Tag Archives: mobility

The Mobile Continent

Whenever we read about those things mobile, it’s always country (USA and China) or region (Europe or Central & South America). Unfortunately, when the conversation talks about Africa, it is like the continent is treated like a country, it some region so far removed from normalcy that what happens in mobile is novel. Thankfully, not every perspective is like that. Thankfully, we get solid pieces like this:

…Context is important. In the 1980s and ’90s, computer and communications technology took hold in the West. But in Africa, if you ran a business, say in Kenya’s cities or up-country, you were hard pressed to communicate efficiently with your suppliers. Lag time between customer demand and inventory levels was legendary. You could show up at one auto store to find that the owner had a mountain of supplies that would sit gathering dust for the next 10 years. Or you could show up at another auto store just 10 miles away and find that all its inventory had been snapped up and nothing was coming in for another two months…

Read the rest of The Mobile Continent at the Stanford Review

What games your views of mobile, and is it grounded in reality, or perspectives too broad to be applicable?

Mobile Evangelism at Renew Outreach

Its always a joy when other ministries jump into the area of mobile ministry and begin to take their unique content or audiences and do something familiar and different at the same time. One of the most recent examples of this comes from our friends at Renew Outreach. As you might recall, about a year ago, we interviewed the founder/president of Renew (David Palusky), and now we are seeing some of outgrowth of parts of that conversation that were not covered on-camera.

What now appears on the Renew Outreach website is a section dedicated to the topic of mobile evangelism. Besides the previously linked video, there’s also a decent explanation towards the methods used in mobile evangelism. Here’s a snippet from that page towards what this section is aiming to do:

Currently, there are around six billion mobile phones (cellphones) worldwide. Most of these devices are capable of playing audio and video files that tell the Gospel story. Renew World Outreach has created these training videos to empower mobile evangelists so that they can make use of the three main tools for distributing Gospel content – such as audio Bibles or the Jesus Film – to mobile phones in rural areas. To begin the video training series, start with the Bluetooth Intro video…

Renew is also good friends with the folks over at the Kiosk Evangelism Project and so its not too surprising to see some of the same methods and tactics used here in order to share the faith and extend the viability of content production efforts.

For more information, in addition to utilizing the mobile evangelism efforts for your own teams, visit the Mobile Evangelism section at Renew Outreach. If you, or someone you know, is involved with missions to the literal ends of the earth – areas where we are just beginning to explore – then I’d recommend Renew Outreach’s expertise here as well – they specialize in audio, video, and solar technologies that speak to the conditions faced at the edge.

ICCM Europe 2013, MMF Consultation Videos

Last week, ministries gathered in the Netherlands for the 2013 iteration of the ICCM Europe Conference. While we were invited, finances and scheduling kept us from being able to attend. Nevertheless, there was a very healthy slate of presentations and conversations covering topics related to mobile ministry, missions/evangelism tech, internet evangelism, non-English language content, and security in tech.

Last week, we were also passed a note of two of the presentations from the 2012 MMF Consultation, here links to those:

If we get a  notification of additional topics, we’ll update this post with the links to those presentations. In the meanwhile, check out Mobile Advance and GEM eDOT for more info about those presentation topics and to collaborate/contract their services for getting setup.

Unlocked Mobiles and Your Choice

Nokia Lumia 900 and iPhone 5 at Caribou Coffee
This past weekend, the USA mobile and technology community experienced something that doesn’t come around so often – the removable of rights, or as I’d argue, the perceived ability to make a choice towards what you can do with mobiles.

The short end of things is that starting Saturday, any mobile devices that you purchase cannot be unlocked unless the terms of the original sold contact are completed. Or, to quote the CTIA blog:

…That’s all that is happening here: consumers who pay the full price for a phone can take that phone to the carrier (or carriers) of their choice. However, if a carrier subsidized the price of the phone in exchange for the consumer’s agreement to use the phone on that carrier’s network, the consumer can only transfer the phone to a new carrier once the terms of the contract (or the carrier’s unlocking policy) have been satisfied…

Now, to clear up the confusion… because its gotten really long in the mouths of many folks talking about it.

