“People – let’s not lose our common sense here.”  It seems that people are crazy over mobile technology – some in a good way, and some in a not so good way.

Take the recent story about the man in the UK who mistakenly bought a bag of potatoes when he thought he was buying an iPad. A man approached him on the street who said he’d sell him an iPad. The man went to the cash machine, withdrew money and handed it over.   Never opening the package until after the seller was gone with his cash.   Let’s use some common sense around here!

Have you noticed that some people are techno-phobes? Perfectly intelligent people can at times lose all concept of the real world when it comes to technology. People can get a mobile device in their hands and suddenly they can be apprehensive, tentative and sometimes just lost. A friend of mine will say “I didn’t want to break anything” when asking me for help with email on an iPad or some other app. Really?

The lesson here is that mobile apps and technology are still new to some people, depending on your target audience it may be more or less so. Some people are connected 24×7, while some are still intimidated by the world of “apps.”  I’m sure we’ve all seen the transformation of an individual when they are first exposed to mobile apps. A few weeks into the experience they can be heard wondering aloud how they ever lived without access to the apps that have quickly become an integral part of their daily routine.

This is the lesson for companies looking to deploy mobile within their ecosystem. These people are your customers, your business partners and your employees.  Some are trading in their iPhone 4 for a 4S the day it’s released, while some are content with a five-year old BlackBerry, and others still may have not even entered the smartphone or tablet revolution.   Your mobile strategy and app design need to keep all users in mind – too complex and you may scare off the less experienced, while too basic an app will alienate the more advanced audience.  Mobile apps need to balance art, design and function.

So don’t let your mobile initiatives be planned and executed by a team which includes only your most mobile-savvy employees.  Take a cross section of your target audience and plan appropriately. You may not have any users who would confuse an iPad with a potato, but I guarantee you have a diverse user audience, so keep common sense in mind when planning and designing your mobile apps.

As a connoisseur of fine food and apps, I’m going to start reviewing food-related apps that I’ve downloaded and tried. The first one I’ll be reviewing is an app called Foodspotting.  Here is the description of the app from their website:

“A visual guide to good food and where to find it. Foodspotting is the easiest way to find and share the foods you love: Instead of reviewing restaurants, you can recommend your favorite dishes and see what others have recommended wherever you go.”

The Foodspotting app, shown here on an Android like mine, brings mouth-watering dishes to life

The idea is that even a bad restaurant may have one dish that is exceptionally good. Using the Foodspotting app (which, by the way, is available for all the major smartphones –a major plus) you can snap a picture and share that one delicious dish with everyone. The app uses geo-location to display pictures of food that have been taken nearby by other users and allows you to add comments and recommendations to the food photo. You can even flag a dish as “Want It” so that it will be saved for you to go and try at some point.

You also can search for specific foods or restaurants to see what is being served up. Foodspotting is also incorporating local food guides as well as known brands like Zagat and Food & Wine. Having validation from those guides is nice, however, as a foodie I would hate for Foodspotting to get too commercial and watered down. Another interesting thing about the app is that most of the pics are from local mom and pop restaurants. What’s great about this is that it promotes food diversity and drives business towards local restaurants. But more recently I’ve noticed pics from Taco Bell and other chain restaurants. Personally I don’t need a picture of a Chalupa to remind me how good/bad Taco Bell is.

Overall this app is a great idea. Sometimes I just don’t know what I’m in the mood to eat. Or I might be in an unfamiliar city and want some visual reference of the food to go by before choosing a place to dine. A nice photo of a mouth-watering dish makes the decision process that much easier. I just wish there was a “scratch-and-sniff” part of the app so that I can actually take a whiff of these dishes!

Mobile Gourmet gives Foodspotting: 5 out of 5 Stars

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, It seems like “…déjà vu all over again,” with this technology stuff. I spent the early part of my career in the communications industry. If it transmitted or received a signal, I probably worked on it. In the late ’80s and early ’90s there was a technology war raging between the various camps related to cellular phone and system technology.

AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service) had run its course and was successful beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. The analog systems were maxing out and pushing the laws of physics while trying to accommodate the re-use required to serve the growing cellular phone-user population. Analog cellular was a huge jump forward compared to IMTS (Improved Mobile Telephone Service), and expectations for this upstart technology were getting higher.

