I suppose they can’t help themselves. They are a phone company, after all. How many of you out there use your smartphone to get online with your laptop by tethering the latter to the former?

Uh, huh! I don’t have to see you to know there are a lot of hands shooting up right now.

Bad news if you’re a Sprint customer. Sprint announced this week it will no longer allow its customers to tether their way online with their smartphones. From now on, you’ll have to use a special Sprint dongle and get yourself a separate data plan (No, you’re not wrong. You are being turned upside down by your ankles while your carrier shakes you down for more cash).

Eeeee-vil!

That’s just wrong as my best friend, Zelda, would say.

You can bet the other carriers will be right on their heels with this one.

I got one word to say: netbook.

That’s what this is about.

Let me harkin back to a posting of mine from earlier this month, “Will Telcos Kill The Netbook?”

I made the prediction that the telcos are aiming to co-opt the netbook business with their own business model that is not so user-friendly.

It’s already happening.

I bought my netbook for $330 this summer, competitively priced to undersell the larger, more powerful laptops. I fear these days are dwindling. It appears the phone carriers are hoping to sell netbooks like mobile phones with a monthly data plan and a two-year contractual commitment (plus whatever extras they can sell you).

Of course, in order for this to work, they need to make sure you can’t use your smartphone to get your netbook online,

This would be like your cable television provider making you get separate accounts for every television in your house with cable access (instead of a nominal monthly fee on the same bill for each additional outlet).

This would be like your electric company making you set up a separate account for every plug in your house.

This would be like the water company making you set up a separate account for every faucet, washer and dishwasher hook-up in your house.

This would be like your electric company no longer allowing you to power small appliances with a handful of Duracell batteries. Instead you would have to use a proprietary battery of theirs set up under a separate account with a monthly basic fee that is double your basic electric bill fees,

Not much will be said about this up front. Trust me, there’s going to come a time when the consumer catches on and realizes what a shameles stick-up this is.

We pay for Internet access at home. Businesses pay for it at work. We pay for Internet access on our mobile devices. Now Sprint wants you to pay separately for netbook access.

Monthly Internet access should not look like a car payment.

People use the Internet on the move across multiple devices. People should not be forced to pay for separate data plans for every location and device they use to go online.

I wish I were a Sprint customer so I could dump them in protest.

I don’t know what kind of boss I am at VerticalResponse—you’d have to ask my staff about that. I think they’d say I’m fair, fun, I like to cut to the chase, and will use fewer words than most to try to get my point across. They’d probably say that as long as they’re getting their jobs done, I don’t interfere too much, and I’d like to think I try to remove obstacles for them. I hope that they’d say I believe in growth from within a company. I like to think I learned this from a few bosses in my past that just happened to be women.

Cut back to the early 90’s and my second job out of college when I was a sales assistant at a major media corporation in New York. I was privileged to have a wonderful boss, Tracy. I was a bit nervous to take the job because I was leaving one department to go to another and I felt guilty for leaving my current boss, but I was really in a dead-end position. Tracy really gave me a chance given that I didn’t know anything about sales in a media corporation and she went out of her way to help me grow.

Tracy was a nice, elegant, Southern woman, about late 30’s, and even though there was nothing pretentious about her, she probably made over $250K a year. She took me under her wing and made the time to sit with me and teach me the ropes. It was my job to make sure her sales orders got processed and instead of telling me to “just do it,” she explained why it had to be done. It took an investment of her time up front, which took away from her selling, but in the end, she knew it would benefit her.

Tracy had respect. When things were going awry with her clients, she never let it get to her and never blamed me. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” she always said. She made me feel very much a part of her work life and let me really get to know our clients. And although I made a mere $19,000 a year, she always took care of me and encouraged me with spot bonuses and beautiful holiday gifts all tied to work well done.

In the end, she wanted to help elevate me so that one day, if I wanted it, perhaps I could “graduate” into a successful salesperson like her.

Now for the dark side.

When Tracy left her job, I was re-assigned to Liz. She was a tough, divorced, single, fast-moving, New Yorker who was looking to “climb to the top” and she was taking no prisoners on the way. Liz was anything but calm; she ran around the office shouting orders at me, but always stamped her shouts with a wink and a smile as if that would make me feel better about being yelled at. If something was going wrong with a client, her first thought was to point the finger at me: “Let me see the order YOU wrote up.” She rarely took responsibility.

