- Rob Bushway

One of the best things to have happened to me since launching GBM was partnering up with Warner Crocker. He is an awesome friend, a wise counselor, hilariously funny, and someone who absolutely loves mobile technology. They don't make them any better than Warner.

Join me in wishing Warner a Happy Birthday!

 

 

 

 

- Rob Bushway

It seems the tidal wave in conversation has begun shifting from Twitter to FriendFeed, and I'm moving my mini-blogging conversations to FriendFeed, too.

If you are interested in following stuff I share or post about while out and about, then you can follow me via FriendFeed here. A lot of the stuff I share and comment about never make it on GBM, so it can offer some other insight to mobile tech. We also have a GottaBeMobile.com room set up for GBM friends to pop in and chat.

I'll let the other team members post up their FriendFeed links.

 

- Rob Bushway

In the two and a half years that GottaBeMobile.com has been toiling away in the mobile pc space, we've seen tremendous growth in our traffic and participation from our readers. In the past year alone, our unique visitors have grown by more than 100%. I think people enjoy what we are doing here, which is great, because we are enjoying it, too. The mobile pc space has certainly changed a great deal over the last two and a half years, but we have remained true to our calling: covering tablet pcs, mobile pcs, and the natural input technologies that tie it all together.

To bring you more indepth coverage and to help spread the workload that running an active site like GottaBeMobile entails, we've been expanding our writer base. In addition to the new contributing writers that joined our team several months ago, Craig Pringle and John Gannon, I am pleased to announce two additional contributing writers: Truc Bui and Matthew Dillon. That brings our total number of contributing writers to eight, five of which are Microsoft Tablet PC MVPs.

Many of you know Truc from the outstanding Screen Protector Shootout series that he has been compiling over the past month or so, and from his participation in our forums. I was very impressed with the work that Truc did on the series and saw a great fit for the site, the team, and our readers. Read more about Truc below.

Matthew Dillon is an educator and will offer a unique perspective on technology, education, gadgets, and more. Matthew is a self-described "do-it-yourselfer" and loves working with various OS's like OS X, Vista, Linux and more. You can expect some very interesting commentary from Matthew in those areas and more. Read more about Matthew below and on his blog.

Join me in welcoming Truc and Matthew. I'm sure you'll be hearing from them both in the next couple of days.


About Truc Bui:

I started my digital revolution in 2001 with the integration of a Handspring Visor into my photojournalism and freelance work. It was my last year of college (for my first degree) and I found that the Handspring, when hooked up to a Targus Stowaway folding keyboard, allowed me to take notes in class and sync it to my computer for much cheaper than any laptop on the market at the time.

Currently, I am in my last year of pursuing a second bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. After finding myself inundated with hundreds of pages of handouts, reference material, worksheets, and assignments, I needed a better way to stay organized. I couldn’t use a PDA anymore since Chemistry required hand-drawing of molecular structures and general trend graphs (and because my Dell Axim crashed out on me in 2004 and made me lose the data I hadn’t synced yet, causing much cursing and throwing of said PDA).

Since buying the Fujitsu T2010 tablet, the way I study, the way I stay organized, the way I collaborate with other researchers and fellow students has been forever changed. I can’t imagine life without my tablet now. It is my lifeline to my education.

From my perspective as a college student, I find that battery life, weight, durability, stability, and size are all very important. The current crop of ultraportables, or whatever is the phrase of the day is for these devices, is of particular interest to me. If I am not in need of inking, I’d rather take something that’s even smaller and lighter than my T2010. I hope to expand my knowledge base on both hardware and software, particularly cloud-based services, and report on it from a student’s point of view.

