I had the privilege of speaking at the BE-Wizard Web Conference in Italy last week. It was a tribute to Enrico and his team at Titanka, to witness and participate in an international class conference, that in only 4 years have taken an initially small event, with only 30 people attending in 2009 to having an audience of over 600 people in 2012.
After attending the conference over the 2 days at the sea side holiday resort city of Rimini, I decided to grab the opportunity to take a vacation break and explore the sights, history and gastronomic delights of Italy.
The trip has also been an educational and invigorating exercise in blogging while travelling and keeping up the discipline of maintaining and monitoring my social networks while on the move by train and motel.
Most of the trains in Italy have power, so the challenge of ensuring having enough electrical juice to keep the batteries of the iPhone, the laptop and the iPad powered up has been largely successful. (I would recommend though taking a power board to charge multiple devices at one time)
On landing in Rome, some time was taken to ensure I had a local SIM which provides cost effective broadband mobile access that allows mobile blogging, communication and the ability to maintain the social networks.
The laptop is of course the main mobile blogging station and has the tools for putting the blog posts together. This includes my “can’t do without” software tool for screen shots and image management “Snagit”, that is vital for including those images that are essential on an increasingly visual web.
The iPhone has been good for posting Instagram photos to Twitter and Facebook, checking my Facebook timeline and viewing Hootsuite for Tweets and direct messages. It is also my Internet tethering device that provides my Keeping in touch via email is a breeze as the Italian mobile broadband is quite fast and very accessible even in out of the way alleyways and the five awesome and picturesque headlands that are in the “Italian Riviera” called the Cinque Terre. Some tunnels even provided internet access!
This the is the consummate tourist guide and tool you can’t do with out once you have used it. It provides you with the Google GPS map function that ensures you can find your way in places like Florence. It is also great to find restaurants and cafes with the “TripAdivisor” app. It also is the perfect research device for finding about the local area and highlights. The local information center is now not required. Travelling while working is becoming easier and more convenient and the mobile connected devices are freeing us from being bound to a desk or even your own country.
The growth of the social networks over the last few years has been matched by the mobile internet with smart phones sales approaching nearly 500 million units in 2011. The synergy that these 2 fast tracking trends provide is changing how we work and play.
So what are some statistics worth noting?
The smartphone sales were up over 63% in 2011 from 2010 (488.5 million)5.9 billion people now use mobile phones globallyOver 300,000 apps have been developed in the past 3 years and downloaded more than 10.9 Billion times77% use mobile phones for searchSocial networking accounted for 50% of all page views on mobile phones in 2011Facebook mobile users quadrupled in 2 years from 50 million to 200 millionThere are 200 million mobile video playbacks from YouTube every dayThere are 1.2 billion internet connected smartphonesThe upside for mobile commerce and smart phone growth is enormous as all mobile phones will eventually become internet connected. On current numbers that means that 4.7 billion smart phones are yet to be sold and connected! Is your business ready for the mobile web?
Infographic source: Culturelabel.com
More Reading
Image by theOOBE
0 comments:
Post a Comment