She never made me feel like I was part of her accounts and often kept the clients to herself. I often wondered, Was she so shallow that she thought I would rise up through the ranks and compete with her? Or did she simply want to keep me in the current position forever and not help elevate a young up-and-comer?

You might be thinking I wasn’t lucky for having Liz in my life, but I don’t see it that way! I learned a lesson from her that year—what I don’t want to be and how I don’t want to treat people—which can be just as valuable.

Fred Wilson on “slow capital”.The VC and blogger Fred Wilson tackles the slow movement today, and introduces a new term: slow capital. The slow movement encourages people to focus less on accomplishing tasks and more on taking one’s time with things. Wilson’s take includes focusing on meeting the company’s needs rather than the investors’ and being flexible with timing. “I’ve spent almost twenty five years in the capital markets watching investors behave,” he writes. “Way too often it is a ‘wham bam’ experience and then off to the next deal. Things like exploding offers, ‘fly by’ board members, and shotgun marriages are so common that you sometimes wonder how anyone makes any money. There’s a reason why Warren Buffet is the best investor of his generation.”

How to come up with a company name. Don’t stress. That’s the advice of Thomas Petersen who says that a great product will more than compensate for a bad name. So focus on that. “There are no perfect names only great products,” he writes. Still, coming up with a name–especially at a time when many short dot-coms are taken–is hard. Petersen advises picking a name that says something about your product. And keep in mind that bad names can start sounding pretty good if your company does a good job. “Your brand cannot make your product better, only you can make your name better,” he writes. “By making sure that your customers and users get good experiences when they interact with you, your name will gain value. Therefore concentrate on your customer service, optimizing the service, providing superior experiences and maximum utility and your name is well on its way to be the perfect name you wanted it to be.”

Remembering a fast-food legend. Sad news for fast-food aficionados as Troy Smith, founder of the drive-in burger chain Sonic, passed away this week at the age of 87. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Smith’s burger joints were originally named Top Hat, but after he introduced a system where drive-in patrons could deliver their orders via speakers, the name Sonic was chosen and gave birth to the company’s slogan, “Service with the speed of sound.” An innovator in the restaurant field, Smith’s original fast-food chains in the 1950’s included waitresses on roller skates, a streamlined kitchen, and angled parking spots so that the “wild teenagers,” as he described them, couldn’t park window-to-window. Smith became Sonic’s “chairman emeritus” in 1983, but remained involved with the business as an advisor. In 2008, Sonic had $3.8 billion in sales and 3,600 stores in 42 states.

The SBA ups the size limit for small businesses. If this first round of proposed revisions is adopted, more than 12,000 additional companies would be considered small businesses, and hence become eligible for SBA loans and preference for federal contracting, reports the Washington Business Journal. A total of 71 different types of businesses would enjoy SBA-sanctioned benefits should the changes be approved, including hotels, retailers, and various sectors within the service industry. According to SBA Administrator Karen Mills, the size increase is designed to “reflect changes in the economy and the marketplace.”

Facebook and Zappos on hiring strategies It seems like there’s always some new company started by former Google employees, but is that good press for the company or brain drain? As the Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Zappos‘ Tony Hsieh recently discussed their opposing philosophies of employee hiring and retention at Y Combinator’s Startup School. Zuckerberg favors a revolving door of bright people honing their craft at Facebook and then going on to their own creative endeavors. Hsieh said he aims to keep employees for the long haul and explained how he achieved that goal. “We now provide mentorship and training so employees can join at the entry level and, over a period of five to seven years, have the opportunity and training to become senior leaders in the company,” he said. “Constant growth is what will keep them in the company for a very long time.” Get some additional hiring tips from Whole Foods’ John Mackey.

Do you know where your children are? Well, if they’re at Keith Valley Middle School, be afraid, says TechCrunch. Very afraid. That’s because Microsoft has gotten a hold of them, and the result is a cult-like video starring the Bing jingle. (Director’s note: What isn’t shown is the aftermath in which the Bing students get stuffed in lockers by their Google counterparts.)

