Results tagged “mobile” from WorldCat Blog
There's a WorldCat Webinar on the WorldCat Mobile pilot coming up this Wednesday, April 29.
WorldCat Mobile pilot Webinar
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
10:00 - 11:00AM US Eastern Daylight Savings time (3:00 - 4:00PM BST)
Register now
Facebook event page
That is day after tomorrow--hard to believe April is almost over already?
Hosted by Mark Allcock, global business manager in the OCLC UK office, the session is designed so you can ask questions, give feedback, and get the latest on recent and planned enhancements.
There are two more Webinars planned for WorldCat.org next month. So if you can't make it this week, mark your calendar now for May 21.
WorldCat.org Webinar
Thursday, May 21, 2009
9:00 - 10:00AM US Eastern Daylight Savings time (2:00 - 3:00PM BST)
Register now
WorldCat.org Webinar
Thursday, May 21, 2009
4:00 - 5:00PM US Eastern Daylight Savings time (1:00 - 2:00PM US Pacific Daylight Savings time)
Register now
We're two weeks into the WorldCat Mobile pilot and you've already uncovered a lot of future functionality and would-be-nice-to-have features--in addition to helping identify specific troubles with certain models of phones. Thanks to the 1,315 people who have already downloaded the app to their mobile phone, there were 39,474 queries made to WorldCat.org through the app. in January.
Extrapolating from the usage statistics, most people seem to be starting their searches at the "home" screen (1,209 users made 26,450 queries). But then 452 people started at the "change location" section (452 users made 4,218 queries)--which just goes to show that lots of people are either reading my hints or more likely, you're using the app on the go, for travel. Finally, the down economy may be prompting people to find more libraries, more often, because the 263 people who used it created 5,355 queries.
All in all, it's a fantastic start for the WorldCat Mobile pilot, and if you haven't tried it yet, go on and give it a go. If you have tried it and received an error message, brace yourself and would you be willing to try again? Our partner organization with the pilot has been making fixes and putting in patches almost 'round the clock. If you try it again and still have problems, please send us feedback so we can get it fixed.
A very long time ago (2005! gasp!), I wished for all the library content in the world to fit in your pocket. We're a whole lot closer to that now, with the launch of the new WorldCat mobile pilot. The six month-long pilot will gather data to help inform future WorldCat mobile efforts, and is currently available to people in the US and Canada.
To download the application, go to www.worldcat.org/m on your mobile phone's Web browser.
The current WorldCat.org mobile pilot complements the recently released experimental iPhone app for WorldCat, built from the WorldCat Search API.
Once you've used WorldCat.org on your mobile phone, please give us your feedback with details of your experience and/or suggested enhancements.
This pilot was developed through a partnership with the mobile technology organization Boopsie. You, too, can partner with WorldCat by linking in.
Wondering if your phone will work? Here's a list of supported devices, which include iPhones, Blackberries, Nokias and more.
I've been reading books on hand-held, mobile computing devices (formerly Palm Pilots, now a Pocket PC that doubles as a cell phone) since around 1996. I was an early adopter (read: new toy lover) of the Palm, and was doing all kinds of weird (at the time) stuff on it: calendar, contacts, to-do lists, games, etc. A good friend ("Hi, Bill!") told me that he was also reading books on his. Mostly free ones downloaded from the Gutenberg Project.
"You read books on your Palm?" I asked. Tetris was one thing... but reading whole books?
"Sure," he told me. "It takes some getting used to is all."
"How much getting used to?"
"The first book you read on that small screen will make you feel like your eyes are bleeding all the time. Each page is a chore and a terror. If you push your way through, you'll wish you'd never tried. But the second book... about half way through you'll realize you're not thinking about it. And then it will just be another way to read."
Bill was right. The first book was pure torture. But by the end of the second... I was hooked. It's so much easier to read books when you're already carrying them around on your portable device of choice. I now do about a third of my reading on my mobile.
I bring this up today because of news from several sources about a new offering from Vodafone, in which the mobile operator will sell eBooks and eAudiobooks directly to its customers for download onto their phones.
Which in turn reminded me of this story from the Sidney Morning Herald from last December, which talks about how half of the top selling books in Japan at the time were written on mobile phones. You read that right -- not just sold and read on phones, but actually texted into existance on they tiny keypads. As the Herald story points out:
Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined "to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture".
That's a lot of readin' and writin' happening on the go.
I don't have an iPhone yet, but I just found (another) reason to want one: there's now a WorldCat app developed for it, available for download at iPhone Toolbox the Apple Web site apps section (for free). If you have an iPhone, download it and let us know how it performs for you. In fact, we might even send you a free WorldCat t-shirt in exchange.
