Mobile Everything

The Lotus Mobility Portfolio session covered a lot of old ground that we've already blogged about at the LoLa conference last year, but there were a couple of interesting nuggets to make the 2 hours worthwhile...

There was an amusing* 6 minute clip that explains Lotus Mobile Connect better than anything I can write here. View it here

Also some good tools that the presenter uses that we should look at as we start to get more serious about mobile devices (is Col reading this?)

• www.testiphone.com - allows simulation and testing of many different devices
• www.mymobiler.com - iPhone simulator
• www.useragent.org - useful when developing websites that may be displayed on many different devices

One area that we haven't spent much time thinking about is that last one on the list. Let's take a real world example - www.MyMMs.com. Right now the site is optimised for 'standard' browsers on traditional deskops and laptops, and works great. But what if you're out and about? If someone suggests that it would make a great valentine gift? Try it on your phone now! You might buy if you can use the site right then and there, but if it's a frustrating experience would you always get onto a 'real' PC and follow though?

With the enormous growth of mobile devices and netbooks, are we missing out on impulse sales just because the site is inaccessible to mobile browsers? If this isn't a problem for us now I'm willing to bet that it will be - and surprisingly soon.

IBM has a solution for this, and I'm sure others do too. What's even better though is that tools exist to measure the number of site hits that don't result in a sale, and also to measure the browser configurations being used to access the site. But is anyone looking?

* this is the special definition of "amusing" that only applies after 2 hours of Security presentation

Brian gets ID'd

Well it didn't even occur to me to mention it, until Brian said "I bet that is the first thing you blog" with a look of embarrassment.

That will teach him to get upgraded air travel and leave his team member behind in cattle ;-)

Anyhoo, after a laborious 21 hour journey we finally got to the hotel at 19.30 ish, ironically Terminal 5 was not a problem for us but the queue to get past immigration in LAX was about 2 hours with broken aircon and a mass of disgruntled visitors. Then the flight to LV was delayed almost 2 hrs, which in a way was lucky as we may have missed it due to the immigration wait. Silver linings and all that.

At the moment I am struggling with scale, I keep getting lost walking from my room to the lobby and it takes 10 minutes and 2 different elevators when I do the way right. The indoor mall painted to look like it is out doors is huge and a little bit freaky. When you bodyclock is telling you it is breakfast, you are eating an evening meal and are sat in an area that looks like it is mid afternoon it is not surprising we were getting confused. I would have laughed at Brian falling asleep whilst trying to eat if I wasn't doing the same myself!

Having said that the hotel is very nice if not cheesily opulent, my room is bigger than my whole flat back in Reading, although I can get an internet connection in my flat. I'm trying this up stood at the end of the lobby check in desk as that's where the only free Wifi is.

I'm starting to see how everything is geared to making money off the punters...as I said the free Wifi means standing in the lobby, paid for Wifi is available elsewhere where there are seats but is incredibly expensive. Tomorrow when MMS starts I'll be able to use the MS network. They gym costs $35 a day, room phone charges are expensive and whilst they provide an in room fax and personal number for your stay, you guessed it, you pay to receive them. Everything is geared to get you out of the room and spending.

Today I think the plan is to do some exploring, on the map the Apple store looks relatively close, but I think in reality its probably a 40 min walk as I said the scales are a bit beyond my comprehension at the moment.

So what is the tech angle on this post you say (apart from the blogging/Wifi), well once I found the free Wifi CTM worked perfectly and I was able to use my EN provided Avaya softphone to call my girlfriend with a local cost call from my desk back in ISW, its this type of service Mars IS should be providing to the rest of the business, I have probably saved $10-20 on that call, multiply that by our travelling users and all the days they are away and you can see how small individual savings can become big savings! As my grandmother always said, save the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. Lets hope we can continue this great work with the likes of the Web conferencing project and the innovations seen via the Sametime 7.5 POC.

So to get some media involved, here are pics from my window at 6am.

Look Ma no neon!