Vibrant tech startups emerge from New York’s financial wreckage. According to Wired, New York City’s tech scene has got an unexpected boost from the financial sector’s demise. Investors that used to look to larger institutions are giving startups that need just a couple hundred thousand more of a chance. Scrappy tech CEOs are also having an easier time pulling good talent. With the financial and media industries in turmoil, the market in general is more hospitable to these upstarts. Engineers that were once hard to lure away from six-figure salaries are attending suddenly maxed-out events like NY Tech Meetup. And VCs like Spark Capital, Polaris in Boston, and First Round in Philly are creating a network effect. In fact, New York has been quietly, asserting itself as a hub for tech startups for the past couple years. First Round Capital’s entrepreneur-in-residence Charlie O’Donnell tells Wired, “Some of the entrepreneurs who have been ‘head down,’ building great businesses, are now able to take a breath for the first time in years . . . so there’s more visible participation from them in the community.” So who are some of these phoenixes rising from the ashes? Ivy Exec: “like an even more velvet-roped version of Ladders.com” that Inc. profiled in July. And GiveReal: a site that started out as a Facebook group and lets people give gifts at nearly a million different merchants by piggybacking on existing credit card networks. (Hat tip, peHUB).

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On Wednesday, Oct. 21 and Thursday, Oct. 22, local members of the Greater New York business community got together on the shores of Stamford, CT, then downtown Manhattan, and finally in an imposing home on a hill in Short Hills, NJ, to discuss a serious topic: year-end tax planning for businesses and business owners.

Lucky attendees to this Rothstein Kass and Co. sponsored event received a free copy of High & Dry: Retirement Planning Mistakes by Business Owners.

In Stamford, CT, we were treated to a gorgeous evening in a beautiful new home on the shores of Long Island Sound. The house was “move-in” condition for the first lucky duck ready to fork over $8 million. Throughout the home, original art from the likes of Warhol and others hung on the walls, courtesy of Samuel Owen Gallery, also in Stamford, CT.

In New York, we met in the wood-paneled conference room of Darby and Darby, an intellectual property law firm in downtown Manhattan. If you can imagine floating 42 stories above New York, you can imagine the scene at Darby and Darby.

Finally, in Short Hills, NJ, we gathered in the historic home of Abraham Lincoln’s Financial Adviser’s home. That’s right, Abe’s financial advisor slept there. The house, more like a castle, was set on 2+ acres and was modernized from top to bottom over the last 4 years. Buy it for $11.9 million and they’ll throw in the squash court.

Okay, enough about real estate. We were together to discuss ways to use advanced financial and tax planning techniques in order to turn 2009 from a crummy year into a so-so year and turn 2010 from a re-building year into an outstanding year.

(NOTE: Abraham Lincoln’s financial adviser did not respond to requests to speak at our event. Something about his voice mailbox being full.)

With just 70 days left in the year, our experts were given the difficult task of imparting at least one solid piece of wisdom that the business owner participants could take home to their financial advisers and accountants and apply to their current situation–a challenge, indeed.

Alan Kufeld, a partner at Rothstein Kass, the CPA firm, was first up. Kufeld opened with a game-changer: “forget the conventional wisdom,” he said. “After a year of financial turmoil, learn to embrace the ‘new normal.’” Kufeld quickly dove into specifics.

For example, while most business owners are told by their advisers and accountants to speed up expenses at year-end while simultaneously slowing down accounts payable from our clients, Kufeld says that in 2009 that should be reversed. Why?

“With health care legislation in the offing, tax rates are likely to be higher in 2010 than they are in 2009. Why accelerate expenses in 2009 when you can take them in 2010?. The reverse would be true with revenues.”

If, like most of us, you believe taxes are going to go up, that little chestnut could save you lots of money. Kudos Kufeld. What else have you got?

“Give part of your company away now, while it’s probably worth less than it will be in the future.”

Say what, Alan?

“When your company suffers a bad year, that’s the perfect time to pass it on to the next generation or place it in a trust. That way, you can get the value of the company out of your estate and into the hands of your children most cost-effectively. In the years to come, when the value increases, that value will not be part of your taxable estate.”

POW, I did not expect that. Give away equity when it’s worth very little? “Yes,” says Kufeld, “and soon, before Washington D.C. takes away some of the advantages.”

While the audience was pondering that one and scribbling calculations on scraps of paper to see how much money Kufeld may have saved them, he pulled out his best for last.

For this idea, Kufeld teamed up with high net worth specialist, Frank Seneco, of Seneco & Associates in New Haven, CT. To summarize, Seneco and Kufeld presented a way to effectively create your own liquidity event on your own terms. Using their idea, you can take hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax losses over several years, saving you thousands of dollars in taxes and fund a lifetime pension plan for you and the other owners.

