Categories: OLD Media Moves

What happened when Forbes held 100 percent mobile day

Forbes chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin writes about the business magazine’s 100 percent mobile day, held last Friday, when employees got together to brainstorm about the day when all readers will come from smart phones.

Dvorkin writes, “The Mobile Day invite went companywide and was short a sweet: bring your creative minds, we’ll supply the paper and pencils. We began at 10am with a mobile overview (I couldn’t resist going back in time, playing snippets of the Googlezon Flash movie), then focused on how competitors were responding to the smartphone audience. Next we handed out five FORBES posts and asked participants to squeeze and reconfigure the content into a series of mobile screens. After some pizza, editors and reporters and members from the product, design, sales, PR, business and marketing teams organically formed 16 three-to-four person teams and scattered to work stations throughout our Jersey City office. Many worked on the project for three hours before each team got five minutes to present their work to the entire group. Throughout this post I’ve scattered six of the 39 work sheets that were displayed on a projector with — you guessed it — a mobile phone.

“Taken as a whole, the design formats presented overlapping themes. Many were visually heavy. Others included fluid user interfaces with shareable elements, personalization, split screens, annotation, and photo backgrounds. Some included aggregation. A few went to the heart of the matter: mobile specific content. And there was much more.

“This week, the office is still buzzing about Mobile Day, which was spearheaded by our new mobile accelerator unit. At least a half dozen people stopped me to say how important it was to them. In an email to a colleague of mine, one said: ‘I feel as though it is extremely rare for any company in this day and age to seek out all of their employees to come together and collaborate with one another in the way in which we did today. From my perspective, it certainly made me feel as though I was helping to contribute to the much bigger picture.'”