Mobitrends

When I co-founded Kamayo in 2005 (which was acquired by Streamezzo), we did most of our mobile services based on the Streamezzo technology which was and still is the only one able to provide a full framework enabling mobile developers to create applications that work on *a lot* of mobile devices and even low-ends…
The technology has matured a lot over the years and now it obviously can be brought to the “masses” of developers. To do that and to animate this community of experts Streamezzo just announced today at Mobile World Congress the launch of their developer program at http://developer.streamezzo.com where you can get the SDK and learn your way through the Streamezzo tools and language.

Freely downloadable, the Streamezzo SDK includes; Streamezzo Workbench (authoring tool based on the Eclipse IDE), Streamezzo Rich Media Server Developer Edition (J2EE compliant mobile application server), Streamezzo Components Library (Music and Video Players, RSS Reader, Picture Slide Show…), Streamezzo GUI Toolkit (Carousels, progress bars, animations…).

I haven’t been talking about Flash Lite for quite some time for a very simple reason, imho the subject is boring. Let me explain :

• Flash Lite covers only a very little amount of terminals mostly Windows Mobile 5&6 or Symbian series 60
• Flash Lite only worked as a solid use case in Japan on the Symbian platform to feature idle screen animations and tiny games
• The player is poorly integrated to the mobile phone platform and thus gives very little interactivity to available components such as dialing, text messaging and thus limiting a lot any business logics you would like to get inside your Flash application

The Adobe Mobile Packager is a desktop tool to wrap a SWF application with a player version checker, an icon, and metadata into an installable file for user-friendly discovery on S60 and Windows Mobile devices. The resulting output file is recognizable by S60 (.SIS) and Windows Mobile (.CAB) operating systems, acting essentially like .ZIP or .AIR files

All in all it really doesn’t get me exited, technically this is no big deal, they could have done that for years and it’s just yet another announce trying to convince us that Flash is coming to the mobile like they have been doing for years (at least since 2004 which makes it 5 years) and yet none of the high end devices in my pockets are Flash compliant. And I still wonder how they’re going to manage the complexity of the ecosystem they’re building, this is going to be harder than handling 3 existing platforms (sorry, the Palm Pre doesn’t count until it’s released) which is what they are doing right now…
Adobe, stop talking big about strategy and start getting things done !

I’ve switched since CES to my new Android ADP1 phone (developer’s version of T-Mobile’s G1). Overall I’m really happy with the functionalities built-in, it’s all about productivity and I’ve never been so well connected. The keyboard is a dream and lets you type long emails easily and the notifications and background applications are updating you on a regular basis on your digital updates letting you keep in touch just as conveniently as if you were behind your notebook.
Yet the phone has a lot of defects,
first of all the UI is really crap – once you have tasted at the iPhone splendid and homogeneous UI, you can’t really enjoy Android’s which is totally heterogeneous, with both input mechanisms and look’n'feel varying from one menu to another… not mentioning that application developers are really doing it their own way with no real guidelines to follow…
Seconds come the battery life which is a real issue here, when I turn off all notification and network access, that I give a call or two (below 20 mins), I get far less then 24hrs uptime. And when I fire up notifications and network access I just get a couple of hours of uptime, this is TRAGIC!

Don’t know if it’s the software itself that is so young or the fact that I have a developer phone, but this is really a pain, hopefully I’ve got a 1m-long USB cable but that’s not gonna last.
Last but not least : when I install an app it goes in the main phone memory – unfortunately there is little place left there (opposed to the sd-card which has about 1Go of free memory)… still haven’t found a way to move applications to that memory and get rid of the “low memory” notification…. Actually I found a hack explaining how to reformat and hack the OS to have this done, why should I have to bother doing that ?
Update : After updating to firmware 1.1 battery lifespan seems back to something normal for a smartphone (It lasts throughout the full day) – YAY!

Just got my Android g1 dev phone and having a little fun getting to know the device and the OS. As you can see on the screenshot I already started downloading too many apps… First impressions : the “notification” feature is killer – I like being updated in real time about what’s happening on my social network – but regular sync *does* drain battery pretty fast…

As I was booking a Taxi (yeah in France you do that, there’s no way to go on the street and just happen to find one…) just realized that taxisG7 (the leader in Paris) is now providing a cool iPhone webapp to book a Taxi. Can defintly be useful, too bad though it doesn’t take advantage of the built-in GPS. If you already have an account on their service, then go directly with your iPhone to www.taxisg7.fr/mobile. It’s really amusing to see non-tech industries getting into mobile apps (although Taxis have become pretty high tech over those years…). Can’t wait to be able to reserve a good baguette from the nearby bakery and be warned when it is just getting out of the oven – just baked baguettes are the best!