WHACK! Out of the ballpark!

It’s called a benefit-focused pension plan and it’s been around since 2008. While it’s not right for everyone, Kufeld and Seneco walked through the scenario enough to get the audience’s juices flowing. “That,” Seneco says, “is how you turn a crummy 2009 into a good year and how you turn 2010 and beyond into great years.”

In Seneco’s scenario, you could create as much as $33,000 per MONTH payments for life out of your business.

Of course, the details are far too complicated to address in a blog. For more about benefit-focused pension planning, consider downloading our new research report for business owners about falling behind on retirement planning, entitled “High & Dry.”

The next Inc. Business Owners Council: Greater New York event will occur on Nov. 17 and 18, 2009 in Greenwich, CT, Elizabeth, NJ, and Manhattan. For more information, email “events@inc.com“.

I was recently interviewed by a reporter from ComputerWorld about overhyped technology, and it got me thinking about artificial intelligence. When I was reading books about LISP in the 1980s, I envisioned that by the 21st century we would have come up with multipurpose devices to both understand and react to the reality surrounding them. Instead, all we have are toys like the Roomba.

So what have our biggest advances in AI and robotics actually been? I did a little research on the web (and YouTube) to gather some examples.

Robots on the Battlefield

Peter W. Singer just published “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century,” which focuses on how military forces from 44 different countries are already taking advantage of this kind of technology. You can watch an interview where Singer discusses his work on YouTube (below).

What does this kind of technology mean for the future of warfare?

Related links:

The U.S. Military’s New Warriors: Robots and a superman exoskeleton.

Boston Dynamics BIGDOG Robot

Curt works for Journyx, a time and project management solutions company.

Bye bye recession. The nightmare is over. Maybe. The Wall Street Journal (along with everybody else) is reporting that GDP grew by 3.5 percent in the third quarter, “likely marking an end to the worst recession since World War II.” That’s great news, but it was driven partly by large amounts of government spending, especially the Cash for Clunkers program. That’s all over now. “Since the federal stimulus reached its maximum effect in the third quarter and the unemployment rate remains high, there’s uncertainty over the sustainability of the recovery,” The Journal reports. Business Insider says that we may be looking at a jobless recovery, which is better than no recovery, but still pretty bad.

The billionaires next door. Silicon Valley is hardly unaccustomed to concentrated wealth. But according to Valleywag, in one Palo Alto neighborhood not too far from Stanford, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim lives next door (literally) to Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who for months has also been occupying a property a short walk away that serves as his social network’s new headquarters. It’s a modest, laid-back locale for Karim, whose estimated wealth is $64 million and Zuckerberg, who’s worth $2 billion on paper. So why did a College Terrace tipster rat out the rich kids? In the midst of its fast growth, Facebook failed to provide sufficient parking and employees are taking up all the spots.

Finding grants for your small business. Information on where you can find, and how you can apply for, grants is publicly available and free. If your small business meets all of the necessary qualifications, you may just be able to receiving federal funding, writes CNN Money. Federal grant funding programs, such as the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, award more than $2 billion each year to qualified small businesses. While technology-based companies have historically won the majority of these grants, it’s possible - if not a bit tougher - to receive funding as a non-tech business. Find out if your business qualifies for any special small business certifications, and investigate local government websites for an economic development agency you can get in touch with. Or, you can try Grants.gov to find and apply for federal grants.

The perfect Halloween costume for tech geeks. Courtesy of the Baltimore Sun’s tech blog, check out this video of perhaps the coolest, if not the nerdiest, Halloween costumes this season. The video shows two guys decked out as life-size iPhones. Not cardboard and tin-foil iPhones, mind you. Actual working iPhones. The two devised life-sized, wearable monitors that displayed the functions of their standard iPhones right on their chests. Pretty amazing. The costumes may not land them dates on Halloween night, but it has surely won them the admiration of tech geeks everywhere.

Securing your company’s data. It’s a little shocking that, in 2009, any company would secure its data with a single, not-so-secret, password: “password.” But considering that The Wall Street Journal found one for its piece on data protection, we’re figuring there are a few more of you out there. So may we recommend that you read The Journal’s article and then check out some more password protection tools right here.

