With “quality” webcams ranging in price from $50 to $200, it’s hard to understand why the market share for these devices keeps growing despite the relative affordability of the far superior camcorders (see Tom’s Hardware).

In the effort to fit the most functionality into the smallest space, the humble webcam is achieving a market penetration that the better-quality HD camcorders will not achieve. Between smart phones, security systems, video blogging, video telephone, video conferencing, gaming, digital music players and home-entertainment systems, WinterGreen Research, Inc. projects the webcam market to reach $3.2 billion by 2015.

It makes a certain amount of sense; if you can get a “good enough” image of friends and relatives in other cities or continents, are you going to worry about whether the 640×480 image running at 15 frames per second is broadcast quality? Within the next few years, if past trends are any indication, the resolution and frame rate will improve.

But it does beg the question of how long a wired webcam is going to be useful. With video devices being embedded in mobile phones and laptops, as well as the availability of wireless webcams, it’s hard to understand the viability the wired versions.

The wired USB HP HD – 3110 Webcam is a device dedicated to desktop Windows machines. You can’t run it on a Mac. You can’t download drivers for it (the HP software and driver download page kindly sends you to a CD-ROM order page, presumably because the software is from ArcSoft), so if you’re running the camera out of the office, you’ll have to pre-install the software via your network.

Once you get it installed the software is somewhat misleading; the settings panel has a suite of camera control sliders that appear to promise more than they deliver. Do not be fooled by HP’s one-package-for-all-cameras software design: zoom, pan, tilt and roll controls will not work for this device. When that kind of functionality is miniaturized to fit into a webcam, we may be able to fly the devices around the room as well.

On the other hand, the ArcSoft WebCam Companion allows for some creativity. In addition to the basic and advanced editing functions, there’s a masque (face morphing) and fun frame (auto capture). Just the thing to amuse aspiring social media divas.

The HP 3110 appears to be positioned for at least three areas: social networking, security monitoring (face and motion detecting) as well as social media-style clip editing. As such, it’s perhaps not surprising to get continual warning dialogues that higher resolution recording will reduce functionality.

This webcam may need a certain amount of adjusting. Despite the potential 1280×720 resolution, it was difficult to get any kind of quality out of the video recording; images were blurry and not very vibrant, although the video stream was smooth enough. File sizes may also require some work; 17 seconds of video produced an 867Kb .wmv file. Finally, the grip mounter, although allowing for manual tilt and pans, was extremely weak, begging the question of durability.

Available for $49.99 at Best Buy.

Clay Shirky is a smart man. There are very few people better at writing about the intersection of technological innovation and social change. He also knows how the web works. This is a guy who can write a blog post on the most bare bones, standard issue Wordpress blog you can imagine and get 100+ thoughtful comments with his take on the collapse of complex business models.

When he drops a new book on the world you can be sure that his thesis will quickly find itself with a Wikipedia page and so it is with his latest. Called Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, it is a tribute to the possibilities of free time.

His central theme is that we are just now beginning to see the possibilities of constructive use of our spare time. With our media diet switching from consumption to creation and the advent of online tools that bring the costs of collaboration down to zero Shirky muses at the greatness that we could be capable of.

Take the hundreds of billions of hours Americans spend watching television. Merely by diverting a fraction of a percent of that free time we were able to create something as useful as Wikipedia. What other Wikipedia’s do we have in us?

Shirky is quick to make the point that the Internet revolution, like the communications revolutions that preceded with it have brought its share of crap. Think of the printing press. With the spread of cheap books came the advent of mediocre and disposable adventure stories and erotica.

Shirky likes to use the example of the lolcat. While the creation of a lolcat is, in many ways, silly and derivative, it is still fundamentally a creative act. In today’s society we’ve become so used to passive media consumption that even a lolcat fundamentally changes the way we think and act.

While lolcats might be an example of a fundamentally creative act it doesn’t do much for society. Shirky juxtaposes locates with a service like Ushahidi, an open source project which allows users  to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile phone.

Originally used in the aftermath of Kenya’s violent presidential election in 2007 it is what happens when free and widely available disruptive technology is used for something more important than a lolcat.

