This infographic was put together by Android Tablet Fanatic by aggregating publicly available data sources. For those of you looking to travel, these are some of the costs that you’ll be looking forward to. Click on the image to view it full-sized.
Whether you are traveling domestically or internationally, check out the latest pre-paid rates and keep those data costs in mind.
You have already made the decision that you will use mobile as the first channel that you will broadcast and engage your community. You have not settled on applications, websites, or any kinds of marketing tools, but you are certain that you want to use the most that you can with mobile.
Sounds good to me. Here are the characteristics of mobile then you want to keep in mind:
Mobile is the first (and most prevalent) personal mass media
It’s not just that mobile is where markets are focusing, it is where people are focusing on individual levels. And they are actively filtering content and the context of their personal, professional, and spiritual lives thru several mobile devices and services.
Get over the fact that people will not make you their priority, or their authority. You will be one of several streams. But, you can (and should) play a significant role in helping them to manage those streams.
Mobile is permanently carried
A mobile device is seemingly carried by everyone. If it isn’t a phone, it’s a personal media player, game system, music player, and sometimes even a voice recorder. Whatever it is, the device is closer to them than your application or service is. Learn the moments when your mobile effort will best be used, and use the fact that something is carried as part of the reason to be present for that moment.
Mobile is always-on
Always on doesn’t necessarily mean always having a signal. It means that there is power flowing to a device that can garner secondary attention from a primary event. This means that your application or service doesn’t have to sit front and center to their attention, but it should be available in those moments where someone is defaulting to considering something outside of an event going on immediately around them.
And what about those people who aren’t on because a device has lost power. Considering being the point where they power the device back up, and draw a solution for broadcasting or engagement to that point (not necessarily to the mobile device).
Mobile has a built-in payment mechanism
First things that ring in the pocket here are tithes and offerings. Get over it. Unless you are making your online giving systems as efficient as Amazon and iTunes, this won’t gain much traction. Doesn’t mean that people won’t give, but that they will have expectations. Slow services, countless clicks, and an unoptimized experience will simply merit the same responses that giving kiosks have had.
You can, and should, partner with those organizations whom are doing mobile/online giving. Use this as a teaching point for money management and information security. Yes, you are qualified to do so, and this is relevant not only to mobile, but any terminal where payments can be collected.
Mobile is available at the point of creative inspiration
Just because you cannot draw or produce award winning videos on your mobile doesn’t mean that it is impossible. Encourage the creative members of your communities to create and upload to the shared church/organization website the products they create. To those of you already using drama and painting arts in worship services, extend that to those things created dynamically during the service as well. I am sure that sketchbooks and sketchnotes could be really interesting in this wise.
Don’t dismiss the written language. Yes, SMS is only worth about 140 characters, and that’s a good thing. Teach people to pray or write psalms in that space. Again, encourage sharing and broadcasting a specific points in community life. Then, let creative life happen.
Mobile has the most accurate audience measurement
Some of you have justified fears about people tweeting or texting during sermons. You also what that response just as soon as they have it. Consider setting up a Google Voice account where voice and text messages can be set during a service, and then as a leadership team, pray and vet thru the responses for a followup in the next meeting.
Mobile captures the social context of media consumption
If your members are on Facebook more than they are in the Word, consider using those social networks that connect to Facebook as a means to get their eyes in front of the text. And if they are on Facebook and other social networks, are you there with them? What are they talking about? What are the pictures most about? Does your conceptualization of the Gospel meet the, where they live, or where you would like them to live (implying that their lives are meaningless because they don’t follow your pattern of faith)?
Mobile allows augmented reality to be used in media
Augmented reality (and virtual reality) means that you are placing a layer of content, usually online, on top of the real world. Sometimes, this looks like making sure that you are listed in Google Maps so that people can find you using Street View. This can also be the using of QR Codes so that people are accessing their mobile device, and making a shorter step to keeping mind of important information that in just hearing it.
This can also be done in geo-games between churches/groups. This can be a photo mashup compiled from the mobile devices and cameras of several in your community, but layered into the existing web presence your church/org offers.
There are a lot of ways to take mobile and make it work for you. It’s not all about applications, mobile web, or text messaging either. Using the unique qualities of mobile, where you go with it becomes up to your community, not market trends.
What is that question? It is a simple but profound: what happens when our tools become appendages then become doorways of experiencing faith in ways that are virtually real, but altogether a different lens than anything before it?
Dangerous question isn’t it? I am literally asking if we understand mobile and all other digital contexts not as they can become a part of our faith language, but that they develop interpretations and experiences of faith that have no grounding in what is understood now as “faith practices.”
Am I proposing that mobile, and later personalized virtual computing (augmented and virtual reality), will derive experiences that will be considered “living out/by faith” even as they have nothing in common with current faith practices outside of a shared history and end-expression*? Yup. And this scares the mess out of folks.