The continuing strain on the analog radio systems lead to a wave of new technologies that would solve the problem of too many users and too few channels to use. N-AMPS, TDMA, CDMA, GSM, etc. all competed for table space and claimed they were the wave of the future.

These technologies just needed a majority of carriers to jump on board, and they could rule the world. TDMA was the first true contender and the choice of McCaw Cellular here in the states. That lead to some interesting fireworks when companies like PacTel Cellular, NYNEX, SNET, and others jumped on the CDMA bandwagon.

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I am halfway through Steve Jobs’s biography, “Steve Jobs: A Biography,” by Walter Isaacson, and up to this point in the book, Jobs mentions numerous successes: the Macintosh, Pixar, NeXT, iPod, iTunes, Apple Stores. You might argue that they all did not dominate their respective market space, but you have to give credit to the sheer number of products and ideas that he and Apple launched. Did you know that the industry predicted that iTunes would sell one million songs in the first six months? They sold one million songs in the first six days.

The Apple Store was ridiculed by numerous industry and business leaders, including Apple board member Ed Woolard, who is quoted as saying, “Gateway has tried this and failed, while Dell is selling direct to consumers without stores and succeeding.”

The New York Apple store on Fifth Avenue generates more traffic and sales per square foot than any other store in New York City. The Apple Fifth Avenue Store attracted 50,000 visitors a week in the first year. Gateway averaged 250 visitors a week. The Apple Store grosses more per square foot than any store in the world. And it grosses more in total absolute dollars than any store in New York City, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s.

The list goes on.

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When I was 7 years old my parents bought me a bicycle for my birthday. After years of riding hand-me-downs, I was finally going to get a shiny new bike. On that glorious day I opened a card that read, “Go look in the garage.”

I ran to the garage and threw open the door to see my new bike with a big bow on it. My reaction was typical for a 7-year-old: “That’s not the bike I wanted.”

I’m sure my dad was disappointed in my reaction, but without missing a beat he simply said, “No problem. I’ll take this bike back.”

As I waited for the second part of the statement, I heard what I wasn’t expecting: “When you have the money, you can go buy any bike you want.”

My dad said this as he wheeled my new bike off to the station wagon for a trip into oblivion. Wait! Can you guess how the story ends? Well, I may have been selfish, but I wasn’t stupid.

I tell you this story as a metaphor for what we see now in the business community. For what seems like centuries, IT departments far and wide have been providing assets to users. These “assets” were typically selected by the IT department as the standard fare for all employees and should meet the needs of the huddled masses. But what happens when somebody needs a different PC, phone, printer, etc.? IT stands their ground and the user loses. At least that’s what used to happen.

Nowadays, we see a growing trend in the market that has IT organizations terrified. People are bringing their own stuff to work – PCs, phones, printers. Dare we say: Macintosh laptops! Dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria!!! IT is none too pleased.

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In the last decade, we saw the rapidly expanding world of Web 2.0. With it came the advent of Web apps – Web pages designed with more fun, colorful interfaces, integration with social networks and sharing sites, and most notably, AJAX. This gives the slow and stale Web page a much needed boost in usability and, more importantly, speed.

Balancing app. Mobile Web versus mobile app? And what are the differences between a Web page, a Web app and an application?

AJAX makes it possible to communicate with a server without leaving the page – something that has always been the case in desktop applications. Users no longer need to wait dreaded seconds for the page to redraw – even if 95 percent of the content on that page stayed the same.

On June 29 2007, the game was changed once again with the introduction of the iPhone. It ushered in the usable touchscreen as an input device and turned the user interface world on its head. Many Web developers rushed to update their sites and Web apps to mimic the UI put forth by iOS. Aside from the look, the sites now needed to work with the touchscreen. This presented certain challenges when it came to sites that wanted to look more like native applications.

We are now on the cusp of the next leap. The Web has turned into an operating system. Google is capitalizing on this with their Chrome OS. Countless other companies are selling everything in “the Cloud.” I believe this drive is the natural progression towards a decentralized computing platform. We are no longer tied to our computers for our information. We can check our Gmail, work on our Dropbox-stored documents and share pictures on Flickr from any computer or smartphone in the world. This new operating system now needs proper applications.

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