About Matthew Dillon:

I graduated from Miami University in 2003 with a BS in Secondary Education (7-12): Integrated Language Arts. After teaching one year of language arts and two years as the high school speech and communications instructor for St. Marys City Schools, I graduated from Wright State University in March, 2008 with a M.Ed. in School Counseling (K-12). School counseling runs in the
Dillon family. My wife is a middle school counselor, my father retired after 28 years as a school counselor and my mother is a therapist. I often joke that growing up I had few problems with so many counselors around. My other interests include tinkering with computers, playing ice hockey, lifting weights, public speaking, and learning. I enjoy spending time with my wife and family.

- Warner Crocker

July 1 was a big day for Tablet PC MVPs it seems. We’ve already seen news that our own Matt Faulkner was re-awarded, along with Steve Seto. We also saw news that Sierra was awarded MVP for the first time. Well, another key player in the Tabletscape also got re-awarded for his great service yesterday and that is WNewquay. WN has been a major heartbeat in this community for a long time and is writings are legendary. He is the brain and the brawn behind the Mobile PC Wiki, which is described as “about Tablet PCs more and less.” If you haven’t checked it out, you should.

Congrats, WNewquay. As always, well deserved.

 

 

- Rob Bushway

Today is the day for handing out kudos, and with good reason. Steve Seto, a frequent contributor of GBM hardware and software reviews, has also been re-awarded by Microsoft as an MVP for Tablet PC. Congratulations, Steve. I don't think they make them any smarter than you!

- Rob Bushway

Major shoutout to our very own Sierra Modro on being awarded Microsoft's MVP for Tablet PC! Well done, Sierra.

Microsoft was pretty smart to recognize the contributions you've been making in the Tablet PC space over the past five years. Keep up the great work! We love what you do for the community here on GBM!

- Rob Bushway

Big shoutout to our own Matt Faulkner on getting reawarded Microsoft's MVP award for Tablet PC.

Keep up the good work, Matt!

- Rob Bushway

We certainly are not getting any younger around here, you know with the likes of Warner and all.

So, it is definitely good to have some young blood, like Matt Faulkner, around us. The problem is, he's getting older, too!

Join me in wishing Matt a Happy Birthday while he is still young and not "young at heart"!

- Rob Bushway

As I mentioned several weeks ago, we are rounding out the natural input technologies that we cover on GottaBeMobile.com, by adding speech recognition to our regular content coverage.

Well, good news is in store.

John Gannon has agreed to come on board as a contributing writer for GBM covering speech recognition. As a self-described heavy user of speech recognition, John is going to focus on the day to day usability of speech recognition, training, accessories, and more.

Here is a little background on John. I'll let him introduce himself further with his first post:

John is a a licensed psychologist who specializes in marriage and family issues.  He is also board certified in psychopharmocology. 

John uses a Motion Computing LE1600 as his work computer in his day to day counseling.  He is primarily a Dragon Naturally Speaking user, spending 40+ hours a week on the program. However, I'm sure John will also talk about Vista Speech Recognition and the in's and out's about various Microsoft solution. John describes himself as a "poor and slow typist", thus his heavy reliance on speech recognition technologies.

John has  been married for 26 years with two kids, and sculls 7 miles a day for relaxation.

Welcome aboard, John!

- Warner Crocker

Cool. Congratulations to Rob Bushway. The Colorado Springs Gazette did an interview with our intrepid leader here at GBM and it has just been published. In the interview Rob talks about the Microsoft MVP program, Rob's web design business, Rob’s forecast’s for the future in Mobile computing, and of course what’s going on at GottaBeMobile.com. There’s even a list of what Rob’s carrying in his gadget bag.

Head over to the Gazette to check out the interview and give Rob a shout out for the well deserved recognition.

 

 

- Rob Bushway

Any FriendFeed.users out there? I just created a GottaBeMobile.com room for folks to stop by and chat a bit.

Come on by and chat / share something if you find yourself on FriendFeed for a bit.

By the way, if anyone is interested in following my FriendFeed, you can subscribe to it here. I have a number of GBM stuff added to it, twitter notifications, Google Shared Items, as well as my personal blog.

