RINGTONES

MOBILE DEVELOPER TOOLS AND TOYS

This week Adobe announced the availability of Adobe® AIR™ and Adobe® Flex® 3 software which combine to create a technology platform for enabling rich Internet applications (RIAs). The importance of RIA's, a term Adobe coined several years ago, is the promise in the near term to eliminate the usability and functionality boundaries between desktop and web applications. And more importantly for the long term, RIA's promise to eliminate those same boundaries between mobile, desktop and web applicaitons. The concept of coding an application once and deploying it everywhere, seamlessly running it as a web application, desktop application and a mobile application is quickly becoming a reality. Microsoft has released a competing technology Microsoft® Silverlight™.

Continue reading "Code Once Deploy Everywhere with Adobe Flex 3 and AIR "

Posted by Avo Reid at 11:02 PM  Permalink |

In the fragmented market of mobile devices the decision about which device to support can be the most important one a mobile developer will ever make. As if in response to the increasing fragmentation of the market (or in response to a growing business opportunity), a number of vendors are introducing products that claim to make the decision of which target device to support an easy one, just support them all by using their technology.

Continue reading "Device Advice from AOL"

Posted by Avo Reid at 05:46 AM  Permalink |

Linux will become one of the leading mobile platforms by 2012 when it is expected to be running on more than 127 million mobile phones, up from 8.1 million in 2007 according to ABI Research. Another 76 million units will be deployed as real-time operating system replacements for devices up from nearly 0 in 2007. So carriers worldwide will support these major mobile operating systems -- iPhone, MS Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian, Linux, and Palm OS. Linux is a popular mobile OS in China and Japan but has small market share everywhere else including North America.

Continue reading "Mobile Linux ...The Other OS"

Posted by Avo Reid at 10:07 PM  Permalink |

Not to be outdone by Bill Gates prediction of the "Second Digital Decade", Intel CEO Paul Otellini outlined his company's vision during Monday's keynote at the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas.

Otellini told the crowd that today we live in the age of the "go to PC". Today if you want to find a piece of information on the internet you first go to a PC, then you go to a search engine and the you go to to yet another site and hopefully you finally find what you were looking for in the first place. In this model the Internet reacts to our requests rather than anticipating them, the next generation of the internet changes that model. Otellini argues that the Internet is now at an inflexion point, poised to evolve from a responsive cloud that answers user's queries into something personal, predictive, proactive and context aware. It will serve you by bringing you what you want, when you want, how you want, and wherever you are. Instead of having to "search" for information in the near future the internet will actually "reach out to you" in anticipation of your request.

Continue reading "More from CES 2008"

Posted by Avo Reid at 08:55 PM  Permalink |

For the last 2 days there has been a flood of mobility news and announcements coming out of the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas (January 7 - 10). I was amazed at the number of YouTube videos alone that were available on day 1, I didn't count but it seemed like thousands. CES 2008 is the largest in history. With 2,700 companies spanning 1.85 million net square feet of exhibit space, it can only be described as an amazing, global event.

It started with Bill Gates giving his eleventh and final keynote address Sunday evening. In his presentation, Gates described the coming "Second Digital Decade" (D2). We just blew through the "First Digital Decade" which Gates described as "fantastically successful". During that decade, the PC install base topped one billion machines, broadband reached over 250 million users, 40 percent of worlds population was using mobile phones, film became obsolete with the introduction of digital photos and music...well we all know what has happened to music.

Continue reading "CES 2008 and The Second Digital Decade "

Posted by Avo Reid at 04:00 PM  Permalink |

More than 80 percent of Americans now carry a mobile device, a device that is described by Jupiter Research Analyst Neil Strother as "a potential advertising channel in their pocket". With such a huge market many now believe that mobile advertising is ready to explode. eMarketer in their "Mobile Brand Advertising" report analyzes the still-developing marketing opportunities of the mobile medium. According to the report the global budget devoted to mobile brand advertising will rise to $3.5 billion in 2011, up from $123 million in 2006.