When you purchase a mobile from your carrier, and sign a contract to do so, you are generally paying only a portion of the complete cost of the mobile device. The rest of the cost is spread out over the life of the contract. Yes, you don’t own the mobile when you purchase it on a contract, you lease it.

You have a choice to purchase a mobile outside of this contract-lease method. In this case, you would purchase the mobile, usually from the manufacturer, or another retailer. These mobiles are much more expensive – because the carrier is not subsidizing part of the cost of the device for you. And then after purchasing the device, you will have to find a plan (whether that’s pre or post-paid) that works with your mobile device. Now, you can choose to get on a contract, but generally, and I’m speaking only of USA carriers since this law is only in effect here, you can’t negotiate a contract. Its only with the carrier T-Mobile that you have the case where if you come with your own device that the cost for a contract plan is less than if you purchase both the device and contract from them.

The other aspect of this law happens to take effect when you decide that you want to sell a device. You see, many folks make the choice to sell their device to another company (like Amazon, Gazelle, etc.) before the contract is up, so that they can recoup some funds and then get something new. Thing is, the person purchasing the device would be breaking the law to unlock it so that they can use it. Ouch right? Well, it is for folks that like to purchase and release mobiles often. Essentially, these people would need to buy-out their contracts, then have the device unlocked by the carrier, then sell the device.

Almost makes it crazy to think of purchasing a mobile on contract now doesn’t it?

Look, I get it that it makes it a lot more difficult for some of you who are under a social and economic obligation to have the (near-)latest mobile device to have one. Getting an unlocked device from your carrier, and even opting into extending your contract to do so remains an option, just more expensive to pursue.

If you are someone who travels beyond the shores of the USA, your first intent with a mobile should be to purchase it completely, and then keep your option of carrier open. Does this mean that using Verizon, Sprint, and other CDMA-based carriers decline in option? It does? These mobiles might offer you the best signal here, but unless you are purchasing their global models (models that are locked for VZW/Sprint in the USA but have a GSM radio that is unlocked for outside the States), then yes you are stuck.

You’ve always had a choice though. And this call by CTIA is in part going to make you a smarter consumer of mobile devices. Whether it works best for you or not will take a bit more homework and recommendations.

9 Wearable Trends; Implications to Mobile Ministry

I think that one of the reasons that wearable technologies find their appeal is that many of us either have the impression, or live the lifestyle, that computing is more work that it needs to be. With these wearable devices, we are able to put a more appropriate level of attention onto the technology, but moreso onto the context of life going on around us. To that end, this idea some kind of balance between tech and life needs to be ironed out, makes wearable computing not just an attractive matter from a psychological perspective, but also from a computing one.

Over at GigaOm, the world-renowned human interface/user experience designer/developer Christian Lindholm (@clindholm) has posted 9 trends to pay attention to concerning wearable technologies:

  1. Watches enjoy a renaissance as accessories
  2. Functional jewelry as armbands takes off
  3. Audio wearables shape luxury electronics
  4. Sensors connect our everyday objects
  5. Wearables get dressed up
  6. Sensor platform wars begin in the bedroom
  7. Apps make wearables’ data actionable
  8. Sensors in labs reveal our souls
  9. Google glass becomes a social transformer

Christian Lindholm is the CEO and co-Founder of Korulab, a wearables company based in Finland; he’s also the inventor of the mobile phone interface made popular on the various Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, and other mobile devices we’ve seen for over a decade (green and red buttons, numeric pad-grid icon navigation, etc.). His exposition on these 9 trends in detail should enter your radar now as mobile has not just become an entrenched matter of behavior and life, but we are into the 3rd (or 4th, depends on where you start from) generation of mobile within consumer spaces.

