Come to Rove’s session “Every laptop should be left behind” and listen to category-defining companies compel you to leave your laptops behind…

When: Thursday, May 15, 2008 from 9 to 10am
Where: Marriott World Center, Grand Ballroom, Salon 7
Address: 8701 World Center Drive. Orlando, FL

Speakers:
Rob Woodbridge - President & CEO, Rove
Dave Peak - Co-Founder & CEO, LiquidTalk
Paul Dumais - CTO, Rove
Will Hickie - CEO, WICKSoft
Bob Burk - TrueContext/Pronto
Kerry Kinchen - Electronic Communications Analyst, Sealed Air Corporation

Also, visit the Rove Booth #248 and try the key in your conference bag for a chance to win one of three $1,000.00 cash prizes. More information about the session will be available at the booth as well.

It’s official. We are speaking at WES, RIM’s yearly event next Thursday morning. Representatives from Rove, Liquid Talk, Pronto, Wicksoft and Sealed Air will be on stage talking about how our collective solutions allow professionals to leave their laptops behind. More details to come!

Every once-in-a-while someone vocalizes something that resonates because it is so simple, so true and so relevant. This is what Ben Bederson and John SanGiovanni, co-founders of Zumobi, did at the Web 2.0 Expo last week. The beautiful thing about their ‘six secrets to mobile computing‘ is that they are as simple as what they are preaching about mobile computing development…keep it simple!

They have identified the six core pieces to developing software for mobile devices as immediacy, adaptability, one-handed use, visual elegance, put the user in control, and thinking differently. The most profound take-away is the difference between web applications and mobile apps — one derives success from stickiness, the other from being ‘bouncy’ - get this and you get mobile application development.

Read the  article on CNET here.

I had the good fortune of attending the CTIA Wireless 2008 show out in Las Vegas last week – along with 40,000+ other mobile phone professionals from around the globe – and given this was my first “wireless show”, I’ve formed a few new impressions about the technology industry in general and the mobile market place in particular. First, the CTIA Show is all about “The Device” and every major OEM/vendor was actively engaged in a game of oneupsmanship – a “my stuff is better than your stuff!” mentality that extends from product introductions and feature announcements to booth size and level of glitz and glamour; this is Vegas after all and some companies will stop at nothing to grab your attention in hopes of grabbing your dollars. Accordingly, the overriding focus of the spring CTIA show was more about the slickness of the device and much less about the enterprise-class solutions these devices can be used with in supporting business or improving processes out in the unwired world.
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I’ve always been looking for a replacement for the laptop/desktop trap, obviously, and the UMPC market has always intrigued me as a possible answer. After doing some research on these devices they are just laptops masquerading as portable devices. This review does a great job of detailing what is really wrong with these devices.

Danny Dumas says it best:

Ultra-mobile PCs are the awkward middle children of gadgets. They’re constantly trying to assume the notable attributes of their older and younger siblings, but almost always come up short. On one hand, these little dudes aspire to have a laptop’s computational power and ease of use, yet they also endeavor to be diminutive and highly portable, like a smartphone. Unfortunately, the end result is more often than not some ungodly mishmash of half-measures and workarounds, none of which comes close to matching the experience on either end of the spectrum. And, yes, like middle children, they also tend to get ignored and neglected.

Read the whole review here.

This article first appeared in Integrated Solutions Magazine.

My company is located in an historic part of Ottawa, Canada, called the Byward Market. Named after our city’s foremost engineer, Colonel John By, this tourist-heavy area is as known for the things it has (quaint shops, hundreds of restaurants and hotels, street vendors and musicians) as well as for what it doesn’t: telephone poles and over-the-ground wires.

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Can a SmartPhone Replace a Laptop today? It’s an interesting question. One that a reporter from SmartPhone & Pocket PC Magazine, Dale Daniels, asked in April, 2008. Specifically, Dale undertook a version of what we are calling the Every Laptop Left Behind 30 Day Challenge:

“The idea was to see if someone could get by for a month without their laptop PC, using their Windows Mobile smartphone for their business and personal computing needs. At first, I thought that there was no way I could replace my laptop PC with my AT&T 8525, a phone-enabled touch screen device. However, I love a challenge and decided to make a go of it.”

The article is an interesting read… Can a SmartPhone Replace a Laptop Article .

During this person’s own 30 Day ELLB Challenge , the reporter led training classes with his mobile phone, made mobile-phone powered presentations, read spreadsheets, and typed hundreds of pages of text using a keyboard add-on. Our fearless laptop orphan even got pulled into playing some rather addictive games on his mobile phone (Myst anyone?).

In the end, our ELLB hero concluded that he wasn’t ready quite yet to ditch his laptop. That being said, we here at ELLB think his last words are telling…

“There are those who might say that a smartphone will never be as functional as a laptop, but remember, just a few years ago people said that no laptop would ever be able to keep up with a desktop computer. The only true constant is that things will always change.”

What are YOUR thoughts? Are you ready to take the ELLB 30 Day Challenge?

Contribution by David Peak from Liquid Talk.

I’ve owned one of those table PC’s. I would lug it around from meeting to meeting and try to capture notes without looking like a fool. By the time the PC would boot up, the thought I wanted to write down was gone or the meeting was over…Not at all convenient. I’ve also tried to use every one of my devices to take notes (yup, including the bluetooth and IR keyboard options) but everyone just thought I was answering an email or playing a game (I wasn’t, well, most of the time anyway). Enter PaperIQ and their recently released Digital Pen for BlackBerry

Here’s what it does:

Digital Pen for BlackBerry is a new product from PaperIQ that integrates Digital Pen and Paper with the powerful architecture of the BlackBerry wireless solution from RIM®. BlackBerry owners may now write notes and complete enterprise forms with their handwriting recognized automatically using the PaperIQ BlackBerry Digital Pen application.

The Professional edition is aimed at the individual who would like to take meeting notes, create contacts & tasks and send emails & faxes using pen and paper.

The Enterprise edition allows corporations to deploy enterprise-wide note-taking or forms-based applications to their BlackBerry users, providing them even greater flexibility and productivity when mobile.

This seems to me a suitable replacement for those tablet PC’s. Who’s kidding who? When divine inspiration strikes, who wants to wait for Windows to boot?

For those of you out there who happen to be at the right place at the right time but don’t carry your camera or video camera with you at all times this software is for you.

We’ve all seen the amateur camera work sent in to major media outlets from around the world well www.qik.com allows you to turn your smartphone into a real-time streaming recorder that is broadcast live on the web. How does this fit into our mantra of Every Laptop Left Behind? It turns your phone into a capture point with no additional processing, just point, shoot and you are your own tv channel.

With Qik you can stream engaging video live from your phone to the world or use your phone like a camcorder to capture entertaining, interesting and special moments. Go LIVE with your life by streaming anytime, anywhere — right from your phone. Be an eyewitness, capture those first steps, or whip up your own streaming video blog. There are just a million and one uses of qik

They do recommend you have an unlimited data plan if you want to use this service. That’s probably a good idea as this is an addictive little application with a profound impact.

Check it out at www.qik.com

For those companies out there interested in joining our movement — you know who you are — or simply identifying a product or service that fits what we talk about drop us a line and we’ll get you set up to contribute. You will also get to use this badge on your site as a way to indicate your participation.

More to come!