- Rob Bushway

As we cover the areas of mobile and natural input technologies, we do a thorough job of covering ink, tablet pc, touch, ultra-mobile pcs, multi-touch, mobility, accessories, and more. One of the most overlooked areas for us, though, is that of Speech Recognition.

It is our desire to cover speech recognition technologies as thoroughly as we do other natural input technologies, but we need an expert in that area to help us.

We are looking for a writer that can cover the day to day news in the speech reco space, especially as it applies to mobile computing; as well as develop feature articles on speech reco technologies as implemented in various OS's, how-to's, accessories, etc.

If you are interested in being a part of Team GBM and helping to develop that area for us, please send two sample articles in a GBM style, along with your experience in speech reco technologies, to rob@gottabemobile.com. If you are a current GBM reader or forum member, then all the better.

- Rob Bushway

We are testing a new comment system called Disqus. This new comment system will allow for threaded discussions, and help cut down on the amount of comment spam we get. In addition, readers can create a profile and have their avatar show up next to their comments.

All old comments previously entered will still show up, and the old form for entering comments will also be displayed (for parallel testing) for the next couple of days. Please begin using the Disqus system so we can test it out and prove its worth.

Let us know what you think.

UPDATE: I've already found one big problem - disqus returns url parameters when comments are added, something dasBlog doesn't like. I have a support ticket it at disqus and on the dasBlog support forum to see if anything can be done to fix it. If it isn't fixed by tonight, I'll turn disqus off until the problem is fixed. Besides that one bug, I'm really liking disqus. I like that it allows you to edit your comments - very cool!

UPDATE 2: I've turned the disqus system off until I can get a fix on the dasblog side to not error out when url parameters are passed or to get disqus to customize the return variables to accept #disqus_thread instead of url vars. Looking promising though. I like the system a lot. Disqus support is slow to respond at this point in their support desk area.

- Rob Bushway

Many of our readers have come to appreciate the insights of Craig Pringle, a fellow Tablet PC MVP, and more importantly a good friend to GBM and many in the Tablet PC space.

Craig is wickedly smart and passionate about Tablet. He is a die-hard slate user and is not ashamed to admit it! Craig and I chatted a bit over the MVP Summit, letting him know how much I wanted him to do some contributing writing for GBM.

I'm pleased to announce that beginning this week, Craig will be bringing many of his insights to GBM. You'll see his work published here several times a month on a number of topics of interest to pen and ink enthusiasts. In addition, he'll to continue to regularly publish articles on his own blog.

So, join me in welcoming Craig as a Contributing Writer for GBM. I know you all will really enjoy getting to know Craig more.

- Warner Crocker

A hearty congratulations to GottaBeMobile’s main man, Rob Bushway, for being re-awarded Microsoft MVP for Tablet PCs again this year. This is Rob’s fifth year in a row as a Tablet PC MVP, and he is certainly more than deserving for all the great work he does on behalf of the community and the platform.

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program recognizes and thanks outstanding members of technical communities for their community participation and willingness to help others. The program celebrates the most active community members from around the world who provide invaluable online and offline expertise that enriches the community experience and makes a difference in technical communities featuring Microsoft products.

 

- Warner Crocker

Well, it has been quite a day here at GottaBeMobile.com. Our blogging software, DasBlog, choked big time and the site went down. The server was responding fine, as evidenced by the GBM Forums staying up, so we were able to identify that DasBlog was the culprit. Rob spent the day diligently working, trying to figure out what the issues were, with not much luck. Up until a few minutes ago, we were planning on a very quick switchover to another blogging engine.

Then bang. The site was back. As if by some sort of magic. So at the moment things are running again on the home page and it appears that all links are intact.

We have been planning switching from DasBlog, and obviously today’s incident accelerates that planning, so look for some big changes coming ahead.