Just received this email from Google’s Eric Chu as an Android Marketplace member:

Android Market will become available to users to download apps in additional European countries starting early Q1 2009. Some of the countries we will initially support are Germany, Austria, Czech Republic and the Netherlands. As we add support for additional countries in Europe and Asia, we will send out subsequent notifications to you. (…)

Additionally, I would like to confirm that Android Market will support priced applications starting early Q1 2009, as we’d originally stated last fall. Given the country-by-country work required to set up payment support for developers in different countries, we will enable priced app support in Q1 for developers operating in these countries in the following order: (1) United States and UK; (2) Germany, Austria and Netherlands; (3) France, Italy and Spain.

Two excellent news opening a new direction for business opportunities and that should energize the entrepreneurs reading this blog !

Btw, so excited, I’m getting y development G1 phone next week to try out this field (2009 starts geeky!)

The last 6 months have been really exciting in the mobile ecosystem field, and the next 12 month will be, in my opinion, totally changing the landscape as we know it.

First of all, phones are getting way better from a hardware point of vue, which mean that even entry-level phones start having really powerful processors and screens are also improving. This is a major organic trend leveraging on natural chipset and components cost reductions.
Along with that hardware evolution, usage of the mobile phone is getting much more mature and now goes beyond voice calls and texting. While using a mobile as a game device has been fast to be accepted, accessign the Internet from one’s mobile does not sound like a crazy nerd idea anymore, and this is mostly thanks to Apple’s strong worldwide Ad presence. Mails and mobile web are now seen as something useful ready to reach the masses.

Thus here comes my first prediction : Even entry level phones (at 1€ with a new contract) will start offering smartphone-like functions such as decent web browsing and emails. Also they will allow high-quality dedicated apps installation as a “first-screen” feature (and not buried in the Application/Java/XXX tree of your phone menu).

The second prediction will have to do with the OSes. Android has finally made its way to a first phone actually on the market since September 2008. Blackberry OS has matured into something more appealing then it ever was. Apple Iphone’s OS is a reference in terms of user interaction and homogeneity, and has defined a new standard for application deliveries through its marketplace. Symbian remains strong and bound to Nokia.

My second prediction is that : Android will enable newcomers in the Phone manufacturing segment to deliver high-quality low-cost hardware and rely on Android for the software thus changing the current balance of power between current vendors and skilled taiwanese/Chinese ODMs. 2009 will see at least ten Android phones coming from totally unknown vendors (at least from the mass market).

My third prediction is that : Windows mobile market share is going to crunch (unless Microsoft really manages to deliver a fast and reactive OS that does not have to live with its history of an early days as a pen-based PDA OS).

My fourth prediction is that : Each OS will bind strongly with one mass market work environment, just as iPhone is bound to iTunes/Mac, Android is bound to google, Windows Mobile to Windows, Blackberry and Symbian will have to take sides and offer out-of-the-box best-in-class support of at least one work environment – and Yahoo! will have to be one of those.

While the first Android phone in the market, the G1, really looked like crap to me, I must confess that this one from the Australian Kogan is pure w00tness. It’s a 3G phone expected to ship January 2009 and retail at about 300USD. Beware though, it has no WiFi and GPS (if you want those add another 100USD to the beast for the pro version)!
I didn’t know the Kogan brand at all and it seems like they are sourcing products from China/Taiwan and just to rebrand and distribute them, which makes me wonder who the real original device manufacturer of the coolest google phone phone I’ve ever seen is (not so much competition here)?

Update: Ok, I must admit I was wrong – I had a g1 in my hands two days ago and while the phone really looks like a brick it’s really far from it! Nice touch, pretty light, nicely finished and awesome screen and keyboard.

After Wildcharge, Psyclone TouchCharge kit is next in line to provide wireless power to mass market consumer applications. While I don’t know precisely which vendor is providing with the actual wireless power technology (both companies are “just” device manufacturers), this reminds me of the awesome powercast demo I had during last year’s CES. Would be curious to know which vendor has now taken the lead over that field.

Update: actually I just met Wildcharge’s CEO and it appears that Psyclone is their first OEM deal – I guess it’s not just for nothing that the technology was so similar …

If you have a cool idea around LBS you want to demonstrate, you really should go there !