A Race Against the Clock, Again, in Package Delivery

IN the exhilarating, anything-is-possible days of 1998 to 2001, Kozmo.com offered an online store with a quick delivery service in a number of American cities. “Free delivery in under an hour” was its motto.

Kozmo would perish, but some online merchants and their delivery partners are inching back toward that shining vision. Though they aren't promising free delivery within an hour, they are trying out same-day service for a fee. And in doing so, they are addressing the asymmetry that has bedeviled online purchases of physical goods since Kozmo's demise: it takes mere seconds to find and buy goods on the Web, but often several days for them to arrive at the doorstep.

Could the wait again be shortened to just an hour? That remains to be seen.

The United States Postal Service will experiment with same-day delivery of online orders in San Francisco. It sees the new option, called Metro Post, as a way to put its delivery infrastructure to fuller use while developing a new source of revenue - a matter of pressing importance as the service's finances go from bad to worse.

The Postal Service proposes once-a-day pickup of goods ordered online from participating retailers in the city before 2 p.m. and delivery to homes between 4 and 8 p.m.

John G. Friess, a Postal Service spokesman, says the packages won't go through the normal processing centers, but will instead be passed directly between the Postal Service workers who pick them up and deliver them.

“This will be a new experience,” Mr. Friess says, “having a uniformed Postal Service employee knocking on your front door at this hour, delivering the package that you had ordered earlier in the day.”

A flat rate will be charged for all packages up to 25 pounds, he says, but the price has not been announced and may be adjusted as the trial proceeds.

With its fleets of trucks, United Parcel Service also has the delivery infrastructure for same-city, same-day service. But for now, the company is not set up to do both pickup and delivery in the same day, in the same city, at a modest price.

I used the online U.P.S. pricing guide to find the cost of having a one-pound book picked up at a San Francisco bookstore at 2 p.m. and delivered to a home address a mile and a half away by 8 p.m. the same day. This required U.P.S.'s “Express Critical” service, and the company estimated the cost at $226.46.

If U.P.S. decided it wanted to enter the intracity delivery business in a serious way, it could no doubt offer much more attractive pricing. In fact, it would seem positioned to offer a lower price than the Postal Service, whose operational decisions must be approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission. The Postal Service's filing with the commission to try out Metro Post is timorous in tone and lists self-applied hobbles. For example, the service says it will enlist 10 or fewer companies for the trial and limit the volume to 200 packages a day, at least until it can “further test its operational capabilities.”

The big online retailers are running their own experiments with same-day delivery in some markets.

Last month, Wal-Mart announced that it had begun same-day delivery of online orders in a handful of cities. A check last week of the price of two-hour delivery windows in San Francisco showed flat fees of $6 to $7. (The minimum order is $45.) Amazon also offers a same-day delivery option in 10 markets. In addition to a delivery charge of $8.99 for all orders other than gift cards, it adds a charge of 99 cents for each item in the order.

Very fast delivery of online purchases can be found in Lower Manhattan, the area served by UrbanFetch, which offers 10,000 products online that will be delivered within an hour. The speed is the same as Kozmo's - in fact, the company was founded in 2005 by Chris Siragusa, who was chief technology officer at Kozmo - but the selection of goods is far larger.

Customers must live within an eight-square-mile service area, and all deliveries are carried by bicycle. There is no delivery fee for orders of more than $100; a $4.95 fee is charged for smaller orders.

When Mr. Siragusa set out to build an online store with home delivery - originally called MaxDelivery - he did not plan to match Kozmo's one-hour promise. With friends and family, he first tried a service in which the ordering was done earlier in the day and the deliveries in the evening. But he concluded that late-in-the-day delivery was not compelling to customers. “It was still more convenient to walk to the store yourself,” he said.

UrbanFetch's fast delivery is possible because its goods are physically close to its customers in a densely packed city.  In other places, online customers must be a bit more patient, as Son of Kozmo is not in sight.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 11, 2012, on page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Race Against the Clock, Again, in Package Delivery.

Hurricane Sandy Reveals a Life Unplugged

Louie Chin

BLANK screens. Cellphones on the fritz. Wii games sitting dormant in darkened rec rooms. For a swath of teenagers and preteens on the East Coast, the power failures that followed Hurricane Sandy last month represented the first time in their young lives that they were totally off the grid, without the ability to text, play Minecraft, video-chat, check Facebook, or send updates to Twitter.

Marjorie Ingall with her children Maxine, center, and Josie.

If they wanted to talk to a friend, they had to do it in person. If their first post-storm instincts were to check a weather app, they resigned themselves to battery-run radios.

As the full scope of the storm's damage became obvious, it was clear these inconveniences were hardly grave. And because most children, and adults, eventually found some kind of connection via an unaffected neighbor (or Starbucks), the withdrawal was often more of a tech diet than a total fast.

