The Evolution of Portability to Mobility

Let’s deep dive on Mobility:  

Mobile computing is being able to use technology while moving. This differs from just portable computers because they are only good for use while deployed in a stationary configuration. Mobile computing is one’s ability to use technology untethered, but often used to refer to access to information or applications from occasionally-connected, portable, networked computing devices.

Are we spoiled or what? Seriously. 

Let’s go back to the 80’s where, for me, it was about the location of technology and how I could get access either in my house, college lab, or friend’s house.  For example, my friend Ryan Smith from  Intel and I used to play on his on C64 at our houses. Mobility then was about boxing up all the equipment and setup time was less than optimal.  Computing was almost boutique in nature and the thought of taking that on the road for long trips was not even a question. We all knew this Commodore 64 wasn’t something for the road… 

Oh how technology in our world has changed…

Let’s now fast forward to today:  mobility is a given now. It’s equivalent to motherhood and apple pie, if you don’t have mobility you will struggle to stay relevant. What do I consider mobility?  It’s about using technology wherever, whenever; however, it must come with connectivity to the Internet. I was amazed when I received my first laptop and was able to carry it on a plane to Oregon for Intel. I could document everything and take notes on this laptop vs. on paper.  What happened almost immediately is that I realized I could compute while I was anywhere.  I started working in the airport, in the taxi, on the plane; it really didn’t matter if I had any delays as that equated to more time to compute.   This trend continues to this very day and the reality is that my productivity is much different now w/ mobility than it was 14+ years back.  Does it mean that I compute every minute of the day? Well, close, but not really. It just means that I own my flexibility, agility to respond, and can make choices that make a better balance between my family & work.

Let’s put this in perspective for what I’m doing today. Currently I’m focused on testing, validating and showcasing how a new technology Fast Call for Help (CIRA) works on a vPro system, specifically a laptop that is vPro enabled and can handle my demands on mobility, function, etc. 

Here’s my gear that I’m using for this testing and also working on for video editing, it’s a Dell E6400 Latitude which is a Intel Centrino2 with Intel vPro Technology.  

Now let’s add 3G into the mix. Part of being mobile is about having the right connectivity solution wherever you are, whenever you need to work (or play) on your computer. So here’s what I carry with me for those situations. It’s a cradle point with a 3G USB card to either leverage Ethernet connection or put a temporary hot spot.  Either way I’m covered for connectivity wherever I go. 

Mobile computing keeps our world in sync and functioning more smoothly. We live amongst instant communications with businesses overseas, emails with huge documents that used to need the postal service to deliver, and mobile connections over nearly every square mile of this planet. With all of these revelations we have had in technology over just the past 20 years…our minds can only wonder… Where will technology go from here?

Staying Connected to Kids and Work

If you are a digital nomad with kids, are you like me? Do you base some of your decisions on where to spend time with your offspring wholly or in part on whether that establishment has a good WiFi connection?

Is that bad? I think not, as long as you keep and set your own personal work/life balance boundaries. After all, I do not always want to jump around on the Moon Walker, although I know I could dominate six-year-olds on that inflatable Wrecking Ball thing all day long. Those times when I do not feel inclined to see-saw or do wicked sweet pikes on the trampoline, I need a WiFi connection and my trusty old lappy to get some emails knocked out while keeping one eagle eye trained on the little ones.

My wife, Amy, and I found a place where we live called Hoppin’ Hippo. They feature 6,000 square feet of inflatable fun for the kids and a little section I have grown to love called the “Hippo Hangout,” where parents can lounge and survey the chaos before them. I get about 3 MBpS download and a comfy couch to sit on. My niece and nephew have a ball burning off energy and generally getting their ya-ya’s out. So, it’s a win-win for everybody.

A few more of our favorite nomad-kid-friendly places around Austin:

• Pho Hoang Restaurant when I gotta get my pho on.
• Anywhere in the central downtown Austin district.
• Any McDonald’s with a Playland and WiFi.
• The Hutto, TX Public Library.

But I have to admit, I spend more time jumping around with the kids doing sweet pikes than I do Tweeting and emailing. What are some of your favorite kid-friendly places with WiFi?

Location Independent and Digital Nomad Survey

Corbett Barr of FreePursuits.com and Lea Woodward of LocationIndependent.com have done pioneering work in the Digital Nomad/Location Independent field for some time now, and today are launching a Location Independent and Digital Nomad survey.

