Did you hear the one about the guy who returned his iPad because it was just too AWESOME?

It sounds like an Onion headline but no, this one comes from the Harvard Business Review. Granted the writer, Peter Bregman, is going for a bit of sensationalism to rack up the tweets and retweets. And it seems to be working – heck, it caught my attention in my endless quest for mobile bizarro headlines.  

Bregman is essentially saying that the iPad made it too easy for him to be connected and “always-on”. He started to question what value all that instant information and connectedness was giving him and shouldn’t he just have more time for “boredom”?   I quibble with his word choice — being bored is not the same as being disconnected and idle. There is no excuse EVER for being bored in life. But being deliciously idle and doing nothing but thinking about stuff and watching the world go by, well that is indeed the kind of simple joy that I think Bregman is getting at.

Sometimes when we are connected, either through a mobile device or at our desks surfing the Internet, we enter into a place I like to call the “vortex”  –  where you are browsing, cross-referencing and skimming all sorts of messages, news and content. In addition to being highly addictive, is this actually changing the way our brains work? As Nicholas Carr argues in his new book, The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, we may be in danger of becoming shallow thinkers, headline skimmers, multi-taskers that are increasingly incapable of deep contemplation. If you’ve had discussion with a teenager lately, you’ll likely recognize this behavior – most don’t want to read the in-depth story on anything – just the facts, ma’am.  Perhaps in the future,  instead of just being left-brain/right-brain dominant, we may also be deep/shallow dominant.

So is too much technology bad for us? My sister refuses to use GPS when driving because she’s sure it will make her stupid. Me, I’d rather not have the anxiety of getting lost. Furthermore, I can’t imagine not having Google at my fingertips, or Yelp on my BlackBerry when I’m out and about – does this make me weaker or smarter in the long run? (The irony is of course that this question requires deep contemplation.)

Whether we like it or not, the Internet and mobile is transforming the way we all think, live and act in significant ways. It can be overwhelming as with Bregman’s need to return his iPad. It can also be frustrating when things don’t work right. But most importantly, it can be liberating and life-changing, enabling you to connect information and people in new ways to form entirely new ideas and relationships.  

So don’t blame your iPad. Or your BlackBerry or your laptop. Just switch the darn thing off every once in a while and go fishing.

Recently I had the opportunity and pleasure to speak with one of the ubiquitous voices of technology M&A, The Deal’s Mary K. Flynn, who has had her fingers (or I should say cameras) on the pulse of technology M&A for quite some time. Discussion points included what deals we’re looking at as indicators of where the mobile market is going in the enterprise, what role consolidation will play in the market, and what’s next for us on the M&A front. These are all both interesting and critical industry issues – I hope the conversation spurs some thinking on the part of everyone at Mobile Masters.

I would love to hear from the Mobile Masters community – what do you think about mobile market consolidation? What should happen on a larger scale within the enterprise mobility vendor community? Post your comments and let us know

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Our CEO at Antenna is a oenophile, so I hope I get my facts straight on this one.

Great wines are based on a number of factors–the age of the vines, the weather, the soil, and in the case of blends the types of grapes used (BTW, some of the best wines are blends). Some wineries are renowned for their consistently great wines (like Chateau Petrus, Opus One, and Screaming Eagle), but sometimes a confluence of events help to product a vintage that stands out more than others. For example, the 2005 vintage from Chateau Petrus was hailed as the best in nearly 100 years due to the perfect summer weather yielding super concentrated fruit. It was already fetching nearly $6,000 a bottle in 2009, and you have to wait at least 10 years for it to mature to enjoy it!

At Antenna, we just announced our own vintage for 2010 — AMP 3.0! And we think that this vintage could be the best mobility platform produced in the last 20 years by anyone! What makes this vintage so great? Well it’s actually a blend of technologies–the best parts of the AMP 2.0 and Concert platforms coming together (the latter acquired in the Dexterra deal). In addition, the technology landscape over the past year–with the emergence of iPhone, Android, and HTML5–has provided great depth and character to our AMP 3.0 product, which supports these technologies in addition to supporting BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian). We also believe that we have the sharpest mobile minds and connoisseurs to help put together this vintage. Come for a taste at one of our live demos!

What the Neck?

