This Article is printed in the April 2010 edition of the Adventist Messenger.
4.1 Billion.
That is the number of active cell phone users worldwide published in a March 2009 UN Report. Approximately 60% of the world’s population have access to mobile phones and the number is rapidly rising each month.
The first commercial text message was sent in December of 1992. Today, the number of text messages sent and received everyday exceeds the total population of the planet.
We are currently experiencing another technological shift that is directly related to mobile communication.
Steve Jobs, CEO for Apple Inc., announced in January 2010 that Apple sold 250,000,000 mobile devices called ipods. It is estimated that they will sell approximately 45 million iphones in 2010 alone.
Smartphones, ipods, iphones, and the recently announced ipad, blackberry, laptops, 3G, 4G, Bluetooth, wifi, GPS, Social Networks, Twitter. These are just a few of the terms you will hear mentioned in almost any conversation about current and future technology trends.
There are approximately 140,000 applications for the iphone and ipod touch available for download on the itunes app store. Apple just announced that they recently reached 3 billion downloads.
With the rapid growth of better smartphones, cooler applications and faster mobile networks, how can we as Adventist’s take advantage of the digital mobile wave?
Hye Multimedia Ministries
Well, Eisen Montalvo, owner of Hye Multimedia Ministries (http://hyem3.com) located in Tucson Arizona, has thought long and hard about this same question and decided to do something about it.
Beliefs App
Eisen, is a computer engineer who created an iphone/ipod touch application that has been getting a lot of attention amongst the Adventist community and for good reason. The application is called, Beliefs and it showcases all the biblical beliefs of Seventh-day Adventists.
In a recent interview I had with Eisen, I asked him why he developed this application. He said, “Because I wanted to share our beliefs as Seventh-day Adventists with people that don’t know anything about us or have heard myths about the Seventh-day Adventist Church and would like to know the truth.”
A Beliefs app user from Australia, gave it 5 out of 5 stars and had this to say, “Best portable study guide out there! The supporting bible verses are awesome, well done to those who put this together.”
The Beliefs application is also a great tool to help Adventists refresh their beliefs and to provide a quick resource for answering questions from friends or co-workers.
The application is very easy to use and has a simple layout. The start page shows a list of Adventist beliefs and allows for each one to be selected. Once a topic is selected, the iphone/ipod touch user can read the information on their device screen along with any associated bible texts.
Bible Gateway supports 101 Translations
The bible texts are sourced through the well known online bible resource called, Bible Gateway (http://www.biblegateway.com). Eisen says that using Bible Gateway is “the main feature of the application because it is a well known online verifier of bible verses that support Adventist beliefs in any version of the Bible available.” Bible Gateway currently supports 101 translations featuring 54 languages.
Another potential use for the Beliefs app could provide evangelist’s a great tool to reinforce the biblical teachings as new bible students are able to do further study on a topic from their iphone or ipod touch device.
With the iphone being available and used world wide, Eisen says he has seen approximately 2000 downloads since November 2009 when the application was first put on the itunes store.
He said these downloads of his Beliefs app have come from approximately 44 countries. The top 5 countries being United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
The Beliefs app is currently available in English and Spanish. Eisen tells me that there are future plans to develop a French version as well.
More Information
For more information about the Beliefs application you can contact Eisen through the Hye Multimedia Ministries website (http://hyem3.com). To down the application to your iphone/ipod touch, search for it through the itunes store.
About Troy McQueen