The survey consists of an opening question whose answer will determine one of two surveys participants take- one for location indepents and one for aspiring location independents. I saw a preview of a few of the draft questions. It should be interesting to see the results. So, take a moment and see where you stand among nomads.

Easier to Engage With Us and Identify Yourself as a Digital Nomad

We’ve implemented some changes to the Digital Nomads site to make it even easier for you to engage with your colleagues and join in the conversation on what it means to be a digital nomad, location independent or in other ways workshift your day.

Effective immediately, you can now add your comment to a post without having to log-in or even create an account with us. Thanks to many of you, including Digital Nomad blogger Andy Sernovitz for the nudging (see screenshot at right.)

We’ve also uploaded some new items to our download section to allow you to identify yourself as a Digital Nomad.

In addition to the basic Digital Nomad footprint, we’ve added two more that you can download to use in your e-mail signature, on your website, or other online materials. Of course, we’d love it if you linked your badge back to this blog :).

I’ve also noticed lately that more of you are uploading your digital nomad photos to our Flickr pool - thank you. If you didn’t realize it, these photos are randomly pulled into the banner of our site so don’t be surprised if you see your image there.

And finally, if you’ve not yet bookmarked our links on Delicious, we encourage you to do so and follow some of the stories we think resonate with our mobile lifestyles.

Thanks to all of you for being part of this community.

Top Ten (Plus One) Tips for Working Remote (WR)

Another “top-x” list? Top five, top ten, top twenty ways to do anything? I know, I know, I’ve seen and read many of them as well: top ten ways to lighten your bag; top ten ways to stay connected from the road; top ten ways to be happy at work; and finally, my favorite: top ten ways to steal a car (but more importantly, how to protect against them).

But this top ten list is a little different and hopefully will appeal to many of you reading this blog: those who only occasionally work from home or a coffee shop and are part of the global corporate world. I’m calling this working remote, or WR for short.

That is certainly me. Most days, I have so many face-to-face meetings that I have to travel to my corporate office. But while I’m not in meetings I struggle with the same thing most cube-dwellers struggle with: distractions. It may be the loud-talker, the fly-bys, the phone calls from companies warning you that your car warranty is about to expire, the general office noise. Now, let me be clear: I need to go to an office. I need the team collaboration. I need the creativity it spurs in me. I need the camaraderie of a centralized workspace. I need the routine. But I also need the flexibility to get some focused time where I can think, strategize and write — free of distractions.

That’s why I love my laptop — it has become my office. My actual workspace has very little paper in it. I keep a few old journals, photos of my wife and kids, drawings from my kids, an AP stylebook and dictionary, paperclips. But other than that, it’s a work surface with an external flat panel.

I’ve been working in the corporate world since 1989, first in consulting roles, and since 1995 in a corporate technology setting and can now reflect on how to WR effectively.

Here are some of my suggestions of how you can be more productive when you don’t go in to the office. And perhaps more importantly, how you can set expectations for those you leave behind at the corporate mothership on how to reach you and interact with you.

1. Alert everyone on your team where you are. Better yet, be predictable. If you’re going to work remote every Monday, let your manager and team know that. Every other Friday? Let them know that as well. Put it on your and their calendars;

2. Answer your phone, e-mail, IMs and other digital smoke signals quickly. True, you may be deep in thought or writing something, and not paying attention to those corporate lifelines, but until you’ve built up trust with your colleagues, respond more quickly than normal. This will eliminate all suspicions that you’re actually playing golf;

3. If you’ve got a whiteboard in your corporate office, write your essential contact details there and indicate that you’re working away from the office;

4. Don’t say, “I’m going to take advantage of a meeting-free day to work from home,” if you’re also going to say “I’m going to take advantage of a day full of meetings to work from home.” If you’re my colleague, I don’t really care why you’re working from home. This also flies in the face of being predictable;

5. Report on your day to ensure your manager is aware of what you’re doing and what you’ve done. And don’t make it look like you’re sucking up, just state the facts of what you’re doing;

6. Map out your day and add more things to your to-do list than you think possible. You’ll be amazed at how efficient you’ll be when working remote. Don’t be tempted by finishing your work early to go play;

