Size matters

Being mobile implies to deal with the size and the weight of objects the mobile worker would have to carry. And sometimes, being a mobile worker could be just really painful for your back (or your bag … or your pocket). For example, a cool and ultra new smartphone could be really a fantastic tool, yet not easy to fit in your pocket. Sometime, the latest gizmo isn’t the best solution.
Of course, laptops are probably the biggest concern regarding the size. Since the rise of netbooks, they now are a good answer with very compact size. If laptops and netbooks become really small these days, it’s not always the case for the charger, though … Something to keep in mind before packing your bag

Useful reading :

• The Ultimate Computer Case (made in Switzerland)
• Lifehacker laptop bags
• Travel light with one bag
• Your laptop on a USB key!
• The ultimate vertical bag
• The laptop bag group on Flickr

Energy management

Being mobile with all the gizmos modern worker have could be just a nightmare if you don’t have an energy source. We previously discussed the issue of the charger – a universal charger could be a good solution, avoiding dealing with plenty of them.
Once again, the latest gizmo could be really cool, but on the road, it’s important to go back to your basic needs. Sometimes, the previous gadget generation has the benefit of being optimized (latest firmware, etc – leading to better battery management). Or they simply consumes less energy (for example, smartphones are just burning battery so rapidly, while normal phones will be with you for the week.
Thin and light charger are definitely something to look for. Another solution that might be to consider at some point : solar charger.
Hopefully, the move of the European commission for universal charger will help at some point.

Useful reading :

• Small battery-powered USB charger
• USB Car Adapter Charges Any USB Device On-the-Go

Internet connection

We’re getting more and more used to unlimited and permanent internet connection – wifi access, 3G networks are getting always more popular and are weapons of choice for mobile workers. Learn to plan and map your trip with the closest wifi hotspots available (McDonalds, airports, cities, hotels, etc – for France, a Neuf, Fon or FreeWifi access is a big plus). A small wifi detector can also really help. But sometimes, there is just no internet, and you’ll have to deal with that.
Working offline can also be great opportunity to work differently, to focus on what matters and being more productive.
With a decent email client (ie. thunderbird), you can still read your email you’ve previously downloaded, answer to them offline (they’ll be sent next time you’ll connect). Also think to download your important documents (or the one you currently work on).
Offline period are also great moment for reading … tools such as readitlater allow you to mark internet page for later, and download them for an offline visualization.

Useful reading :

• Readitlater
• Free Wi-Fi Guide for Holiday Travelers

Adapt to your working environment

Finding a nice, quiet place to work is always the better option. And if the view or the place inspires you, you’re work will be more productive and creative. But sometimes, it’s just not possible to pick the perfect spot. Noise is often the no1 enemy – earplugs will be lifesaver in these situations. If you like working with music, a good headset will also be very helpful (Noise cancelling technology can be a plus).

Useful reading :

• Comfortable earplug for a silent environment

Working mindset

Working is all about routine. Working outside the office or on the road could be sometime disturbing or distracting. To be able to focus on what matters, it’s important to recreate a routine that will help you find your focus point. Drinks, lights, working space, specific music will help you to find standpoints and go back to work.

Useful reading

• Coffee break

Bonus : the 6th rule – with you wherever you go/are

Inspired by Nicolas who thought it could be a good idea to make reminder about the remote access solutions. Technology indeed offers us plenty of options for accessing our work capacities remotely. Drop.box remains definitely a strong asset, but during this year, a few other tools also came to help us.

One of the first one that will probably be pretty huge in the coming month : Mozilla Weave (disclaimer – I do work with Mozilla) will allow any firefox user to synchronize its data (bookmarks, navigation history, tabs opened, password, login, etc) between 2 firefox (for example, “home computer”, “work computer”, “laptop”) with the required level of security. Go and adopt it !

If you need to remotely (and simply) access to your computer, logmein also improved its offer during the year with a mobile edition. Yummy.

Useful reading

• More details about Mozilla Weave
• 10 useful tools and tips to help you (better) work remotely!

]]> http://www.52ndwest.com/gizmos/mobility/5-rules-of-mobility-learned-in-2009/feed/ 2 http://www.52ndwest.com/gizmos/mobility/usb-car-adapter-charges-any-usb-device-on-the-go/ http://www.52ndwest.com/gizmos/mobility/usb-car-adapter-charges-any-usb-device-on-the-go/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:35:30 +0000 Nicolas http://www.52ndwest.com/?p=1438 [singlepic id=101 w=600 h=480 float=center]

The iLuv Micro USB Car adapter turns your car’s cigarette outlet into a universal USB charger, so you don’t have to buy specialized car chargers for all of your USB-chargeable gear.

The device is tiny (1.7-inches long), so once plugged in only a small portion of the gadget will stick out from your dash, so it shouldn’t be much of an eyesore. Then, rather than buying car chargers for your cellphone, your iPod, your camera, or whatever else you’ve got that can already charge via USB, you can just plug your cheap USB charging cable into the USB car adapter and call it good.

