webDU fast approaching

I'm sure there'll be some more posting from me as we get closer to the event, but I just wanted to start the ball rolling by bringing the upcoming webDU 2007 conference in Sydney to your attention. This the fifth (or sixth!?) webDU and it keeps getting better every single time.

If you're in the area, or don't mind a long haul flight, there is an amazing spread of speakers from all over the world, including Australia, New Zealand, US, UK and the Netherlands. Topics being covered include Flash, Flex, Cold Fusion, Web2.0, CSS, Flash Lite, Apollo, Acrobat , CMS and many more. It really is a very well rounded presentation of what's going on out there right now - and not just from Adobe.

On the Flash Lite front, myself and Jesse Warden will be presenting sessions, plus I'll be giving a Day Zero full day training session on Flash Lite 2.1. Another Flash Lite'r, Weyert de Boer is presenting a session called "Leveraging the Apollo Runtime".

This year Moket is also a Bronze Sponsor of the conference, which I'm very happy about. This will be my fourth conference, and third as a presenter. It's a great thing to be associated with something so highly regarded in the developer community, and to have that association grow over time. I'm also very happy that my session is on Day One this year ... in past years the Microsoft open-bar on the first night has left attendees a little "muddle headed" the next day :)

I'll be posting regularly from the conference of course, but if you're keen then tickets are still available and going fast.

Moket Site Update

I've just done a quick freshen up on the Moket site, with some screen shots from a couple of new games we're launching shortly - Dizzy Zub Zub and Wire3. Gotta get rid of that headshot of me though with something a bit cooler!

Flash Lite Comp Reminder

The deadline for the Flash Lite competition we're running in conjunction with other mobile user groups is coming up at the end of Feb. We're starting to get more entries now that it's getting close, so make sure you get your entry in soon! Full details are here.

Porting J2ME to Flash Lite

Mariam from Indiagames has a new article on Adobe Mobile Dev Cente, all about porting J2ME content to Flash Lite. Indiagames have a large catalogue of Java content, and in her article, Mariam talks about a real world example of her team porting some of that to Flash Lite. Well worth a read.

Touchscreen from hell

via Wayne ... this may have made it's way around the blogosphere before, I seem to remember someone talking about the interface from Minority Report becoming a reality, but thought it would be worth posting about. This is like the upcoming iPhone Multi-Touch touchscreen interface on steroids ...

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid271543545/bctid422563006

200 Million devices and counting

Adobe say that 200 million devices have shipped now with Flash Lite, and there are now 300 device models out there.

That's a lot of phones ... getting to some kind of level now where the numbers start to stack up for clients. Noice.

New Flash Lite News

'Tis the season for new announcements! Don't you love it when a big conference rolls around and all the big boys who have been saving up their fireworks let them all out of the bag. Well 3GSM has started with a bang, with the announcemnt first of Flash Lite 3. The new release is centered around the support for FLV - Flash Video. This means that your FL content will be ableto work in with Flash Media Server and other streaming services, plus leverage the massive amount of FLV content that is in the market these days (anyone heard of a little site called YouTube?).

Flash Home is the other "product" that was unveiled - a customisable Flash Lite home screen for your device. This is a white label product that is pitched for carriers, MVNO's, etc. Some of the key features are:

• Flexible, data-enabled home screens
• On-device catalog for easy discovery, preview, and management of home screens
• Support for rich media, including FLV files, text, audio, and vector graphics
• Over-the-air updates of branded user interfaces
• Extensible architecture
• Powerful mobile authoring capabilities

I'm sure there'll be more coming soon! Stay tuned party people ...

The Google Monster

Google has reported more than a billion dollars in profit in the final quarter of 2006, beating the market's high expectations for the superstar internet search engine.

If anyone had doubts that another tech boom was on it's way, perhapd they should think again. In fact maybe it's already here? The big boys just keep getting bigger ... maybe this time the bubble won't burst so dramatically.

Read article here

Some new Flash Lite sites and blogs

Some new Flash Lite sites popping up around the place :

• Indian Mobile and Devices Usergroup - IndiMaD
• Mariam Dholkawala from Indiagames has a new blog
• Dimitri in Russia has a new Flash Lite related blog