This is not to say that the book is perfect. While Shirky is an academic, the book is unfortunately short on studies. While an engaging and easy to read writer the plural of anecdote is not data.

Also, some of his examples walk the line in terms of believability, particularly his assertion that Korean schoolgirls helped force the Korean government to overturn an unpopular decision on American beef imports. With Shirky being the unrelentingly optimistic techno-deterministic cheerleader that he is, don’t expect him to find arguments and examples that countervail his wisdom.

However, don’t let that scare you off there is a lot of great stuff in the book about social networks, group psychology and human behaviour but it’s the fundamental optimism of the book that forces me to recommend it.

As Shirky says, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here and there, could we make a good thing happen?”

My assignment would be much easier if I could open this review by exclaiming, “You need to read this book.” The truth is you don’t, that is, if you enjoy the status quo rut you’ve curled up in. But if you want to know how to fix the world’s convoluted and oftentimes redundant systems that affect global productivity, then you’d best crack open Macrowikinomics.

For the sake of Unlimited’s Money theme, we’ll focus on authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’ chapter on the financial services sector (other chapters centre on outdated educational systems, the green economy and health care, among others). In chapter two, they look into what caused the financial crisis and then discuss the pros of collaboration as a solution.

The openness of collaboration is the core of Macrowikinomics and its precursor, Wikinomics.

“[In Wikinomics] we wrote about how businesses could harness collaboration to compete, to develop better products and services, network with customers and engage with partners and suppliers, essentially to tap into skills and knowledge they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to tap into following conventional business wisdom,” says Williams. “Macrowikinomics essentially applies that same thinking and some of the foundation and principles to all the other institutions in society.”

Concerned that Joe and Jill Internet will impede any productive discussions due to their poor credit scores and lack of knowledge in the industry? The authors address these concerns by saying, “there are plenty of financially sophisticated people around the world who do not necessarily work on Wall Street or in the City but have the requisite skills” – analysts, traders, professionals, academics and experts.

When it comes to the financial services sector, this is a conversation requiring some level of expertise. Tapscott and Williams also stress that this process will take time before anyone sees buy-in from the industry.

Read Unlimited’s Q+A with co-author Anthony Williams

One of Michael Sikorsky’s first business ventures, when he was seven years old, was what he calls Desk Sales. “I would open up the drawer where I put all my top possessions and auction them off to my brother and sister. I would bundle items or hold back items till the next desk sale. I loved it.”

Flash forward to 2009. Sikorsky has started six businesses, made two exits and was forced out of a company he founded. He is an angel investor, software programmer and self-professed hair product enthusiast. And he’s done all of this with a computer engineering degree from the University of Alberta and the help of books. Thousands and thousands of books. Based in Calgary, Sikorsky has created what you might call his own personal MBA-style reading list and, in the open-source tradition he comes from, posted it on Google Books for everyone to see.

Sikorsky’s list offers a peek inside the mind of a successful young entrepreneur. Unlimited talked with him about how he got started, which books have influenced him most and why he doesn’t read in the bathroom anymore.

Were you an obsessive reader as a child?
No, it didn’t really hit me till around 12. Until then, I think I had read – by volition – a few Encyclopedia Brown books. I got passionate about reading when I realized how it helped me do stuff, like learning how to program computers.

You’re not just a serial reader, but also a serial entrepreneur.
The first real company I started, when I was 26, was Servidium, which ThoughtWorks bought when I was 28. After selling Servidium, I entered what I like to call my post-exit depression. You’re supposed to be happy, so, you feign it, but on the inside I felt like my “meaning bubble” had just been popped.

Why did you post your reading lists on Google?
I love what Google is doing for books. And I knew that putting my books online would help other entrepreneurs. Most people guard their book lists or forget what books helped them grow. Being able to search the books I’ve read for quotes, for instance, is really powerful. When I search my books list for the word “enzyme,” I find one of my favourite quotes, by Gérard Bricogne: “Mankind is a catalyzing enzyme for the transition from a carbon-based to a silicon-based intelligence.” [This appears as an epigraph in Mark Buchanan’s book Nexus.]

