Mobitween bought by Zed

Every reader of this blog will have realized for some time that I am a fan of mobile Flash and the good folks at Mobitween (just see here and here), the mobile Flash pioneers from Paris. And, boy, would I have wanted to work with them some more but, alas, it seems this will remain wishful thinking as they have been the first prey of D2C giant's Zed M&A fund: yes, they have been acquired.

The deal - unfortunately for me, I guess - makes a lot of sense to Zed, who have been raising their revenue numbers to heights so dizzying they would nearly make the initial investments comprehensible... (if only the initial investors had seen anything of that success; but well...): Zed famously claims to make up to 85% of their revenue with

 predominantly in-house produced generic content, and when it comes to speed and efficiency, mobile flash in general and the guys at Mobitween in particular have no match.

So, well done them, and let's hope Flash will continue to roll as it started to promise, so that we can all marvel at dramatically reduced time to market and, consequently, hopefully a vastly improved content offering all around (oh, and buy Zed shares if you can).

Adobe Flash Opens Screens

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

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...

Flash or Silverlight or both?

Microsoft scored an important success with a recently announced a deal that will see its Flash competitor Silverlight (with the most Apple-esque logo ever issued in Redmond) installed on the mighty Nokia's s60 and - low-end - s40 devices (or multimedia terminals as the good folks from Finland like their posher phones to be called). Interestingly of course, Nokia also embeds Adobe's Flash Lite... Tasty!

Now, is Silverlight really this good? Or is it only another product the people from Microsoft thought they should have on their shelves (arguably not being too happy that Adobe carved out for itself a nice niche for some)? I don't know and I won't be able to answer that without embarrassing myself. So: the news tonight is simply that Nokia is a good catch for Microsoft. And, now, the weather...

One small piece of advice to MS though: choose your showcase sites carefully. The Yugoslav maker of one of them (I don't really know what they're doing) does not really offer the latest and greatest in web design and functionality...

Convergence in games

It's been the buzz for some time but no one had, with few exceptions, been seeing too much of it but now it seems to start taking off: cross-platform convergence of games. It is a bit of a holy grail: the network operators (or carriers) are not always the most creative and daring bunch when it comes to trying things out and they take a very healthy cut of the revenues from a tough, fragmented and still relatively small market. No wonder then that a lot of people are praying for alternative solutions. But, alas, it never really worked: every games publisher will tell you that, other than for music, wallpapers, etc, the direct-to-consumer model never really worked for games; the operators dominate the space as the, by far, most important distribution channels.

This could be, one thinks, overcome when more users would actually get themselves familiar with the games in a less constrained environment, the web being an immediate answer. Many have tried, many have failed (even the superstars of mobile games, Gameloft, stopped their in-house offering). But, hey, maybe it was just the wrong approach. Trip Hawkins' brainchild Digital Chocolate showed with their approach to their award-winning game TowerBloxx how it can also be done: they created a Facebook app and an online Flash version of the game that have been roaring successes: allegdely, the Flash game saw more than 10 million plays to date and the Facebook app has had 430,000 lifetime users. For a property that sprung from mobile, these are very respectable numbers indeed. And whilst I have no idea if it actually helped selling more games (300,000 clicked the "buy now" button but, for some odd reason, they don't know how many actually bought it), it will have played its part to keeping the game in the front of people's minds - and that's half the work done, isn't it?

Other players are onto it, too: online gaming giant Oberon Media bought mobile publisher I-Play last year in order to offer a more comprehensive line-up across media boundaries. Real is doing similar things. It is probably only a question of time before EA connects its pogo.com online destination with its mobile titles. I also know of quite a few smaller developers that start to very actively incorporate the multi-platform into their game design and development considerations. Very encouraging, that is!

And it makes so much sense of course: handsets get more and more powerful, the garden walles gardens start to come down with flat-rate data plans for mobiles becoming more and more the rule: all in all, a perfect runway for the ascent of convergent media consumption.

Now let's add (mobile) Flash to the equation, and things could become very interesting indeed... (and, yes, I know, we may not yet have the install base but it's getting there...)

Games 2.0: UGG (or user-generated games)

The wonderful guys from French Flash specialists Mobitween launched a user-generated-games portal called ugenGames. Here's the PR blurb: "The site invites players, developers and designers to create, upload, customise and share web and mobile Flash-based games. It also offers the chance to personalise and share games with others players by embedding them into social websites such as Facebook and MySpace or blogs like Blogger and Wordpress."

Mobitween's CEO, Philippe Chassany, reckons that this approach "bridges the gap between web and mobile game developers and players allowing them to create, customise, embed and share an endless library of games".

The concept is intriguing: basic casual game engines that can - because all done in Flash - be easily customized even by amateurs. Moreover: as the creator can adapt screen sizes, you can also choose to have it output in Flash Lite flavour - suitable for higher-end mobile phones! It is a rather sweet accompaniment to the 2.0 revolution.

However, will Flash Lite become J2ME's nemesis and revolutionize mobile gaming? Probably not just yet but the potential would certainly appear to be there: with over 200m enabled devices it is no match to the other technologies around but it is reaching a size where development for it might make a lot of sense: it is faster and cheaper than J2ME or BREW (last but not least because the porting nightmare falls away due to the vector-graphics approach used by Flash). Given that the limitations of input via mobile handsets limit the complexity of game play anyhow, the inherent limitations of Flash might not actually be too much of an impediment. Interesting...