ustwo, one of our sponsors (and main providers of tasty beverages and pizza's at the meetings)  has won the Sony Ericsson Content Award 2008 for Themes and graphics.

" Most mobile backgrounds are static images that do little more than look pretty. This year’s winner of the Themes & Graphics category of the Sony Ericsson Content Awards offers backgrounds that have both beauty and brains.

Flashion is the name given to ustwo™ created Flash Lite wallpapers. Flash Lite is a medium that allows us to create Premium wallpapers with intelligent triggers. For example - time of day change, battery indicator, music mode, charging animations, accelerometer controlled graphics."

Congratulations to the whole team, and great news to see Flash lite content starting to make serious waves.

Mobile Design UK aims to provide an open forum for UK designers working with mobile technologies to share knowledge, encourage exploration of technologies, tools and ideas, and showcase the UK as an influential hub of mobile design to the world.

They had their first meeting on the 3rd of december, which unfortunately i was unable to make,as it sounds like they had a great line up of speakers.

Tom Jenkins, Nokia Design, gave some insights into Nokia’s working processes; Ali Driver of Trutap confessed an aversion to wireframes and Visio whilst talking about rapid prototyping in Flash Lite; Mathias Dahlstrom of Lastminute.com Labs discussed the challenges of internationalization in the mobile application ‘fonefood’, and Jaeseung Chang, Flirtomatic, discussed how it really is possible to do inhouse usability testing without a huge budget.

As well as the main site @ http://mobiledesign.org.uk/, they also run an active discussion group on Yahoo!

Looking forward to the next meeting in february :)

Thanks to all of you that attended the eSeminar, we hope you found it informative and were excited to hear about the new features and announcements we made on the night.

To give you a brief overview of the main announcements made :

• No more appZone on lauch
• Launch country expansion - UK and India added to launch date
• Aggregator Expansion
• New mobile site @ m.adobe.com
• New secuirity model for 3.1 + other features

For full details, view the recording here

Also , there were a couple of questions at the end, which i promised i would follow up on. As i don't have the email addresses for everyone, i have posted them below. To view them, click on more....  (below the image)

The Family @ ustwo™ are expanding again, and are looking for another Flash Master™ to join them making some of the most cutting edge mobile content on the market today. As well as working on amazing projects for big brand names, the ideal candidate would help develop a wide range of internal applications and content.

For full details and requirements, check out the job post on the jobboard by clicking here

Adobe is opening up the  RTMP specification (a protocol used extensively for delivering data and services via the Flash Platform) as part of the new Open Screen Project .

in 2007 Adobe announced enhanced support for FLV video within the flash lite 3.1 Distributable Player, which includes new API's for video smoothing, seek and enhanced buffer support to name a few.

"2009 really should be a huge year for video on multiple screens and I think this announcement will serve us all very well in years to come." M. Doherty

for Mark's post , follow this link.

You can also get more detailed information from Ryan Stewart’s blog

Can't wait to see what else the Open Screen Project has instore for us :)

The Boston Adobe Mobile and Device User Group is holding an eSeminar on January 29th, 2009 at 12pm EST (check your time), Bill Scott will present GetJar and their Flash Lite content distribution solution.

Use this url: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/getjar/ to enter the eSeminar on Jan 29th.

Looks like next week will be a good one for Flash Lite related eSeminars!

On the 28th January 09, @ 5pm GMT we will be holding the first eSeminar meeting for the UK Adobe mobile and devices usergroup this year.

Myself and Stuart Varrall will be speaking about the upcoming Flash Lite distributable Player, and how it will affect the flashlite developers in the UK.

We will be going into a bit more detail on how it works, sharing some of adobe's road map for this initiative, and showing you some interesting data on current flash lite usage in the UK market.

Please join the group if you haven't already, and we will be posting details of the link closer to the time.

Looks like LG has released some more info on their handset Flash Lite implementation. Their new developer portal has launched and they have posted "Flash Lite Developer Guides for LG Phones V.1.1", a light weight pdf that contains some tips and tricks for designing and developing flash content. The tips and tricks are pretty much a repeat of the standard guidelines from adobe, but the really interesting info is the device list with supported content types.

