Would be v.interested in presentations / discussions on the museum supply to visitors of consumer devices as the mobile interpretation platform. What are the operational issues? Hardware maintenance? Business model? Examples of success of failure.
The LACMA multimedia guide might make an interesting casestudy for this.

Loïc, I'm totally with you on this. It's the "anguille sous roche" [eel under rock] of the great multimedia liberation front!

In the coming weeks, we will also be piloting delivering the content on our museum-supplied iPods over wifi to visitors own Apple and Android phones. Not enough devices to keep up with visitor demand, so we're forced to take the plunge. Issues involved: do we need to strip out the videos which we provide on the in-house device?

We also expect to do an in-depth visitor evaluation in August. We might have first inklings of feedback from that.

@peter: What is the issue with the video's? Is that a bandwidth issue for the wifi?

I want to hear discussion about business models where free and paid content co-exist. How do museums assist private sector developers to create content (that they self fund or some other arrangement that's independent of the museum) that visitors will buy even when offered alongside the high quality 'free' museum content? Does the higher purpose of museums to generate and distribute knowledge trump considerations for private sector participation. What innovations are there in this field?

Peter, with regards to the video choking it really could be either, I suppose an easy test would be to try and supply it via youtube. If simultaneous youtube videos streamed over your wifi connection choke, it's your bandwidth, if they don't it's your server. Though I'm sure your IT crew could determine which through more direct measurement.

On the video on iPod Touch problem: we had the same issue at Cooper-Hewitt for our Triennial Exhibition tour which is very heavily video, delivered wirelessly to a mobile website on devices handed out on-site. After many attempts to tweak both the network and the file size, our colleagues got in touch with someone in Apple Support who said the network and 'reset all' settings need to be reset at least every 2 weeks to avoid this choking problem. They've been doing so ever since and it seems to be working! Details at: http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/video+on+iPod+Touches

I'd like to see some time directed towards location-aware uses and mobile gaming. Both of these uses are growing tremendously in the larger mobile universe, and will only become more pervasive in the next few years.

Coming at this from otuside the museum world, I wonder if there's a very basic requirement to talk about connectivity and permission to use mobiles in musuems. From my experience, there's limited 3G in many museums and wifi is a 'pay for' service and museum guards get VERY tetchy if you take your phone out in some galleries. How do can using mobile be something everyone can and should do?

What's missing in the discussion is this: how can exhibits be designed to best take advantage of mobile technology? Only one museum that I know of (Petrosains, in Kuala Lumpur, which I designed in 1995-8) was conceived so that visitors use a mobile device as a primary interpretive tool. For example, the device allowed visitors to control other screens, make robots move in a group game, and collect data that drove experimental outcomes. BTW, location awareness was achieved at a gallery level using "radio gateways."

Your project sounds amazing, but I'm not sure we should be designing exhibits to take advantage of technology - that sounds too much like technology for technology's sake to me. Rather we should be designing exhibits to meet our visitors' and our needs and goals, and then chosing the technology that achieves those ends, be it high tech mobile or post-it notes.

Did your project in Kuala Lumpur go live, and is it still in operation? Do you have documentation of the experience or evaluations of it? I'm sure there's a lot we could learn from a case study about it if you'd be willing to post it on the wiki!

While I second Nancy's concern, especially when it involves newish technology, I think integration is not necessarily a bad thing. The trick is identifying the non-gratuitous use of the technology that enhances the visitor experience, rather than just trumpets the capabilities of the technology. The example that springs to mind is several versions of of talkback walls I've seen where the input device for a large screen is a phone. You text your message, it appears large for all to see. I don't think they'd work as well with a dedicated keyboard. The phone has affordances other techs don't. Lots of people can be doing it simultaneously, and the users already understand (to some extent) their phone's UI, so there's not the learning curve you usually see with an interactive exhibit.

It can be done, and it should be done more often, in a thoughtful manner.

The KL project used 400 Newtons and they were so popular that you had to prove you'd already been through the museum without it, before you could rent one. As of 2007, over 200 were still working, I'm in the process of checking to see how many have survived over10 years! See http://4274design.com/media/handheld_arif.html and click the ARIF in PETROSAINS link on the page for more details.

I think that exhibits are always designed around technology at some level (some well, some not), but it's too broad a subject. I'd be more interested in focussing on exhibit design and mobile tech; how to concieve an exhibit with mobile tech in mind. One can consider mobile tech overlays on exhibiting exhibits like the new AMNHguide, or developed from the ground up. These strategies can be as simple as the near perfect Museum of Islamic Arts artifact numbering, in between like Augmented Interpretive Reality or as complex as Petrosains.

Those Newtons were truly an idea ahead of their time! I hear that CES in Las Vegas still uses them for checking people in at that enormous trade fair; they scour eBay etc. for spare parts to keep them running, because nothing comes close to being as good all these years later! Speaking of Newtons, have you seen this? http://www.worldmind.com/media/text/clients/visible/visible.html
The Smithsonian's first multimedia tour - in 1994?!

iGo..Steve Waytana, I think. We talked to them as they'd done a Chinatown SF walking tour, but they wouldn't go as far as we needed so we built a team in house. Amazing what you can do with a $65 million budget!

Within the content design portion, I'd be interested in brainstorming about we might use new aspects of platforms to clearly differentiate content for different kinds of users. How can we address issues of prior levels of knowledge, different viewpoints, some sort of specialty interest, etc more effectively? And let users know before they access that such specialized content exists to hook them in?

I'm interested in talking about how we might merge the content production efforts we currently pursue related to mobile experiences with the other content production that happens in the museum for websites, kiosks and event print publications. It seems to me that the most valuable and enduring thing that will be produced from our efforts in mobile will be the content. How might we look to reuse, mashup or otherwise re-appropriate content between all these different channels? Will we continue to see a merging between mobile tours and simply mobile versions of web content? If so, how can we streamline our content production pipelines and media infrastructure to take advantage of that now?

You speak my mind, Rob and Sandy! Getting mobile out of the "shiny new technology" ghetto, and into a more normal production cycle will only benefit us in the long run. Having done mobile projects in both the old, "do it once you figure out the exhibit content" model and as an integrated part of a content strategy, the latter gave us so much more freedom to select appropriate content for the various delivery media like labels, videos, interactives, mobile, web...

Rob, I love the aspirational goal of merging content production streams, but I know plenty of places that haven't yet managed to even get print, web, and exhibit channels to mesh, let alone a new channel like mobile. It will be a long road, but we can at least start down it, right?

Great topics already! I look forward to the conference and propose the following questions:
- What possibilities and challenges do ‘augmented reality’ (AR) on your smartphone offer the museum, both inside and outside the building?
-What is the additional value of AR mobile tours in relation to conventional multimedia tours?
-What do we expect of user participation? (for example: DIY AR tours)

As for case studies: The Museum of London have a really slick AR app. Definitely worth consideration.

As for topics: One of the big things I keep getting asked about is Apps vs Web. I wonder if we could discuss: Apps, Web, Messaging - which to use when and where does this lead thinking about free/freemium/paid content models?