Apr

30

Ever notice how most news is negative? Well not this post! Over the past few days there has been some extrememly GOOD news being posted about the mobile space. My last post noted that Microsoft is on a hiring spree regarding their mobile division. Nokia always has positions open. Macromedia has a few positions as well. The BBC posted an article yesterday titled “Boom time back in mobile market.” A new study says that wireless internet use is growing. More mobile devices are being sold than PCs. Game companies are finding profit in creating mobile business units. Mobile versions of Web sites are coming online. New mobile services are coming online. Competition in the market place is starting to even out. There is so much going on. 3G is still coming. Cameraphones are selling like hot cakes. SMS is catching on. MMS is catching on. Software is being developed. This is such a hallelujah post. TGIF!

Apr

27

Microsoft has a number of new job postings for their mobile division. Everything from testing to engineering. Looks like things are exciting there right now. Wish I lived in Redmond!!

Microsoft’s mobile efforts are also in the news today because of a research firms new report that according to their analysis, they think Symbian will maintain market share lead until 2010. I’m not so sure I agree. I really like my MS phones. I think enterprises will like MS over Symbian as well. MS is just able to offer more features and benefits if the enterprise is running Windows on their workstations. But that firm could be right. I just think they are being a little overdramatic with the 2010 number. I see MS making some inroads into the market share over the next year.

Apr

22

Bill makes note of a new Developer Center article written by Juha Christensen, President, Mobile and Devices Macromedia, Inc. In it Juha speaks about what FlashCast is and its impact on the industry. During the last 3GSM conference in Europe, Macromedia gave sneak peeks of what FlashCast can do. Apparently, in order to demo the product, they set up channels of content pertaining to the conference. These channels were then updated with relevant content for the day, along with a note from Juha. This gives a little more information as to how FlashCast works. As I’ve noted earlier FlashCast is built on top of the Flash Lite version of the Flash Player. Macromedia will develop a UI (maybe for each carrier that signs on), and the UI will contain channels of content. Channels are just like TV channels. They are labeled with appropriate titles and inside will be content, just like TV shows on a TV channel. The shows will be made in Flash. It sounds like the channel lineup and the shows will be downloaded and cached to the device during times of connectivity. No going to find content, instead it will be pushed to the phone. I like this for entertainment and news. Finding mobile content is very hard to do currently. Problem with this method is paying for that unknown amount of data. I think this is going to be the hard sell to the carriers. Users may get confused on how much it is going to cost because they won’t be aware as to how much maybe downloaded and cached in the background. Details aren’t known and I’m sure Macromedia has already covered this concern. The content shown in the article looks great. Awesome looking for mobile phone content. Of course this is going to require a higher end phone. But soon the mass majority phones will pick up in speed and storage. FlashCast looks promising. I can’t wait to build something for it.

Apr

13

With my recent move back to the midwest I’ve missed the meet and greets of San Francisco and even Cincinnati. I like having other developers to geek out with face to face rather than everything being through email or IM. Lately I’ve been learning everything I can about the .NET CF. I have it installed on my Pocket PC Phone finally and want to build a few things. It would be nice to have some local folks to show things to and get ideas from. So luckily for me I was checking out blogmap and found Adam Kinney’s blog here in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Adam had a link to the NUFW. Curiously I looked and it is a .NET User Group for Ft. Wayne. Great! I’m a member and should be able to attend the next event. This is great. Who would have thunk that in this mid-sized midwestern town there would be an advanced technology group like this. This brightens my day for sure.

Apr

12

I’ve been reading John’s blog for years now, it’s hard to remember when it actually went up. But I continue to read it because he is clear, concise, and stays on topic. Clearly he works for Macromedia, but also highlights other brilliant technologies and movements from other people. Well on Friday he made a post about FlashCast. FlashCast is one technology that I am really looking forward to knowing more about it. It is built on Flash Lite. That is cool. It has this whole business model, which is what attracted me to Central in the first place. I was more curious about Central on devices rather than on the desktop, but hopefully that will come soon. FlashCast just seems like an amazing opportunity for Macromedia. The mobile device world just doesn’t have a rich client/server development model yet. Well not counting .NET CF, since the phones are not widely deployed. Even so. FlashCast is different because it sounds like it is going to integrate into the carriers networks. This could be a great thing and it could be a complete nightmare. Regardless, let’s give FlashCast a try. I can’t wait to see more about how people like myself can really build and deploy FlashCast content. I’m already working on some .NET CF examples and have a whole mobile content portal system ready to deploy. FlashCast sounds like the next evolution forward. Hopefully Macromedia can delpoy FlashCast sooner rather than later. Thanks for the post JD, it’s good to hear the details (even if they may change tomorrow).

Apr

6

It has been ten years since Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain died of either suicide or murder. I was a pretty big fan of Nirvana back during the 90’s and remember exactly where I was when I first heard the news. I’ve remained a big fan and am listening right now. I believe Kurt was really something more to the music industry than some singer of some grunge band that was going to fade out with the era. I still really like the Nirvana sound today, not a lot of artists can pull that off. Anyways, R.I.P Kurt, your music still plays on my PC today and keeps me motivated and inspired; ten years later.

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