Adobe announces a full Flash player for netbooks and smartphones, but not for the iPhone

Today, at its annual conference in Los Angeles, Adobe promised to make more of the Web accessible to smartphones with the latest version of its Flash software plug-in.

Flash allows Web browsers to display rich media content such as video and animation. The new version, Flash 10.1, will be compatible with many smartphone and netbook platforms. For now, however, iPhone users will have to wait.

Many smartphones already support a less powerful, stripped-down version of Flash called Flash Lite. “Large chunks of the Web have been missing,” says Avi Greengart, research director of consumer devices at Current Analysis, a research firm based in Washington, DC. Though Flash Lite has been installed on millions of devices, Greengart says that it has mainly been used to build the user interface rather than to access content on the Web.

Greengart sees the new Flash player as a “very positive” step toward a Web experience that is truly consistent regardless of device or software platform. “People are starting to see mobile phones as portable computing platforms,” he says.

Software developers in particular stand to benefit from fully functional Flash players on mobile phones. Not only will users gain access to video and other media via Flash, but they will be able to make greater use of rich Internet applications, which often use Flash to create an interactive experience inside the browser.

Ben Wood, director of mobile research at CCS Insight, a U.K.-based consulting company, says that having the full Flash Player on portable devices will make it easier to create “write once, run anywhere” software. In other words, a developer’s application should automatically work on a wide variety of devices without requiring new code. In contrast, many applications today often have to be rewritten for each mobile device the developer wants to support.

“For [Adobe],” Wood says, “the worst-case scenario is fragmentation of their platform,” since Flash’s key selling point is its ubiquity. He says that Adobe’s rigorous certification program helps protect the unified Flash experience.

Wood adds that as recently as a year ago, smartphones just didn’t have the processing power to deal with a full version of a Flash player. He credits “the iPhone effect” for pushing device makers to give their products the necessary horsepower. Device makers had previously steered clear of powerful processors because of worries about efficiency, but most have changed in an effort to match the high expectations set by Apple’s device.

Ironically, though, Apple’s iPhone is absent from the list of devices that will support the new Flash player. Adobe says that the terms of the license for iPhone software developers mean that it can’t offer Flash Player for the device without support from Apple. Greengart of Current Analysis suspects that Apple either wants to work on implementing Flash at its own pace or has plans for its own competing technology. He expects Apple to reveal its plans by early 2010, since lacking Flash is a competitive disadvantage. Meanwhile, plans are under way to include it in Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian, Palm WebOS, and Blackberry devices.

Flash isn’t the only means for bringing richer Web content, such as embedded video and interactive content, to portable devices. The World Wide Web Consortium has been working on a new Web markup standard, HTML 5, that will handle a wider variety of content without requiring plug-ins. HTML 5 could present a threat to Adobe’s Flash platform, says CCS Insight’s Wood, but he thinks the resulting competition will ultimately be good for the end user, since it should help lead to the same Web on a mobile device as on a desktop computer. For now, many developers still have to build applications tuned to specific mobile devices, but Wood says that technologies such as Flash 10.1 and HTML 5 will trigger a “tipping point.”

Once both technologies are in place on mobile devices, Wood expects to see developers move toward offering more applications and services via the Web. “I think [this] will define the future of how applications manifest themselves on devices,” he says.

Adobe plans to make the new Flash platform available to developers working with Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS, and desktop PCs by the end of this year, and to Android and Symbian developers by the beginning of next year. The company expects the first devices featuring the Flash player to hit the market in early 2010.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/23591/page2/

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Can the Wireless Internet Be Neutral?

Every cell phone tower includes scheduling software that decides how fast e-mails, videos, and photos flow to and from wireless gadgets. Today these schedulers are programmed, at least in part, to make sure that the most profitable Internet traffic moves along at a fast clip. But under forthcoming Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “Net neutrality” regulations, wireless carriers may have to more strongly consider something else: fairness.

“Sometimes these (wireless) schedulers are designed to maximize throughput, rather than fairness,” says Dipankar Raychaudhuri, director of the Winlab, a mobile Internet research lab at Rutgers University. “For example, you can maximize throughput to someone who has a strong signal–favoring one user who has a high signal over another who doesn’t–so that it leads to higher revenue.”

Last week, delivering on an Obama campaign promise, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced in a speech that he would propose Net neutrality regulations. Such rules would promote the Internet as a level playing field, and prohibit service providers from slowing down or blocking access to websites or applications. The actual draft rules will be released next month, but Genachowski made it clear that both wired and wireless technologies are in the crosshairs. “It is essential that the Internet itself remain open, however users reach it,” he said, adding that “how the principles apply may differ depending on the access platform or technology.”

Ensuring Net neutrality across the airwaves will be more complex though. “I don’t have a position on Net neutrality,” Raychaudhuri adds, “but this would be quite an interesting technical problem to try and solve.”

The complexity of the situation is illustrated by a recent flare-up in the wireless space. The FCC is investigating a claim by Google that its Google Voice application was unfairly rejected from Apple’s iPhone App Store. AT&T, which provides iPhone service, shot back in a letter to the FCC that Google’s voice application blocks calls to some rural areas where it would be more expensive for Google to connect.

It’s not clear yet whether Google Voice–which bridges both Internet and landline connections–would be considered in violation of any existing regulation. Because while traditional phone companies are barred by regulation from blocking calls to far-flung exchanges, Internet telephony applications do not yet face such regulation.

