. “The kind of milestones that we have associated with adulthood are happening later in the 20s,” she says.

This isn’t to say the older kids are still children. The ages 18 to 25 are also a time of wonderful energy and creativity, Simpson says. The dualistic thinking of teenagers (everything is either bad or good) is being replaced in older children by an ability to see a complexity of viewpoints.

Learn more here

New openness toward phone consumers! (Er, who wanted that?)

Pity the poor family looking to buy new cellphones and reading how “in the last nine months, carriers, software developers and cellphone makers have embraced a new attitude of openness toward consumers,” as The New York Times reported this week.

Sounds great. Where is it in the store?

As the NYT explained, “The market for smartphones, which are really handheld computers, has quickly expanded beyond business users. They have gone mainstream, with teenagers and women finding novel uses for them — texting snippets of their lives to friends or tracking friends on maps. The carriers and the handset makers realize they have to make the phones adaptable to those new customers.

Super! So, therefore…

Well, deep into the article, it explains that “Of course, consumers should be careful what they wish for. Already there are at least six major operating systems for cellphones — Linux, Symbian and BlackBerry, as well as those made by Microsoft, Palm and Apple. And more are coming. Google expects the first phones in its Open Handset Alliance, which will use its Google Mobile operating system, to be out this fall.

“Consumers may find it confusing that some applications work only for certain phones because developers do not have the time or money to adapt projects to every operating system.”

“Consumers will also come to realize that “open” comes with an asterisk. The word means what the carriers, handset makers and software developers want it to mean.”

Of course, it’s even worse if you are a “mobile marketing” professional trying to figure out your next move.

To reach teens and pre-teens, use parents (Duh!)

A new study about teenagers’ attitude regarding the news reminds me of when, several years ago, I got deep into the massive amount of research done on how to keep children from starting smoking and how to convince kids who had started to smoke to quit. Everyone wanted to discover the major influences on pre-teen and teenage children’s behavior.

Northwestern University’s “If It Catches My Eye” report released this month offered the same thing I learned, time and again, from my readings what influenced teen smoking: Reaching parents is about the best way to influence their kids. Believe it or not, kids do listen to (and watch) their parents.

WuduPlz is a web service for the parents of pre-teen and teenage children. While using the online service regularly, WuduPlz is designed to deliver advertising messages from local newspapers. We are also, however, strongly recommending that our newspaper partners place linked appropriate news headlines on WuduPlz’s concluding pages to attract parents into their online newspaper.

Having more eyeballs of active parents has value to many marketers, but don’t discount the long-term value of also attracting more family leaders into the habit of reading the news which, the research shows, is a habit they will pass on to their children.

Download the report here: If It Catches My Eye (pdf)

What did you mean by THAT?!? (WuduPlz calm down)

According to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we only have a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study, reporting on in The New York Times, also showed people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mail messages they receive 90 percent of the time.

This is email messages, not text messages, which have to be shorter and are often done on the fly. And this report covers all people, not parents communicating with their pre-teen and teenage children. My conclusion: Yikes!

People (not just kids) reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations, the study said. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times,  psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago told the Times.

The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren’t that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person’s perspective.

WuduPlz should help with this problem, at least in terms of communicating household tasks. First, the message is identified as a WuduPlz.com message. (Some people have told us that saying “WuduPlz” takes the edge off. Some, however, have said it sounds sarcastic, which backs up Dr. Epley’s research.)  Coming from the WuduPlz website, it should be more difficult to assume one can read “mood” into the message. Second, we have crafted our messages to be polite and clear. Our checklist should be a help.

“People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they ‘hear’ the tone they intend in their head as they write,” Epley explained to the Times.

WuduPlz should help parents be more clear. Maybe, at times, a bit kinder and more helpful even. After all, your kids really, really, really, really did mean to take out the trash like you asked, but–like children everywhere– they “forget.” Because they’re kids. (We don’t have any research to explain this, but then you don’t need any.)

Shopping for a worthwhile idea on parenting? Here’s one

Last week YPulse’s Anastasia Goodstein made a remark in her blog that voiced what I think about often. The savvy observer of modern parenting noted that “we all want five easy tips or simple rules you can use.” Parenting isn’t that easy. (What is?) Setting guidelines “depends on you, your values, your kid, what they’re doing online, its value, its effect on your kid, etc.”

