Magenic Company Blog

We hear a lot about how companies are using mobile to impact their business. Bally Total Fitness is one of those companies. In part one of my interview with Senior VP and CIO, Guy Thier, he shared some of the Mobile initiatives they’ve undertaken with Magenic. He also spoke about using mobile to help update the company image and increase sales.

I had the opportunity to talk with Guy Thier, SVP and CIO at Bally Total Fitness, about their efforts to harness the strength of mobile for both customers and employees. As the company continues to move this long-standing brand in the fitness business forward, from customer service to new CRM integration, mobile is now occupying much of their development efforts.

Angela Johnson is an agile mentor and coach, scrum master, trainer and project manager with more than 15 years of experience in software development. She's been asked to share her thoughts and expertise on agile via Magenic's blog. "How did you know that you were done eating breakfast this morning? This is a question I pose to teams adopting agile or scrum that I am coaching or training."

If you are remotely interested in the Internet, no matter what part of it you are into, you know that the Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage at Facebook’s F8 conference last week and rolled out Timeline, a robust revamp of the profile section of your Facebook page.

One of the age-old challenges in project management is keeping all the members of the team on the same page – or even the in the same book – as the project changes and evolves. Long before the concept of a mobile workforce came along, project managers struggled to make sure the latest document, report, or task was available to everyone on the team, or all the cooks…even when they are in the same kitchen.

Like many, I spent two hours and change looking in on the opening keynote for Build 2011, the Microsoft developers gathering held in Anaheim. In exchange for those 130 minutes we were treated to the unveiling of Windows 8.

As I’ve stated here before, tablets are a growing segment of the mobile device world. That trend shows no sign of letting up and there are already many businesses – including airlines and the NFL – incorporating them into their mobile plans.

Summertime isn’t for slacking; our mighty thought leaders went above and beyond expectations to spread their wealth of knowledge.

This past week, I spent a few minutes with Peter McShane Lewis in Magenic’s Business Development office. We were talking about the benefits of mobile in an enterprise environment. Of course we discussed a lot of the “usual suspects”; things like portability, network access, accountability and more.

The headlines continue to be filled with news about patents in the tech space and the big boys that continue to pour money into litigation. And Google’s recent 12.5 billion dollar acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and its associated stash of patents, makes it that much more interesting to watch...