InfoTart

I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, last week for the first Design For Mobile conference. It was the first mobile user experience-oriented conference in the United States.

www.design4mobile.mobi

You might ask how in the world did a mobile conference land in Kansas, of all places. (I certainly did!)

The conference was organized by Barbara Ballard and her design gurus at Little Springs Design, which is located in Lawrence. It’s much easier to put on your first design conference when you host it in your own city!

But it turns out that Eastern Kansas is not a mobile wasteland. Indeed, Sprint’s world headquarters is located just down the highway in Kansas City. Barbara has great ties with Sprint as she had worked there earlier in her career.

There were two great talks by Sprint, too. Although I’m more of a GSM guy myself (rather than CDMA, which is the technology Sprint uses), these were two of my favorite presentations. Michael Lundy was design lead on the Sprint Instince device and gave a great case study presentation on what it took to get that device out in just 9 months. On the second day of the conference, Jason Ward presented on Sprint’s impressive user experience research capabilities. I’m definitely in awe of their sophisticated measurement tools!

Luckily, I also won an unlocked Motorola RAZR2. I’m very happy about that because my personal device library is heavily biased towards smartphones, so this is only my third feature phone device. I won the device by knowing the answer to the question: “What are the two best selling mobile devices (or, device lines) of all time?”

The answer: The Motorola RAZR and StarTac!

I kept a constant update on Twitter, using both my personal and Hand Interactive accounts. (Each from a slightly different perspective.) If you’re curious, I tagged them all with the tag, #des4mo, and you can see the list of Tweets at:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23des4mo

In Westfield, MA, yesterday for the autism walk. My friends, Patrick & Kathy, have beautiful son, Ryan, with autism. Every year, more than a dozen family show their support by walking for their team called “For the Love of Ryan.” Learn more at:

www.walknowforautism.org/site/c.kpILKVOCJoG/b.3618169/

The organizers put a nice video on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmrdHJa1-Yc

An old friend of mine from high school was visiting Portland, so I drove up to spend a couple days with her. We hadn’t seen each other in at least 10 years, so it was a great visit!

It was my first opportunity to hang out in Portland, ME, too, and I really enjoyed it. Great food scene and a great vibe.

Check out my pictures on Flickr:

www.flickr.com/photos/56758117@N00/sets/72157606435136264/

An old friend of mine whom I originally met about 16 years ago recently got in touch with me through Facebook. We had lost touch with each other about 10 years ago.

Mark was planning a visit to New England to visit some family, so he stopped by Boston for a couple of days. I love to go sightseeing with friends from out of town. With the gorgeous weather, Mark rented a Seabreeze convertible and we headed up the North Shore for a nice drive.

What’s really cool is that Mark has one of those super cool digital SLR cameras. (They also cost a small fortune…) He let me borrow it to snap pictures all day. I’m totally in love with that camera! Time to start saving up some spare cash…

Check out the pictures I took in my online picture gallery:

www.handaweb.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=3193

Some friends and I went to the Newburyport, MA, Music Festival on the 12th.

While walking to Newburyport Center, we came across a papier mache bird that had been thrown out and abandoned on the street. Carl took an immediate liking to the bird. We named him Ruffles and he became our mascot for the day! We snapped quite a few pictures with people in our group plus random strangers with Ruffles.

Check out the pictures on Flickr:

www.flickr.com/photos/56758117@N00/sets/72157606141786732/

My employer sent me to London for a week in early April 2008. Here are a few pictures I took while playing tourist on my first ever visit to the UK!

Check out my pictures in my online photo album!