The word unlimited is misused in consumer technology. Unlimited data transfer from mobile networks rarely is and unlimited cloud storage usually doesn’t last long. Is the expectation of unlimited anything unrealistic and what should the industry do about it?

Since the original iPhone launch smartphone data usage has spiked and is now the main buying criteria for many of us selecting a plan. When the iPhone launched on O2 there was an unlimited data plan. If you look around the market in the UK today you’re hard pressed to find unlimited mobile data and the market in the US in similar. Three still have their ‘All you can eat’ data offerings but they seem to have deliberately avoided the work unlimited. Even here though there are restrictions on tethering.

Consumer cloud storage has also had its share of issues with the word unlimited. Bitcasa famously offered unlimited cloud storage but the offer ended amongst much angst for its users. Similarly Microsoft made a big splash when they offered an OneDrive unlimited plan only to withdraw it a year later. The latest casualty of the unlimited storage wars seems to be Amazon whose unlimited Cloud Drive seems to being withdrawn.

So is unlimited realistic? As a consumer looking at an unlimited offering it seems to make some kind of sense. The things I am buying that is ‘unlimited’ is not tangible, it is in the cloud or in the case of data transfer is transient. This though is where the new world of cloud and everything online collides with the reality of the underlying technology. Whilst to a consumer this is all a bit abstract to a provider there is real world technology underneath. Real world technology with capex costs, electricity and cooling costs as well as bandwidth costs to be paid to providers.

I think there are a couple of types of consumer that are attracted by unlimited. There are those that are simply looking to avoid worry about hitting the limits. I fall into this category especially for mobile data. The other category some call ‘abusers’ but I can’t go this far, how do you abuse something that is unlimited? You can’t. In the data storage world there is subreddit for DataHoarders with their euphemistic ‘Linux ISOs’ who upload Terabytes upon Terabyes of data. These consumers though are costing the providers real world money because of the underlying technology costs.

I am not sure there is an answer to this conundrum. Consumers who don’t want to worry about limits will always be joined by those in the second category (which I cannot bring myself to call abusers). Maybe an answer is to set large limits which allows the first category to not worry but limits the second. But to do this the uneducated consumer needs to understand what that limit means. Do your parents understand what a 10GB limit on their mobile data plan means or are they just looking to use their phone without worrying? Maybe the answer is more education. Or maybe we just need to stop using the word unlimited, especially when we don’t mean it.

​Image: Zentilia/Shutterstock.com

Co-creation is one of the most descriptive buzz-words currently in the business lexicon, but what does it really mean? At the highest level most people would agree it means creating something with another party. The relationship between the co-creating partners and whether one of them buys the goods or services created complicates matters.

There seems to be a spectrum of co-creations ranging from the rather simple on the one hand to complex partnerships between massive global brands on the other. Dominos let their customers custom create their own pizzas. Is this co-creation? There are two parties involved and one of them is ultimately buying the creation. If it is co-creation it is on the left-hand side of our spectrum, at the simple end. Some will define co-creation as pretty much any situation where an end-customer is involved or consulted in the product design process but, to me, this is an over-simplification.

Staying with the food service industry there are numerous examples where food brands team-up with fast-food restaurants to co-create an offering they then sell to the end-user. These are quite often specials which leverage the brand-appeal of both parties to sell something which is greater than the two halves. Examples, in the UK, include the Reggae Reggae Chicken Sub in 2008 where Levi Roots of Dragon’s Den fame co-created a Subway sandwich.  This is a more interesting example because the two parties in the co-creation are not the ultimate end-customer. In this example a new product is being created that neither party could have created alone. Essentially the two brands are combining in order to create - co-creating.

At the more complex end of the scale there are some very large strategic partnerships between global names. The IBM Apple partnership is one such example where there is more than just a single product developed. These kind of collaborations can also often be seen in the luxury goods industry where aspirational brands will join together create an uber product such as the Breitling for Bentley watches or the various Oakley Ferrari sunglasses. ​

Co-creation means all of these things right along the spectrum from examples where the end-customer is one of the parties right to the global mega-deal between brands. Personally I think the more trivial examples are a little invalid and I’d go as far as to say a co-creation needs two parties and a separate party to buy. Others though will disagree.

​Images: Gajus/Shutterstock.com and Ewais/Shutterstock.com

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​There have been a lot of high profile data leaks and hacks recently. How would you know if your data, your login credentials or something even worse was out in the public domain?

There are a few sites where you can search for your information and see if you've been unlucky, the most famous being Have I been pwned. You can also sign up for alerts at these kind of sites so you don't have to constantly visit and search. Pastebin is one of the places where sites like the one above check for leaked details. Pastebin has long been a favourite place for Ne'er-do-wells to paste log-in credentials and other leaked data in 'pastes'. Pastebin themselves seem to be aware of this and have their own alert service that lets you monitor their pastes pretty much in real time. You need a paid account to do this but they are not expensive. They simply let you create a list of keywords and if a paste appears that contains the text they send you an email. You can use your email address, your name, your address or anything else you are worried might get out there. I've done this for a while and the amount of alerts I get is a bit scary - my namesakes seem to have their passwords compromised on a regular basis. The most common type are 'dumps' of email and password pairs from compromised websites.
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Now using the built in Pastebin alerts is interesting but for those with a technical disposition there is also an API. There are a few reasons why you might want to build your own solution. Firstly the Pastebin alerts only sends you a link to the actual paste and quite often they get removed before you click on the link in your email. By building you own solution with the API you can save the whole text to look at later. You can also have more than the standard 15 keywords if you build it yourself. The DIY approach means you can customise the alert mechanism to do something other than send an email. You could send an SMS or use of the of the mobile push applications like Pushbullet or Pushover.
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The best reason for me though was this is interesting technology to play with. To this end I spend a couple of hours writing a simple monitor in Python. It's not the most elegant code I've ever written but it works and is published here on Github. 

Image: Minerva Studio/Shutterstock.com