Take mobile. In every interview that I have done for mobile ministry, the question has come up if I can see there being a time when some aspect of mobile tech will take away the treasured face-to-face interactions. I always am careful to ground the answer in context – it depends on the environment and the faith practice/behavior that needs to be exercised. The answer isn’t will it, but rather in what contexts will it. Looking at it that way is exciting and scary… and it is this that we have to address.
Is your faith so grounded to a specific context that you can’t live outside of it? Or, is the way you would like to live out your faith so undefinable by the dominant digital faith contexts that you know that you feel and act out of a limited and unfulfilling spirit? Or, maybe this tweet better fits, “A friend calls mobile the “appendage,” does your church/ministry have a gym for that appendage or is it relegated to a diff zoning ordinance?”
For many people, there is little to no difference between online and offline expressions of faith. Does the description of your faith end where virtual reality begins, or can you confidently walk through the door of mobile/augmented reality/virtual reality and translate the beauty and immense glory of God into something unique yet altogether familiar? Expressions change, faith keeps a consistent and definable fingerprint.
*One can, and many do argue that if the apostles were to be ported to today’s time period that they would have a very hard time identifying a Christian inside the context of a church service, but would more readily see Christ-following in “secular” functions such as the United Way, Red Cross, etc.?
This year, we’ve got another info-graphic to poke your mind towards the Internet as it would look in 2020. From the folks at Intac, there’s a lot on here that’s not always easy to see in pictures. Here are some of the points noted:
More People Will Use the Internet
In 2010, there are 1.8 billion Internet users and a world population of 6.7 billion. In 2020, it is estimated that there will be five billion Internet users.The Internet Will be More Geographically Dispersed
The estimated world population in 2009 was 6,767,805,208. The estimated number of Internet users on December 2000 was 360,985,492. The latest data shows the current number of Internet users at 1,802,330,457. The penetration of the Internet into the population is 26.6 percent. The growth of Internet users from 2000 to 2009 was 399.3 percent.The Internet Will be a Network of Things, Not Computers
Today, the Internet has 575 million host computers. Expect billions of sensors on buildings and bridges to be connected to the Internet by 2020
Lots of things here, and much of it aligns with what we saw in last year’s report. What sticks out for you? Or, what doesn’t go far enough?
If you’ve got something you deem worth sharing, be sure to point it out to us (@mobileminmag) or use the #mobminhashtag if its directly related to mobile ministry efforts.
A Mobile Lens for 2011
Mobile will continue to push towards the front of technology, health, educational, and policy conversations in 2011. What will be most interesting is the overlap. As we talked about some last year, contextualization and cross-functional knowledge will play a bigger part in understanding the role of mobile and the impacts to digital faith behaviors. Those individuals and groups that pollinate their mobile perspectives with multiple arenas will remain ahead of trends and applications.
In hardware, we are still looking at more of the same from basic devices (slates, candybar, tablet, some clamshells). Storage and processor technology is again on the verge of stepping up a generation, but battery power isn’t. We should see a few more attempts with device and network intelligence on devices, but only at the highest model ranges. Look at what you see as high-end right now, it will be low/mid-range by the fall.
Price points for devices will come down to orughly $100USD for a smartphone sans contract (currently $130-150). This will continue the transformation of some (mobile savvy) developed markets towards being largely populated with new smartphones. That said, feature phones will continue to sell huge in most markets – and the 2nd owner market should also grow. Service prices will hold steady for a bit longer before we start seeing more tiers in data service offerings with larger carriers. Keep an eye on SIM cards, these might be changing – and not just in size.
Software will continue to go the route of paying attention to user experience and smoother user interface design, though we will get some attention paid to optimization and information security. I wish I could say that users will care about security, but situations such as WikiLeaks shows us that this will remain governmental and enterprise conversations.
Looks like we are on the verge of some jumps in the amount and attention paid to audio and multi-lingual approaches. However, the easiest paths for developing these solutions will continue to be with web-dependent data and transaction services.
Open source will continue as an area of opportunity and frequent barrier in software and business development. Religious content is one of the heaviest areas where DRM and antiquated processes remain, and so the change here to more fluid models is still some time off. We will see more attempts like the Kiosk Evangelism Project and The Evangelical Exegetical Commentary that will push some open source behaviors forward – the catch being with regional and legal issues which don’t change so quickly.
Mobile applications will continue to dominate the conversation in smartphone-heavy markets. Mobile web will pick up steam after Q1 and newer devices will further blurr the line between web and native applications. Would be nice to see a bible software company lead in this area – Logos’s Biblia was a great stepping stone to this.
We will see people more empowered with mobile to create their own solutions through more app-wizard-like programs and processes. I’m not sure if it will come from the faith-based space or outside, but I can see a few groups doing more with mashup-technologies that empower individuals to create solutions, instead of waiting for a larger network to be the solution.
