I heard a rumor today that perhaps Verizon may be rolling out their pay per byte pricing on data plans beginning with their San Francisco customers who would want access to a 4G (LTE) connection.

AT&T spoke about the variable pricing model for data a couple of weeks ago. Now, Verizon is mentioning it. The problem with Verizon doing this is the sheer number of users in Silicon Valley and mid-Texas…the 2 most bandwidth-hungry places in the USA. Verizon indicates that their selection of next-generation of phones may indeed be out in late 2010, not 2011 as they indicated in late 2009.

What does this mean for a San Francisco Verizon user?

With a tiered pricing model for data starting as soon as next year, you will want to make sure your handset is wifi enabled. You definitely won’t want s new Hulu or YouTube video product to cost you an extra $500 per month to watch The Office. This should be good for AT&T & Starbucks…two of the beneficiaries of increased wifi use.

Ok, so I don’t know for sure, but I have a suspicion. Google recently launched their local business enhancements for San Jose, California and Houston, Texas. Perhaps this gives us some hints about Google’s view of their most progressive and highest-margin markets.

First, let’s talk about what is known. Google plans to start-up its own ISP in at least one test market. The market will showcase Gigabit level speeds for a small sample area of users.

Austin, Texas – Why not build it for Austin, Texas (aka the other Silicon Valley)? Google has supposedly soured on Austin because of the situation with the office they closed and quickly shuttered.

Why Houston, Texas? Houston has a large amount of excess inter-city wind-powered (Green-E)electricity capacity (at the zip code level), plenty of dark fiber and shovel-ready sites located in easy tech access areas. In addition, if you assume Houston is one of their highest margin cities, they would want those users to increase their speeds (and searches) first.

I stumbled upon an interested value proposition this week. The idea that people would do 1 to 10 things online for $5. Some would design a logo for $5, some would talk down to you like your father, while some would become your Facebook friend.

The name of the service is fiverr and it contains a listing of people will to do everything under the sun for $5….payable via PayPal. I tried it out for some of our other companies.

I used a user called goinglikesixty to review our companies for $5. I liked him so much that I used him to offer reviews on 5 different sites for 2 different companies. Good deal.

I also used a user called DeuceGroup to Digg and Stumble a few deep link pages inside some of our sites.  Very quick, very good links.

In both cases, the work was completed in less than an hour and was done satisfactorily. The fiverr website runs slowly because of all the new traffic, so I’d recommend getting individual email address to be able to bypass the website. The site accepts PayPal, retains some of the funds and send the rest to the workers.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) still generates enough buzz that CNET’s into its fifth year of nominating products for its Best of CES Awards, and among the gadgets that made the cut for its Best of CES 2010 round-up is the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.

Hearing the word “hybrid” associated with a car may not immediately generate skepticism about whether and how well it works, but when it comes to smaller gadgets it’s a natural reaction, and CNET raises good questions about this notebook whose screen undocks from the keyboard “to become its own handheld Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered tablet.” CNET makes the point that a Lenovo rep demonstrated the undocking at the show, which makes the reviewers “curious as to how delicate the procedure is and whether the laptop might accidentally disconnect under casual use” and also wonder “will both devices sync well with each other? Will the battery life be suitable? None of these could be determined in the space of a few minutes.”

Those concerns aside, it’s hard to deny not only how cool this thing looks but how cool it would be to utilize it in a presentation if it actually works the way it should. CNET noted that the tablet’s touchscreen performance and video playback was a mixed bag, but the one feature to get excited about is that “the base, when detached, can continue to function as its own Core 2 computer independent of the tablet–a monitor would need to be attached, but it opens up possibilities for the U1 to truly act as two devices in one. Separate batteries and Wi-Fi antennas are contained in both the base and the tablet screen, while the tablet has the 3G and Bluetooth antennas, as well as speakers and a webcam.”

This kind of redundancy, we’ll say again, is exciting, especially when you consider how versatile the hybrid would be if, say, at a trade show you could easily attach another monitor to the U1’s keyboard to let your colleague continue demonstrating an app at your company’s booth while you ran off with the tablet to demo something else. Practically, it would probably be easier to have two separate devices, but that’s where the cleverness of the end-user comes in – how could having this undockable tablet really save me time and energy on a day-to-day basis? What do you think?

Image source: Lenovo