Astute Labs is an exciting Belfast-based software start-up in the mobile app building space with a particular emphasis on large communities such as schools. They have only been going about 12 months but have already secured a large number of customers globally and just raised their first round of private investment.

In early December 2011 I upgraded from an iphone 3G to iphone 4s on the Orange UK network. Since upgrading, a month ago, the iphone 4s has been losing the mobile signal at least 10-15 times per day for periods ranging from a few minutes to one hour. During this time it is not possible to make or receive phone calls or texts. In my view there is an unacknowledged issue with the iphone 4s - my advice would be NOT to purchase one until it is resolved - watch this space!

I was part of a fascinating panel session "Mobility, Teams, The Cloud and Collaboration" at the recent Mobile Cloud Summit (London: 21 September). The summit and the session was chaired by Jeffrey Peel of Quadriga Consulting and my co-panelists were Brian Caulfield of DFJ Esprit and Chris Horn of Movirtu.

Mobile teams, who spend much of their day on the road, face communication challenges that cannot be solved by web-connected laptops alone. This case study shows how the Intermediate Care Team at DaisyHill Hospital addressed these challenges with a Bioteams approach supported by integrated mobile phone and web "swarm" technology.

Ken Thompson presented on the topic: "Bioteams: what can we learn from natures social networks" at the NLab Social Networks Conference (19th June 2008) at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

An excellent article in The Economist (10th April 2008), Nomads at last, describes the growing band of “digital nomads” who travel light from oasis to oasis with only an iPhone or a Blackberry and traces how they evolved from “digital astronauts” (who carried all their vital supplies with them) through “digital hermit crabs” (with a basic shell of devices, batteries and connectors) to their current digital nomadic form.

To coincide with the launch of my bioteams book I am delighted to announce Bioteams Books where I intend to collect The Bumblebees Top 100 Collaboration books. Just click on the books tab on the main blog menu to go to a brand new section of the Bioteams blog where you will be able to see, on a single web page, all the best books, in my humble opinion, on collaboration, team dynamics and virtual/mobile teams.

The most widely used tool for mobile, distributed and virtual teams is still the plain old telephone conference call. However it is also the most badly used! So whether you are talking over Skype, mixing it with screen sharing and messaging, using your corporate PABX or just calling in to an external service if you follow these 12 simple rules you will get much better calls.

Christian Kreutz pulls together 4 examples of highly creative use of mobile phones in Africa in News Reporting, Financing, Health Care and Trading showing that necessity really is the mother of invention!

The term cyborg is used to designate an organism which is a mixture of organic and synthetic parts so designed to enhance its abilities via technology. William Mitchell a professor at MIT Media Lab believes that through our mobile devices we are all becoming mobile cyborgs and its for the better. In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City which he discusses in an interview with James Harkin Mitchell describes how the new communications technologies have overlaid our city spaces with central nervous systems connecting us into the wireless ether via our mobile devices which act as umbilical cords to anchor us into the information society's digital infrastructure.

The term cyborg is used to designate an organism which is a mixture of organic and synthetic parts so designed to enhance its abilities via technology. William Mitchell a professor at MIT Media Lab believes that through our mobile devices we are all becoming mobile cyborgs and its for the better. In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City which he discusses in an interview with James Harkin Mitchell describes how the new communications technologies have overlaid our city spaces with central nervous systems connecting us into the wireless ether via our mobile devices which act as umbilical cords to anchor us into the information society's digital infrastructure.

Always-on mobile devices need supporting etiquette. A few years back The Economist ran a short article “Think before you talk” on how Ideo (the designers behind the Palm Pilot and Microsoft Mouse) developed 5 prototype “social mobiles”.....

In the ground-breaking book Communities Dominate Brands, Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore introduce a new generation of technology users: Generation C (C stands for Community). If you have some Gen-Cs on your team you are ideally placed to take advantage of bioteaming principles and here is how you can spot them.

For the mobile industry, waiting for people to use the net via their phone has been like waiting for a bus that never comes. That’s according to Dan Simmons reporting for BBC Click Online (15 Sept 2006).

In any communication using intrusive communications technologies such as mobile phones, SMS, VoiP and IM there are actually 4 different parties who each have rights (and obligations). In this article I suggest a structure for a “Polite Intrusive Technologies Etiquette” .

Copying biology's instant broadcasting systems

One of the things we learn when we study biological teams is that the communications used are designed to instantly reach the intended recipients wherever they are. For example, many forms of social insect communications are chemically based with the intensity and longevity of the scent (and the wind direction) determining who gets the message. In other words biological communications tend to be 'instant broadcasts'.