Borrowing the app from Apple. For now, the growing app industry is all about smart phones. But Ford is opening a development kit for in-car apps, according to our siblings over at Fast Company. The developers envision drivers using the apps to plan trips, find points of interest, and access other data on-the-go. “The way we’re developing the toolkit, you could sit in the comfort of your home and plan a roadtrip,” says Prasad Venkatesh, who leads Vehicle Design & Infotainment at Ford. “At the click of a button, the cloud would make all that available to you in the car, and it would broadcast it to your social networking groups.”

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AT&T has what I call a happy problem; too much traffic on its 3G network.

That’s happy as in for AT&T, not so for their customers who suffer through dropped calls and out of service time (see my blog posting earlier this month, “Smartphones and Dumb Carriers”.

AT&T by its own admission can’t scale up its 3G network fast enough. A big part of the problem is dealing with so many local bureaucrats and each municipal fiefdom’s own unique maze to get approval to add equipment in public areas.

While all this hashes out, one make-do solution appears to be all those AT&T hotspots. There are now more than 20,000 of them in the United States.

On AT&T’s end, WiFi through a hotspot is much easier and cheaper

Customers seem to be catching on, as well. AT&T’s own 3rd quarter report on hotspot usage shows there were more than 25 million WiFI sessions at AT&T hotspots. That’s up from 15 million sessions in just the previous quarter of this year.

In other news:

Microsoft announced this week that it will retire MSN Direct on January 1st, 2012. Question: does this have anything to do with Mayan prophecy?

Oh, sorry, you have some real questions about this? Chances are you will find answers in the following FAQ at the MSN Direct site.

One thing most startups and small businesses don’t have enough of is sick days. It is something that I’m personally very aware of, having had to take a sick day in my business today. When it’s your business, it is tough to “take a day off” when you typically work eight days a week. It especially hurts if taking that day means your business isn’t moving forward.

While I don’t want this column to harp on the health care debate in Washington, Terri Lonier, President at WorkingSolo.com, told me she believes “The Entrepreneurial Spirit would be unleashed in the US if we had better access to health care. Of course there are economic consequences, but in my experience, people who are ready to run their own firms stay as W2 workers due to challenges getting insurance. Illness underscores the reality that many entrepreneurs are their business. They should have contingency plans in place for someone to fill in for client or customer obligations when they’re not able to.”

Elizabeth Brooks, managing partner of Str.ate.gy knows about that “plan b.” She has a small team, but she’s the creative lead on almost all her projects, and many can’t move ahead without her input. “The world stops when you are incapacitated. I’ve had the situation where I had a minor outpatient procedure, but had no idea if I would be on painkillers, or how long it would take for me to recover.” She had people who she trusted completely, but “It is always difficult when it is a creative decision since no one will make it the same as you would. Creatives are often very ‘type A’ and hard to relinquish control - but you need to have that backup person.” She advises that for each initiative, for each item, hand it to the person on your team with the most appropriate background. Or, give it to someone who you trust as a partner who you work with often. “You have to have faith in your ability to choose great staff, or great partners. Having been a corporate executive helped me learn to do that.”

Mark Tafoya, owner of the Remarkable Palate personal chef service , and co-owner of the Culinary Media Network
said the biggest problem is “you’re the guy. If you are sick, you can’t work. On the media side of my business I could work from home, but as a Personal Chef, it’s irresponsible for me to cook for others when I’m not healthy. I pass the job to someone else, and end up losing the money from that day’s gig, but it is the right thing to do. The benefit of being a chef, though, is that I’m much more aware of being clean, and I wash my hands all the time. I actually am getting sick less often.”

What’s your plan B? Let us know in the comments.

A researcher at Microsoft has spent the last 10 years putting all of the information in his brain onto computers in order to preserve it. According to CNN, Gordon Bell “carries around video equipment, cameras and audio recorders to capture his conversations, commutes, trips and experiences. He also saves everything — from restaurant receipts (he takes pictures of them) to correspondence, bills and medical records. He makes PDF files out of every Web page he views.” The total size of his “e-memory” is over 350 gigabytes (not including streaming audio and video). He believes that by 2020 we will all have such transcripts of our lives.

I think this is just completely fascinating. We are all going this way already, whether we know it or not - an increasing percentage of your life is digitally available. The trick is getting Big Brother to work for you instead of against you. How can you be sure all this data is solely under your own control at your own discretion.

