Vaughan Rowsell

Geeking my ride with my mobile office

April 14, 2009 at 8:22 am In Getting Things Done, Life, 2 Comments

You know what they say, “You can take a geek away from his computer, but chances are it’s a laptop and he will take it with him.”

When planning my ride up the country I wondered if I should just leave all the gadgets behind me for two months and go cold turkey, but who was I kidding, not anyone who knew me that’s for sure. And so as I ride the length of New Zealand I will be blogging, tweeting and posting videos to YouTube. I may even chip away at the new start-up project that has been keeping me busy for a bit. The thing is, you can.

When I came back from overseas 9 years ago, freshly inspired by seeing the world and travelling, I set up my first business, which specialised in tele-computing and mobile computing, and at the time you could finally put together all the building blocks to achieve true mobile computing. The technology at the time sucked comparatively to what we have got now, and even what we have now sucks a wee bit and is slowly getting better, but it still let people operate and stay connected on the move. At the time everyone went on about the remote workforce, tele-commuting and the mobile office but people weren’t interested in implementing it. Companies didn’t want people to work from home, not because it was too hard, but because they didn’t trust them and it was too hard to keep an eye on them. This is all another story, which I may well come back to in the near future, but for now my point is that today it is really easy to get away from the shackles of your desk and do business on the road.

At work, we operate the Voom Studio office totally in the cloud. We use Google Apps for email and documents. We use WorkflowMax for job management and time tracking. All our billing and accounts are handled through Xero. The new software product we are developing is SaaS based. Our code repository is totally up in the cloud also so there is no physical reason to physically be in there. The only gear that sits in the office is a printer and an Apple Time Capsule used for storing any large files we are working with, but mainly for storing software, video and any other heavy files (games usually). For collaboration however you cant beat having a chat at someone’s desk or just calling out across the office. That and the fact that customers like to know you “exist” are probably the only reasons we have a Voom office at all.

Here is my mobile office.

This setup lets me do everything I would normally do from my desk, with the added bonus of taking video and photos, neither of which would be very interesting taken from my desk.

There is only one thing that bothers me about my mobile office setup and that is that everything on the left should actually be just one device. If I could have an iPhone that took HD video and let me access the net on my laptop via mobile data then I would be in heaven. In fact I would put money on Apple including fairly decent video camera in the next hardware version of the iPhone, then it would be the single pocket powerhouse computer you would need. Apple, please buy Flip. Samsung and LG are both on the market with a HD video phone, but they are not iPhones are they. The good news is all these devices charge via USB, so I can leave all their associated power cables behind.

The Flip Mino is my latest toy, and I had to ship one in from the US at the last minute when I discovered Flip had removed the off shore sales limitation on their products. It is pocket HD juiciness. I have already in one afternoon put together my first video as an experiment. 30 minutes of footage from a ride, condensed into 2 minutes with voice over and music, thanks to the brilliance of the Mino, and the magic of iMovie. The Mino HD can record on device an hour of video at HD resolution. The brilliance of the Flip cameras are their easy of use and convenience. Smaller than your average cellphone, and lighter, with a single big red button that makes it really easy to point, click and you are recording your next YouTube masterpiece. No fiddly focus rings, or zoom buttons. No back light controls and no on camera effects or editing. Just record. When you plug it into your computer, you can suck off all the video and fiddle with it in your video edit suite of choice. In my case I have a mac so it is iMovie, which does the job just nicely. Today our home computers have plenty of grunt to process video and audio and all we want from a camera is the data.

On my ride, for the mobile data side of things I am using a vodem, and I will pop my SIM card out of my iPhone and use that so as to not have to maintain two data accounts. Hopefully this works. I have tried it out and I could connect from my MacBook, but knowing Vodafone and their screwy data connection settings, my usage may not be billed against my iPhone data allowance.

Finally my iPhone will be my phone, GPS and map, and email and twitter on the go.

All this fits into a surprisingly small bundle. I have water proof bags so no need to stress about being caught in the rain. So I can be anywhere and do everything I would normally need to do on any given day. Customer meetings will be a bit of a pain, but otherwise it will be just like I am still at work, but with 7 hours cycling each day. Now if I could figure out how to type as I ride then life would be just grand.