If you’re like me, you love March. The NHL trade deadline falls in March, meaning there’s a lot of excitement. NFL free agency starts in March, so we all get to watch players change allegiances on a dime, and the NHL playoffs are right around the corner. Last, but not least, is March Madness.

Every year printers across the country are busily printing away brackets so that you can win your pool. This year, I took a look at some of the bracket offerings and found only one using Flash – ESPN.com. I’ve always liked ESPN’s use of Flash, so it’s good to see they’ve stuck with it for their tournament pool.

Anyone else see a Flash bracket out there? If you want to win this year, you can just use my bracket right here (should be viewable tomorrow). Quakers all the way.

I was reading this BusinessWeek article about the MIT Media Lab and I had a thought that I’m sure other’s have had, but that I never realized before. Flash has the potential to bring powerful, life-changing applications to all corners of the world.

The mobile world has been touted by Macromedia/Adobe for a long time, but in the press releases you hear about the FlashLite adoption in Asia (usually Japan) and Europe, where the cutting edge phones are being released. However as Flash enabled phones get cheaper and cheaper, they’ll become available to poorer and poorer countries. In many parts of the world, mobile phone growth is expected to be astronomical. One study projected additional sales of 1 billion handsets if countries exempted mobile phones from value-added taxes and customs fees.

If FlashLite becomes economically viable for these phones, it opens up the Flash Platform to an unprecedented number of people. Developers all of a sudden have the potential to change the world. A well-written, easy to use Flash app could provide farmers in Kenya an online marketplace in which to sell their produce. It could provide students in Nepal an easy way to access information from an encyclopedia.

The possibilities are endless and they go beyond simply providing web access. Surfing the web on a mobile phone is an arduous task, but FlashLite can provide a user interface that takes the data and presents it in a useful way. That’s the kind of added value that can really make a difference in poor countries.

Sometimes it isn’t about selling your Web 2.0 startup to Yahoo! Sometimes it’s about repackaging information for the world. Because it has the potential to be everywhere, the Flash Platform provides a pretty good engine to do both.

I just saw Thumbstacks.com over on TechCrunch and it’s a very neat little application. It’s a web based powerpoint creator and has a pretty solid (if basic) user interface. One of the things I found most interesting was that they created two versions of Thumbstacks, a Flash version and an AJAX version. If it detects the Flash Player, it sends you to the Flash version, otherwise you get the AJAX version. I haven’t figured out how to manually switch to the AJAX version so I can’t say anything about it but the Flash version is very intuitive and seems to be a great start. The product is still in Alpha but it looks very promising.

In the comments of the TechCrunch post one of the co-founders responds to someone about why he would create two versions:

Tom: we didn?t really create anything twice. If available, flash is used to do things like scale images, which browsers tend to be pretty bad at. Our aim is to be widely compatible, so there?s no flash requirement; but if you have it, we use it to tweak the experience.

Signup is free and it appears to be open to anyone. I’m going to see if I can get an interview with a developer, so if you have any questions about the app, leave them in the comments. They also have a presentation if you want to check it out before signing up.