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What If Reading the Bible on My Mobile Was Like Stepping Into the Middle of a Video

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

Mobile phone in hand with green screen
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.

 

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That Ever-Evasive Calculation of Mobile ROI

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Mobile ROI

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:

 

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2012 Mobile Global Market Update from Chetan Sharma Consulting

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

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

 

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Goodbye Analog, Hello Digital

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

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.

 

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RESS (Responsive Design w/Server-Side Components), Keeping Context in View

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

In the web design/development community, there’s been a lot of energy, excitement, and critique around responsive design. Responsive design is essentially the pracice of building a website from the perspective that it will be viewed across mobile, tablet, and desktop/laptop screens, with the (usual) approach of targeting the leveraging of CSS’s media queries. There are positives and negatives to this approach, and indeed, its something that can add some considerable time to the building and testing phases of a project. However, the results – having one website that adapts its content display on the basis of what the device, device’s screen/resolution, and browser capabilities – is an attractive proposition to other routes (building/managing multiple websites, dealing with User Agent scripting, etc.) for many.

Going down this route of responsive design, there’s a fork in the trend when discussing responsive design. Specifically, how does a developer manage responsive design when pieces of the the website are driven by scripting and dynamic generation from a server (responsive design leans heavily towards the browser/client making the decisions towards the display). I saw this linked on Twitter last week, and its probably one of the better tutorials on the subject of RESS (Responsive Design w/Server-Side Components). Here’s a snippet:

…With this setup we have two sources of information about the browser. Modernizr is a feature detection framework that makes it easy to detect browser features. It simply runs a test in the browser to get a boolean answer as output: “does X work?” and the answer is mostly “true” or “false”. The beauty of this is that it works on all browsers, also those that are not released yet. But it does not have much granularity, and the capabilities that are available is limited to what is possible to feature test. Examples of features that are possible to test include boxshadow, csstransitions, touch, rgba, geolocations and so on.

Device detection on the other hand, is something different. It all happens on the server and it’s a framework that analyses the HTTP header of the device. It then looks up in a database of known devices and return a set of capabilities for that device. The beauty of this is that it’s a database of information that is collected and maintained by humans and it can hold incredibly detailed information about capabilities that is currently impossible to feature test. Examples include device type (desktop, TV, mobile, tablet), device marketing name, video codec support and so on.

The downside is that User Agent analysis can go wrong some times and many devices tend to have a non unique UA string or to fake the UA string, but using a framework will minimise the rist of false detection. Device detection and feature detection cannot really be set up against each other as they are not two sides of the same coin…

Read (and bookmark) the rest of the RESS Tutorial. Some of the tools, APIs, and templates noted in this tutorial are listed here.

The original article on RESS was penned by LukeW – much of what’s covered in the tutorial leans on what he’s written. There’s also a SlideShare Presentation on the topic worth taking a look at.

Responsive design is something that’s been considered for MMM (given our content focus). As of now, we aren’t leaning towards that direction. There are things we have been learning from responsive design, and especially this tutorial given its server-side focus, that allows us to consider tweaking potential new routes for creating device and context-respecting content.

If you’ve gone the route of starting or implementing a responsive website, what are some of the challenges you’ve run into? Or, if you’ve visited a website that says it has employed responsive web design principles, has the context of how you wanted to use the site been lost or accented in that approach?

 

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JIT (Just in Time) as Your Mobile Focus

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012


When preparing for this week’s articles and activities, a term kept coming to mind, then it started popping up in various articles and comments. The term is simple, JIT (just in time), and it refers to a context of information and the media channels supporting it. But when we drive into mobile, JIT takes on another, more personal implication – I’m using this device for this channel because at the moment of need, its just in time to reply.

When was the last time that you went to your mobile for something you needed right now? Was it directions? A movie time? A contact you needed to message? How did it make you feel when you got that desired information? Were you relieved? Or, did you decide that you’d not go that route anymore – hoping that you never were stuck in that same place with that “only known to you” avenue of finding it?

In designing for a mobile context, this concept of JIT has to be taken probably a bit more seriously than everything else. We can see that there’s at least one signifiant set of mobile consumers who can be strictly judged by this JIT approach (see Pew Internet report).

So, when you are designing your application or service – does it matter to a JIT context? Yes, some content doesn’t. Let’s strike that off the board now. Now, to the content that does matter – can it be accessed just as its needed? Does someone have to remember a login code to get there? Do they have to compromise privacy in identity, location, or relationships to get whatever is needed just at that time? Is the value of that extra step worth what’s at the end of the rainbow?

