iSpot - clear wire offering for iDevices

Clearwire surprised many idevice enthusiasts with iSpot. They saw the opportunity of growing iDevice ranging from ipod to iPads and trying to dent the AT&T existing mobile brand band plans. The device is configured to filter based on MAC address which allows it to ID the Apple mobile devices only and unfortunately it wont work for other non idevices. Can it replace the phone with broadband data like iPhone? no, i think it is very early for that. They recently also announced Rover- pre paid broadband service without contracts and plans for $5 a day to $50 unlimited/month targeting youth segment. At this point, clear service is not available in all markets, but they promise up to 6Mbps download and 1 mbps uploads speeds.

FITC - San Francisco - Adobe Key note

I got the opportunity to attend the FITC event held at UCSF during this week. Here are notes from key note speaker - Kevin Lynch - CTO, Adobe and Mark Andreas - Adobe fellow

- He started with history of flash player from initial version to flash 10. The 10.1 release seems to be a major miles stone for them due the full flash support on mobile devices.Being in the audience, Flash community seems pretty exited about this.

- He tried make a point to the developers that flash is not going away by giving example like there were many flash killers during the journey from AJAX,HTML5,silverlight..etc But it all faded away due to the consistent experience delivered by flash.

- Adobe manage to work with partners to give over the air updates of flash players to the mobile devices, which was considered as a big challenge initially.

-The Flash 10.1 is currently available on 7-8 devices on android platform from HTC and Motorola. The latest droid2 box includes a special promotion "Can play flas" with flash logo.

- The road map of flash player includes tablets, televisions and other multiple farm factors.

- Mike Andreas talked about the major performance improvements they made to make it available on handsets including memory management, hardware acceleration, reducing the power consumption ..etc. He demonstrated the non-optimized regular yahoo flash site vs sony pictures optimized site.

- He talked about Flex 4.0, but it is not currently optimized for moble and it is on their road map.

- Air 2.0: They made some decent performance and mobility improvements in Air 2.0 Air2.0 can also act as server for their peer to peer multicast support. They demonstrated simple asteroid multi player game where the air 2.0 acting as a server and all the devices connects to the air2 running on desktop.

-Air 2.5 for mobile devices is currently available as beta, can be downloaded from adobe.com/go/airbetasignup

-Kevin talked about the device central functionality in cs5, where the developer can emulate the flash content on the device. He demonstrated simple board game with action script code blocks.

-On device debugging is currently not available but expected to come.

- Adobe's priority is to get flash on the devices first then the air.

With Droid 2, Adobe Flash Stakes its Claim

The old days of flash lite are gone , which never satisfied the thirst of accessing any page on mobile phone. The full flash versions appeared recently at least on Android OS. HTC EVO is the first phone with full flash capabilities. The Droid2, is pre-installed with flash running on Android Froyo. For Adobe, this is the time to take off some of the allegations made by Apple, that there is no device running the full flash. Droid2 might be a milestone for Adobe's future, if flash on droid2 is successful in giving good performance as well as battery life. with Flash,the Android tablets may look better than today ipad. All the casual game developers seems to be happy about adobe's progress.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T may lead a venture to replace credit cards

I do agree that a mobile payment is the next logical step for the consumers. The never expected carrier partnership on mobile payments is revolutionary and game changing. The right business model is what lacking all these days to work with financial network like Visa and Master card. The details are not known at this point about the banks participating in this initiative. The carriers most like to use the existing transaction clearing networks like Discover, rather than building their own. Convincing the retailer to spend sub $200 on new terminal would be another challenge. It all depends on mass adaptation. It took more than a decade to Visa and Master card to convince the retailers and consumer. But the moment may be right because the retailer are currently disappointed with transaction fee set by Visa and Master card which they have been fighting for years. Visa is very active in the space, they recently announced a partnership with Texas based start-up called Device Fidelity, to NFC enable the existing iPhone though a case. Overall, this is very positive step, which may provoke the other operators across the world to build their own payment networks or at least to get into co-operative agreements with Visa Master card.