7. Mute your phone while on conference calls. How many conference calls have you been on when someone is driving in a car and doesn’t have their phone on mute. Also, don’t say “Sorry, I was on mute,” when coming back into the call. It’s said way too often and often can be construed as not paying attention;

8. Start your day just like every other day. If you typically go in to the office at 8am, boot up your laptop and get your day started at 8am from your remote office;

9. If you aren’t going to work from home but need time out of the office, do all of us a favor and don’t say you’re working from home. It gives those of us who actually are working remotely a bad rap;

10. This one may get some of you riled up, especially moms or dads that try to do it all: If you have young kids and are working from home, you’re not really working from home. You’re trying to work from home, but in my experience it doesn’t work. You may have the best intentions of working from home but with all the interruptions it will be hard for you to get anything done. Don’t call it working from home. I’d suggest a new acronym: TTWFHWCBWNL (trying to work from home with children but with no luck);

11. And finally, take advantage of WR and your setting, wherever it may be. Have lunch with your spouse, a friend. Pet your dog. Hug your kids when they come home from school. Take occasional breaks to go outside. Have a cup of coffee in the sunlight. But not for too long or soon, you’ll not be WR.

So, what do you think? Did I miss any?

The Dopplr Effect

Unhappiness is looking down your list of Skype contacts at 11:30 in the morning and realizing all of your online colleagues are more than 300 miles away from you. So much for typing, “Wanna do lunch?” to any of them.

I thought about this for a while and concluded there really ought to be a better way of finding out who is going to be around in my neck of the woods (wherever that happens to be). Quite a few of those I work with around the world use their Skype Mood to state where they are, and if you look down the list you might find someone from another office is in town, and subsequently available to “do lunch.” However, what about breakfast or dinner? As a digital nomad who is married with children and spends quite a bit of time away from them in different parts of the world, negotiating a “night pass” isn’t something I can do on the spur of the moment. It takes advanced notice and negotiation - “If you’re going out on Tuesday for dinner with Brian, I want to go out on Thursday night to the ‘Making Deserts with Spinach Class’” etc. Many of you reading this may know the drill.

Also, what are the odds of turning up somewhere and getting together with someone you know from somewhere else? Recently I went to Japan and had dinner with our marketing EVP purely because I happened to hear from someone that he was going to be in the next town to me. I thought “There has to be a better way!” and maybe I should propose some kind of internal corporate Web 2.0 application that allows people to log their travel and have the site tell their work friends when and where they are going. The site could look for co-incidental travel where two or more people from different offices are going to intersect in the same place at the same time. I began to realize that this wasn’t just a fun social application it could also save the company some money. People arriving at an airport at roughly the same time could ride share, get block booking hotel discounts as well as benefit from local knowledge of places to visit or dine from those who had been there before or who lived in the vicinity. I had it all planned out in my mind, and as a friend used to say about software “The rest is just typing.”

Then I met a guy from Mozilla who burst my bubble and told me about TripIt.com, which seems to do just what I wanted.

I also discovered another service called Dopplr.com, which does pretty much the same kind of thing.

Both have their pros and cons, so for now I have decided to sign up to both. TripIt looks more like a classic travel website while Dopplr seems to epitomize the simple minimalism that Google has brought to website design. I found that I could hook my Dopplr badge (a little travel status widget) into my Facebook profile and other websites so people who aren’t members of the Dopplr community can roughly see when I am making trips and to where.

So, next time you’re in Japan, try out one of these tools and look me up. I might just be free for dinner.

Nomads at Burning Man Have a Place to Call Their Own

I’m Cherie Ve Ard, and my partner Chris Dunphy and I are full-time digital nomads, though we prefer to call ourselves “technomads” - a word coined by our friend (the original technomad) Steve Roberts. Together with our kitten Kiki, we make up Technomadia.

We roam around the country in our small solar-powered travel trailer geeked out just for us. Neither of us has a physical “home base” anywhere else, and we truly are out there living a mobile digital lifestyle full-time. We run a small consulting business as we go, and when we take on projects we have found that physical location is growing less relevant in an age of increasingly ubiquitous connectivity. Often we work remotely (sometimes very!), and other times we take advantage of our nomadic flexibility to be on-site for a client for an extended period of time.

Our nomadic lifestyle allows us to be ‘home’ wherever we are - even when attending festivals and events. One event we regularly attend, and a place we consider a home in our hearts year round, is Burning Man.

