A few times this week, I have had items come up which make me think on the position towards mobility that I’ve taken over the years. Specifically, the posture of doing just about 100% of things via mobile and connected services. This isn’t something that everyone can do, and its been one of those conversations where I’ve had to mature in seeing the point of mobile context more than just mobile ability. In that, its always great seeing some companies and individuals disrupt themselves and find that mobile and connected services are a better route towards getting things done than whatever was in place previously.

…So how does Butcher’s team pull this off? A handful of tech tools are key. “We use Google Apps for email, chat and calendar. We also use Vocalocity, which is our phone system. It’s cloud-hosted, which allows us to take our handsets anywhere. OfficeDrop was one of our last legs in becoming truly paperless. Anybody that we’re doing business with, we’re paperless with them if possible, but not all companies are at that level yet, so they are mailing us items that are important. Instead of sticking them in a file cabinet, we scan them and upload them right to OfficeDrop’s cloud,” Butcher says.

Techs in the field all carry stripped down netbooks with touch screen capabilities. Industry specific proprietary software sends their assignments straight to these laptops. “It’s a little piece of software. It’s got a custom drawn map and a job roster list, and we literally drag and drop the service calls. Once the day of the route comes, the technician turns on his laptop and he’s running a little utility that automatically pulls those service calls right in,” Butcher explains. “Through that utility they can capture all the information they need – what they did, model, serial number and they also can bring up a ticket image on the screen. The customer can sign right on the screen. It’s very nifty.”…

Read the rest of Fred’s Appliance from Web Worker Daily/GigaOm

Have you gone the route of changing all or parts of your office or administrative tasks using mobile? Has this translated not only into organizational efficiencies, but also ministrial ones?

During the month of January, we posted six articles which corresponded to five resolutions suitable for those working in and around mobile ministry. Five months into 2012, these are the kinds of resolutions which should have seen some marked progress. How are you doing with yours?

Here are the items we posted:

1. An App is Not A Strategy
2. Specifically Define Mobile in Education
3. Get Connected to Tech, Mobile, and Mobile Ministry Events
4. All Books Project and Mobile UX Standards and Raising the Bar on Mobile UX Standards
5. Become a Digital Faith Advocate

Found this on the web recently, which got me thinking a bit more about the kind of bar towards computing that’s being taught to kids and those new to digital environments – and therefore sitting also as expected knowledge to those of us within this space:

Do you use the internet to share information about yourself or others, communicate with friends, comment on what you see online, play games, get material for an assignment or buy stuff online? If you answered YES to any of these, you are a digital citizen.

Why is digital citizenship important?  Do you want to get the best out of using the internet and keep yourself and others safe and healthy in an online world? Use these materials to learn what it takes to become a positive digital citizen.

This seems to be a curriculum for schools to use when modeling digital citizenship to kids (in the K thru 6th grade age range). And at least on review, looks to at give some direction towards how not just to teach about what computer tech tools can do, but offer some means to speak on the responsibility towards them.

It goes back to that same picture of digital wisdom that we keep poking at: its not enough to promote the use of a tool, but do you also promote what healthly versus unhealthy uses look like?

Nothing like a good weekend away from things to reset and refresh. I think that in all of our moments, that we should take the time to do so. However, the question after you have rested usually sits on one of two ends: have you been inspired to continue forward or not?

When sitting on the beach this weekend, I pulled out my mobile a few times to take some pics and to pay for parking. I otherwise just left it alone to let the breeze, sand, and water be the social networking streams of my moment. I saw many people doing the same; some walking on the beach, many kids playing with parents or relatives taking photos, and a few sun-bathing. I even saw someone under an umbrella relaxing with a Kindle. But very little of the tech of the day getting in the way of the moment. I smiled, put down my mobile, and went back into the water. I was inspired to take in the moment for what was around me that I traveled to be in.

When you look at your use of mobile, or even how you persue mobile in this framework of mobile ministry, are you setting an environment where others can be inspired to jump into the streams of life? Even if that takes them away from your voice, product, or service? What does your presence in mobile ministry inspire in others? Is it maturity in the faith? Is it wasting time? Or, is it walking out onto the water to meet the King?

This piece was contributed by Gerad Hoyt of docSTAR, a firm specalizing in document management and business efficiency. Follow docSTAR on Twitter (@docstarsoftware).

Many employers have opted to provide their employees with mobile devices and tablets in order to stay connected and organized while in the office and on the go. With the ever growing pool of smart phone applications and increased effectiveness of communication in a handheld device, we see how easy it is to become more efficient by the touch of your finger.