That said, the idea that wearable computing has a context that’s relevant to the field of mobile ministry is a preemptive one. One of the challenges we see now with mobile technology is the struggle that many have had just wrapping themselves around context-appropriate behaviors. And now we’re proposing that there’s another evolution of computing in progress that will also have a set of behaviors, perspectives, and implications towards ministry endeavors. That’s a lot to take in… and yet it has to be.

Just using the 9 items above, we’ve got several questions in which aspects of ministry have answered, or might have to reframe expectations for how we respond to them:

  • When the computer is just as much a fashion accessory as it is a communications and functional one, where do we start the conversation about modesty in dress
  • When we talk about wearables now, its mostly about the fitness end of things; how does the traditional perception of the out-of-shape church leader become a voice worth hearing
  • Its not just 3rd party companies that will be able to mine the information these devices create, people themselves will be able to mine, mashup, and even go off the grid because of these devices – or the behaviors they will incite. What about connectivity needs to be kept, and what does fellowship become redefined as if I can connect with you over data streams, not just physical presence
  • What kinds of social transformations do non-religious artifacts instigate into normative religious traditions (for ex., wearing of a rosary could also be the wearing of a pedometer and communication handset – see Nokia’s Human Form Concept)

Not that we have to have the answers now, but this is the tech that is becoming the new(er) wave. Wearables also gets into things such as cybernetics and cosmetic augmentation, items that were once the realm of science fiction only. Its here now, and whether or not it comes in the next decade is non-essential. What’s clear from Lindholm’s trends is that we should be thinking and working on understanding the spiritual implications of these now. Not when it becomes mainstream… at that point, its too late and now you are just catching up to the slowest runners.

Build Your Own

empty classroom in a Saanich school district school

A news story that’s making the rounds in the educational space is that of the Saanich School District (British Columbia, Canada) getting ready to release their own student/faculty management software suite – one that they have built from scratch. That’s something that friends and I have talked about from time to time when its come to church management systems – whether there is enough IT/IS savy in churches for many churches to just pull off-the-shelf open source components, and create something usable and scaleable? I think there is. But, as the Saanich story illustrates, there’s a lot to consider when getting away from packaged solutions and developing something of your own.

Just referencing the Saanich story linked, here are a couple of the items that people see and don’t see as considerations:

  • The cost of developing the suite ($1.5M)
  • The cost of maintaining a staff that builds it, and then is willing to stick around to support it (costs not mentioned)
  • The time to concept and develop (took 17 months)
  • Similar strategies to develop/self-develop an open source student-focused software suite
  • Training

From personal experience of using a content management system for personal endeavors, there’s a lot that if you don’t scope for, then you end up spending more time with things such as building schemas to export to better software, dealing with multiple user sessions, dealing with multiple-non-web-connected devices, and even simple items such as just putting content into the system in the best managed and speed-sensitive way.

I don’t know churches that are trying this. I do know of companies that stepped out of the shadows of their churches and now do this for others. But, could the way forward be more that teams of IT/IS-gifted persons come together to make these for their churches, and then teach other churches how to mature similar groups that create self-designed software? I wonder…

From Cellular to IP

VoIP on Symbian with Gizmo VoIP screenshot

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?

Remember the Purpose

Some weeks ago, probably a month ago now, I made a phone trade with a friend of mine. In the trade, I acquired the not-for-sale Nokia N950. I’ve been wanting to get an extended play with this device for sometime. Besides the user interface experience being like nothing else (except the for-sale N9 that’s hard to get my hands on as well), there are no other mobile devices out there with the pedigree of a Nokia and the openness of a full Linux distro (Maemo/MeeGo) under the hood. For a tinker-er like me, this is just like letting me loose in a candy story, when my teeth are coming in.

