I’m sitting in the Adobe Seattle campus after listening to presentations by James Talbot of Adobe and Marc Nadell of Nokia talking about the mobile world. I’m going to do a full write up over at my ZDNet blog, but I wanted to get a couple of informal posts up about what I’m seeing.
Obviously mobile is important to Adobe, but it’s always interesting to see how they want to see the space grow. One of the interesting slides I saw divided up Flash mobile into three groups: Enhanced Content and Browsing (Flash Lite, FlashPlayer SDK, Acrobat Reader LE), Customized UI (Flash Lite, MMI), and Converged Data Experiences (FlashCast). It’s clear there are a bunch of places for developers and companies to jump in. One example they gave was a Samsung CEO phone that was a custom, Flash-based UI made specifically for CEOs. This could be a big value add for companies – imagine developing a Flash UI that integrated very tightly with a company intranet.
I’m also very curious to see how they’re going to work Apollo or to a lesser extend some of the PDF capabilities into their mobile plan. Acrobat Reader LE was shown on the slide, but there wasn’t any discussion of how it fits in. That has a lot of potential, but the connotations behind Reader on a phone aren’t necessarily all warm and fuzzy.
There are some big numbers (3 billion mobile subscribers by 2008, $43 billion in mobile content revenue by 2010) which is one reason there is so much buzz around mobile. But right now it’s largely unfulfilled promises. However, as more people in North America use their mobile phones like consumers in Asia the opportunities are going to be immense. Phones will become more and more personalized and customers will come to demand more from their phones in terms of user interface and multimedia. Adobe has all of the bases covered, and they’re making all of the right moves. The key is going to be sustaining that momentum as the sluggish North American market comes around.
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