These perks aren’t just seen in a fast paced environment of the business world either. Even farmers are getting into the game — in the article ‘Farming the “Smart” Way’ describes how his laptop can save him much time, effort and money; instead of travelling hundreds of miles to bid on cattle, he can place his offer remotely from his property. Another explains the process of monitoring sprinklers on the other side of their land can be almost effortless. Regardless of the industry, mobile technology seems to be a paramount factor of success and finally a study proves it.

Researchers Don J.Q.Chen and Vivien K.G.Lim completed a study testing the productivity of 3 groups students who were given different tasks. The study started off with each group having to complete the tedious task of underlining every “e” they came across in a 3,500 word article. Next, one group was told to bundle sticks into groups of 5, a second group was told to do anything that did not involve the internet (such as phone calls, bathroom breaks, text messaging, etc.), and the third group was allowed to surf the internet and engage in social networking, news, etc. After 10 minutes of these activities, the subjects were asked to underline each “a” they found in an article containing 2,000 words. The result of this experiment showed those in the first group, who continued to use their brain doing tedious tasks, were 39% less productive in the post test than those who surfed the web, and showed a higher level of boredom and mental exhaustion.

While having almost limitless connectivity seems great, at what point does this connectivity become detrimental? Sure it may make things easier while on the job, but what about when it’s time to go home and recuperate for the next busy day? Is it really possible to do such a thing while always being connected? Emails are constantly being sent from international clients, a co-worker may need to reschedule the morning meeting, etc. When do you get a break? Is there a dark side to mobile?

Within the report The Well-Being of the Mobile Workforce (Dr.Caroline Axtell, Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK), it was found that our ability to be contacted anywhere, anytime can and at times does have a detrimental effect on employee well being. The demands and stresses of this can also have an impact on relationships with family and significant others.

Excessive hours are a large reason for impact on relationships. The study found 47% of respondents who worked 5-10 extra hours a week, and 26% worked an extra 15-20 hours. Many were found to be working in nearly every spare moment, causing a complete disruption in their work-life balance. A deeper dive into this data found this experience of working in spare moments to be driven primarily from pressure and expectations from others. For instance, 32% of those working 15-20 extra hours reported that they stayed connected to their technology during vacation because of external pressures.

While this data is alarming, its not all doom and gloom. 64% of those surveyed said they felt they were able to better balance their workload with personal commitments. Pluses such as the ability to use dead time like commuting or waiting for flights as well as the greater flexibility gained from mobile technology also were cited in contributing to better performance and more satisfaction in work.

So does mobile really equal increased productivity or is it a detriment? The truth lies somewhere in the middle ground and the ability to maximize the good and minimize the “dark side”. To get the full benefit without the negative focus on:

• Detaching from work – Development of a strong separation of work and home is a key in ensuring that mobile doesn’t make work take over your life.
• Plan time for relaxation that can’t invaded by technology – Just as mobile technology can help improve productivity by serving as a break up of monotonous activity, it can be become a determinant if not kept in check

Follow these steps and you’ll be on a path to get the most from your mobile technology and maintaining an approprate work-life balance.

I have had this article about embodied cognition from Contents Magazine sitting in a tab or Evernote for the better part of two weeks. Each time I glance and reflect on it, I am left asking the question “why is the Bible I read on my digital devices so flat?” I have my own project (All Books) that in some ways seems to be addressing a temporal association to the text, but really, much of what we interact with in the Bible isn’t text, it’s emotion, space, activity. 

There is a sense to find your imagination around you while reading the Scriptures, but very little that you can do until you read all of the associated historical, sociological, and theological commentary around it. In a real sense, you have to create the world around which you can view Scripture within its lens (that is, if you are event interested in hearing it in the voice that it was written in). But, isn’t that kind of looking at things the wrong way – fitting that world into your own? What if the engaging of a Bible on a digital device (a digital window if you will) were more like stepping in on a conversation happening, and your digital window wasn’t text at all, but a series of still and moving images, mono and stereo audio – where you were always coming into the middle of a moment, no merely being in the seat of the narrator?

I am thinking almost in the sense that each of characters or books in the Bible are a channel. Each of these channels plays content that maps directly to the written text, but loops mich like an audio playlist. You only get to choose the character or book though. As soon as you make that selection, you are locked into wherever that story is happening right at that moment. This would be something like the Bible Experience audio series, but instead of simply walking into something narrated, you would literally be coming into still images or a performed program.

If you will, recapturing some of the creative energies that are used to display and tell the events of Scripture in layers, leaving the text as perhaps a caption or linked reference (similar to the Info/Guide button on a cable TV station). Again looking at engaging the text not from the perspective of studying, but more from the attitude of tuning into see what this channel of life is up to.