The Onion developed this fake magazine cover for laughs, but I fear too many of us are looking for simple answers we can buy.

The benefits of getting the kids organized

It’s now three days old, but the article in the New Year’s Day issue of The New York Times about tutors helping boys do better in school remains at the top of the list as the most popular.

The thrust of the article is very simple: Boys seem generally to have more difficulty getting organized and multitasking than girls.

“The guys just don’t seem to develop the skills that involve organization as early,” Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska and founder of the Boys Project, a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys’ problems, said in the article.

The answer is, according to the article, is giving boys more attention and following up in a positive way about being organized.

It’s our hope WuduPlz.com might be seen as a simple but clever tool that parents can use to help their boys and girls be more organized and responsible. Even the name of the service “Would you please” is a good start.

WuduPlz helps the adults in the household be a bit more organized, using the power of the list. By sending a short, timely list regularly to young family members, kids see how adults handle the world in a responsible way.

WuduPlz, used thoughtfully, can be a great teaching tool. And, it can get the trash taken out or the dishwasher loaded, too.

The power of the list: managing “extreme complexity”

“Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered,” Atul Gawande explains in his article about Peter Pronovost’s simple but powerful idea.

For many families, “managing extreme complexity” might also describe parenting in the 21st Century. Can what Peter Pronovost is using to save lives in hospitals help parents? Or, as Gawande’s December 10 article in The New Yorker asks in its sub-head, “If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”

Pronovost’s simple idea is a checklist. “If a new drug were as effective at saving lives as Peter Pronovost’s checklist, there would be a nationwide marketing campaign urging doctors to use it,” says Gawande in his article. (Gawande is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. In 2006, he received the MacArthur Award for his research and writing.)

Gawande explains that the puzzle of intensive care is “you have to make sure that a hundred and seventy-eight daily tasks are done right—despite some monitor’s alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help “get this lady’s chest open.” So how do you actually manage all this complexity?”

The medical industry’s response has been to create a “super-specialist” for ICU care.

Peter Pronovost says, instead, a simple, better, management technique is what is needed in hospitals. Gawande tells the story of how using “a checklist” instead of depending on better training is what made it possible for pilots to fly complex, modern airplanes. Would a checklist work in ICUs?

In 2001 a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. “He didn’t attempt to make the checklist cover everything; he designed it to tackle just one problem, the one that nearly killed Anthony DeFilippo: line infections. On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in. Doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in. Check, check, check, check, check,” reports Gawande.

“These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist just for them. Still, Pronovost asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.”

Gawande says that Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them.

Why did it work?

“The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events….

“A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.”

You can read Gawande’s 7,800 word article (well-worth the time) online here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande

WuduPlz’s presents a checklist of household tasks with a means to easily and simply communicate to family members what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. If this kind of management can work well for doctors in a hospital and pilots in fighter jets, perhaps it should be tried in homes as well.

Family life–which is suppose to be loving and caring–may not sound to some like a place that could be better served with a checklist. It doesn’t sound “natural.” But, then, it doesn’t sound like doctoring to some people, either.

Using a checklist “pushes against the traditional culture of medicine,” explains Gawande. Some families who try using checklists are sure to feel the same or get some push-back from others.

“It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation,” he concludes. “Good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.” I suggest that the same could be said of running a household.

Therefore, I’ll attempt to answering the question the New Yorker headline asked (“If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”) and point families to WuduPlz.

The facts about household chores-over 2 hours a day

The U. S. Census Bureau interviewed of about 21,000 individuals beginning in January 2003. Respondents were interviewed only once and reported their activities for the 24-hour period from 4 a.m. on the day before the interview until 4 a.m. on the day of the interview–their “diary day.” If respondents reported doing more than one activity at a time, they were asked to identify which activity was primary. Activities were then grouped into categories for analysis.
Here is some of what they learned about household activities:

On an average day in 2003, 84 percent of women and 63 percent of men spent some time doing household activities, such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or financial and other household management.

Twenty percent of men reported doing housework–such as cleaning or doing laundry–compared with 55 percent of women. About 35 percent of men did food preparation or cleanup versus 66 percent of women.

Women who reported doing household activities on the diary day spent about 2.8 hours on such activities while men spent 2.1 hours.