Thank you 2008 ... Goodnight!

As has been my custom for the past couple of years, I'm signing off 2008 with a final "wrap up" blog post here as I head off on holidays.

2008 has been a real roller-coaster of a year for myself and Moket. We've had a lot of highs, plenty of lows, and in between have continued to try and build a business around Flash on mobile devices. Some of the highlights for Moket this year have included:

• Developing a closer relationship Forum Nokia, and achieving recognition for many of our products through their various publications and initiatives
• Signing deals with Gambit Group and Paramount Pictures to develop Flash Lite content for their film properties
• Developing the Dojo Monkey series further, and signing up Kelly Chapman as producer for Dojo Monkey. 2009 will be the Year of the Monkey :)
• Seeing our Flash Lite content on sale in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, India, Philippines, Mayalsia, Taiwan, Indonesia ... with more channels coming on stream in 2009

I want to give a particular shout to everyone who played on the Moket team this year - Michael Heydon, Jack Lee, James Lee, Hania Lee (James and Hania they got married this year too, crazy love birds!), Benjamin Drake, Xue Sen Wong, Anthony Cheung, David Smith, Dmitriy Logunkov, Jarrod Elvin, Sam Boss-Walker, Andrew Muller and Thomas Halmlyn-Harris.

I also had the pleasure of traveling a lot this year for various events - some were demoing Moket products and exhibiting Flash Lite content, and others were conducting Flash Lite training for Adobe. I certainly wracked up the frequent flyer miles in '08, and got to see some amazing places, met some amazing people, and overall helped to educate and engage with the mobile developer communities. The role call of 2008 destinations looks like this:

• MTV Asia with Dojo Monkey, Singapore (March)
  
• S60 Summit with Forum Nokia, Barcelona (May)
  
• Flash Lite Training, Paris (Aug)
  
• Flash Lite Training, Manila (Sept)
  
• Device Central CS4 Essential Training recording for Lynda.com, Ventura California (Sept)
• Nokia Games Summit, Rome (Oct)
• Adobe MAX Conference, San Francisco (Nov)
  

So what's in store for 2009? Your guess is as good as mine! One thing that's definitely happening is I'm spending the first part of the year writing a new Flash Lite 3.x training course for Adobe - bringing the current one up to date with everything that has changed over recent times (CS4, Mobile Packager, Distributable Player, etc) so that will be good fun.
 
Things certainly changed late this year with the Adobe re-organisation and loss of staff, and while the upshot out of all of it for mobile was very good, it will still be some time before the dust settles and we start to see the results coming through in action. Overall though, 2009 will see more Flash Lite devices ship (particularly touch screen devices) and more opporunities surface for developers building mobile apps and content with the Flash platform. Here's hoping that more of the mobile ecosystem in general also starts to engage with Flash for mobile, most likely through the Open Screen Project, and that the net result is more business for Flash developers working on non-PC devices.

I hope you all have a happy and safe Christmas, and you get to spend some holiday time with those that are close to you. So down tools, stop Twittering, only carry one mobile with you, forget about functions, classes and tweens, and just go and make some memories with family and friends.

Merry Christmas, and best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year!

New links to my presentation slides and recordings

2008 has been a bit of a year for presentations for me. Since about July, I have been doing a Flash Lite eSeminar for the Adobe Pacific office every 2 weeks. Also throw in 3 different titled sessions at MAX (not including Dojo Monkey on the last night!), webDU and about 3 other international summits/conferences, and I've started to accumulate quite a bit of material.

So I've created a new section further down on the right hand sidebar of my blog here called "Presentations and eSeminars", with links to the slides (as PDF), recordings, or both, from various sessions. I'm still tracking down may of the links, so I'll be adding to this over time. Just wanted to get it all in one place so that it's a little easier for people to find and reference. Hopefully the content covered will help people at various stages of their experience with Flash Lite.

And speaking of blog updates, I'm planning on migrating my blog across to a new server and possibly even a new blog platform over the Christmas holidays. If you experience any weirdness, please bear with me and stay tuned.

Now co-managing Mobile Monday Brisbane

Along with my good mate Chris Kettle (CEO of My247.mobi), and perhaps some others, I'll be taking on the co-management of the new Mobile Monday Brisbane chapter in 2009. We've had some small and informal meetings recently and are excited about the prospects for next year, and for the talent and knowledge in the mobile space that currently call Brisbane home. More to come, but if you're in Brisbane on the third-Monday of each month, then keep an eye on the blog here for details (or also on the currently-un-developed mobilemondaybrisbane.com site)

Some cool Adobe technology in the works

Couple of thingsI found while surfing around the interwebs this morning:

Adobe Stratus Service: Now appearing on Adobe Labs, Stratus is a beta technology for creating peer-to-peer connections between Flash 10 and AIR 1.5 players. Think Flash Media Server without shared objects, server-side scripting, etc - great for creating connected applications or even VOIP (apparently). Hmmm ... wonder if this could be part of FP10/AIR on mobile?

Adobe Creative Technologies Lab: Via Peter Elst - some cool R&D being done with manipulating (FLV?) video over at Adobe. This demo video shows "Interactive Video Object Manipulation" and was very impressive. Not that long ago, YouTube acquired a Silicon Valley start-up (name ecapes me at this time of the morning - need more coffee) that was building a video annotation service, that didn't look nearly half as cool as what they guys are experiementing with here.

Enjoy.

Today's Final eSeminar for 2008

Don't forget today at 2pm (Sydney time) I'll be presenting the final mobile eSeminar for 2008 - "Packaging Options for Flash Lite".

This series of eSeminars (stretching back to June this year!) is for beginners in the mobile scene who are perhaps coming across from Flash for web/desktop, or just new to Flash. We've covered topics relating to development, various Flash Lite content types, handset integration, tools for creating and testing content, and today we'll look at the concept of packaging your Flash Lite content into installable "packages" for distribution and deployment to devices.

And since we're getting into the Christmas spirit, there'll be a gift for all attendees!

See you there!