At least from my perspective, many of the apps – and I can argue even down to the mobile platforms themselves – do very little these days to repsect that some information needs to be gleaned as easily as God makes Himself available to us – think it, nav to it, got it. When its not, what breaks in the experience? There are less than 20 app slots on that homescreen – is what you offering as necessary to someone’s life also valuable enough to be put on that screen that’s accessible at the immediate moment of need? If not, did you have the right focus/perspective in building that channel?

Just in time… we get dingged about that towards MMM all the time (hence the design approach taken with the alternate mobile site). If its not available when its needed, then its value diminishes faster than the time it takes to finally get there – if you do get there. Tech is relevant when its personal – but personal matters in the context of being right on time.

 

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Two Hemispheres of Tech and Memory

Monday, May 14th, 2012

diagram of a brain
Memory is a weird thing. There are some who say you can hack it (and other aspects of your mental/physical capacities), there are others who believe that you are given a brain with only so much capacity, but few who ever make it to the breaking point of using it all. I’ve been asked if I do mental exercises to train my brain (nope), or what it is I do to read, retain, and restate so much (rest/Sabbath is key). And its amazing. We can think that we forget so much, but in a flash – whether its a smell, touch, sound, or sight – we are triggered to memories. I remarked to a friend how one of the stars of The Avengers movie looked so much like someone from the past that it was actually disruptive to enjoying it without employing a memory filter of sorts. Memory… its got a few sides worth considering in our techie age for sure.

One of these hemispheres of memory is just the facility of managing it. As stated so nicely on the post at BigBible that sparked this one:

…Culture and context

How do we learn from this now, in a culture that relies more and more on other mediums to do our remembering for us?  Do we bother re-visiting our memories, or do we just assume they’re stored somewhere?  What happens when we have a dramatic encounter with God?  Do we remember it – consciously recall it – in a way that influences our lives?  How can we harness the power of technology to help us remember, without putting it in the place of memory itself…

This reminded me of one of the ways in which I use Evernote – I use it to store blog posts (archives) and tweets that I which to remember or probably look back at later for reference. And usually I’m just saving a snippet, not the entire article – even though it might be something specific in the article that’s not clipped that I might need later. In a real sense, I’m using Evernote (a storage system with algorthm for search) as an appendage to the brain I already have, sometimes to a deterement of knowing/undestanding/wisly applying whatever was saved there.

The other hemisphere comes from the side of my devices. Over time I’ve steadly acquired more and more portable storage space. These days, my mobile has 48GB inside (16GB internal memory + 32GB microSD card). My iPad has 16GB, but I rarely save anything on it that I’m not concerned with deleting, I use Dropbox and ad-hoc WLAN connections to my mobile to be its backup/appendage. Then there’s also that 1GB USB memory key bracelt that’s an ICE mechanism. But is that steady acquisition of more and more space healthy? I’m already dealing with several layers of backup/redundancy because of it – but why is it even needed (besides my admiditly large photo and music collection)? Is this a silo just waiting for me to be taken out before it can be cashed in (Luke 12:13-21)?

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”

Memory. Its a tough subject from both ends. A lot that we do with language is simply the translation of memory to activity and back to memory. Perhaps its ok to have some of this external to our physical facilities (remember how God instructed Israel towards the level of remembering the law, “write it on the tablet of your hearts,” “write it on your foreheads and eyelids,” “inscribe it on the doorposts of your home,” “when you get to that place, build me an altar…”). But, if we spend more time building the case for these external places and channels for memory, do we also miss the point of the life we were meant to live (John 4:21, 23)?

…a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem… But a time is coming- and now is here – when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such people to be his worshippers.

When memory in both of its spheres incites us to live to Him, then is it most valuable?

 

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Trying Out the biNu Mobile App Developer Platform

Friday, May 11th, 2012

Per our usual activities here, we occasionally check out processes and software which would be relevant to the #mobmin (mobile ministry) world. A question for many groups is the process of making a mobile application, and so we definitely like to take a look at the various application creation platforms that are out there to get an idea of what’s needed in terms of graphical, technological, and marketing knowledge to get things up and running. The latest of these development platforms we are looking at is the biNu platform.

biNu is a software delivery platform. Think, something like an app store – but optimized for feature phones (non-smartphones). When there is an opportunity for an engagement to be accented with a mobile app on a (most likely) Java-based mobile, biNu is positioned through its delivery platform to refactor your RSS feeds or any other custom (mobile-lite) page content into a downloadable application for these mobiles.

