Author: Volker Page 55 of 73

Adobe Flash Opens Screens

On 02/05/2008

Flash maker Adobe isn’t tiring on bringing out news these days: this time it announced the “Open Screen Project”, in which it is partnering with a plethora of mobile industry giants, namely ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG, Marvell, Motorola, Nokia (see also here re Microsoft‘s Flash competitor Silverlight), NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson (see also their initiative to marry J2ME and Flash here), Toshiba and Verizon Wireless as well as major media players such as the BBC, MTV Networks and NBC Universal.

It said “the project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. Adobe said it would open access to Flash technology, accelerating the deployment of content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).” This will include:

Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Adobe says its Flash Player reaches over 98% of Internet-enabled PCs and more than 500m mobile devices today. It now expects more than 1bn handsets to ship with Flash technology by the end of 2009 (this means a year faster than previously forecasted). Flash technology is used to deliver vector graphics, text, interactivity and application logic, video and sound over the Internet. Currently, more than 75% of broadcasters who stream video on the Web use Flash technology (YouTube will be a big contributor to that number).

Following my many posts on mobile Flash (see e.g. here and here), this now looks like a real assault on the medium. Given that Flash reduces developer cost (less porting because of vector-based graphics) means it is a likely boost to the content industry: more and richer content at lower cost. Could this be it?

Sony Ericsson marries J2ME with Flash

By Volker

On 30/04/2008

Sony Ericsson announced that it would release a new technology that would basically marry Flash Lite with J2ME. The new technology and tools, referred to as “Project Capuchin” make, it says, it possible to “combine the richness of Flash and J2ME technologies allowing developers to utilize the best attributes of both software stacks to create content-rich mobile applications”. Sony Ericsson wants to launch this in H2/2008 and will demonstrate apps running under this at JavaOne in SF next week.

The concept is pretty cool: the thing is said to allow pure Flash Lite content to be encapsulated in J2ME applications, making content created in Flash appear as Java apps. It goes on to say that “more advanced capabilities will allow FlashLite technology to handle an entire presentation layer and make it possible to create Java ME applications where some or all UI components are defined in Flash.”

I have reported a little on Flash Lite and its moves into the markets in the past (see e.g. here and here). One obstacle always was the device footprint. If you can make a Flash app appear to be a Java one, this gap would appear to be immediately reduced to, yes, zilch, zero, naught, nothing at all. So this would bring us the slick UI and interfaces we all so love from the Flash world to all the Java-enabled phones immediately.

What I would really like to know though is what the porting would be: would one be able to address everything in one build, Flash graphics being vector-based and all and therefore automatically adaptable to all screen sizes? That would be a real killer. I’m thrilled…

Mobile Advertising works!

By Volker

On 29/04/2008

We seem to be having another successful showcase of mobile advertising: this time, mobile ad firm Greystripe and research firm Dynamic Logic have produced a report that confirms that mobile ads are uber-effective: they report about a case study for a mobile advertising campaign for The Golden Compass (which was broadcast during load times for certain mobile games). The campaign brought about a 19.3% increase in awareness of the film’s title a 9.5% increase in interest in seeing the film among all respondents. The ad apparently also outperformed a typical online advertising campaign by 52% in terms of brand awareness.

The case study also states that results showed that WAP sites were effective in influencing
a highly-engaged audience, particularly when advertising new movies:

Among overall respondents, 35% say they use their mobile phones for “finding theater and movie times,” and 29% “watch movie trailers.”
Frequent movie-goers — those who have seen at least two movies in the theatre in the past two months — use the mobile Internet more often than non-frequent moviegoers (79% for frequent movie-goers vs. 58% for non-movie goers).

It would have been interesting to know if the game was actually the mobile game for the Golden Compass (published by Glu, which was surprisingly absent from any mention) or if it was just more or less random games selected. There was also only little to read about the details of the survey, etc, etc. As Greystripe has somewhat of a vested interest in this, one might be querying…

The naked numbers from above are in themselves impressive. However, I am calling for more information here as this is per se not substantial enough to merit a whole big new world… I am inquiring for more details… Fingers crossed.