Would you have learned as much only from school?
Reading is how I learned pretty much everything I know, so if you said I could only have one of the two, I would pick reading. But I loved university. Reading plus school plus doing is the secret combination. And doing is at least 50 per cent of the equation. Doing gives context to everything you read in a book.

What do you read in the bathroom?
I used to read in the bathroom. Now my 18-month-old twin daughters always want to come in there with me. Basically, we floss and do makeup.

If you were to write a business book, what would it be called?
Opposite George: The George Costanza Guide to Business. The premise is, basically, to do things opposite to what people expect. Why start a company when you’re 40? Start one when you’re 20. U

This inspiring and almost unrealistically optimistic book defines natural capitalism as the economic practice of assigning a cost and value to the use, maintenance, depletion and restoration of natural resources and ecosystems. This dense, well documented book is packed with stories and anecdotes of how entrepreneurs, companies and organizations are realizing the value of natural capital and incorporating it into their business. If you want to save the world and make money you’re going to need an understanding of the principles espoused in this book. The four main principles being;

• Radical resource productivity – Getting much, much more from less will be more important than ever.
• Biomimicry – Design systems around nature. Nature doesn’t truck it’s garbage 200 miles away to end up in a landfill. From the book, “Spiders make silk strong as Kevlar but much rougher, from digested crickets and flies, without needing boiling sulfuric acid and higher temperature extruders. The abalone generates an inner shell twice as tough as our best ceramics, and diatoms make glass, both processes employing seawater with no furnaces. We may never grow as skillful as spiders, abalone, diatoms, or trees, but smart designers are apprenticing themselves to nature to learn the benign chemistry of its processes.”
• Service and flow economy – Shift the perception of wealth from good and purchases to valued desires and satisfying human needs. Don’t sell your product, become a deliverer of a service with long-lasting, upgradeable durables. Interface Carpet leases floor covering services rather than selling carpet. This also makes makes manufacturers responsible for their waste instead of downloading it to the consumer.
• Investing in natural capital – Develop economies and markets that enhance and restore the environment.

The connection between The Geography of Hope (a previously reviewed book) and Natural Capitalism is unmistakable. Both are optimistic enviro-screeds focusing on the business end of the equation. While Chris Turner focuses on telling stories in Hope, Natural Capitalism is much more focused on concepts and real world examples.

An important concept to take away would be what the book calls tunneling through the cost barrier. Traditional thought holds the more you want to save on a resource the more you will pay for each increment of saving. Let’s use the example of building a home. If you super insulate your house, using energy efficient windows and maximize passive solar heating your upfront costs will be high. However if you do a good enough job you can remove the need for a furnace. The lifetime cost of heating the home has now dropped very close to zero and you get one happy homeowner. This idea can be applied to to many different processes across various industries. Inertia keeps far too many wasteful and inefficient practices going.

A lot of what is written about is just straight up common sense; eliminating waste, energy efficiency, resource efficiency, integrative holistic design and closing the materials loop. These ideas are not new but when put out there with such thought and passion it’s hard to understand why these ideas aren’t ubiquitous.

I swung drastically from quite high to very low in reading the book. They’ll drop some terrible stats about the loss of topsoil then follow up with an intriguing anecdote about an entrepreneur growing watermelons in the a desert with something called subsurface drip irrigation. Most of the innovations talked about seem frustratingly out of reach for mainstream adoption despite the quality of the idea.

There are definitely parts of the book that show their age (the book was published in 1999) and parts that are just flat out wrong. In Chapter 12 specifically, the authors are extremely excited about the possibilities of the Kyoto Accord and spend the chapter making projections about the future of carbon trading that just didn’t come to pass. The authors, specifically Amory Lovins, go on about ultra-light, ultra-strong Hypercars. Of course after publishing the book domestic automakers pumped out thunderingly inefficient SUVs for the next nine years.

The chapter on economic and market theory offers an excellent critique of the subject. Transferring taxes from labour to resources is such a basic idea that it’s shocking it’s not in place. Taxing the pollution that ends up in our water table is a much better idea than taxing my income.

I’ll end off with this quote from the book.

“How is it that we have created an economic system that ells us it is cheaper to destroy the earth and exhaust its people than to nurture them both?”