By providing great mobile interfaces and app flows, we hope to save the worlds mobile workers from this rash of neck strain issues. What can be created to make mobile apps really usable while running through the airport, paying for parking…is vastly better than the capabilities mobile devices could support even as short as a year ago.

So protect your neck and make good choices for your mobile applications.

Got an Android device? Here are 10 Android Apps for the Mobile Worker. I’m actually a BlackBerry user so I haven’t tried any of these first hand, but if you have please let us know what you think.

Got a hankering for some “street meat”? Here are 8 great street food vendors in NY. I’ve only tried the key lime pies in #6–pretty darn delicious. Have you tried any of the vendors? So much good food, so little time to eat.

You may remember a book that came out in the early 1980s – Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. The book focused on the machinations behind old time minicomputer vendor Data General and its intense efforts to get an important new machine out the door. As Wikipedia puts it: The book “chronicles the experiences of an engineering team racing to design a next generation computer under a blistering schedule and tremendous pressure…”

I mention this because pulling together M&A in this day and age, especially in the heated world of mobility, isn’t much different – a management team racing under a blistering schedule and tremendous pressure. Hence, “Mobile Machinations” is about the soul of a new deal — an opportunity to dig behind the scenes, behind the blistering schedule, behind the engineering, and behind the ‘emotions’ needed to make deals – whether M&A, business development, partnerships or sales – happen…and how to turn them into reality.

As Antenna’s CEO, I’ve been involved in four M&A deals since 2003. All of them have been acquisitions on our part. Each deal had very specific drivers behind it and different emotions as well.

One very interesting aspect of M&A has to do not so much with how a given deal affects the companies involved, but rather how a deal affects the market you are doing business in. The right deal can easily shape a market in dynamic and strategic ways that create entirely new business opportunities; a deal can simply deliver tactical benefits, such as eliminating competitive noise in the marketplace; or a deal can fundamentally change the way a company does business inside of its market – a more subtle way to think about market shaping.

More often than not, the companies involved in a deal are likely to have known each other for a fairly significant period of time. They can be hostile enemies or friendly competitors when squaring off against each other in the marketplace. There are always underlying emotions at play in the heat of competition. And there are certainly emotions at play when a possible deal scenario emerges. More often than not those emotions will likely make or break a deal.

Can you make a deal simply because of the pleasure it may give you to finally put the screws to a formerly hostile enemy? Do you simply make a deal because you’ve become good friends with a competitor you perhaps have grown to like? I can tell you firsthand – those emotions are absolutely there at the front end of any deal. And they are real.

Truth be told, most deals begin way before they actually occur usually based on the relationships between the CEOs of the respective firms. Having an existing relationship with a peer or competitor makes the process of a deal easier – not easy, but easier. As an example, Antenna’s recent acquisition of Vaultus was made easier based on the fact that I have known their CEO for many years and always made a connection whenever we were at an industry event. In addition I kept in regular contact with a key Board member. The first discussion of merging actually occurred 7 years ago!

So in addition to the actual science and accounting forensics that are necessary in a deal, a certain level of emotions – we can call it art – is necessary to provide that strictly unscientific ‘gut feeling’. My own emotions focus not on anything personal in nature, but directly on how I feel about how the deal will affect both the overt and subtle shaping of the marketplace. Do I feel confident that the marketplace will become more favorable? Or does an honest emotional assessment reveal an overriding nervousness about it?

Often times the best decisions are the decisions to walk away. While we have done a number of deals recently, it pales in comparison to the number of opportunities we have reviewed and turned away from. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s better to walk away – you need to trust your gut.

A management team racing under a blistering schedule and tremendous pressure…Will I play, or will I walk away? The combination of art and science is the only way I know.

Well…welcome to Deep Dev, where I hope to be spending some quality time diving deep into the mobile application abyss -  or rather to help you to make sure that when you develop mobile apps they do not in fact end up in the abyss. I hope to help guide you to  deliver delightful user experiences. I know a little something about building mobile groups – I and my dedicated mobile app-building team are working around the clock to build some of the best enterprise applications to be found anywhere. I say that with humility and modesty.

So, where should we start? We have all seen countless articles in the last few months on who will win the battle for developers – let’s start there. The focus, control and channel of Apple has been an easy entry for many. Android offers openness, a choice of devices and power.  There are many others, but for those looking for fast entry into the market, these are the platforms. Where are you placing your bets? We wanna know.[poll id="5"]