The gadget will set you back $15, so it’s probably just as cheap (if not cheaper) than dedicated chargers. It’s currently not available from the iLuv store, but it’s supposed to be sometime in September, meaning it should be available sometime in the next week.

Equipped with GPS and a small projector, Maptor allows the user to display map on almost any surface and view their current location. It somehow reminds me the mobile phone with embedded GPS which displays arrows on the ground in “Microsoft’s vision to the future”.

Creating a concept is nice, turning it into reality is even better.

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Nicolas was kind enough to invite me to share my experiences with mobile VoIP, specifically with Sipdroid on the Android platform. I’ll start by providing a quick summary of the technology, and how applications are now utilizing it.

Simply speaking, VoIP – short for Voice-over-IP – is a general term for technologies which route phone calls over the internet, rather than regular telephony networks. The result is very cheap telephony, or in the case of pure internet-to-internet communications, free telephony.

The best example for this technology is the extremely popular Skype software: internet-to-internet is free, but whenever the regular phone network is involved (for example when calling a mobile handset via SkypeOut), a miniscule fee is charged.

Skype uses a propietary protocol for communication. What most people don’t know is that VoIP communications was standardized ages ago as SIP, a technology which currently is extensively used in corporate environments, but not (yet) that popular in the private sector.

To use SIP, you need either a VoIP-enabled phone (all the desktop phones at my workplace are plugged into the LAN!), or a software client, commonly called a “softphone”. This gets you the free internet-to-internet calls. For internet-to-regular-telephone calls, you will additionally need a service provider. There are hundreds of providers to choose from (most of them a lot cheaper than Skype), however for beginners I recommend sipgate.

[singlepic id=91 w=320 h=240 float=left]Luckily enough for Android users, there is a great SIP client for the Android platform: Sipdroid (http://sipdroid.org/). Sipdroid tightly integrates into your phone. When Sipdroid is active, all outgoing calls are automatically routed through your SIP provider. You don’t pay or use any phone minutes because your end of the call is going through the internet. You just pay your SIP provider’s minutes, which are dirt-cheap. Best of all: by using a WLAN hotspot, you can use SIP from any place in the world, for the same cost! There is no need for roaming, because all calls are going through your internet connection.

I merely touched some if SIP’s features here. There are tons of others (one or more phone numbers for incoming calls, online voice boxes, etc.). I can only recommend that you check out one of the “beginner” VoIP providers and see what you are mission out on

On a side note: I realize the above may be a too laborious or time-consuming solution for some. There is another SIP client for Android callue truphone. Truphone offers everything in a bundle (SiP provider, software, etc) – just register an account, and that’s it. The issue I have with truphone is that you are locked into their service, i.e. you can’t switch between providers.

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Nicolas, thanks for the opportunity!

Cameron Chapman of Smashing Magazine, provides sixteen tips to help you better manage your time and improve your time management experience (“How to find time for…  everything!”).

Very formative indeed, even for “veteran telecommuters”.

***

I want to keep track of where I spend my time in: Five best time-tracking applications

read more on reducing task friction to get to task completion

Not enough? Check the Helpful hints for the home office warrior

The big news here is that Spotify has launched its mobile version for iPhone and Google Android’s owners! This is somehow surprising, knowing Apple’s usual protectionist habit, that it finally decided to let it in its AppleStore when we know that Spotify is a direct rival to iTunes. Is it a demonstration of good will or did Apple finally realized that the future of music lies within its ability to remain available anytime, anywhere and for free?

The free app allows you to stream any of its nearly 4 million tracks over WiFi or 3G and syncs playlists for playback while disconnected. However, it is available exclusively to Spotify Premium members in the UK, Sweden, Spain, France and Norway (a US launch is expected soon).

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In one of its articles published last month, Mashable highlighs that it is possible to “store up to 3,333 songs in offline mode, making it ideal for listening to your music on the plane. The core selling point, however, remains the same as the desktop app: on demand access to 6 million+ tracks. Another neat feature: it syncs with the desktop via wifi…no need to hook up your USB cable. Even US reviewers are blown away: Wired’s Epicenter blog claims it’s so good that “you’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead iPhone before I’ll delete it from my phone”.

You just read it well: The big attraction of the Spotify app is its ability to store your playlists so you can listen to them while completely offline – on the Underground, on a plane, or wherever. Needless to say that this is a revolution in the music industry. For this, you definitely need wifi, and the foresight to remember to sync your playlists before you leave.

My feeling? I just can’t wait to have Spotify made available for Nokia S60 users… windows mobile users (Kerolic kindly shared a link to a video on which we can see Spotify running on a Nokia S60. It is just gorgeous!)

Read — Spotify on Android
Read — Spotify on App Store
Read — Spotify on Symbian S60

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Want more? go and visit Nokia labs

The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

one year walk/beard grow time lapse by Christoph Rehage
November 9th 2007 – November 13th 2008
one year on foot – 4646km through China
unlimited beard & hair growth

(thank you christoph for this “trip”)

“And then the invasion slowly started, deeply burying its roots in the neuralgic points of major industrial cities, before it spread all over the World.

And there they were, all around us, before we realized it was too late.”