We lost three posts during the outage, including Sierra’s great Inkshow on he Iliad E-Book reader, which we’ll be reposting soon. For now you can go to this link to see the InkShow.

Thanks for bearing with us.

- Rob Bushway

Over the past several weeks, I've been working on a new design for the GottaBeMobile.com site and am pleased to unveil it today.

There were several goals I had for this new design, which were confirmed from the "Open Mic" session we had several weeks ago.

• Improve the page load time - the new design is 66% smaller than the previous design, which should help with overall performance and page load.
• Utilize white space in an effective way to help readability, and stick with overall theme for consistent color treatment. We moved to a large left column for news content, and two right columns for ads. In addition, the two right columns are used for highlighting site news, features, InkShow videos, etc.
• Remove clutter and duplication. I wanted a design that was clean, crisp, and consistent.
• Consolidate Featured Stories and Cool Stuff
• Provide a better way to keep readers informed of new videos - notice the video clips on the right side that provide direct links to our videos hosted on Blip.tv
• In an effort to improve page load time, I also removed the drop down menus, which was causing a big performance hit. Instead of the dropdown menus, there are 4 simple links to the main areas of the site.
• On the bottom of the page, there are links for Older Posts / Newer Posts to allow you to page back through previous days. This was another repeated request from readers.
• For those of you who are wondering, we are still using dasBlog right now. My next task is to begin mapping out a migration to WordPress.

I still have some more work to do on the forum section, in addition to getting a tag cloud working for our news categories. I'll also be tweaking a few colors, spacing issues, and font sizes over the coming days. In addition, we are continuing to work with our advertisers on decreasing the amount of animation in ads.

Feel free to leave your suggestions, feedback, etc; and as always, continue to let us know what we can do to improve your experience on GBM!

Rob Bushway

GottaBeMobile.com

- Rob Bushway

There's nothing like a little "atta-boy" to get your day off to a good start.

InformationWeek has compiled their Top 60 Little-Known Technology Websites, and wouldn't you know it, GottaBeMobile.com made the list!

The list is grouped by technology focus, but is not ranked.

This Web site delivers news, reviews, and commentary on everything related to mobile computing, such as tablet PCs, ultra-mobile PCs, operating systems, software, accessories, and connectivity. The "staff" is made up of editors that run the site, and several contributing writers who deliver the material in a very conversational way, often in first-person. While GottaBeMobile provides a lot of opinion, it's a good place to find reviews, specs, and pricing on the hottest mobile gadgets.

One very cool aspect of GottaBeMobile is the InkShows, a whole series of podcasts and blog entries on various topics that incorporate screen recording software for demos of products. It's not clear how big the Web site's following is, but it must be substantial enough for them to be selling T-shirts, mugs, messenger bags, and other GottaBeMobile gear.

One caveat: The Web site contains a lot of useful content but the user experience could use improvement, especially when it comes to loading time -- homepage often takes way too long to load)

IW mentions the load time of our homepage as a negative, and it is something I'm well aware of and working on. I believe we have outgrown our blogging engine, dasBlog. I've been in the process of looking at some more powerful blogging engines that can handle the amount of traffic and content we pump through. Stay tuned.

Thanks for sending the link to us, Sumocat. You made our day!

And, of course, a huge thanks goes out to Warner, Sierra, and Matt. They are an awesome team to work with.

- Rob Bushway

We hope that your Christmas is one filled with joy, laughter, and relaxation as you spend time with close friends and family. We’ll see everyone on Wednesday.

Until then, enjoy this wonderful rendition of the 12 Days of Christmas by Straight No Chaser.

 

- Rob Bushway

Are you hitting the online stores today, taking advantage of all those specials? Do us a favor, and start your holiday shopping here.

Follow these links before you begin your shopping, and you'll be helping GottaBeMobile in the process. Thanks!

• Amazon.com
• Apple.com
• Buy.com
• BestBuy.com
• Dell.com
• Lenovo.com
• OQO.com