First, I’m presenting on ALCTS’ Mobile Catalog Interfaces panel:
Saturday 6/26/10 10:30 am-12:00 noon
HILTON WASHINGTON, Columbia 5

I’ll be going over our mobile catalog interface, a bit about the design process, pointing out some new features, and hoping for great questions.

Second, I’m co-chair of LITA’s Distance Learning Interest Group. We’re co-sponsoring a program with ACRL’s Distance Learning Section:
Open Access: A Conversation
Saturday, 6/26/10 1:30 to 3:30 pm
Washington Convention Center
Room WCC-144A-C

Third, for the DLIG annual meeting we’re trying something a little different. Instead of having a giant room reserved for a standard roundtable discussion for a block of time, we’ve reserved some space in the Networking Uncommons: http://annual.ala.org/2010/index.php?title=Networking_Uncommons
Networking Uncommons space
Sunday, 6/27 9:30-10AM

The Uncommons is a space on level 1, concourse A, near the exhibits. There’s tables, a projector, and plenty of power strips. We have no specific agenda. Just show up, hang out, and mingle! It’ll be morning, so feel free to view it as a warmup for the day – bring coffee and ideas. We have the 9:30-10AM Uncommons slot on Sunday the 27th.

Hope to see you there! If anyone wants to meet up during the conference, the best way to get ahold of me is a message on twitter. I’ll be around from Friday – Sunday, leaving Monday morning and trying not to melt.

Today’s slides, on slideshare:

(A couple of images got scrambled in the process of uploading to SlideShare, but all the content is intact)

First, while there’s many other available frameworks than just the two I talk about, I do want to specifically point out the MIT Mobile Web project. The folks over at NCSU have done a great job implementing it with their library’s mobile site. They’re talking about it in a session right after mine, so I won’t be covering it in too much detail. MIT’s code is fairly robust, but also much more complex to get set up and running than iUI or Jason Clark’s work.

Second, some interesting stats. From two separate reports, both with data about December 2009. Looking at them side by side:

-Apple has 25.9% of the US smartphone market share (in devices sold), but iPhones also make up 54% of US mobile web traffic.

-Android has just 5.2% of the US smartphone market share (in devices sold), but makes up 27% of US mobile web traffic.

-Blackberries have an astonishing 41.6% of the US smartphone market share (in devices sold), but make up just 10% of US mobile web traffic.

There’s an important lesson here to keep in mind when choosing which devices to support with a mobile website. At first glance, looking at Blackberries’ market share alone, they seem to be the platform to support – it’ll get the most users in, right? Not when they use just 10% of all mobile web traffic! The heaviest users, the people we should be targeting now with our services, are on Android and iPhone. By supporting their combined 31.1% market share of devices with our our mobile sites, we’re available for 81% of mobile web traffic. That’s a pretty solid return on investment. I’m not surprised by these results, but it’s always nice to have numbers to back up intuition.

This isn’t to say that blackberries should be ignored – they’re just not the best target audience for a pilot program.

My other favorite thing about iUI is that it degrades pretty nicely into a format that’s more generic and not tailored to an iPhone – simply by removing the CSS and javascript links. So any mobile device can use it, and we don’t have to duplicate development efforts!

We’ll be using iUI to launch a mobile site for the library pretty soon, hopefully before the fall semester kicks in. I’m not sure how valuable my presentation slides are without my accompanying narration, but here it is just in case:

http://www.slideshare.net/chaefele/low-effort-high-impact-mobile-web-development

They may not entirely make sense without my narration, but I wanted to get them linked. I’ll try to give some context in upcoming posts.