Three years ago we took our first steps in making our own site “iPhone friendly” by adding an alternative to the Flash-based navigation, to be used when a browser doesn’t support Adobe Flash. This simple change made our site usable, but zooming and scrolling in two directions isn’t an ideal experience.

We’re usually so busy working on clients’ sites that our own site gets neglected, but recently we took the next step and created a simplified version of our site that’s optimized for mobile devices. If you go to www.consensus-technology.com on any of the popular smartphones you’ll be automatically redirected to this optimized site. It has the information we think mobile users are most likely to want, presented in a very straightforward way.

The footer of each page contains a large “View Full Site” link so users can easily get to everything, but the things they’re most likely to want are now much easier to find. For instance, the mobile contact page lets them ‘tap’ to call us, and includes a link that opens the Map application to find our location and get directions. (If a particular phone doesn’t have this feature then it will open Google Maps instead.) As we gather statistics on how the site is being used we may make adjustments to its content and design.

What Are People Saying About Your Mobile Website?

At the start of 2010 4.6 billion people globally had mobile phones², 68% of the world’s population. Increasingly those are going to be smartphones. That’s an awfully big market to ignore.

Consider the social web on mobile devices. Here’s the statistics from just Facebook³:

• There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Twitter founder Evan Williams wrote on the company blog September 2, 2010⁴ that mobile usage of the site has gone up 62% in just over four months, and 16% of all new Twitter users are starting out on mobile devices as opposed to web signups.

If you are in the hospitality or retail business this is extremely important. What happens when people go to your Facebook brand page, Twitter page, Foursquare, or Google search and click to go on your website? With the increase in mobile smartphone usage, it’s becoming important for all businesses to include mobile web site design in marketing plans.

We are in the process of creating mobile web designs for existing and new website clients and welcome your comments and questions in the box below.

¹ Yankee Group, as reported in Network World, October 26 2010.

² International Telecommunication Union (the U.N. telecommunications agency).

³ Facebook Press Room Statistics 2010

⁴ Twitter Blog September 2, 2010

We’ve always embraced artistic endeavors and have many clients and friends in the arts. Recently we started a ‘celebrate the arts’ feature on our Facebook page. Each Friday, as we wind down our work week and look forward to some recreation, we celebrate the creativity and hard work of an individual or group involved in the arts. This week we’re focusing on our friend and client, “Best of NH” composer, Lawrence Siegel.

Larry is currently in Houston preparing for a major concert: on November 23rd the Houston Symphony and Houston Symphony Chorus will perform a full symphonic version of “Kaddish”, Larry’s oratorio which draws on the actual words of Holocaust survivors. “My intention in writing it is to make common cause with those who survived the Holocaust. I want the audience to feel some shadow of what the survivors felt and feel. I want us to carry in our hearts, and, metaphorically, on our backs, those who perished.” says Larry. The work is powerfully direct, never more so than in the resilient, defiant, and joyful closing movement, “So Here I Am”.

Of the process, Larry says “The libretto for Kaddish is fashioned largely from testimonies of survivors; primarily first-hand interviews which I conducted over several years. Because of the verbatim use of testimony, the messages are an authentic and accurate reading of the feelings and thoughts of some of the survivors of the Holocaust.”

The same process is also used in his “Verbatim” Projects (participatory encounters in which a group or community creates and performs an original work of music theatre about their own lives and experiences) and in a series of pieces he’s currently working on, under the collective title “Fellow Citizens”.

We encourage those who can to attend the concert in Houston (Nov. 23rd at Houston Symphony, Jones Hall), or performances also taking place next month in Florida (Nov. 6th at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton) and New Hampshire (Nov. 14th at University of New Hampshire, Durham). If you can’t make it to any of the performances we hope you can at least learn a little more about Larry’s non-profit organization Tricinium, the Kaddish Project, and if you’re on Facebook you can ‘like’ Tricinium and the new CD release of Kaddish.

One of the many data security seminars I attended this year to stay current as a computer security specialist  (I can’t remember which or I’d give credit) included a good story as illustration…

Imagine this is 1989 and you’re a foreign intelligence agent tasked with identifying potential “assets” in a US aerospace defense contractor. You target female senior engineers, divorced, in their 40s. It might take months of research to identify individuals, and months more to find their interests and daily habits. All of this would be quite costly. Fast forward to 2009: you could find all this data and much more in minutes through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and similar sites. People tend to trust contacts they make through social networking sites so after a few dozen interactions, and almost no expense, they trust you. You know what their hobbies are, their likes and dislikes, and are well placed to recruit them. This is one of the many nightmares facing big business and government, and it’s one of the reasons the Department of Defense policy has been an absolute ban on all use of social networks.

Contrast this with a company like online shoe retailer Zappos.com which actively encourages employees to engage online, with 489 employees on Twitter. Or Starbucks, with over 360,000 followers on Twitter and over 4.5 million fans on Facebook.

Which policy is right? They both are. Weigh the risks and the benefits of computer information security versus social media marketing influence and choose what’s appropriate for you.

Simple Security and Privacy Steps

If you decide that a Social Media presence makes sense for you then take some basic precautions:

1. Be aware of the threats. These include cyberstalking, phishing, scams, and identity theft.

2. Choose a complex/unique password for your social media accounts. Using the same password on multiple services can leave all your accounts vulnerable if one site is compromised. Longer passwords are usually better. Use a combination of  letters (upper and lower case), numbers and special characters (such as +, *, $, @, !). Do not use your address, phone number, birthday, license plate, or social security number. Do not use any word that could be found in a dictionary. Do not give your password to anyone else.

3. Set privacy levels for each of your social media accounts. Each service has different defaults but generally your information will be public and easy to find. You can choose to restrict who can (easily) see certain information.

4. Be careful what you post online. Essentially everything you write and every image you upload should be considered public. Don’t assume that only your friends can read your messages and see your pictures, even if that’s how a service is supposed to work. Would you be comfortable seeing your comments and images on page one of the newspaper? If not then don’t post them anywhere online. Announcing that you are traveling can increase the risk of your home being burgled.

5. Be careful about accepting friend/follow requests. People may not be who they claim they are, and their intentions may not be good. Also, accounts can be compromised, messages may originate from someone other than the rightful owner of an account: be attentive for strange messages or behavior from friends, they may be trying to lure you into being compromised too.

6. Be careful installing third party applications. Facebook, MySpace and others make it easy to install third-party application in your profile. If these applications are maliciously coded, or just not programmed with attention to potential abuses, they can expose your private data to computer security issues. Of course you should also use anti-virus software and keep it up-to-date. Even more important, install all computer operating system and software updates. Most important of all, make sure the passwords you use to log into your computer, your email or any application or online service are secure.

You can read more on Staying Safe on Social Network Sites as well as general Cyber Scurity Tips at the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team website, US-CERT.gov.