Continue reading "Mobile Advertising Up Up and Evidently Still Annoying"

Posted by Avo Reid at 01:10 PM  Permalink |

If you have been on the fence about the impact mobile devices will have on learning, and you don't believe the market demographic data about the baby boomers leaving the learning space to the masses of the millennial generation...than read this. Recently the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI) was named one of the world's most significant information technology projects of the past year, according to CIO Magazine's 20 the annual CIO 100 awards competition.

The award specifically cited an initiative which promoted widespread use of iPod as a teaching tool that contained content that addressed dorm life, campus activities, community events, health and safety related contact information, and details about freshmen residence halls. The DDI has also paved the way for students to download the course lectures and materials to listen to and study at any time Faculty members use the iPod to reinforce course content and collect feedback using surveys and quizzes.

Speeches, lectures, news, music and more are available from iTunes at Duke University carrying the tag line "Learn with Duke. Any time. Anywhere." If you don't know about the iTunes U it is a dedicated area within the iTunes Store featuring free content such as course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours provided by top US colleges and universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University and MIT.

Continue reading "Listen to Learning"

Posted by Avo Reid at 10:42 PM  Permalink |

Late this year SnapTell, the leading image-recognition based mobile marketing solution provider, entered into a partnership with iLoop Mobile, the leading mobile services and technology provider for interactive mobile marketing, mobile advertising and mobile content distribution. The partnership offers mobile marketers the ability to engage consumers in interactive opt-in mobile marketing campaigns and services.

The way it works is innovative and simple. The really important feature is no software downloads necessary, making the technology accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. The mobile user simply snaps a picture of an ad using their phone and sends the picture to an address provided in the ad. The image is recieved at SnapTell and matched to a marketing campaign image, once the marketing campaign is identified the campaign content stored in iLoop's Mobile mFinity™ platform is retrieved and optimized for the handheld device and sent in a message back to the user. The content, as in any marketing campaign, might contain more information about the product in the ad, special discounts ad offers, where to buy etc.

Continue reading "Show and Tell - A Physical World Connection Twist"

Posted by Avo Reid at 11:28 AM  Permalink |

The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in the October 2004 12.10 issue of Wired Magazine which later became a book "The Long Tail - Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More".

The term "long tail" is the common name used by statisticians for the appearance of some statistical distributions when graphed. As a simple example think of a graph with Sales on the Y-axis and Products on the X-axis. The tail is created by graphing the most popular products with the highest sales to the left of the graph nearest the Y-axis, followed by products that have lower and lower sales, gradually tailing off to very small sales to the right of the graph. The resulting graph line resembles a tail and the area under the graph resembles the cross section of a great sledding hill. The interesting thing is that in many cases the low sales products, those making the tail long make up the majority of the graph line, and they make up the bulk of the hill, which means that the majority of the total sales comes from these low sales products.

The theory of the Long Tail according to Chris Anderson "is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail."

So what does this mean for mobile video? Today video is streamed down to mobile devices and must be targeted to the device and format supported by the device. This means that media companies and application developers developing video content for mobiles devices must be very concerned about the complexities of delivering mobile video. The complexity increases exponentially due to the variety of end-user devices, each with their own unique screen size, resolution, bit-rate and supported codecs. This may seem surprising since it is pretty seemless to watch different video formats on your PC, but mobile devices are not as sophisticated in their video capabilities.

In fact the problem is more pronounced for mobile device makers, the explosion of user-generated video (UGV) on the internet is forecast by IDC to grow to 4.8 million uploads per day by 2011, with more than 7,000 terabytes per day of internet video traffic in the US alone. UGV is certainly at the long end of the tail.

Continue reading "The Long Tail and Video To Go"

Posted by Avo Reid at 04:49 PM  Permalink |

In my post "Physical World Connections, is this the tipping point?" I discussed the fast approaching clickable world. An almost science fiction world in which you could click on physical objects around you like you click on hyperlinks on the internet, with the same effect. Well now according to Dennis Hettema, founder & creative director at ShotCode.com, the industry "has been like a slumbering volcano for the last three years and now it is ready to explode”.

Continue reading "Clickable World Update"

Posted by Avo Reid at 04:32 PM  Permalink |