Mark Kolier’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘mobile websites’

Our office was without full power in our office for nearly 48 hours following the aftermath caused by Hurricane Irene. We had lots of company. Local municipalities have gotten smarter about communicating with residents during major local events like snowstorms or hurricanes. I wish I could say the same for utilities.

In no way do I mean to knock the efforts of all the great linemen that have come to help restore power after the hurricane. But these people are seemingly forced to run around like chickens with their heads cut off to help wherever it’s needed. Why are things done the way they are when it could be so much better? It’s not like they did not know a hurricane was on the way.

For example – crews came into the Northeast both in advance, during and after the storm. I asked one of the crews near my office how they were receiving information on what to do and where to go next and he shook his head and said that he received many different contradictory messages from various levels of authority. Now it was my turn to shake my head. Today’s technology allows for the lightning fast creation of small topical websites, mobile distribution lists and even groups that could act as an aggregation platform for local community, county and state communication for officials and crew before, during and even following significant events.

It cannot be a question of expense. The cost/benefit of having a centralized communication platform for disaster relief is tremendous and at times could be life-saving. With all the money available for state and federal disaster relief I cannot believe that the cost of creating a simple website combined with a small team to aid in administering it to monitor and send out messages would more than pay for itself in helping teams be more prepared as well as efficient.

Adding a mobile site would be a great way to communicate since SMS texts could be deployed to communicate with everyone in the field or sent to individual people or crews on demand. Every lineman on every crew has a mobile device that would support SMS campaigns. For those that have smartphones they could easily be directed to the mobile site for more information.

I don’t expect my thought here is anything revolutionary but I am amazed that it’s not already SOP – standard operating procedure. Maybe it is SOP in some locations but it should be universal.
Do you agree?

In a report, titled “Mobile Devices Market Sizing and Share,” market research firm ABI says that more than 171 million smart phones were shipped in 2008 compared to 116 million shipped in 2007. The report says that smart phones accounted for 14 percent of all cell phones shipped in 2008. ABI noted that the sales are expected to grow 18% to 203 million 2009 as operators seek to sell lure users with aggressive strategies. Strategy Analytics estimates that smart phone shipments will total 177.2 million in 2009. Juniper Research forecasts that annual sales of smart phones will rise by some 95 percent to more than 300 million between now and 2013. The report says that by 2013 at least 23 percent of all new mobile phones will actually be smart phones.

OK so we all get it – smart phones are the future – and actually the present. But how many times have you tried to access a site on your smart phone and waited, and waited and waited for the pages to load? This is because the site you are accessing is not optimized for viewing on a mobile device.

100% of .mobi sites must be optimized for viewing on a mobile phone, the main advantage of .mobi, from the users’ perspective, is that they are theoretically guaranteed a site optimized for usage on the go. This means the website can be optimized for hard factors such as smaller screens, device form/size, device input/output options, existence of embedded sensors (acceleration, location, touch, etc.), as well as soft factors such as expectations of immediacy of results, context awareness under a shortened attention span (compared to home use of the Internet). Although a .com or any other extension can technically employ the same optimizations for mobile phones as .mobi sites, in practice, only a fraction of them are, thus necessitating content adaptation solutions.

3G transmission speeds are pretty fast, but nowhere near what people have become accustomed to when we use super fast 100MPS+ connections via cable or fiber optic networks. Personally when I have to wait more than, oh let’s say 2 seconds for a page to load I begin to get impatient and even a bit annoyed. (I bet I am far from alone here). .Mobi sites address this far better than any increase in transmission speed can – at this point. It won’t be long before smart phone transmission speed rivals that of cable and fiber optic wired connections –of course for me that day cannot come soon enough.

People will have to become more familiar with going to the .mobi sites but many sites when accessed on a smart phone give the option to go to a mobile version that is optimized. The experience and interfaces are so much better – check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.