But the storm provided a rare glimpse of a life lived offline. It drove some children crazy, while others managed to embrace the experience of a digital slowdown. It also produced some unexpected ammunition for parents already eager to curb the digital obsessions of their children.

Early this year, when Michelle Obama revealed rather draconian rules about technology for her daughters (no TV, cellphones or computers during the week except for homework), Pam Abel Davis of South Orange, N.J., used the news to threaten her tech-addled children with Obama-esque regulations. “My son in first grade signed a pledge for ‘TV turnoff' during the week to win a gold medal,” said Ms. Davis, a senior program officer at the Robin Hood Foundation. “But it was too much. He said, ‘Mom, let's just go for the silver.' ”

The storm hit Ms. Davis's neighborhood hard but spared her home, which became a charging station for friends of her daughter, Lucy Reynal, 13. Then last Sunday, electricity was shut off while fallen trees were cleared from the road, and within minutes the house emptied out, no longer useful to the teenage power vultures.

“Lucy almost had a heart attack when the Wi-Fi went down, until she saw pictures of the devastation all around us,” Ms. Davis said. “I had just bought a hand-cranked phone charger, thinking it would be a kitschy Hanukkah gift. We were winding it ferociously, sweating and running out of breath.”

Hegemony over the car adapter that provided precious power resembled a scene from “Lord of the Flies,” according to Gail Horwood of Scarsdale, N.Y., an executive at a consumer health care company. Bridget, 15, and Lila, 11, unearthed every ancient defunct flip phone in the family's past and tried to arrange sleepovers where they could recharge. There was a throwback moment: Lila had to study for a test of state capitals, so as the lights were flickering just before the blackout, she found a childhood jigsaw puzzle of the United States. But any resourceful return to old-school methods were not expected to last.

“Not a chance,” Ms. Horwood said. “It's a digital world, and they live in it.”

The Zanders of South Salem, N.Y., experienced a blackout last year, “so we're getting good at the 1800s in our house,” said Lauren Handel Zander, who runs an executive life-coaching company. Her three children “live for Mommy's iPad,” she said, likening the first days of the blackout to rehab. “It's like coming off drugs,” she said. “There's a 48-hour withdrawal until they're not asking about the TV every other minute.”

The Zander children did enjoy the unusual undivided attention of a working mom. “Mommy got parked,” Ms. Zander said ruefully. “I'm not as ‘on' if my kid is attached to one of those devices. I played Clue. I haven't played Clue in a very long time. We got to hang out more, which was an entire family adjustment, but it's a good problem to have.”

Among the parents who spoke with pride about newfound family time when their children were forced offline, there were honest admissions about the joy-kill of too much bonding. One 10-year-old boy in Lower Manhattan sweetly told his mother, “This gives us a chance to talk.” After three hours of “and that's why they need to ditch Sanchez and make Tebow the starter,” she was silently pleading for someone to turn the power on.

“For the first three days, I was full of maternal pride,” said Marjorie Ingall, a writer in the East Village. “'Look at my children: reading by candlelight, cutting out paper dolls, engaged in such brilliant imaginative play. We are so ‘Little House on the Prairie.' Then Day 3 hit and the charm of screenless togetherness wore off. I was genuinely concerned that we were all going to kill each other.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 11, 2012, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Life Unplugged.

Disruptions: Casting a Ballot by Smartphone

Last Tuesday, millions of Americans stood in long lines to cast their votes. While they waited, sometimes for several hours, many used their smartphones to pass the time.

Some read articles about the election. Others updated their Twitter or Instagram feeds with pictures of the lines at the polls. And some took care of more private tasks, like sharing health information with their doctors, reading and editing confidential work documents, or paying bills and transferring money using banking applications.

Once in the voting booth, they slipped their phones into their pockets and purses and, in many cases, picked up a pen and a piece of paper to cast their ballot.

So at a time when we can see video shot by a robot on Mars, when there are cars that can drive themselves, and when we can deposit checks on our smartphones without going to a bank, why do most people still have to go to a polling place to vote?

That's because, security experts say, letting p eople vote through their phones or computers could have disastrous consequences.

“I think it's a terrible idea,” said Barbara Simons, a former I.B.M. researcher and co-author of the book “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?”

Ms. Simons then ran through a list of calamitous events that could occur if we voted by Internet. Viruses could be used to take over voters' phones; rogue countries like Iran could commandeer computers and change results without our knowledge; government insiders could write software that decides who wins; denial-of-service attacks could take down the Internet on Election Day.

“It's a national security issue,” Ms. Simons said. “We really don't want our enemies to be able to determine our government for us - or even our friends for that matter.”

Of course, many of those concerns make sense. None of us want some evil autocrat picking the next president.

