Pocket Flash

It’s official, Mobisite is being developed on Rails. In fact it’s being built on one of Media Temple’s shinny new Grid Containers

In short
Ruby on Rails Rocks
David Heinemeier Hansson is a legend in his own lifetime
(just don’t tell him I delevloped early parts of Mobisite in a live production environment… well you can’t pull a feed from a Rails app onto a mobile unless it’s on a server, I really had no choice)
Mobisite is mobile blogging, by mobile users, for mobile users.

“What is Flash Home and who is it for?
Flash Home is a solution for the creation, discovery, and delivery of rich, Flash based home screens across multiple devices. The solution benefits mobile operators and OEMs alike.
Sold as a white-label solution to mobile operators, Flash Home combines customizable home screens with live data services to provide subscribers with a personalized, engaging experience. Flash Home is easy to promote, discover, and use and provides operators with an opportunity to both extend their brand and generate new revenue opportunities.”

I always wondered how Adobe managed to receive incoming sms notification, and call logs when there is nothing in any of the Flash Lite 1.x and 2.x documents, shown in this MAX 2005 video (Day two mobile UI - Josh Ulm)

News from 3GSM is that Flash Lite 3.0 is on it’s merry way.

The main focus of the press release is video, with the .flv format in particular “delivered by the Adobe Flash Media Server”. You could speculate other potential opportunities, such as multiuser environments that would open up all kinds of intersting avenues for developers, though we’ll just have to wait and see.

Tomi T Ahonen does an amazing job on adding context to the shear volume of mobile phone users there are today. I’ve stripped out the list for those who fall asleep after reading more than ten words.

THE CAR AT 800 M
TELEPHONE 1.3 B
TV 1.5 B
CREDIT CARDS 1.4 B
PC 850 M
INTERNET 1.1 B
THE GOLIATH, MOBILE PHONES 2.7 B

For the Flash Lite developer, or anyone who has attempted to sell Flash Lite as a concept to any client, the crunch always comes when the client asks “so how many phones will this work on”. You see if you said 17, as it is today (or back in 2004 when it was 2 devices and only if they had T-mobiles newsExpress) then your client may loose interest fast, which has been the case on more than one occasion. But if you include that if they managed to get their content in front of just 1% of mobile phone users, then they would be looking at 27,000,000 units, then you can start to make some headway.

It’s this kind of information / ammunition that helps us educate clients about the position of Flash Lite content within the “mobile eco system”, so that they will be comfortable enough to allow you to take their brand / product onto mobile devices.