I know, it sounds like basically taking TV/YouTube as just running it all the time. But, I am asking for a bit more. Where the viewer doesn’t have control of where they come into the scene. Where there is no rewind. What if when you took your mobile, while reading in your favorite bible app, from the position of having your head down, to picking your head and mobile up (similar to holding it for taking a picture) and then Scritpture that you were just reading started to play like a movie in front of you. That’s what I am thinking here.

Caught this on the 271st Carnival of the Mobilists (hosted by MobiThinking) and thought it just great to put into the stream of posts given the direction the past two have taken:

Many execs put items on their roadmap that their gut tells them are important, but it’s difficult to calculate the ROI.

While I agree that it’s impossible to calculate the exact ROI of soft ROI initiatives, I think you can calculate the ROI enough to objectively assess your priorities.

In fact, I think it’s critical that you do so. The mobile landscape is littered with too much wasted money because of executive gut decisions that didn’t end up the way they expected.

So, let’s walk through an example…

Read the rest of Mobile Roadmap: Calculating Hard ROI on Soft ROI Initiatives at Mobile Manifesto

In other words, it can be hard as counting black beans in the dark but its not impossible. A lot of how you determine that ROI starts from what you know and don’t know. Perhaps in light of the piece at Mobile Manifesto, these posts will help make your ROI calculation, and project viability measures, a bit easier to understand and work through:

• Mobile Ministry Methodology
• Should Our Church Have a Mobile Website or a Mobile App
• A Primer on Differences Between Mobile Web Apps and Native Apps
• How to Build a Mobile App for Your Ministry
• How to Determine Your Audience for a Mobile App, Website, or Service
• Mobile Ministry Should Not Neglect Accessabiliy Practices
• Being Acquainted with the Challenges of Mobile as Ministry
• 2010 Future Trends Series: Bible Software | Bible Publishing |Physical Bibles

Chetan Sharma, a long-time and well respected voice in mobile, has recently published a report which paints a global picture of what’s happening in mobile not just in relation to itself, but also in relation to other large-scale trends and appliances which seem normal to many of us. The big picture summary of this report paints an interesting picture not just for mobile and connected spaces, but how economic factors will play a part in mobile as an avenue for ministry:

The global mobile industry is the most vibrant and fastest growing industry. We expect the total revenue in the industry to touch approximately $1.5 Trillion in 2012 with mobile data representing 28% of the mix. Mobile data services revenue stood at 33%. Global Mobile Data revenues eclipsed $300 Billion for the first time in 2011. It is also the first year in which non-messaging data revenues will make up the majority of the overall global data revenues at 53%.
 
By the end of 2011, the global subscriptions exceeded 6 Billion. The first 1 billion took over 20 years and this last one took only 15 months. The primary growth drivers are India and China which are cumulatively adding 75M new subs every quarter. China became the first country to eclipse the 1 billion mark in March 2012. India is likely to arrive at the milestone by early 2013.
 
Smartphones are driving tremendous growth around the globe. Amongst the major markets, US leads with 69% sales. The global figure stands at approximately 32%. Some operators expect 90-95% of their device sales to be smartphones in 2012. In terms of the actual smartphone penetration, we expect the US market to eclipse the 50% mark in 2012.
 
China leads in the number of subs but US dominates in both total and data revenue. A number of emerging nations are now in top 10 – Brazil, India, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Mexico while once dominant – Korea, UK, Italy, Germany have dropped off or slipped in rankings.

A few of the facts highlighted in this report include

Total Global Subscriptions to exceed 7 Billion in early 2013
– China exceeds 1 Billion, India 950 Million. Subscriber growth is in Asia, Revenue growth is in Asia+North America
China and India represent 27% of subscriptions but only 12% of the global service revenues
– US represents only 6% of the subscriptions but 21% of the global service revenues, 26% of the data revenues, and 27% of the global CAPEX
Mobile Devices are now exceeding traditional computers in unit sales + revenue
– 70% of the device sales in the US are now smartphones. Device Replacement cycle is shrinking
Samsung and Apple now account for 50% of the smartphone unit share and 90% of the profit share
– Difficult environment for other OEMs esp. when ZTE and Huawei are coming strong from the bottom. It will be difficult for pure play device OEMs to survive long-term
Tablets (iPads) has created a new computing paradigm that is having a significant impact on commerce, content consumption, and developer investments
– Apple will continue to dominate the segment and iOS will be the leading OS for the segment. Amazon, ZTE, Huawei, to chip away at the sub-$200 tier.