But other countries allow citizens to vote via the Inter net, or are experimenting with the idea. In 2005, Estonia started testing an online voting system and has since registered more than a million voters who now cast their ballots online. Italy plans to test an online voting system this year.

Not the United States, the land of the free and the home of the smartphone.

Ronald L. Rivest, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that for now, the best technology out there is the one we've been using.

“Winston Churchill had a famous saying that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried before,” Mr. Rivest said. “You can apply the same statement to paper ballots, which are the worst form of voting, but better than all the others that have been tried before.”

Mr. Rivest, who is the R in the name of the RSA encryption system, which is used by government institutions and banks, said that if things went wrong on Election Day, chaos could ensue, because doubts about the results would rattle the foundations of our democracy.

“One of the main goals of the election is to produce credible evidence to the loser that he's really lost,” he said. “When you have complicated technology, you really do have to worry about election fraud.”

So what's the solution? Ms. Simons and Mr. Rivest both seemed certain that the best alternative was to stick with a technology that's a couple of thousand years old. “Paper,” they both said, as if reading from the same script. “Paper ballots.”

Voting by mail, which some cite as an option, lets people avoid the lines, but it is not so easy on the vote counters. In states where this is allowed, envelopes have to be opened and ballots sorted into precincts. Then the signature needs to be matched with that on the voter registration card. None of this is terribly efficient.

So in 10, 20 or 100 years, when our cars have been replaced wi th self-flying spaceships, robots take our children to school, and our smartphones are chips in our heads, will we still be using a pen and paper to choose our president? I sure hope not.

After Hurricane Sandy disabled power and transportation for many in New Jersey, the state announced that some people would be allowed to vote by e-mail. The entire operation was pulled together in three days. Although there were problems, the system worked for most.

Digital voting could drive more Americans to the polls. According to a report released by the Census Bureau this year, nearly 50 million Americans didn't vote in the 2008 election. Millions of people said this was because they were out of town, had transportation problems or were too busy to get to the polls. Internet voting could let millions more people take part.

There are, as the security experts point out, a litany of issues to confront before this happens, but it's not impossible.

Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard and author of the book “The Right to Vote,” added one more issue to the list: voter coercion, in which your boss or someone else bullies you into picking a candidate, perhaps right in front of them. But Mr. Keyssar said people should eventually have the option to vote via the Web.

“I think it's something that the government should be looking to develop as a down-the-road option,” he said, adding that in Brazil, a government group called the Federal Election Tribunal has the task of developing all-digital voting technologies. “We could have a similar tribunal here,” he said.

In his acceptance speech, President Obama acknowledged the problems of those who had to wait in long lines to vote, saying, “By the way, we have to fix that.”

There are more than twice as many mobile phones in the United States as there are people who voted during this last election. As one option to “fix that,” I'd vote for an app that allows me to cast my ballot from the privacy of my own home, rather than waiting in line to mark a piece of paper with a pen.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Apple Settles Patent Suit With HTC

Apple and HTC have brought an end to their lawsuits against each other, in the first settlement between Apple and a maker of Android smartphones.

In a statement issued Saturday night, the two companies said the settlement includes the dismissal of all current lawsuits and sets up a 10-year license agreement between the two companies that includes rights to current and future patents held by both parties. Apple and the Taiwan-based HTC said the terms of the deal were confidential.

“We are glad to have reached a settlement with HTC,” said Timothy D. Cook, the chief executive of Apple, in a statement. “We will continue to stay laser focused on product innovation.”

“HTC is pleased to have resolved its dispute with Apple, so HTC can focus on innovation instead of litigation,” Peter Chou, the chief executive of HTC, said in a statement.

Apple's battle with HTC had a much lower profile than Apple's legal fight with Samsung, a much more signifi cant rival in the smartphone market and the biggest maker of handsets based on Google's Android operating system. A jury awarded Apple more than $1 billion in damages in its lawsuit with Samsung in August, though Samsung is challenging the ruling.

The HTC suit, however, was the first one Apple filed against an Android phone maker and a harbinger of future Apple legal challenges aimed at the software. Apple filed patent infringement suits against HTC in March 2010 in federal court in Delaware and before the International Trade Commission.

The suit was the start of what is widely viewed as a proxy war between Apple and Google, the creator of the Android operating system. The week Apple filed the suit against HTC, Steven P. Jobs, then Apple's chief executive who died late last year, erupted in fury over Android, in a scene depicted in Walter Isaacson's biography of Mr. Jobs.

“I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product,” Mr. Jobs said, acco rding to Mr. Isaacson's book.

Apple sued Samsung in 2011. Another Android maker, Motorola Mobility, sued Apple in late 2010, and Apple subsequently countersued the company. Google now owns Motorola.