If you haven't booked your hotel room yet, you happen to be in luck! The Hotel Orrington has decided to extend their conference discount until the end of the business day on Wednesday, September 15th. If it's something on your to-do list that you just haven't gotten done yet, now would be the time. Check out our Venue page for the code and the hotel's contact information.

If you’ve been following D4M at all, you might have seen that the schedule of events is starting to look complete on our site. It wasn’t easy, and there’s still work to do, but we’re happy with what’s happened so far and excited about what’s showing up on the page. What you see there though is just the finished product (of the schedule, it’d be pretty impressive if we could cram the whole conference, travel, speakers, and conversations all on to that one page), and not how it was put together.

Sticky notes are what make it all possible. Why sticky notes? Because they’re cheap, quick to edit, and if you realize that something is changing you get the satisfaction of taking it off the wall and throwing it away, then getting to put a new one up in its place. On top of that, they have a set shape, are easy to write on, and can go just about anywhere. With sticky notes, you’ve got instant visualization, and the ability to move things around with hardly any effort.

I’m sure that we’re not the only office that uses more sticky notes than are good for us, but I know that there’s a bit of a personal connection when you see your writing up on a note hanging on the wall. It means something, and is hanging right where you placed it.

It’s why, even with all the fancy programs and apps out there, we’re still using the lowly sticky note to put together and understand the schedule for D4M. Everyone in the office is able to glance at it and get an idea of what’s going on, and it can hang in a place where we get a look at it whenever we walk around (in other words: Barbara’s office, since she wants to be able to see all of us too...).

Is there a lesson in that? Maybe. You could probably make a case that there’s something in having a physical object there to mess with, that digital just can’t compete with. Or, if you’re feeling a bit more generous, maybe it was something that filled its niche perfectly and it’s something worth using at every opportunity. Either way, we have yet to find a real substitute for sticky notes here at Little Springs, and we're okay with that.

We are excited to announce that Microsoft is sponsoring Design for Mobile this year! In addition, Microsoft is sending Albert Shum to speak at the conference.

After months of finding just the right speakers, we are at the stage of organizing the actual schedule. This is such a key part of the conference experience, so we want to do it right. Because we are a design shop and this is an information design project, we resort to Post-It notes and a whiteboard. Here is a sneak peak:

Despite being just a bunch of Post-Its on the office wall, there's a notable organization to it:

• Orange is workshops.
• Pink are conference sessions. The pastel one is the same as the hot ones, there are just two stacks of notes.
• Blue (look hard, it kind of blends into the wall) are third party events, off site events and so on.
• Organizational, structural lines and labels are black.
• Purple lines are when Barbara's son came into the office the other day and drew on the wall.

The schedule will be finalized soon, then posted here on the website in a significantly more readable manner, before the early bird deadline expires July 16th. Be sure to register now to secure your place.

D4M 2010 is moving along, with new speakers, and soon a few more announcements. While not everything is ready to be posted, we'll give you some teasing hints so you know what to look for.

First of all, the venue is almost settled. We should have that all signed within the next couple weeks and will get all the information up you need to plan your trip. Check back here at the D4M 2010 website for more information. Of course, we'll also blog and tweet about it, so if you subscribe you'll hear right away. And of course if you have already registered for the conference, we'll email you with updates like this.

We've booked eight speakers so far, and many more are on the way. Just a handful are featured on the home page at any one time, so be sure to check the full list of speakers for more details. While details of their presentations will be coming eventually, if there's something you'd like to know know or like us to ask any of them in general, post it here and we'll work on getting that answered in a subsequent post.

This year, we're expanding into two tracks. Not the normal tracks, mind you, but "theory" and "practice." The former will cover more why; the latter will cover more how. If you are a product owner, you might not care about details on interaction design for the iPhone, so you would instead attend a talk on how mobile user behavior is changing. Want something in particular? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

And we are starting to line up sponsors. This is good for you because we should have a new feature this year, vendor demos. You can get your hands on some of that new, cool stuff being released by just going down the hall or sticking around for lunch. Again, when we have final information, we'll share more of that with you here at the D4M site.

Since it was created in 2001, Little Springs Design has been pretty much exclusively about mobile design and technology. It's a fast-changing field, with lots of variation by region, country and even just types of users. To keep abreast of all this, we were always reading, attending talks and training, talking to people, and flying around to do all of this.

For years, though, there wasn't very much. We started a blog, Barbara wrote a book on mobile design, but most conferences just didn't give us enough.

Mobile conferences would give us introductory design topics. Design conferences would give us introductory mobile topics. And we were giving some of these talks, so not learning much in the overall scheme of things.

Eventually, some conferences focusing on the mobile user experience started appearing in Europe. But sending our whole team overseas remained an unsustainable expense, especially in terms of time. But no conference appeared in North America.

So how to get training? If we were to fly in the top experts in our field, who would they be and what would they talk about? A list started growing. Concepts were bandied about: We'll hire in someone for a day of training. We'll alleviate the costs by sharing with some others in the area.

Pretty quickly, we decided to create a conference, and the D4M concept (there's a wiki also) as a community; a place where we can all learn about our chosen field.

We created the conference to be our dream experience, and we're sharing it with you.

Now in it's third year, the D4M conference is growing. This year will be longer, with more speakers, more workshops, new formats, and specifically addressing the needs of anyone interested in bringing the best mobile experience to their customers.

New to mobile? Attend a preliminary workshop in the discipline of your choice. Experienced in mobile but unfamiliar with other disciplines? The introductory workshops are still for you.

We're expanding beyond the core of research + design into the critical neighboring disciplines of business + building. Without each of these disciplines, a product or service will fail.

So come join us on our journey. You will find your fellow travelers interesting, and the scenery fascinating.