This morning I attended a mobile media seminar hosted by Capitol Communicator and Brunner Digital in DC. There were about 40 attendees and the group was starting at a nice level of sophistication. They gave a number of nice example of what large brands are doing in mobile, but also addressed the fact that any one can enter with a simple SMS campaign opposed to starting in with a custom app.

I thought it was amusing how the mobile development platform was compared to the early days of web development where you practically had to build a different site for each browser. In this case, the diversity in standards is even greater because of the new ways of interfacing with the devices such as turning an iPad or pointing your iPhone.

Some nice open source resources are emerging like PhoneGap or Wurfl at allow you to detect the device type in addition to your OS or browser detection. They also had some useful stats on market share and how mobile devices are expected to surpass tradition web surfing in the next year or so. I’ll post these when I get a chance. Mary Meeker fro Morgan Stanley was also recommended as a great statistics resource by Bill Hennesey of Washington Post Digital.

As someone that just spent the last hour “patiently” trying to find a wifi hotspot that would accept a standard RDP connection just to add two seconds to a Flash animation, I’m eagerly watching the emergence of viable mobile platforms and happily participating where it makes sense.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mary Meeker’s Amazing Internet Presentation (businessinsider.com)
• Why the Golden Age of Mobile and Online Advertising Is Upon Us (gigaom.com)
• I want the iPhone 4 (techstartups.com)

Today there was a domestic dispute in my neighborhood resulting in a woman being shot and a police barricade surrounding the townhouse. We are still awaiting news of whether the SWAT team has captured the man yet (my daughter just said they were sent in 30 minutes ago) and whether the woman is alright. Hopefully, she is! Right now, I’m checking the status on Washington Post’s Police: Man Barricades Self in Va. Home After Shooting

Beyond the unexpected horror of it all, the thing that struck me is how people have reacted and how they spread the word about the incident. It is a neighborhood full of kids and the first I heard about it was from my sister-in-law via IM who heard about it from her boss who heard about it on WTOP and saw the online news video broadcast. I picked up my cell phone to find my au pair and kids who were heading to the park. While I was picking them up in our car and bringing them home, my husband was reaching out to his brother who was also in our neighborhood. He had already heard about it because Cameron Station had sent out a blast email to the residents who had joined its extranet.

Just a few minutes later, I got a call from our neighbor who has a child in the daycare center down the street from Waples and we were discussing the latest details and whether it was better to keep the kids in lockdown or pick them up. There was a wide variety of information going around at a very rapid speed using all forms of communication. This seemed to be working well to keep everyone informed and protecting their loved ones.

Meanwhile, TC Williams was announcing to its students that they were going to be bused to an alternate location and have a police escort drive them home. My oldest daughter informs me of this after she arrived home on foot because the bus driver somehow did not receive this message and instead dropped them off at the front of the neighborhood, only a few blocks from the ongoing barricade. The police told them to walk through the park to get home, and instead they all cut through the Home Depot parking lot which was actually the safer way to go since it was further away from the incident. They all had cell phones, but didn’t call to be picked up even though I was awaiting the call and our part of the neighborhood had access. This was because they were told that nobody could drive through the neighborhood anyway; which was not true.

So, to get to my point (other than being floored at the lack of coordination in a crisis on the part of the Alexandria school bus system), I think this illustrates how many forms of communication we have these days and how proper advance planning and a variety of dissemination options can provide useful, timely, and accurate information. Whereas, just the opposite can occur if poorly executed or if you are relying on the old-fashioned telephone game.