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To that point you are maybe wondering if this is some kind of stupid joke like the Crop Circles, a punk movement like the Army of the Twelve Monkeys or if this is real and we are under the threat of an Alien-like invasion.

“None of them” you’ll say. And you’re damn right and clever! Those weird drawings are only QR Codes.

Very common in Japan, QR Codes or “Quick Response Codes“  basically look like this:

Yes I do agree, not so attractive.

Technically speaking, QR Code can be described as a two-dimensional barcode which can be decoded quickly by cameras, especially those in mobile phones, supporting the codes.

Most cell phones * (see the list at the bottom of this article) are today able to scan QR Code and open the associated resource in the cell phone. The resource is usually a website but can also be a phone number, sms or text. Anyone using a cell phone to open websites can imagine how much faster and comfortable this method is.

I’m using this technic for the day to day business, as for instance I featured a QR code at the back of my own business cards (print and digital)

Some print publications also started to include QR codes in their magazines to provide their readers with a better experience, and every articles in the print version of this blog features a QR code so that readers are able to access them online from a mobile phone Internet browser.

If until that point you’re lost or not convinced by the good of QR Codes, this video will clear all your doubts.

A nice illustrated story by Kaywa is also available here

You got it now: a QR Code Generator allows anyone to create QR Codes easily. Websites such as Kaywa, BeQRious and QR Jumps offers this functionality. The good thing about Kaywa and BeQRious is that there is no need to register to create new QR Codes (which is unfortunately not the case for QR Jumps). Both sites distinguishes between basic and advanced QR Code and Damatrix generation. The basic form contains of course fewer options. But it is still possible to use the basic QR Code form to create url, sms, phone number, text resources and RSS feeds for mobiles!

Indeed, most Blogs or websites have an RSS feed, but content is still unadapted for mobile devices. Feed2Mobile will simply let you create a mobile version of your content and make it available to mobile visitors. For instance, by scanning the below QR Code with your mobile phone, you’ll be able to easily reach and bookmark the mobile version of of 52nd & West

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Kaywa also offers the possibility to download a 2D Barcode Reader for your cellphone. The Kaywa Reader is a 2D Barcode Reader to install on your mobile phone. Once installed, you can scan 2D Barcodes and the content of the 2D Barcode is then immediately resolved on the phone.

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The URL is certainly the most interesting type of information which can be encoded. After scanning the 2D Barcode, you get a connection to the mobile site.

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The user selects the content type at the top and enters the information below. Creating a QR Code for an url would mean to enter an url in the form. The generator will then create the QR Code image which can be created in various sizes and the two image formats jpg or png.

Easy, isn’t it?

BeQRious regularly publishes interesting news on how QR codes are used around the world. You can access them from here

So next time you see a QR code-like art in the street, don’t freak out, unless you see this…

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muuuuhahahahahhahahahah

***

* Compatible OS include: Symbian 2nd Edition, Symbian 3rd Edition, Symbian UIQ 2.x / 3.x, J2me, windows Mobile 5.0 / 5.5 / 6 / 6.5, Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Palm (Palm OS / Windows Mobile) Windows XP / Windows Vista (Webcam Reader).

Online resources:

- http://reader.kaywa.com/

- http://www.beqrious.com/

Don’t have a cell phone with embedded QR code reader? Dowload a QR Code Reader for your mobile here or use an online QR Code Decoder.

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According to Engadget who managed to get a hand on it, “It’s half speaker, half cushion and 100 percent useful. Philips‘ [...] CushionSpeaker laptop stand is designed for the bedridden among us, combining a soft laptop stand with a built-in speaker for amplifying those lap-based movie sessions. Of course, this thing probably won’t do much for heat dispersion, but for those also looking for a personal heater, this thing just might be magical. The integrated speaker connects to one’s laptop via USB, which just might put off netbook owners struggling to get by with just a couple of those very sockets.”

Come on guys, it’s just a laptop cushion! And honestly, its design sucks! It looks so 1999! Okay, okay, maybe you’ll use it, find it cool to watch movies while lying in your bed, but it will eventually end-up in your closet or on eBay in even less time than it took you to make up your mind and purchase it.

To my opinion, I think that a laptop cushion per se should be easily transportable; most of the time I’m sitting in a place where there are no tables is anywhere but at home! So what’s the point here? I think that Philips really do innovative stuff. But this laptop cushion speaker seems more like a distress call saying “hey, we’re lacking innovative ideas at the moment”. I believe that it’s better not to release a crappy product than to do so to give your customers the feeling that you’re always at the forefront of innovation!

Personnaly for that price ($100 USD!)  I’d expect to get an inflatable laptop cushion I could also use as a laptop case so I could take it anywhere (with or without the speakers)!  Unfortunately most designs I’ve seen are only prototypes or just pieces of art.

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So R&D, why don’t you get to work!

And if you manage to include a built-in lap massaging engine, I’m telling you: you just won a new customer!

In the meantime, I’m going to IKEA to get my own $15 BRÄDA laptop cushion with its handle and mobile phone pocket on the side…

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