To read this report in detail, visit Chetan Sharma Consulting’s website, where there is a PDF downloadable version of this report complete with graphics and other source data useful for analyzing this data.

Once you have gone through it, does anything stick out for you? Does any of the data presented alter your plans or current activities in mobile? 

View our complete listing of Resources and Statistics

A few weeks ago I came across this article, Social Media: You Can Log Off But You Can’t Opt Out, which has put forth some interesting viewpoints, and to a large degree puts the right perspective on social media tech and the constraints they impose socially. Here’s a snippet:

…So technology is political in the sense that it is a site of struggle (perhaps, one could say, communication technologies are “places where revolutionaries go“) but it is not political in the naive sense that it determines the outcomes of social action (i.e., there are no Facebook or Twitter revolutions). Most relevant for the present conversation is this concept of non-optionality—that we can neither opt-in or opt-out of the socio-technical system. We are all touched by the emergence of new technology, even those who are most marginalized within the system. Because, at any given historical moment, technology and social organization are always linked, we all inevitably feel the ripple effects when new technologies are introduced. This very point was the premise of the South African slapstick film The Gods Must Be Crazy, where a single Coke bottle tossed from a plane is imagined to upset the entire social order of a remote Bushmen tribe (caveat emptor: racist and inaccurate portrayals abound)…

Read the rest of Social Media: You Can Log Off But You Can’t Opt Out at The Society Pages

So, going back to a question we posed a few times already, if you are gong to tell people to use mobile or social networking (an app, for announcements/broadcasts, etc.), are you going to spend the same energies talking to the, about it’s downsides?

This article was originally posted as a blog post at Urban Scholar:

Earlier today I was contemplating the thought of purchasing a new print Bible. One of the first posts I made on this site was about my switching to the ESV. Well, the only print ESV I own is a 2001 text edition, and there have been a number of changes since then with the 2007 & now 2011 update. So, I started to think that I should purchase a new ESV to have on me, especially for when the opportunity presents itself to teach again. I thought about it to the point that I even tweeted about the kind of Bible I wanted, saying the following:

considering buying a new print Bible… yes, a print Bible… thinking it’ll likely be a new thinline ESV w/2011 text updates

As the day went on, with the thought still on my mind, I wondered if the local Lifeway store had any 2011 ESV Bibles in stock. Then, as I thought about it some more, I was thinking, “Oh, I need a nice ‘preaching’ Bible too, to go with the thinline as my everyday ‘handy’ Bible!” After a while, I finally paused and asked myself a question. If I do all of my studying of the Bible digitally, why should I have a Bible that I only use for teaching? Shouldn’t the same Bible I study with be the same Bible I teach from? The answer was: why not?!

As I thought through this some more, I wondered what this would look like for me. Preaching from a tablet is nothing new and has become more popular in the last couple of years, so it’s not like I’d be breaking new ground or anything; yet, there could be something that better suits how I do things. In my thought process, I quickly realized that the way I teach requires lots of “page flipping” because I typically cross reference a lot of Scriptures. How could I leverage a tablet to my advantage? Right now Logos is my primary tool for study, but their mobile app doesn’t support a split screen of Bible & notes; so, that wouldn’t work. Then, I remembered that I have Olive Tree, which does & can also sync with Evernote. Having Evernote means that I can simply copy/paste or dump my passages or notes into an Evernote note and sync it with Olive Tree quite easily. Then, I can have my notes split with my Bible, and tap to open a reference. Now that could work! That would completely eliminate the need for a print Bible & printed notes.

So, let’s take this further because now I’m thinking about completely getting rid of my laptop from the pulpit. This proves tricky because that’s how I run my PowerPoint slideshow for the congregation to follow along. If you’re asking, yes, I usually run my own PowerPoint. Then I started thinking that this is somewhere that Logos could come back into play. They recently released Proclaim Church Presentation Software and it is built for this kind of thing. So, I just get a computer, any computer, connected to the overhead projector (whether it be my own or the one in the sound booth) and load it up; then, I can use my phone (or the tablet) as a remote to progress the slides as needed. Now that would be cool!

I could really see myself teaching in that fashion, and it’s right up my alley. I’m a digital guy, so working in this fashion keeps all of my notes accessible to me from multiple devices and I’m not in a jam if I ever forget or lose my print Bible. Plus, there’s always the freedom of being able to switch translations on the fly, which is nice. I also feel that technology is at a point now that it is fairly reliable, especially in terms of battery life, where no real red flags are raised for me anymore. I truly think that this is the route that I’m going to go in the future, however the Lord sees fit for that to happen.