User First Web

If you are interested in attending Web Visions, I encourage you to register now as the early bird rate ends tomorrow.

If you haven’t been to Web Visions before, you’re missing out. It is a top-caliber event. It takes place in Portland, and is reasonably priced. You’d be hard pressed to find a better deal.

At my previous job, I took my entire team to Web Visions every year. For the same price I would spend to send a single person to a more expensive conference in another city, I could send my whole team.

This year’s speaker line up is exceptional and includes a keynote by Jeffrey Veen whose last keynote at Web Visions was worth the price of admission alone. His presentation remains my favorite and is something that I’ve used to inform my thinking many times.

So if you do anything web related, I can’t recommend this conference enough. Plus, you may recognize a familiar name on the speaker list. :-)

A quick reminder that Mobile Portland is tonight at 6 pm at eROI. Tonight’s hot topic is the iPhone SDK. More details and RSVP information.

Verizon announced that they would open their network late last year. Last week they provided details which shows that it isn’t terribly open.

Verizon also one the recent spectrum bidding where again, the definition of open is being debated.

Carlo Longino of MobHappy has written about how “open” has become the big buzzword for mobile this year, but most of what is being called open isn’t really very open.

My favorite is Sprint’s new “OpenWeb” service which seems to be breaking everything on the web. What a mess.

One of the reasons for my interest in site performance is because these techniques become even more important when developing for mobile. Google published some recent evidence supporting this belief.

“We saw something similar after we launched an updated interface for Gmail on the iPhone during MacWorld earlier this year. Lots of iPhone users tried the new interface (hence the bump in Gmail pageviews between January and February), but they didn’t stick around like we hoped they would. Over the course of the next few weeks, we made some tweaks to drastically improve the speed of the product, and Gmail pageviews on the iPhone not only stabilized, but began to rise, as the graph below shows:”

Read more at Google’s blog.

Where do the phone makers get their dictionaries?

In case you missed, tests show that Safari on the iPhone will only cache objects that are under 25k. Something to keep in mind as you build your iPhone web apps.

In case you missed it, the first meeting of Mobile Portland is scheduled for next Monday. See more details and RSVP.

After a process that took far too long, I’ve finally managed to publish my slides from last week’s mobile presentation.

The big news out of the event was the announcement of Mobile Portland, a new user group focused on mobile development. We’re currently planning our first meeting for March. Sign up now receive details on our first meeting.

At last week’s talk at Portland Web Innovators, I promised to post the slides on Cloud Four’s blog. It seemed like a simple promise at the time, but boy has it turned out to be an ordeal.

• My slides don’t make sense without my narrative — My slides are typically photographs or illustrations that augment the story that I’m telling instead of bullet points that I’m reading aloud. This makes for more dynamic presentations and fits my belief that my job is to tell a compelling story by adding a visual and hopefully an emotional component to the narrative.

  Unfortunately, a slide that has a picture of a wall covered in post-it notes and a title that says, “And she married me anyways” doesn’t make a lot of sense to those who weren’t at the presentation.

• To add context to the slides, you need to add presenter’s notes or audio — Unless you created presenter’s notes from the beginning that can be digested by other people, at the very least you will need to go back to the slides and edit them all to add presenter notes. If you choose to record audio, you have to find the software to do this and learn how to record and compress the audio correctly.
   
• Some slides have to be edited to simplify their transitions — I also found that I had to edit some slides that had automatic or timed transitions to no longer have those transitions because I would no longer control the timing of the slides.
   
• No good solution for posting presenter’s notes online — My first choice was to add presenter notes. In fact, I added presenter notes to every slide before I realized that the services for uploading slides and embedding them in other sites didn’t support presenter notes very well. There appears to be no way to see the presenter notes if you embed a viewer like Slideshare into your site.

  I ended up copying all of my presenter notes (including the onerous task of converting non-ascii quotes which Slideshare wasn’t escaping correctly) into comments on each slide. I then added a large note on the first slide instructing viewers on how to view the slides.

  Ultimately, I was disappointed in this solution because if I embed the slides into Cloud Four’s blog, the presenter notes won’t show up.

• Recording audio isn’t fun — Actually, I’m sure it is for people who do it more often than I do, but I had several aborted attempts including one complete run that didn’t have enough volume.

  The lessons here are that Garage Band is much easier to use than Audacity, that I can’t listen to my own voice for any length of time so I didn’t try to edit the audio at all, and that 3/4 quarters of the way through the audio I realized that I had said that things were going to “radically change” far too many times (yet another reason why I *will not* be listening to the audio again).
   

• Slideshare has been processing my audio for almost 24 hours now — The final hold up on posting the slides appears to be problem with Slideshare that is preventing me from uploading the audio file successfully. I’ve submitted a few support tickets, but have no idea when it will be resolved.

Throughout this process, I’ve found myself thinking, “This shouldn’t be this hard.” But the reality is that the type of presentation that is compelling live is very different than one that can be comprehended by someone reading online. Any way you slice it, it takes a lot of work to repurpose your slides for online posting.

So for those who are waiting for the slides to be posted, I apologize. They are truly on their way. And believe me, I want them posted as soon as possible. :-)

One of the more interesting quotes from last week’s Mobile Congress came from Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin who cautioned mobile carriers that “we must not allow ourselves to become bit-pipes and let somebody else do the services work.”

I’ve been waiting for one of the carriers to say something like this. I’m certain that carriers will be conflicted in the coming months as they realize that there is a lot of revenue to be made from data services, but to capture this money, they give up control to companies like Apple, Google and Nokia.

In response to Sarin’s comments, Ajit Jaokar has a great post comparing mobile carriers to the builders of the silk road. In it, he writes:

But by common consensus, the company everyone wanted to meet was not an Operator - It was Apple. Like it or not - Google, Apple, Nokia and others drive the agenda today – and already with the launch of iPhone – the Operator is already a bit pipe. There may be no going back since iTunes is the billing mechanism for iPhone.

The truth is that mobile carriers are going to be bit pipes. The transition has already started. I expect to see a lot of carriers vacillate between opening their networks in order to provide more data services that consumers want and fighting the changes to the market that will mean that their importance is diminished.