MMM in 2011
With 3/4 a year under the belt as MMM as Antoine’s primary focus – and the addition of two voices for regional and development interests, there’s been a lot of learning and pushing taking place. Here’s some of what you can expect from in 2011.
If you will, all of this is simply building on the core so that the depth of content hits on as many applications of mobile and digital faith explorations as possible.
2011 aims to be filled with a lot more sending and receiving of Christ in mobile and we invite you to be a part of the signal. Connect with MMM and let’s continue to enable the Body to see the intersection of faith and mobile technology.
*If you are interested in being a contributor to MMM, make your request known via the Contact Form. Include links to sample writing pieces, up to three (3) areas of focus/interest, and how often you’d be contributing by writing. Those who can write in a language besides English are heavily preferred, though all applicants are equally considered.
…One example of the measurement challenge: a news related application. The first measure of an app’s success is its downloads count. In theory, pretty simple. Each time an app is downloaded, the store (Apple’s or any other) records the transaction. Then, things gets fuzzier as the application lives on and gets regular updates. Sometimes, updates are upgrades, with new features. At which point should the app be considered new — especially when it’s free, like most of the news-related ones? Second difficulty: a growing number of apps will be preloaded into smartphones and tablets. Rightly or wrongly, Apple nixes such meddling with its devices. But, outside of the iOS world, cellphone carriers do strike deals with content providers and preload apps on Android devices. That’s another hard to get number…
Read the rest of Measuing the Nomads at Monday Note.
In those conversations about mobile data and analytics, it has been made very clear to me that this is a major hurdle for some of the larger groups which use these measurements in order to determine how to better support – or even adjust how they are supporting mobile ministry activities. What have been some of the methods that you are finding successful?
Or, if you’ve got a case study towards a mobile ministry initiative and have described some of these measures of success, would you consider submitting that to be posted on our Mobile Case Studies/Research page? There’s still much to be learned from one another and grounds to be plowed in this space. And until we can start seeing consistency in actions/successes/failures, the challenge to collecting and understanding mobile data in the ministry context will go unanswered.
The businessman whose family’s $70 million gift lifted Oral Roberts University (ORU) out of debt is backing a cooperative effort to digitize Bible content and speed the pace at which translations are completed.
Every Tribe Every Nation plans to initially put 160 existing texts into digital format, although Mart Green said the process for converting several thousand will likely take 20 to 25 years.
“This is driven by the sense of urgency in several areas,” said Green, who became chairman of ORU’s board of trustees three years ago after helping the school pay off $54 million in debt. “What’s front and center for me right now would be mobile. Every hour 1,000 people are downloading the Bible onto their iPhone.”
What is most interesting about this story is that here we have publishers not just being pursued by their customer audiences, but now donors are also getting into the fray making sure that no effort is spared using financial and collaborative tools that would make sure the Bible makes it to every corner of the reading, listening, and communicating world.
In our Future Bibles series, we looked at publishing being effected by digital trends. This report by Charisma Magazine further emphasizes this point. For publishers, the challenge will not just be technical, but also aiding teachers and communities to also digitize their teaching tools and methods to account for this huge digital push.
Always worth a read for his opinions and analyses of the mobile industry, Tomi Ahonen (Communities Dominate Brands, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media, etc.) has given a preview of an upcoming publication of mobile statistics for 2010. Here’s a preview of some of the information contained in that post:
Tomi’s data is one of the few places one can get an entire picture of what’s happening globally and his next almanac will be chock full of these and other very notable stats about mobile, mobile use, and upcoming trends.
Take a gander at the noted stats in detail at his preview post. And contemplate just how much more attention to mobile you’ll need to pay in the year to come as mobile is more than even something global and personal at the same time.
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Tomi Ahonen Mega-Post on Becoming the Next Millionaire Mogul in Mobile
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011Such is how I feel after having read his latest 20K+ word article about the mega-opportunity in mobile. Thankfully, Ahonen speaks in more than monetary terms. And given the insights he and several others in mobile share, the opportunity in mobile for great gains is just a matter of capitalizing on the opportunity. Here’s a snippet of the article:
Read the rest of How You Became Next Mogul in Mobile (and a Millionaire) at Communities Dominate Brands. Also, you might want to add a cup of coffee or tea and a sandwich for this one (the reply from Martin Geddes, then Tomi’s reply).
For something a bit shorter, but packing a similar punch, check out this interview of Tomi Ahonen over at Mobile Zeigeist.
Tags: augmented reality, Communities Dominate Brands, innovations, location-based apps, metrics, MMS, mobile, mobile applications, mobile web, SMS, social networking, statistics, Tomi Ahonen
Posted in Commentary, Devices and Software, Future Trends | 1 Comment »