WIRED: Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown

For iPhone fans, it really was too good to be true. A pair of Apple executives had just described the latest model of the iPhone — the 3GS — onstage at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2009. The audience loved it. The 3GS was twice as fast as its predecessor, it included a camera that shot video, and the updated iPhone operating system enabled multimedia messaging and tethering — the ability to use the phone as a modem. Just one problem: While many customers in Europe and Asia could enjoy all those features, AT&T, the iPhone’s sole US carrier, wouldn’t allow video messaging or tethering at launch. In other words, the most advanced features wouldn’t be available to AT&T customers. What’s more, some current iPhone users who wanted to upgrade wouldn’t get the subsidies that new customers enjoyed. Incensed iPhone fanatics vented their fury on Twitter. “AT&T has been one disappointment after another.” “Is AT&T trying to squeeze more money from us poor suckers?” And they punctuated their complaints with a hashtag — the Twitter convention for grouping conversations — that became an eight-character protest slogan: #attfail.

It’s an interesting read on the Apple and AT&T love/hate relationship. With the launch of iphone and associated negative stigma around it, I am not sure if they will just walk away from AT&T and blame them for the ‘antenna’ issues.

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First iTunes App for LotusLive!

If you haven’t heard already, the LotusLive team has just released its first app for Lotuslive on iTunes for free.

In my recent digital strategy role shift, the MI work has lately been around paying close attention to the newest and the greatest in the mobile, social web and network engagement methodologies. And, yes, to “try” to have it incorporated in a practical manner in our business and marketing strategies. Notice I didn’t say social media because I don’t think it will exist in its form in the next few years. My new upcoming project, EarnedWeb, will go into depth on that. More on that later.

So, it was no surprise to me when the analyst firm IDC, indicated in their latest report that there will be more than one billion mobile workers worldwide by year end 2010. The United States has the highest percentage of mobile workers in its workforce, with 72.2 percent of the workforce mobile in 2008. Further, the U.S. will remain the most highly concentrated market for mobile workers with 75.5 percent of the workforce, or 119.7 million workers, being mobile in 2013.

With that being said, 2010 is also the year for mobile marketing to take off — augmented reality, location based apps like foursquare, gowalla, facebook & twitter’s own iterations.  I am glad to see that our development roadmap also takes advantage of this industry trend and is providing mobile applications to the SMB’s and enterprises to take advantage of the shift in knowledge worker behavior.

With the immediate availability of a free iTunes download of LotusLive Meetings, users can now access cloud-enabled LotusLive web meetings on the iPhone from anywhere, at anytime. Similarly, LotusLive users can access Web meetings on the Blackberry smartphone as well.

LotusLive Mobile is a smartphone application that enables users to access the LotusLive network and collaboration services — including joining a webcast, sharing files and accessing your LotusLive business network right from the Blackberry smartphone.

And a little snippet from my Lotuslive team, there will be a Android and iPad version coming very shortly.

It’s free for both the iphone and the blackberry. Check it out and let us know here how you liked it.