What is Burning Man?

Not unlike the Grand Canyon, Burning Man is something that can’t adequately be described with words or pictures - you really need to experience it to understand it. The basics, however, are rather simple - nearly 50,000 people come together in the the remote and desolate Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada during the week before Labor Day every year to build a temporary city dedicated to “community, art, self-expression and self reliance”.

There is no vending, no food stalls, no t-shirts, no main stage, no “official” agenda, and no corporate sponsorships of any kind allowed. The only city infrastructure provided are porta-potties, ice sales, and a Center Camp cafe that sells lemonade and lattes. There aren’t even any trash cans - every participant is responsible for carrying out not only their own trash, but any other trash they find, making Burning Man the largest “leave no trace” event in the world.

There is however amazing art, music, fire (lots of fire!), food, architecture, technology, and even an airport to be found. All of it is created by other attendees, and offered to each other via a “gift economy” where even bartering is frowned upon.

Burning Man operates on a “no spectators” philosophy - and there is intentionally no distinction made between audience and performers. Everyone attending Burning Man is encouraged to find some way to actively participate, whether this looks like working as a volunteer for the city itself or helping on one of the many giant architectural projects, or doing other things - such as gifting handmade jewelry, giving a fire dance performance, hosting a BBQ feast for your neighbors, playing live music, offering aerial tours, showing off autonomous swarming networked robots, giving rides on a magic carpet, creating a roller disco, offering math tutoring (seriously!), giving dance lessons, or even just offering cold icee pops to passers-by on a hot day.

No one is being paid to perform. Whether you stumble across a world-renowned DJ spinning, a famous artist painting, or a full-on circus (complete with big top tent) performing a high-wire show, you will marvel realizing that every one of them came through the front gate having purchased the same tickets that you did.

The physical centerpiece of the city is a giant wooden man that is burned on Saturday night, but with so much other stuff going on all week long the “Burning Man” itself is hardly the focus of the event any more.

Camp Nomadia

One of the things we crave as we travel is a deeper connection with community. Our travel allows us to connect with people all over the place, but we find a certain special connection with other folks who  are also called to a nomadic lifestyle and who are out traveling the world.

To help bring together other nomads, last year we we founded a new theme camp at Burning Man - Camp Nomadia. It’s a camp specifically for nomadic souls to come together and converge to create a temporary home for us all.

Last year was a great success, and we enjoyed camping with other nomads as well as hosting several nomadic happy hours to bring together other nomads camped elsewhere in Black Rock City. Over the course of the week, a wide range of amazing folks came together to connect, swap stories, and share experiences.

We are planning to host Camp Nomadia again this year at Burning Man, and we’d like to extend a special invitation to all digital nomads out there to join us.

As nomads tend to be used to being very self-sufficient and independent, Camp Nomadia has intentions of being a very chill no-frills camp. We will have no central group infrastructure, except perhaps a shade structure. This means each nomad is responsible for all his own needs - food, water, cooking, clean-up, shelter, shower, power, greywater handling, etc. But unlike many other more infrastructure-heavy camps, we also have no camp fees.

Camp Nomadia is open to current nomads, digital nomads, future nomads, wanna-be nomads, part time nomads, domestic nomads, international nomads, technomads, low-technomads, former nomads, RV nomads, couch-surfing nomads, land nomads, rail nomads, backpacking nomads, sailing nomads, or folks who just want to be around nomads (yes, your non-nomadic friends can join too!). We welcome Burning Man veterans and virgins alike.

For more details, go here

If you are considering coming Burning Man this year, we would love to have you join us in creating Camp Nomadia. And if you are going to be camped elsewhere, be sure to stop by and say hello at one of our Nomadic Happy Hours!

Real Nomads

We traveling executives like to talk about being hard-core digital nomads.  But we’re rarely as far away from home for as long as the sailors and Marines on the USS Nimitz. I’ll be spending a night on the ship with 15 big bloggers as we learn what life is like when you’re serving at sea. My focus will be on how they use the latest in social media to stay in touch with family and friends. Stay tuned for more as we tweet and blog from the Pacific.

Here’s a photo of how we’re getting there.  I’m terrified (but in a cool, macho way).

P.S. Follow LCDR Jason Salata — the official Nimitz tweeter.