The creation of an economy that realizes the hundreds of trillions of dollars of value present in our atmosphere, the soil and water should be the economy that our grandchildren should inherit.

In this optimistic ode to a sustainable planet, Calgary-based writer Chris Turner tours the world, offering up slices of sustainability from Indian office parks, rural Thailand and other locales.

Turner, a former door knocker for Greenpeace, mixes a cheery outlook with a pop culture commentator vibe that makes the book quite readable. This is an excellent  introduction to basic sustainability concepts in energy, food, shelter and transportation but it also has a beating heart. His sincerity is engaging without being preachy. I particularly enjoyed his examination of carpet company Interface and his sojourns to Denmark.

I have a bit of a history with Turner. My parents gave me his first book, Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation, as a gift five years ago and I remember it as decent. What I liked about the book weren’t the dissections of various characters or discussions about the best Simpsons episodes of all time. It was that it widened my view of the pop culture world. He introduced me to things like street art, Banksy and Adbusters. In Hope, he does much the same, opening my eyes to the cool world of sustainability.

Turner can write but he’s also a helpful curator. After reading Hope, I went out and added books like Natural Capitalism and Small Is Beautiful to my reading list. My Internet browser bookmarks were similarly burnished with new places to visit like Grist (link).

Of course it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. There are times when he goes too far with the background information. If you’re familiar with architecture, the introductory preambles on Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller and LEED might be a bit much. Also, his relentlessly optimistic approach glosses over some of the hard realities he’s talking about. Just because BP is investing in solar energy means little without context. He tends to curse, which I don’t really mind in real life but it hurts the message and seems out of place.

If you’re a nascent greenie or just want to introduce yourself to what a sustainable world would look like, I recommend The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner.

Read an excerpt from the Geography of Hope from issue 5 of Unlimited.

I have an ever-growing list of the most depressing books I’ve ever read. Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, topped the list for a long time. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman has a place. The Da Vinci Code makes an appearance, but for reasons unrelated to subject matter. (That book is this popular? Really?)

Now I have a new addition. The Ego Boom: Why the World Really Does Revolve Around You, by Canadian Business editor Steve Maich and Maclean’s staffer Lianne George, thoroughly got me down. That isn’t a bad thing. I probably needed to read it. A lot of people, from generation X right on down through generations Y and Z (once they’re out of grade school) need to read it.

Ego Boom documents the rise of the “You Sell.” Maich and George explain, “Where marketers used to primarily sell products or brand values, they’re now selling You – an idealized, self-actualized version of yourself – back to you.” Take L’Oreal’s recent slogan tweak. The company’s catchphrase once was, “Because I’m worth it.” Now that first person singular has been replaced by the second person: “Because you’re worth it.” Or consider that Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 was none other than You.

Marketers have changed their messages from aspirational to affirmational because they’ve realized consumers are increasingly narcissistic. Such self-esteem building has created a generation of individuals who each believe they are unique – too unique for mass-produced computers, entertainment, or spirituality. Companies like L’Oreal reaffirm this trend by showing how products will enhance that individuality. It’s a compelling argument, but it makes me wonder if there is too much mythic power attributed to large corporations.

New media, meanwhile, has created its own constellations that revolve around you. In a chapter titled “That’s Show-Me Business,” Maich and George propose that the “me media revolution” means that “by selling us on our own individuality, putting a feeling of control in our hands, big business has engineered a new golden age based on the same old star system.”

What makes this especially depressing for me is when my generation (the millennial, generation Y, generation next, whatever you want to label us folks born from the late 1970s to the early ’90s) is singled out as the most self-involved of the bunch. We know the least, we participate in society the least, and we think the highest of ourselves.

Maybe we (and you) need the reality check of a book like Ego Boom, distressing only because it forces us to re-evaluate our relationships with ourselves, with each other and with consumerism.

A little bit of humble pie never hurt anyone. Case in point: Kanye West. “The danger,” the authors astutely point out, “is when the ascendancy of ‘You’ crowds out any sense of ‘us.’” And if the message is hard to swallow, remember it’s because we’re worth it. U

+ Enter to win one of 22 copies of Ego Boom. Contest runs from December 1 – 31, 2009.

