Becoming a Forum Nokia Champion

Thanks to Forum Nokia for the privilege of being inducted as a new Forum Nokia Champion. I'm joining the ranks of some very talented Flash Lite guys in the Champion program and hope that being involved here with them will continue to push Flash Lite to the front of the mobile development community. More on this when I start blogging over on the Champion website.

Caption Competition

Here's a snapshot from the live-video-section of my upcoming Lynda.com training title. I have no idea what I was doing, but want to open it up to readers to post their ideas for a caption. So leave a comment on this post (don't forget I get to read them before publishing them!) and the best caption idea will win something cool (just checking with some people as to what I can give away!) ... over to you

Living in America

I've been working in Ventura California for the past week, recording a new upcoming Flash-Lite training title for Lynda.com. It's been a lot of work, but I'm nearly at the end of it all. Which is great, cause when I arrived in the US I came down with a virus, and so I'm sounding a little croaky husky sultry on the recording and my voice doesn't have much left in it :)

Anyway, I just had a bit of a moment yesterday afternoon and I was driving back to the hotel from the studio. I felt like I was in a movie ... the sun setting over the Pacific (wrong way around from where I live), driving along palm-tree-lined-streets in California, a Lou Gramm song ("Just Between You and Me") playing on the 80's radio station - I was expecting to see Arnie (on his lunch break from the Governor's office) and Danny DeVito walking down the sidwalk in matching beige suits and hawaiian shirts ... it was great!

There's certainly a charm to this place which is great to experience (oh, and cheap Chuck Taylor Cons!), but I'm REALLY looking forward to getting home on the weekend and being back with the family. The Lynda.com guys thought have been great in making me feel very at home and looked after, and have helped me produce some good material. Thanks Max, Jen, Megan, Noah, Kali, and everyone else for helping me out this week.

Travel and Recent Events

It's been a little hard to keep on top of everything that's been happening lately, as I've been in the middle of a stretch of Flash Lite related travel.

I've just returned from a few days in Manila, where I was training developers in Flash Lite for the country's largest operator, Globe. This was part of a developer competition they had run and an attempt to start equipping the local developer community with the tools and knowledge they need to begin bringing Flash Lite applications and content to market. Many thanks to "Blue" and the G-Labs team for having me and looking after me while I was there, and also to the attendees of the courses for being great students. Manila turned it on weather-wise while I was there, with 1 typhoon passing by and another 2 waiting out to sea. The rain was so heavy on my second day of training that I had to stop frequently because I was having to shout over the noise of the storm outside! Many class members didn't make it that day either because of flooding and traffic chaos in Manila. I got a chance though to meet up with local FL developer Naz for a coffee and talk all things mobile and Flash. There's some seriously talented guys in the Philippines and I'm hoping we can collaborate with them on some upcoming Flash Lite work.

Next trip this week is to California for a week and half of time dedicated to a new Lynda.com training title. It's a Flash Lite related topic, but more details on that once we have some dates for release, etc.

Then in October I'll be demonstrating Moket's Flash Lite games at the 2008 Nokia Games Summit in Rome, and putting Flash Lite forward as a viable platform for developing mobile games. It'll be interesting to see what conversations I get into with a conference full of Java, Symbian and N-Gage developers!

I think the remainder of this year is going to be very exciting for Flash Lite developers. Moket has some interesting stuff to share over the next couple of months, and of course MAX is coming up in November. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen's recent keynote at CTIA (available now on You Tube thanks to Bill) also gave some insights into where Adobe are pushing Flash Lite and the Flash platform in general.

So stay tuned, and I'll try and post from some of these exoctic locations I'll be visiting over the next few months. And in case you're wondering, Moket only flys me economy class so I'm not the jet-setting executive that all this travel might lead you to believe! Although, with all the frequent flyer miles I'm accruing, I did get enough points on the Manila trip to get access to Singapore Airline's Gold Lounge ... free food and drinks and comfortable seats are what you want when you're about to get on an 8 hour midnight flight!

Moket games for sale at Voeveo

We've just uploaded some of our recent games to the Voeveo mobile portal for purchase and download. Games include old-timers such as Dizzy Zub Zub, Cipher and Jon Burgerman's Sausage Smackdown, along with some more recent ones like Trench Rocket and Palleggio. Most of these games are also available, or are making their way, to Nokia Download (in APAC and soon China and Europe). They're also going to emerge in Singapore shortly.

It's been interesting in the past few months seeing the success of App Store, and the subsequent news from Google and intimations by Microsoft towards their own "open markets". Surely this has to kick start the education process for many, many more mobile consumers on methods to simply engage with mobile content. It may also help to educate them with having to pay for content, but time will tell :)