How do we keep all our mobile devices charged?

We own and manage a lot of mobile devices. Like between 100 - 1000 depending which ones you count.

Most of them are Windows Mobile, which means they are fairly power hungry, and need regular charging, but with this many devices, how do you safely and securely avoid tripping over cables, and sitting on devices?

Plan 1: is our magical, homemade cupboard. It gets rave reviews by the visitors to our office. If you have ever had to look after multiple devices, you will know why!

Plan 2: A bloke called tony has made a mobile version in a toolbox! I just discovered it on his learninginhand blog.

Another great, lateral thinking plan!


Geoff

Converting phone video to play on your PC

In the mobile learning world we seem to be forever converting media from one format to another. This is often because phone manufacturers are pushing the envelope in compressing media (especially video), but the PC players are a bit slow to keep up.

This is exactly the time to turn to the Open Source community, and today's post is to point out a few excellent sources of free media conversion.

To play back the file without converting it:
Use VLC media player to play just about any media file.

If you just want to convert the damn file:
Try http://media-convert.com who will convert just about any file to just about any other vaguely relevent format. So upload your phone-video, and get it returned as a wmf or mpeg that will play back nicely from your PC

Alternatively, download super which is ... well ... super at converting most files into most other file formats.

If you are a developer:
Our mediaBoard product needs to support just about any format of media from any phone, and convert it into a web-friendly format, and for this we use the excellent, open source FFmpeg component. If you need to convert your media files, they are well worth checking out.

Thanks to these sites, and the developers behind them for helping out countless of our m-learning users over the years!

G