+ Listen to Unlimited’s CareerJoy blogger Alan Kearns’ conversation with Steve Maich and Lianne George.

Good Reader ($0.99, v.2.2)
Why you’ll like it: Do you need to review e-book-like documents when you travel? Do you need to review huge images as part of your work? Good Reader lets you read enormous documents from PDFs to JPEGs to MS Office (PowerPoint docs with too many embedded images anyone?).
How it works: Upload a file to the device or download it from the net.
What we like: Neat trick: if you find a giant file online and want it sent to Good Reader, just type a ‘g’ at the beginning of the URL and you’re good to scroll. Screen readability is decent and page flipping is easy. In other words, the Good Reader will tide you over until you can get a Kindle.
What to fix: Jargon in the help/setup instructions (the computer version of trying to assemble Ikea furniture). Apps should be intuitive and accelerate your work, not slow you down as you figure them out.
Bottom line: The popular reader AirSharing works if your file sizes are average, but if you deal in design review or need to read book-length documents on the go, Good Reader is, well, a pretty good option.

Jott (free, but $3.95/month for a mandatory online account)
Why you’ll like it: Just remembered something you forgot to do but you’re walking from your office to your car? This app records your voice, transcribes the task, asks for a due date and can send the entry to your Google calendar as well as a reminder to your email. Jott also created versions for salespeople and admin assistants.
How it works: Sign up for an account online, download the app and start talking.
What we like: The transcribing works extremely well and the interface is intuitive – all making for a short learning curve.
What to fix: It’s still not clear why you need a pricey Jott account. Make this effective app a little slimmer feature-wise so it can stand on its own, and don’t pretend to be free when you’re not.
Bottom line: VoiceMemo shipped with the iPhone 3.0 upgrade should have been there in the first place. Still, Jott makes the process easy. Raise your hand if you know what MMS means. If you don’t, you’ll need to study up on VoiceMemo. Jott’s service makes it easy, so don’t bother wrestling with something as easy as talking to yourself.

TimeManagerPro ($0.99, v3.0)
Why you’ll like it: This task management app is robust, flexible and it only costs a buck. Use it to track billable hours or make grocery lists. (There is also a free “light” version.)
How it works: It’s pretty standard. Enter, categorize and schedule tasks. Run a timer if you want to know how long tasks are taking, instead of trying to remember later and entering data from memory or scraps of paper.
What we like: Help files on every screen and online chat support! The stats module will help you figure out where your time sinks are (and you can send reports to your email). Most of us have some blurry space between work and home, and this app gets that with a category to manage your personal time.
What to fix: Intuitive integration with desktop calendars like Outlook or Google Desktop would make this even handier.
Bottom line: Understanding where the time goes is the first step to effective time management. TimeManagerPro’s task analysis takes it to the next level. See everything on your plate at once and reprioritize your time. U

All apps were tested on an iPhone OS 3.0.

Hard to believe, but there are places where Internet signals are as weak as Heidi Montag’s music career. In fact, as I write this, I am vacationing in a cabin in the Quebec countryside where the only modern conveniences are running water and electric lights. I have no access to email, let alone my favourite blog, thesartorialist.com, by fashion photographer Scott Schuman. Better known as the Sartorialist, Schuman has earned a following for his street verité photography.

Fortunately I have a copy of Schuman’s shiny new book for a fashion fix. The Sartorialist is, essentially, a picture book, which makes “reading” all 512 pages a breeze. It’s surprisingly small, but substantial – like a New York deli sandwich on thick bread with extra meat. On the cover, a fluorescent orange sticker taunts me with a quote from Mario Testino: “The place to be seen!” Testino is one of the great fashion photographers of all time. I am instantly impressed, but a little insecure. Would my last season sundress even be worthy of Schuman’s snaps? Yet as I flip through images of the Sartorialist’s impeccable street fashion, I am inspired.