Ringtones, Wallpapers & SMS in the UK

By Volker

On 29/04/2008

English newspaper The Guardian published the results of a couple of recent surveys on mobile content, including the quarterly “Orange Digital Media Index” and a study carried out by TNS and, alas, no real surprises here:

Ringtone and wallpaper downloads are slowing and are on the decline and, frankly, who in their right mind with a phone that plays MP3s, has a good camera as well as multiple connections to a computer, would spend money on such little gimmicks anymore? Ringtones were down more than 10%, whilst wallpapers still grew but at a meager 3%.
Full-track downloads of songs though were on the rise — 292,000 in January on Orange UK compared to only 100,000 ringtones.
SMS are going strong (up 21% or 1.3bn for the month in the UK) according to Orange, a number to which I, through my 12-year-old son’s phone bill, contribute no small share…
TNS believes mobile IM is on the rise but this is not really the big thing. What IS the big thing is that, according to TNS, more than 1 in every 3 messages a user sends from either his/her mobile OR computer are SMS (38%), and that shows how ubiquitous the whole thing has become. Again, judging by my son’s communication patterns, I believe that: his choice of messaging is – in order of relevance: 1) SMS, 2) IM, 3) (and I mean a very, very distant 3) e-mail.

So pretty much all as expected. Unfortunately, no news on mobile video, games or applications in this one although this is there might actually have been interesting things to report. I am actually wondering now why I even bothered recording this at all… Apologies…

Blyk now at 100k subs

By Volker

On 24/04/2008

Now, I will not claim that they ramped up their efforts as a result of my comments a few days ago, but Blyk announced today that they breezed past the 100,000 subscriber mark. So, well done them!

It does not however alleviate my concerns about the general business model, I have to say. They are not revealing ARPU or anything like that. The overall constraints of the ad-funded approach do, I think, remain. I stand to be corrected but would need to see a more robust business parameters to be convinced…

PS: Thanks to BitRabbit for the heads-up!

Alltop: new site for mobile news and everything else under the sun…

By Volker

On 22/04/2008

One of the ventures backed by Apple legend and Garage Technology Ventures founder (and of course blogger extraordinaire) Guy Kawasaki has just launched a wonderful site syndicating feeds from loads of mobile-related news from all over the web. You’ll find it here. And, yes, I am greatly humbled to be part of it (and will therefore happily boast with it here… forgive me).

Alltop, which is the new venture, not only provides information on the mobile sector though: they syndicate a host of items grouped by topic; they call it “an “online magazine rack” that displays ‘all the top’ stories for popular topics”. Great stuff and thanks for having me!

DigiChoc brings its mobile games to the web…

By Volker

On 21/04/2008

Mobile games developer & publisher Digital Chocolate has started to port some of its games over to the PC format in order to allow players a flavour of it prior to committing to pay. Users can play the game as an online Java version for free. They can then choose to purchase it as a downloadable PC product ($9.99) or – directly from the website – on mobile (prices will probably vary per country/operator).

It is yet again a try to get word out to the gaming community by more than just placing the games on as many mobile operator portals as possible (which is still where the majority of games are being sold). Digital Chocolate have been on the forefront here: their Facebook adaptation of their hit title TowerBloxx has found a huge following on the social network. There is no information (or at least none available to me) to tell if this leveraged sales of the title on mobile, too, but it is a good way to bypass the very limited space that carriers’ WAP portals can allow.

The online trial version is a sweet idea although one could say that some connected features and high-score tables (as available on said Facebook app) might add a little more flavour. I suppose any premium PC sales will add incremental revenue. From a mobile game developers’ perspective, it is only one more port after all, a laugh compared to the hundreds and hundreds of handsets that need to be supported.

Well done, guys!