Imagine using this sort of data to automatically fill out your timesheet, for example. As long as it’s your data - controlled by you - and you have the right to edit and control the timesheet before submittal, then it can only help your day.

Curt Finch writes for a project management blog as well.

From grease monkey to professional pumpkin carver. Just in time for Halloween, the Wall Street Journal has the story of Sean Fitzpatrick, a former auto mechanic who turned his hobby of carving pumpkins into a successful business. Fitzpatrick’s transition from a job as an auto mechanic at a Ford dealership to a professional artist began rather simply when his three-year-old daughter asked him to build her a snowman. His artfully-carved creation led to some media attention and inspired him to start building sand castles as well. As Ford began to close dealerships, Fitzpatrick used that as the inspiration to quit his job and get into the sculpting business full time. It’s been uphill ever since. Fitzpatrick’s business now does sand sculptures, ice sculptures, and pumpkin carvings for corporate promotion events. On Halloween day, look for Fitzpatrick doing a live pumpkin carving for a NASCAR event at the Talladega Speedway.

Community banks object to lending plan. At the American Bankers Association’s annual meeting, which is currently being held in Chicago, some attendees are complaining about the government’s proposed programs for small banks, reports Reuters. Many of the new efforts to aid small businesses that were unveiled last week by the Obama administration rely largely on community banks to ease the credit crunch. One such program would provide low-cost capital to banks that submit a plan about how the capital will help them provide increased lending to small companies. However, many bankers are hesitant to take the money because of potential restrictions on executive compensation.

Uncertainty a potential threat to recovery. Smart business owners always have a plan b, but in the face of so much political uncertainty, it sometimes feels like there aren’t enough letters in the alphabet for all the contingencies. According to the Wall Street Journal, business owners are having trouble planning for the future because of health care and climate change legislation, both of which are being debated in Congress now, as well as the uncertainty around the Bush-era tax cuts. The Journal quotes a Standard & Poor’s analyst who says, “It’s all anecdotal, and it affects everybody differently, but the one common factor is people postpone decisions. And I’m afraid that’s going to slow us down coming out of the recession.”

Lonely days in the Valley. It may not be a great time to be looking for a job in Silicon Valley. But if you’re a business owner looking for new digs, there’s a whole lot of office space to choose from, reports Silcon Alley Insider. With vacancy rates above 20 percent, it pays to shop around and to negotiate for a low rate.

24-year-old brings the Threadless model to college sports. It’s clear even from a quick look at Jeremy Parker’s resume that he’s got the entrepreneurial bug. When he was 19, he used the $7,000 he saved from his bar mitzvah to make a film called “One Per Cent” about the wealthiest demographic in America. Fresh out of Boston University, he started TeesandTats, which sold limited edition pieces by a famous tattoo artist. And today, Parker is launching his latest venture, Vote for Art, a partnership with MV Sport that brings the Threadless model to the sleepy world of sports paraphernalia. MV Sports helps Parker secure the licenses from various sports teams. Designers send in their interpretations of what the team’s t-shirt should look like for a chance at $500 and 2 percent of the sales of the winning design. The first contest is for the Purdue University Boilermakers just in time for the team’s first nationally televised game of the season December 1.

Virtual goods booming. It sounds weird at a time when companies can barely move physical stuff, but the market for virtual goods–like digital poker chips on Facebook–is booming, according to TechCrunch, which reports on a survey by digital goods marketplace PlaySpan. “[T]he fact that a third of digital goods buyers reported that they also sold goods is promising for the virtual goods marketplace space,” writes Leena Rao. PlaySpan claims to have processed $50 million worth of transactions since it was founded in 2006.

Twitter for treadmills? A common gripe from those who dread working out? Boredom. But according to NewTeeVee, San Franciso-based startup Netpulse thinks that the usual iPod and magazine combo isn’t enough any more. The company announced last night that it has raised $3.1 million in venture capital, led by Javelin Venture Partners, to turn treadmills, bikes and elliptical machines into interactive entertainment centers — complete with social media networking. The 15-inch touchscreen terminal, which is to be deployed by the end of the year, can be purchased by gyms for about $800, and is attached to the workout equipment, enabling users to enjoy on-demand music and video and read RSS feeds. Integration with sites like Twitter and Facebook will come next year, the post says. You’ll be able to “auto-Twitter your 5k splits and challenge your friends to beat you.” Or you can just stay away from the gym and Twitter about that using your cell phone.

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