Being on the road for a week and away from the office can be a challenge for those needing to stay in touch with the home base. Luckily there's a number of fantastic mobile apps available to help you stay productive, even while you're in San Diego for a week experiencing the Esri User Conference.
For yours truly that means having some handy, useful, and productive apps loaded on my iPhone. Below are 10 suggested mobile apps for the iPhone user - please note, many of these services are available on other formats including Android, BB, and Win Phone. Be sure to update your apps and test them out before you head out on the road.
Do you maintain a Wordpress blog? If so then be sure to check and see if a compatible mobile app is available for your device. The app above shows how one can easily update to Wordpress via iPhone. Note, WP mobile app works with self-hosted blogs only
uStream is a fabulous service for sharing live video streams. Using the uStream mobile app users can broadcast directly from a smartphone. The client also connects to your social media to inform your followers that you are now live broadcasting - a great idea for companies to show off live updates direct from their booth in the exhibition hall - uStream is also available for Android users
Ever been on location at an event and wanted to share a sound clip? Cinch is a fun mobile app that enables you to sent a Tweet and attach a sound clip - a great way to share some breaking news!
Usrs of any kind of smartphone can take advantage of the cool EsriUC BackChannel app from DTSagile. The mobile app runs in any mobile browser and provides a handy conference agenda, SDCC maps, a fun photo safari game and more!
Have you got your Google+ invite yet? If so then you can create a circle of friends that will be at the ESRIUC and share your updates using G+. No official iOS mobile app is available yet although Android users have one. The above shot shows the mobile web experience on iPhone. Visit m.google.com/plus on your handset
Smartphone users will want to make sure they have the latest update of mobile facebook handy so they can access their home stream, the ESRIUC fb page, and event hit the TweetUp facebook event page
Traveling to San Diego to ESRIUC from far away? You might want to save on the calls by using Google Voice. If you think you'll be in sessions most of the week you might want to consider forwarding all your calls to Google voice, that way you can receive alert notifications as well as text transcripts of your voice messages... very handy!
Plan on sharing loads of media and updates from ESRIUC? If so then Posterous is a fabulous mobile app that enables users to quickly post to many social streams and services using one click.
The Esri ArcGIS Mobile app on iPhone is fun and handy. Looking around the suggested maps and services you'll find some handy maps for use while in San Diego. In 2010 there was a handy 2010 ESRIUC foursquare map showing places that you might want to check in to!
Google+ isn't the only mobile service available to Google users. Be sure to update your Google apps so you have access to many handy tools while away from the office including your Google reader, Docs, YouTube and Google Maps
Oops! I guess it was implied, however, I guess I can't forget about Twitter! No doubt any good EsriUC conference goer will need a good, reliable mobile Twitter client. Vanilla Twitter mobile is ok, however, to get the most out of Twitter I suggest you have a robust client app like Echofon, Seesmic, TweetDeck, or HootSuite. Most of these clients are supported by all/most smartphones and provide much needed functionality like photo uploads, multiple account management, hashtag search, lists and more. Don't forget to tweet and follow #ESRIUC - thanks @cageyjames for the reminder!
For me, I like Seesemic mobile (on iPhone) which enables me to update to Twitter, facebook, and LinkedIn. I also have my photo upload option set to archive all my photos on Flickr rather than donating them to TwitPic. A final Twitter tip... for those of you planning on making big announcements at ESRIUC, make sure you schedule a few tweets to go out just in case you can't get to an app to post during the busy week.
HxGN Live - The Hexagon Global Network - Learn about surveying, mapping, laser scanning and geospatial solutions from Leica Geosystems. June 3-6, 2013, Las Vegas, Nevada
Join us at GIS for Government 2013 taking place June 24-26, 2013 in the Washington, DC Metro Area to find out everything you need to know about GIS. Click here for more information
To register for the first GCS Geospatial Big Data webinar, visit the new GCS website at www.YourDataSmarter.com. The one-hour free webinar will be broadcast live at 3 pm EDT Wed, June 12, 2013