Grab the pdf for here

Visit the LG developer center here

It would be interesting to hear feedback from anyone with these devices, as i have used the KF700, and although the handset supports wallpaper, it only allows content from a trusted folder to be used, and this folder is inaccessible to the user. I posted full details of this on my personal blog, click here to read it.

Admob has just released their mobile statistics for november, and have highlighted a few points:

• For this month's feature, we look at the growing mobile web and application usage on WiFi networks in the US and UK. Not surprisingly, the iPhone is at the forefront of this trend and recently launched smartphones such as the G1 and BlackBerry Bold suggest that WiFi traffic will continue to grow in the coming months. Mobile devices that aren't phones (e.g. Sony PSP, iPod Touch) are also generating significant traffic on WiFi.
• In the US, 8 percent of total requests in November were on WiFi networks, up from 3 percent in August. 42 percent of iPhone requests are made from WiFi, notably higher than most other WiFi capable phones which average between 10-20 percent. iPhone WiFi usage is generally higher on iPhone specific sites and applications than on normal mobile sites.
• The UK has seen a similar increase in the amount of WiFi traffic and requests from WiFi capable devices. 8 percent of UK requests in November were on WiFi networks, up from 4 percent in August. After the iPhone and iPod Touch, the Nokia N95 and other N series phones are the leading WiFi devices in the UK.
• The G1 (HTC Dream) generated 15 million requests in November and already represents 7 percent of all T-Mobile traffic. Android had a 2% share of smartphone operating system traffic in the US.

It is interesting that large numbers for smartphone users are now using using wifi networks to connect to the net. If this trend increases significantly, the kind of media rich mobile applications that can be developed becomes very exciting. Higher quality streaming video & sound and no worries about longer connection times with more data passed, as the wifi network erases the data cost issues of connecting via the network. Maybe more applications will start to be developed with a 'network' and 'wifi' mode built in....

Click the full article & link to the stats.

via biskero,

Adobe has uploaded 2 training video's on their devnet site : Flashlite 1.1 video training & FlashCast video Training.

"Adobe Flash Cast is a rich offline portal solution that delivers engaging, branded mobile experiences across handsets and platforms. Adopted by leading operators like Verizon Wireless, Flash Cast enables compelling, easy-to-discover data services."

check them both out here

There is a new job opportunity available on the Job board. One of our sponsers, ustwo™ , is looking to take on a Flash Master to help them develop cutting edge mobile content. The position is based in london, or malmo in Sweden.

for full info on the job, and candidate requirments, check out the post on the job board here

Also, if you have any job vacancies you would like filling, feel free to contact me with the details and i can add them to the jobs board for you. ( this is a free service, available to all group members)

Some of the sessions from MAX in SF are starting to appear on Adobe Tv.

Click here to view 'How to build a mobile business' , a presentation with Mads Djurhuus from little big ideas, where he speaks about the nuts and bolts of getting paid for creating your mobile content.

Adobe MAX Milan 2008-12-04

Summary

Adobe MAX Milan was a great event, and allowed an indepth insight into Adobe’s roadmap for the future of their technologies and how this can be utilized to extend and develop cutting edge applications on both the Mobile and Web platforms. There was a large focus on Mobile technologies this year, as well as RIA (rich internet Applications) for the desktop.

Hopefully, we will also have 1 billion flash lite enabled devices by  end 2009

Come and join the Adobe Mobile and devices team for a Birds of a Feather session on everything mobile and flash lite @ MAX Milan. From 6.30pm till 7.30 pm in room Yellow 1, we will be having an informal, fun and open discussion of mobile technology and  some drinks and refreshments.

For those of you that have not attended a birds of a feather session before,
it is a informal group meeting of people interested in Mobile , where a
number of topics are put forward for a group discussion, and you get a
chance to meet members of the mobile and devices community, as well as Mark Doherty, Mobile developer manger , EMEA.

Topics highlighted for discussion are :

* flash lite and c++ integration
* Project capuchin for Sony ericcson devices
* Discussion around the new flashlite distributable player + packaging.
* how are people making money from mobile?
* And many more

We will also be giving out some great Adobe Swag, so mark this event in your
diary! No need to register, just show up @ Yellow Room 1 at 6.30pm on monday night.

Look forward to seeing you all there!