We took a look at it from the perspective of  a content owner who’s looking to gain a presence on feature phones (its a good idea to read Should Our Church Have an App or Mobile Website prior to this). Therefore, our most important places of entry happen through the biNu Dev portal (still in beta – this comes up again).

Note: the screenshots and activity here were performed on a Windows 7 laptop using the Google Chrome browser. For the benefit of the impression, this is an imposed boundary to using the product.

Step 1: Registering for at the biNU Developer Portal

As with similar services, you have to go through a short process to register for the biNU developer portal (http://developer.binu.com/). After filling out the form, you get a confirmation screen noting that you need to complete a step in your email in order to complete the process. Nice and simple in this respect.

Step 2: Navigating

biNU Developer Dashboard

Once you login, you are presented a straight-forward list of what you’d want to do: List Apps (see all the apps you’ve built), or create a new Basic or regular app. First up on my listing was to do the Basic App (this would most likely be the used option for 1st time users of this service).

Step 3: The Basic App Wizard

biNU App Wizard

Once you get into the Basic App creation wizard, you simply just add the title and description to your app. You do need three graphic files here. Though the sizes were specified, I noticed in the test view that all of them seemed to be resized fine. I’d recommend here not using anything smaller than the recommendation, and you will need to ensure that its a PNG graphic w/o transparency for best effect.

You will also need the URL for the RSS feeds that you would use to populate the app. I took our raw feed, in addition to our Twitter feed and the Twitter feed for the #mobmin hashtag (we’ve done this previously with other apps) and there seemed to be no issue with either of those kinds of sources.

Step 4: Testing/Further Edits

biNu testing emulator

biNu offers a Java-based emulator that gives you an impression of how your content will flow to the smaller screen and different input controls of a feature phone. On the PC that I used, I didn’t update the Java client in order for this to work properly (but you would probably want to do this).

Step 5: Publishing

biNU Publishing Your App

Once you have created and tested your app in the emulator, next is to publish it. There are two avenues for publishing – the first puts the app on the biNu platform “store” where those who’ve downloaded biNu would be able to search and download it among other similar apps/services. The second avenue is for you to generate the app yourself using biNU, and then use publish that app on your website or wider-serving app stores such as GetJar.

biNU Generate Java/Android app

When you choose the option to generate an app, you are taken to a screen that’s similar to the app wizard where you refine the details about your app. What’s most interesting here is that you see the option to generate either a “regular” Java app (ideally, compatible with most Java mobiles) or an Android java app (an apk, compatible with Android devices). Apps can be unsigned or signed using Verisign or Thawte. Again, good options for an app which could be distributed in an open market environment.

Generating the app was the only point in the process where I entered an issue that I had to escalate to biNu directly. As of this writing, this is something being looked at.

Step 6: All Done, Go Build Some More
biNU listed apps dashboard

Once you’ve finished making your app (testing, publishing, and generating Java versions), you are pretty much done. As seen in the publishing step, you’ve been given a URL with which to publicize the app (I’d recommend using a URL shortening service like TinyURL or Bit.ly to make it smaller, more share-friendly, and easier to add to marketing materials). View/Download the 1st MMM biNu app.

Conclusions:

Overall, using the biNu app wizard enabled me to build an app in less than 30min. When I went back through the process to build an app from scratch (see Step 2: Navigating), the process took even less time because the source for the app was an existing mobile website (in this case, our alternate mobile site which is written using HTML5 and jQuery). Given the speed and costs (free) to just get on their platform, this isn’t a bad idea for many sites. I’d like to know how some of the more interactive content offerings would fare here – for example, those doing church online might want this for a presence, but the experience of viewing media on a 2.2in screen that’s not optimized for such “snack time” viewing might be a turn off in some respects. Still, there’s some sense that could be made from doing this and perhaps pointing to your YouTube feed of content.

For more information about biNU, do check out their website. Again, the developer section of the site is in beta right now, so if you enter into any issues with it, do chalk it up to that aspect of things. Still, there aren’t too many mobile services specifically targeting feature phones (more people use these than smartphones by a very wide margin). If your content is ready to go, then biNu should be ready for you.

 

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