I have no idea what a hipster actually is, but I assume they drink coffee and ride bikes to work? The alternate headline could be, “The Internet of Things just called and will be here in 15 minutes.”

After a long day at work, the last thing you want to do is fumble to unlock your bike before commuting home. The BitLock makes unlocking much easier and faster by turning your smartphone into a virtual bike key.

Ever stood in line at a Starbucks or some other cafe and wondered why, in the year 2013, you can’t just send in your order 10 minutes early via an app on your phone, and pick it up as soon as you walk in? Briggo has such an app. It asks you to log in, so it can memorize your order and payment information, which enables one-click coffee ordering. Or you can order a coffee for a friend. And use the app to check out how long the wait is for a drink.

From an #ONA13 panel discussion with @etanowitz, @fionaspruill, @corybe, dkiesow​

A PDF of the handout is here. The slides are up on Slideshare and you can watch the video of the presentation on ONA’s site. 

Get your newsroom looking at, and using, your mobile products

1. Get a live view of your mobile website on everyone’s computer.
2. Set up app emulators on the big screens in your newsroom.
3. Work with your CMS team to get mobile preview in the publishing workflow.
4. Use an Apple TV and an iPad/iPhone to show your mobile products in daily meetings.
5. Download Reflector app so you can project mobile whenever needed.

Let the numbers make the case for the importance of mobile

1. Switch all your real-time monitoring to mobile first, desktop second. 
2. Highlight the ways mobile consumption is different, act on them and share the results.
3. Remember that everything you share on social is predominantly mobile.
4. Pay close attention to metrics but don’t be a slave to current numbers. Sometimes an external trend is clear but your numbers don’t yet tell the story. 

Create a mobile-centric culture

1. Live like your audience. Force yourself to be mobile-only at home: phone in the AM, tablet in the PM.  Don’t just use iPhone/iPads; get a WiFi-only Android to play with, too.
2. Take advantage of big news events and use them as catalysts to change the culture in your newsroom. They are stages for innovation and will help evangelize.
3. Build teams that are focused solely on mobile presentation, even if the teams are temporary and they are dispersed after the project/event.
4. Have the editors, producers and designers take a mobile-first approach when planning their coverage of a big news event. Look at mobile plans first.

Signs that your efforts are paying off

1. Your website is responsively designed and mobile traffic tops 50 percent.
2. Your executive editor/general manager/publisher uses your mobile products daily
3. You have newsroom and business leaders with ‘mobile’ in their title.
4. Planning starts with a discussion of mobile elements and presentation.
5. When the mobile site/app breaks at 2 a.m., people are woken up to get it fixed.
6. Your advertising team sells mobile-first. and commissions are tied to mobile.
7. Your CMS allows for different headlines and summary text on mobile, and you have an API that allows ‘data first’ development for future devices and partners.

If your news organization has daily editorial meetings where your desktop website is projected onto a TV or screen and discussed, then you should also be showing your mobile platforms at these meetings. 

Here’s the set up we use at CNN to show our mobile website, iPhone app and iPad app at our daily editorial meetings. 

What you will need

• AppleTV ($100)
• iPhone 4S or higher and/or iPad 2 or higher
• If you are going to permanently leave an iPad or iPhone in the conference room, you should buy some kind of case or cable to lock it to the desk so nobody steals it. We use this Kensington SecureBack Security Case and Lock. 

Once all the equipment is in place, just wirelessly mirror your iPad or iPhone screen to the AppleTV via AirPlay so you can show your apps and mobile website.

Photo showing the setup at CNN Digital’s daily editorial meeting. The TV on the right shows the CNN iPad projected via an AppleTV

Besides projecting from the iPad chained to the desk, your colleagues can also do wirelessly mirroring from their own iOS devices as long as they are on the same Wi-Fi network as the AppleTV.

While this setup is for iOS only, I’m hopeful that Google will enable wireless mirroring from Android apps to Google Chromecast. 

This tip was first presented as part of the “20 Tips to Turbocharge Your Mobile Efforts (Before It’s Too Late)” panel at the 2013 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta. 

Copyright © 2013