Its been the case for a long time now that MMM has been around. We used to offer a downloadable magazine, but have since gotten away from it since we’ve basically leveraged the ability that you (the reader) have to subscribe via RSS, email, and other methods (we once had an SMS service too). One of our goals this year is to bend MMM away from the idea of a destination point, and allow you to embed MMM into your site or method of reading/resources in a fashion that fits you best. In seeing the service EBook Glue that just about gets us there.

Essentially with EBook Glue, you insert the RSS feed (ATOM, RSS, or just the URL if you don’t know the first two), and then add a title and you get an ebook in an ePub or Mobi file that you can install to a mobile device. I think of a situation where you can take that ebook and put it onto a sharing service for your community to download – for example a study guide, package of perodic announcements, or even a ministry guide. For an example of what EBook Glue can do, here’s MMM in ebook form: ePub | Mobi.

Makes sense for us to continue in this form. We’ll add this to the other links that we’ve already published on the About page. The book is yours now to create and open.

via LifeHacker

Of the many reasons that I’ve had for wanting different mobile devices over the years, one of them was this idea that I could use the data connection of my mobile to be the voice (phone) line. Whether it would be through services such as Skype or other types of VoIP/XMPP services, I continue to see that the future of the phone line is a limited one – given what’s possible via the Internet.

I’m not the only one thinking like this. There are several folks who have gone towards similar lines of thinking with their mobile and tablet devics. For example, there’s a person who wrote recently of using the HSPA Google Nexus 7 as their only mobile device:

…Overall, I’m pretty happy with the using the Nexus 7 as my only mobile device experiment, and will probably stick with it for a while, at least until phone screen sizes start catching up…

Its not just people thinking like this, phone companies are as well. Ars Technica talks about AT&T’s pointing in this direction:

Two months ago, AT&T petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to plan for the retirement of traditional phone networks and transition to what AT&T sees as an inevitability: the all-IP telco.

AT&T had been discussing the transition internally, spurred on by the FCC’s own suggestion that the Public Switched Telephone Network might be ripe for death somewhere around 2018. “This telephone network we’ve grown up with is now an obsolete platform, or at least a rapidly obsolescing platform,” Hank Hultquist, VP of AT&T’s federal regulatory division, said today. “It will not be sustainable for the indefinite future. Nobody’s making this network technology anymore. It’s become more and more difficult to find spare parts for it. And it’s becoming more and more difficult to find trained technicians and engineers to work on it.”

And when you think about it (communication’s taking priority, mobile being a primary interface, etc.) these kinds of moves just make sense.

So, in paying attention to the trends – voice isn’t the primary interface for mobile amongst other items – how does your organization/ministry plan to meet people when the state of communications is hyperconnectivity by default?

Its been my experience that many who are coming around to this idea that mobile is pretty much it, find it hard to believe the place that communications takes over other physical and psychological needs. Then again, the research is out there, and it does make sense when you are able to break from your cultural norms and see what others value:

…He is trying to argue that the consequences of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, which bought to common people electricity and plumbing, was far more important than the computers and internet which the 3rd Industrial Revolution has brought us. (Gordon’s 1st Industrial revolution was steam and railroads.) As evidence of this claim he offers this hypothetical choice between option A and option B.

With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?Gordon then goes on to say:

I have posed this imaginary choice to several audiences in speeches, and the usual reaction is a guffaw, a chuckle, because the preference for Option A is so obvious.But as I just recounted, Option A is not obvious at all.

The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don’t have a toilet because I’ve stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.

Most of the poor of the world don’t have such access to resources as these Yunnan farmers, but even in their poorer environment they still choose to use their meager cash to purchase the benefits of the 3rd revolution over the benefits of the 2nd revolution. Connection before plumbing. It is an almost universal choice.

This choice may seem difficult for someone who has little experience in the developing world, but in the places were most of the world lives we can plainly see that the fruits of the 3rd generation of automation are at least as, and perhaps more, valuable than some fruits of the 2nd wave of industrialization.

Read the rest of The Post-Productive Economy at The Technium

Someone told me when I started MMM and they realized that I did nearly everything on my mobile that I was taking an extreme stance on getting to know this space. I’d argue that such a posture isn’t extreme at all, but in fact bends towards understanding the implications of these choices better than simply counting an observation and marking its characteristics versus what my culture determines as normal.

A site that I was reading recently (The Industry) noted 13 design trends for 2013. Are these some items that you are implementing ino your mobile applications and services:

1. Flat Design
2. Fewer Buttons/More Gestures
3. Animation as Affordance
4. Hamburger Menu Drawer
5. Native over Web
6. Responsive if not Native
7. Wider Websites
8. Larger Fonts
9. Larger Search Inputs
10. GIFs as Design Elements
11. Designing for Humans
12. New Colors
13. Vector Graphics

Read the explainations and see examples of these at The Industry

As a side note, changes done here will reflect #1 more than any other, an probably #13 if we can pull of something the web isn’t doing normally. The rest of these don’t fit the context of this type of site. Unless a designer can convince us otherwise 😉

An excellent keynote presentation at the last Mobile Ministry Forum Consultation looking at push versus pull media movements. Lots here for individuals, producers, organizations, and audiences to consider as they move forward into a mobile-native lifestyle.

Having gotten the chance to hear directly from OneHundredFold on several occasions now, can do nothing but recommend them (along with many others) towards those looking for people specifically tasked with not just doing mobile ministry, but leading the understanding of it.

A few years ago at the 2011 Mobile Ministry Forum Consultation, I embarked on an experiment where in talking about tablet computers in a mobile ministry perspective, that I performed the presentation strictly from my iPad – no projector, just the tablet. I again performed a presentation at the 2012 MMF Consultation to a greater degree of success, and with some interesting feedback. There’s an important implication we were trying to get over here, that there’s a difference to engaging content that can be done if we don’t rely on traditional methods of presentations or handing out print materials. Good thing we aren’t the only folks trying stuff like this, as witnessed in this BBC article:

A school in Bolton is pushing the boundaries of education by putting away pens and paper and giving all pupils and teachers their own iPad. The Essa Academy says it helps students and has cut costs, including reducing the school’s £80,000 photocopying bill to just £15,000 a year.

Sure, we don’t hear about how much the tech adds to the costs, nor if there’s any training and the compentencies of the kids, teachers, and admin for this school (which is usually the case in these stories). But, we do see possibility that in doing an event in a different frame, without the ropes of some of the past, that we do get something a little bit more introspective, immersive, or even rewarding.

The video on the BBC page was not embedable; we linked to the one on YouTube, so there’s a chance that it might be taken down at some point. The link to the original article at the BBC remains in this piece

From our friends over at Mobile Industry Review comes probably the best reason to be at CES and any other tech conference this year – phrased in the form of a question and a perspective:

Chances are, you aren’t. But, you community has members who are. So what are you going to do to enable them to live a mobile-encouraged live that looks like the Gospel?

A little while ago, we were asked by Cybermissions to answer some questions for an upcoming class on mobile and tech they are leading soon. We thought it good not only to answer the questions, but to also do something that could be useful for the MMM audience.

The video is about 13 and a half minutes, and just runs through some thoughts on mobile, mobile ministry, and things upcoming. Listen closely, you will probably find something worth commenting about 😉