Here in San Francisco, almost everyone I know has iPhones.  But there are a whole lotta people somewhere in the world with Android devices.

According to this article from ExtremeTech, Android shipments are up from 700,000 total in 2008, to 550,000,000 in 2012.  Yes, five hundred and fifty million devices shipped worldwide running Android, with 136 million in Q3 2012 alone.

With Blackberry's penetration cut in half, and Symbian's even worse, it's now a two horse race between Android and iOS [1].  And although in the Valley all you hear about is the iPhone, and everyone's building apps for the iPhone, a peek beyond to the rest of the world showcases the dominance of Android worldwide [2].

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Congrats to my brother Sam, Nick, Michael and the entire FreshPlum team for their article in TechCrunch today about Helium, a new product from FreshPlum that allows anyone to add a shopping cart to their site with an easy, one-line-of-javascript implementation.

In fact, if you'd like to experience just how easy it is, you can buy Sam a beer to see how he's integrated Helium into his personal blog.

PS Sam, you owe me a beer.  :)

Larry Wachowski is now Lana Wachowski.   She -- previously "he" -- is one of the directors of The Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas.

I've always been pro equal rights for everyone, but this video by Lana got me to take a step further, and donate $50 to the Human Rights Campaign.  It's a very moving speech about how Lana never felt like she quite fit in growing up, and why she's now speaking publicly about it.

Thanks, Lana, for spurring me to take action in a cause I believe in.

It seems that politicians these days can't rally to take action on even the smallest decisions, so it's easy to forget about the bold leaders of our past.

But I saw something awesome today in Michael Porath's Manifest Destiny project.  

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson executed the Louisiana Purchase.  We all learned about it in school.  But what's incredible -- and what I didn't learn in school -- is that the size of the land purchased was unknown at the time it was bought.

So, think about that for a second the next time you hear politicians bickering over immaterial issues.  Thomas Jefferson paid $15MM in 1803 for a body of land that he had no idea the size of.  Now that takes brass cojones and it's a great reminder to follow your gut, because what he was really buying was the removal of French influence in the region, and he knew that alone justified the purchase price.

The CEO of a mobile gaming app just sent me the email above.  It's genius.

Up to 1,000 options for beta testing his app.

Now that's a way to crowdsource your bug and beta testing!

If you're an iOS user who likes playing games and you'd like to request an invite to get these options too, please post in the comments below and I'll make an intro.  (Make sure you've set your profile up correctly, as I'll message you privately).

Last night I met Ray, the CEO of Blue Octopus Matrix at a Silicon Vikings event where I spoke on a panel about the impact mobile is having on social as we know it.

We were chatting before the event started, and Ray whipped out two Android phones running a network sniffer app created by his company, which showed in a very striking visual manner the latency and speed differences between AT&T and Sprint LTE 4G networks.

The verdict: Sprint -- at least in Palo Alto CA that day -- was horrible.  But it's not in just one location that I've noticed this -- a friend with a Sprint iPhone5 and I did a SpeedTest when we were in the DC area last week.  I was getting 31mbps on my AT&T iPhone 5 and he was getting 0.3mbps on his Sprint iPhone5.

Sprint might be offering unlimited data.  But the pipe that serves that data appears to be about the size of a straw.

My wife and I are on a quest to learn how to take insanely great pictures.  We are just starting this journey and I invite you to share it with us if photography is a passion of yours.  The picture above is one of our first attempts at taking the kinds of photos that have a "wow" factor that transcends a regular photo. The photo was taken by my wife; that's my friend Keoni on the left and me on the right.

My first step was to learn about cameras and settle on the right one for me.  After doing a lot of research, I chose the Panasonic Lumix GX1.  I explain below why I bought this camera and what I think of it, and I'll be posting more in the community section as I learn more about how to take world-class photos.

We've been using the "lock & unlock your door with an app on your phone" solution from Lockitron for two years now.  In fact, here's a blog I wrote in 2010 with a video showing how it works.  As early adopters, Paul, one of the Lockitron founders, was great about coming by our office to fix the early version of Lockitron whenever it had trouble.  We were happy users of Lockitron version 1.0.

And that's all I heard about Lockitron for two years.  But it turns out Paul, Cameron & team have been super busy.  Today they launched a new version of Lockitron in a really smart way.  It's so impressive that I'm going to spend a few minutes dissecting it, because we can all learn from what they've done.   I'd also like to invite anyone from Lockitron to give more detail on my observations in the comments section below.

The first and most obvious thing they did was use a Kickstarter-type approach to their launch.  When you visit www.Lockitron.com you see what I've taken a screenshot of above.  (I'd be curious to know if they're using a while-labeled Kickstarter-type service, or more likely, just taking the best from Kickstarter's approach and doing it in-house).

As I've outlined in the screenshot, they set a goal which (purposefully or not) is now massively oversubscribed.  It makes you feel like you have to get in on the action.  

I try not to get too political on this blog.  But politics is something I'm deeply conflicted about.  As a business owner, I want the government to stay out of my way.  But as the son of an immigrant, I value inclusive domestic policies.  I don't feel like either party represents me well.

As I've written about before, there are only a few things I know to be true.  And nothing in politics is among them.  But there are definitely some things I think are true about politics today which really bug me:

1) Politicians seem to think they need to know the answers to everything.  They're dealing with some of the most complex issues on the planet.  It's OK to say "I don't know."  It's OK to lean on experts for answers to inform decisions.  It's not a sign of weakness.  I wish more politicians would be honest about that.

2) Politicians rarely talk about the cost of a decision.  Every action incurs a cost.  I often hear promises, but I hardly ever hear about the costs that will be incurred to execute on those promises.  I wish, when a special interest group asked for something from a politician, s/he would respond with "what would you suggest be cut to provide for that?"  And then let whatever group is affected by that proposed cut have a say in the matter.  There's no framework today to have discussions like that.  

3) I wish politics were a part-time job for people who had other day jobs.  It used to be that way.  Politics should be an amateur sport, not a professional one.