Jim Morris, Macromedia Flashcast
Track: Untethered
Date: Tuesday, February 10
Time: 11:45am - 12:30pm
Location: California Ballroom C
TrackBack
In the history of technology and media, from the movies to the mainframes
and now to mobile, the first applications always visit the old presentation
paradigms onto new technologies. For some reason, folks invent a great new
vehicle for media transmission and display, and their first inclination is
to transmit and display the old stuff in the old way! With movies, it was
filming a theatre production, complete with proscenium arch. With
mainframes, what happened with the advent of the CRT? The IBM CP/67
operating system included virtual card punches and card readers, so now you
could use the CRT to emulate cardboard with holes in it! And when mobile
phones came out -- with the ability to broadcast or narrowcast data to
people, what paradigm was used? WAP, which tried to emulate the browser on a
4 by 20 WAP screen, and has been a pretty big yawn in the wireless data space.
But there are examples where doing a new thing has made all the difference.
Look at TV, for instance. Interactive TV has been pretty unsuccessful for
the past ten years, while Satellite TV has had an amazing ride. People don't
want to interact with TV, but they sure do like to choose between lots of
channels that are being fed to them.
Same with Mobile. WAP has been a failure -- people just don't want to type
and hunt for information on a phone -- they want a mobile service where "the
information finds them."
Macromedia FlashCast is a new mobile service for content providers,
consumers, and carriers. Consumers want a mobile service with accessible
channels of information that flow directly to them in real time.
FlashCast is based on Macromedia Flash, which boasts an existing community
of designers and developers. Content providers already proficient in
Macromedia Flash can develop content and applications for FlashCast using
the same authoring tool they use for their web content. Macromedia has
created a business model that ensures the content providers can benefit
financially from their content and FlashCast provides a "canvas" of
magnitude more creative than a 4 by 20 WAP screen.
This talk explains how all of this works, and how everyone can
use FlashCast to produce and/or consume up-to-date and "TV-like" graphically-rich information delivered by FlashCast directly to the phone.
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