During this time, I’ve been going back and forth between the N950 and my N8. Back and forth between MeeGo and Symbian. Learning a bit of what Nokia understood, and a bit more of what some developers/service providers have felt. There’s been something of an enjoyment when it came to setting up multiple Google accounts (without needing Exchange ActiveSync to get my calendars), Dropbox, Evernote, and several other services. There’s been some mild frustrations as in when I unintentionally duplicated the contacts on both devices because I made edits on both and it didn’t reconcile properly. And there’s been some joy moments like in finding a drawing app that felt a lot like when I used Adobe Ideas on the iPad (simple, zooming, and easy to push wherever). Its been enlightening, and aside from the old battery, useful.

That said, the other night, when I should have been getting some sleep before a few meetings the next day, I was captured into reading Chasing the Cicada over at Metal Floss. It reads like a spy/crime novel, but is mainly about the depths of the Internet that we usually don’t see. Per my usual when a rabbit hole like that reveals itself, I start searching out things that stuck out in the article, one of which being the Tor Project. I’d forgotten about the Tor Project. At one point I was even looking at the Android port of aspects of the Tor Project called Orbot (really, if you use Android, this is a no-brainer direction you should take your platform usage). It then hit me to connect with some friends and rekindle the conversation about the N950 and making something useful out of this “dead platform” for a few ministry efforts.

It was at that point that I remembered why I had the N950 to begin with.

You see, I’d wanted the N950 not for myself, but because it would position my use of mobile into a few directed areas:

  • 1st, I’d be using a platform that would be getting attention for a specific mobile ministry project (or two)
  • 2nd, I’d be working with others who not only knew the platform better, but could expand my knowledge of specific mobile ministry applications that don’t usually get the light of day
  • 3rd, there would again be this experimental aspect to MMM – that kind of thing excites me and keeps me going in this space when times like the holidays roll around and everything slows down

In a real sense, I had to re-own the fact that to have the N950 in my possession could not be about my enjoying a new platform or having a new phone to play with, but it was to reignite the reasons why MMM is directed the way that it is – to ask questions, present approaches, and experiment around those ideas and activities that happen at the intersection of faith and mobile technology. Nothing about keeping this mobile in my hands, double-tapping the screen just to wake it up, pushed that purpose forward. If its in my hand, it has to be pushing this faith forward, and I already had the opportunity, I just needed to be kicked in the pants.

We sometimes get lost in the course of getting something new, or finding out that what we have in our hands is a lot more impressive than we thought. That same night that I realized this, I talked to a guy who had the new Google Nexus 4 for just about a week, but uses it no differently than a feature phone. I asked him of all of the unique features of the Nexus 4 and how he planned on using them and his reply was more like “I didn’t plan on doing that” rather than “let me explore how that feature could enhance how I view and do mobile.” To his credit, he also did remark that he’d not considered mobile on the kind of level towards the questions that I asked either. I know that I think a bit deeper about these things than some other folks.

Still, mobile is a very present avenue for all of us to take note as to the mission that we have in front of us. For some, the mobile is a siren call towards the kinds of security that you must keep up for those whom you are connected to. For some, mobile is a call to accountability in media, as well as relationships. And for others still, mobile is a beacon that there’s potential for something more than just reaching out and touching someone – even if all we needed to do at all is just touch them I get it. And I hope that you do as well.

So the kick happened. And I’m waiting to hear from a few folks who have a similar idea about the N950 and a few directions that we can take things. I remember the reason that I’ve got this device in hand. And I hope that you remember the reason why you have one in yours. Remember the purpose… then walk in it.

TEDx Video: Why Kenyans Do It Better

This was forwarded to us and asked if it is an example of who and how people and groups associated with mobile ministry (#mobmin) should approach the context of their activities. Much like Alex Oswald, there is a surprise to some at the level (and simplicity) of how mobile is being used in daily affairs.

A (Small) Critique
Despite what’s talked about on the video, an acknowledgment solutions that are obvious and should be applied in better economies, nothing much is being said about the strategies that went creating and implementing them. Solutions like these talk very much towards being associated towards mobile as living with people, not just pushing a platform or a message. Unfortunately, there’s too much of a reluctance, even with those of us who work within this mobile ministry space, to be so invested into using the technology/communications, that we can see where this makes sense in our spheres. In an observed sense, people want to develop towards the mobile audience, but not be the mobile audience they are developing for. We see after another’s implementation that its obvious, but don’t live with it close enough to discover our own.

