deansheke: Editor's desk: #TM13

Monday, April 29, 2013

Editor's desk: #TM13

Last week was a whirlwind. We're in full on prep mode for #TM13 in New York City and that meant crushing it for endless hours every day. On the plus side, and it's a huge plus side, I got to crush it not only with the likes of Kevin Michaluk, Phil Nickinson, and Daniel Rubino, but with iMore's own Georgia and Peter Cohen, Mobile Nations luminaries like Marcus Adolfsson, Derek Kessler, Alex Dobie, Ashley Esqueda, David Lundblad, and Jose Negron, the always awesome Martin Reisch and -- oh yeah -- Cali Lewis and John P. of GeekBeat.tv as well.

We've been doing a lot of teasing about #TM13 on Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and more, but for anyone who's been on this walk for us for a while, it should be fairly obvious where's we've been and where we're going. Back when we were still Smartphone Experts, we did the Round Robin for 3 years in a row. When Microsoft and BlackBerry got left behind for a while, it made that impossible to continue in a meaningful way. Now that Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 have launched, everyone is firing on all cylinders again, and that makes things interesting.

We're Mobile Nations now, however, and that means the old Round Robin has to give way to give way to something equally newer, better, and bolder.

Enter #TM13.

I don't want to oversell it. It's going to be a blast, and it's going to benefit all of the Mobile Nations communities in a lot of subtle yet cool ways for a long time to come, but we're not HALO dropping Phil with a pair of glasses on, or shooting Kevin out of a canon in Times Square to see how many characters he can type on a QWERTY before splat-down, or anything stunty like that. Now I did get hung off the roof of a 50 floor building, but the intent here isn't shock and awe. It's what Mobile Nations always does -- entertain, inform, and engage our awesome community.

Speaking of which, Georgia, Martin, and I managed to knock this little video out at the Grand Central Apple Store. They have a rule that you can't use a tripod or monopod, so Martin had to shoot hand-held and we had to stabilize in Final Cut Pro X, which led to some background warp. I like to think it's just rocking out to the iMore theme though. (And by the way, if you haven't subscribed to the iMore YouTube channel yet, do that ASAP -- we've got some great stuff coming your way over the next few weeks...)

I'll be in NYC for another week, but Peter starts full time tomorrow, so look for much more from both of us, and the whole team, as the week goes on.

After that, it's full speed ahead to WWDC 2013 and what I hope is the first look at iOS 7 and OS X 10.9. It's been a long, long, LONG, time since an Apple exec stepped out on the Keynote stage. Any guesses what they have in store for us?