This is Schuman’s intention. We’re invited to look at his photography as a social study rather than an index on the latest trends like cheeky bowties and brogues. Still, among the hundreds of photos, I can’t keep count of all the sockless men and dark-rimmed glasses shot everywhere from Stockholm to Moscow. It somehow makes the world seem very, very small. Unlike other street fashion bloggers (think the Face Hunter), Schuman shoots a range of people, from slouchy 18-year-olds sauntering down the streets of Paris to dapper silver-haired gentleman in Milan. This isn’t a giant hipster love-in; Schuman, who also shoots for GQ, Fantastic Man and Vogue, hits a higher note of sophistication.

The book’s older Internet sibling also features such beautiful, naturally lit portraits, and viewing them online is easy and simple – but also ephemeral. We scroll through blogs so rapidly that the individual portraits become blurs; this makes the Internet a perfect medium for people Schuman describes as “visually greedy.” The physicality of a book instantly changes how we interact with his photography. Where the blog version is a drive-thru, the paperback is a sit-down dinner, one I can savour. And it’s delicious.

Schuman provides charismatic insights about his subjects as artfully curated as his photos. In one instance, he includes a charming story about a baby-faced kid in $1,200 sneakers. Slightly outside the photographic frame, Schuman writes, the boy’s mother holds his ice cream cone as he strikes a pose worthy of Esquire.

The Sartoralist book leaves me no less visually greedy, and I’m left wanting more. What is the full story behind the gentleman sporting hand-painted wingtips? Or the hat-tilting Hasid in Williamsburg? Perhaps once I’m out of the backwoods and can access WiFi I’ll go to the blog to find out. I still need my daily fix.

“Crack a book, you lazy son-of-a-bitch.” _Fez

The likeable fount of slacker wisdom from That ’70s Show never dispensed with business advice, per se, but there’s no disputing his directive. (We’re pretty sure his bookshelf was filled with picture books.) The fall crop from publishers has many Oprah-inspired how-to offerings that are as enticing as an MSG-laced bowl of noodles. Here are two alternatives for those with a reading level higher than a fifth grader.

The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future
Some people rely on fortune tellers. Others – devotees of game theory, for instance – look for something a little more scientific. Like Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s book, the Predictioneer’s Game. The author, a professor of politics at New York University has built a reputation as a kind of Nostradamus by using game theory to explain such political challenges as when Iran will get the bomb.

In Predictioneer (the title refers to how you can both predict and engineer an event), he focuses on more pedestrian issues – how to hire a CEO, anticipate corporate fraud, advance your career. However, Predictioneer is more about strategy than self-help.

Can computer algorithms help predict events? Estimates put this game theorist’s success rate at 90 per cent. (A consultant for the CIA, Bueno de Mesquita’s most notable predictions – 12 years before the event – was that China would reclaim Hong Kong.) Which makes us wonder if we’re better off ditching the fortune teller and heading to the bookstore. Or put another way, reading your fortune costs about $25. For another $6, you can buy this book.
Geek level: 9 out of 10

Enough Bull: How to Retire Well without the Stock Market, Mutual Funds, or Even an Investment Advisor
First of all, our sympathies to anyone over 48½ who was thinking of retiring even remotely soon – what with the sharp nosedive most investments took (40 per cent was the figure a few people lamented when they checked their statements and then, one assumes, started throwing things).

Those of us in our 20s and 30s also don’t have any money. But then, we didn’t have any to begin with. Chartered accountant and bestselling author David Trahair dangles a tasty carrot in front of we millennials and gen y-ers with Enough Bull, a contrarian’s account of how to buy an island in the French Polynesians and spend all day drinking daquiris and reading Infinite Jest.

OK, Trahair doesn’t present this exact scenario. He does present some scenarios that are meant to provoke easily provoked investment geeks: Only buy GICs; sock away only 40 per cent of your pre-retirement income, not the 70 per cent most investment advisors suggests; pay down your mortgage before you contribute to RRSPs. Enough Bull is for risk-averse would-be investors, those who don’t want to pay an investment salesperson – ahem, advisor – whose job it is to sell, sell, sell.

Buying GICs may sound so basic that it surely won’t pay off – this is an investment strategy that seems aimed at the slackers among us. But when boomers are seeing the gains of the past 20 years wiped out, this particular carrot looks mighty tasty.
Geek level: 8.5 out of 10. U