For as long as this person was in mobile, to be surprised at M-Pesa said a lot about a general blindness to the Mobile past than about opportunities not seen. 10 yrs ago there were 1 billion mobile phone users, we were looking at the second generation of smartphones from Nokia, Palm, and a few others, seeing the fall of the PDA genre coming to pass, and some of the first positive steps in mobile web areas. Weird to me that he was surprised if that’s when he started.

Still, this is good for the mobile ministry space as many haven’t heard about what he’s seen, or might be working on similar and need the encouragement. When in and around mobile, you’ve got to keep your eyes open not just to what you want to see, but also what others have seen.

The Pressure of Immediacy; A Smarter Smartphone

Yoda Phone, via Engadget

If there’s anything that mobile has revealed, its that we all enjoy getting information and being involved with something or someone at the point of thought. Perhaps part of that speaks to a stroking of our ego (if the message is coming near me, then I am important and valued enough to receive it). But, we also end up walking this line where at some point that all of these streams don’t just consume us, but change us in ways that we’d not figured before.

Two articles in the past week speak to this change, and the challenge that we all end up having at some point because of the persuasivness of mobile. The first worth taking into your contempletive moments comes from James Whately – The Pressure of Immediacy:

…These two notes are what, to my mind at least, drive the ill-perceived pressure of immediacy. As in, just because we can look up just about anything on the glass screens in our pockets doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. The pressure to know something immediately is balderdash. It is fallacy, claptrap, and poppycock. It is a make-believe blanket of self-made suffocation that we have placed upon our own social and professional situations that really has no need to exist at all…

The second comes from Brian Feld – My Smartphone Is No Longer Working for Me:

I spent two weeks without my iPhone. I was completely off the grid for the first week but then spent the second week online, on my MacBook Air and Kindle, but no iPhone. I got home on Sunday and have had my iPhone turned on the past few days. I’ve used it as a phone, but I’ve largely stayed off of the web, email, and twitter with it. Instead, I’m only done this when I’m in front of my computer. I played around a little with the new Gmail iPhone app (which I like) but I’ve been limiting my email to “intentional time” – early in the morning, late at night, and when I have catch up time in between things…

In both of these pieces you see a resetting of expectations towards mobile and connected technologies. These are the kinds of things that should and shouldn’t have to happen though. I don’t think one needs a period of fasting from social networks in order to maintain a healthy perspective of them – I think that the engagement towards social media starts before you even get onto the service with the question “what kind of time/value will I assign to these kinds of connections, and is it worth what I’m assigning to it?”

I do think that we need smarter settings and tools within mobile devices in order to better utilize the attention spans we do have. I’ve spoken before about using Situations and similar apps on my Nokia N8 to turn the mobile off, ignore calls w/a friendly auto-message, etc. so that I can concentrate my eyes and ears on who/what’s near me, rather than what’s on the screen. Similar applications are available for Android and Blackberry devices (I’ve not seen similar for Windows Phone; to do apps like this on iOS you need to jailbreak your device). I also believe that at the network level, more intelligence needs to be added into services so that smarter actions can happen. I once wrote on what this could look like, and still wait for something like it to show up – but not be tied to a provider when it does (Google Now does something like this).

At the end of the day, what we do with this technology speaks to our value judgments. If we value time on the screen, that’s where we’d spend the time. If we value time face-to-face, then that’s where we spend our time. As ministries also walk this line into creating applications and services that make sense in the context of using mobile, we also have the responsibility that we are not designing away the ability for people to make intelligent and life-giving decisions about how this tech is being used. True, there’s something immediate about getting to someone your content that has a note of the saving grace of God; but its also important that they rely on God once they’ve gotten that message, not the beep of your application, calling them to a screen that they might not be strong enough to turn away from.