It is July, the time of vacations, with the weather finally something other than wet. You seem to wait most of the year for this kind of weather and when it arrives it is nice.

The staff got the rest of their iPhones today so everyone was setting things up, getting a bit lost in menus and experiencing what all the hype of the past week is actually about. It comes with some limitations that’s for sure but overall it is a tribute to Apple and their ingenuity.

First and foremost it is a phone, SMS communicator, email device, calendar, address book….well you get the picture. What it does well is that it is an extension of the Mac OS in what you can do and it works together with what you have on the desktop. I think of it as a mobile extension of a pretty good OS. And then there are the things that seem like science fiction coming true like the map function that shows you as that pulsating dot moving across a map. Why would you need step by step directions when you just follow the purple line as a pulsating dot? With a hybrid map choice it is so simple and almost unreal. We are just starting to learn what it can do and are pretty sure that a few unanswered questions can be solved with what this device offers.

Yesterday Tim (Currency) and William (Vancity) and I got together downtown for lunch and to go over what is needed for BarCampBankBC. Those two are right on top of it and we are well on our way to putting up the framework to make this a memorable event. At one point I had the iPhone out to update the Twitter bunch. After a picture and some text I quickly looked at the SMS messages and email. While I was doing this Tim and William were discussing something and I realized that I had actually left the group for a few minutes by what I was doing. This morning after thinking about what I had done I thought it needed a name so I called that type of action ‘hiving’. It is made up of hive with the -ing. I thought of a bee hive and how busy they always seem to be doing something and yet they are in close proximity. When you have that iPhone or BlackBerry in the midst of people and are doing something with it you are busy, doing what is anyones guess. It seems we do need a verb for what is being done as it is becoming very commonplace. To hive – to be busy or have the appearance of being busy, always within the midst of people, with a small computer-like device.