As any cell phone user knows, quality of service depends on how close the nearest cell towers are, how many other people are using the network, and a host of other factors. Already, the number of iPhones in service is causing traffic congestion on AT&T’s network, and “this will happen to all of the operators as smart phones and data traffic grows very rapidly,” says Raychaudhuri.

Defining and regulating “fairness” as it pertains to wireless Internet traffic is inherently difficult, says Mung Chiang, a Princeton electrical engineering professor working on broadband access algorithms. “The notion of congestion–what is it, how often it happens, who is to blame–it’s much harder to define in wireless networks,” compared to landline Internet connections, he says. “Who is going to take the blame when somebody close to a tower transmits signals that may wipe out others, even if this person may not be downloading movies?”

However the FCC chooses to define Net neutrality, Chiang says the specter of regulation hangs heavy over wireless Internet businesses. “As with other industries, uncertainty is worse than anything,” he says. “Deploying towers, digging up roads, and standardizing new equipment is a very long-term, capital-intensive thing. If people don’t know what is going to happen until litigation sets precedents, that will be a big deterrent to capital expenditures, and that generally is a concern.”

The idea of Net neutrality itself is not new. In 2005 the FCC issued principles–but not formal regulations–saying consumers have a right to access legal Internet content and services of their choice. But the matter came to a head last year when Comcast started slowing some customers’ peer-to-peer traffic–that is, the bandwidth-slurping exchange of music and video directly between computer-users’ hard-drives. The FCC ruled that Comcast had to stop the practice. Comcast sued, challenging the FCC’s authority to act in the absence of formal regulations.

In response to the Genachowski speech, the wireless industry was quick to assert there is no problem to solve. AT&T suggested that the highly competitive wireless market–five carriers with more than 10 million customers and 10 carriers with four million or more–provides state-of-the-art service. “Today, American consumers enjoy the broadest array of innovative services and devices, the highest usage levels, the lowest prices, and the most competitive choices of any wireless market in the world,” a company statement said, adding that “we have never had concerns with disclosure or transparency regarding network management decisions so long as such requirements are reasonable.”

Such industry proclamations don’t mean that private interests can’t crowd out public ones, says John Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The risk, he adds, is that big media companies will seek to “solve the copyright debate through bandwidth shaping or other technical means,” or that ISPs will curtail certain kinds of speech, as is widely done in some other countries. “Without Net neutrality,” says Palfrey, “the most important public network in most people’s lives could become dominated by private interests. The parade of horribles that could occur is endless.”

Even Net neutrality advocates like Palfrey, however, concede that technology advances faster than government. “The trick will be to say ‘Can you draw those rules in such a way that will promote innovation over the medium to long term, not just the immediate term?’” he says. “Any regulation will need to be revised in five or ten years.”

Jon Crowcroft, a professor of Communications Systems at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, fears that regulatory meddling will inevitably add costs. “I personally am disappointed that a regulatory agency wants to get in the loop. Generally regulations are needed when we have a market failure,” he says. “While today there are lots of anomalies, they are generally localized in geography and time, and generally drift toward a generally neutral network.”

He adds: “If someone has to put in extra technology to support existing customer base, it will increase the cost of your components, probably a lot. That would be a very negative effect.”

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Big growing even bigger: Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising

By Sanjay Sharma,
Advertisers these days have many options for advertising, but Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising are the two most thrilling, as advertisements look very attractive when displayed on phone screens and on computer/laptop screens. Since much potential and scope lies in mobile and Internet advertising and it tends to deeply appeal to the viewers. Mobile Advertisement and Internet Advertisements have come in focus.

Mobile Advertising is closely related to online or Internet Advertising, though its reach is far greater – mobile advertising’s estimated targets say that by end 2008, there would be global total 4 billion. Global estimates of computers, including desktops and laptops, is at 800 million. Therefore exclusive advertising on web pages meant for access by mobile phones is a great idea.

It would be easier for an advertiser to convince people to buy their product when people would receive and view ads while there are already out for shopping. Giving them the relevant information needed can do this and supplying them with added details could also influence them to the extent that they straightaway proceed to buy product after seeing its ads. In these kind of situations, Mobile Advertising can be most beneficial.

As essential needs of all humans are very similar, a person who has received an advertisement through Mobile or Internet may not be in need of the service or product advertised but might know someone who is in need of it and so can pass on the advertiser’s message through word of mouth, forwarding the link or the advertisement. A major benefit of Internet Advertising is that the information and content can be accessed in any country even at late odd hours. Internet Advertisements are often interactive advertising so if the Internet Advertiser opts for a response, the viewer may like to visit the brand’s website, or try to contact them through email, phone, etc.

For mobile marketers Mobile Advertising or Internet Advertising is something already so big, a still growing market with open places that they could fill in. Mobile advertisement becomes in this way closer than ever. A major result of Internet advertising is information and content that is not limited by geography or time. The rising area of interactive advertising presents fresh and innovative challenges for advertisers who have until now adopted an interruptive strategy. Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising in future are predicted to become the major sources of advertising.

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Amazon Debuts Mobile Phone E-Commerce Site

Amazon today unveiled the beta launch of AmazonWireless.com, a new Web site offering mobile phones and service plans from a selection of phones from AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

The move marks the first time the e-tailer has dedicated a site solely to wireless phones and plans, although it’s been in the phone-retailing business since early in the decade.

The idea behind Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) new specialty site is to make the process of finding a phone and pricing plan simpler. In addition to expanding selection and adding carriers during the beta test phase, Amazon will be testing different features and gathering input from customers to ensure the best possible customer experience.

“We’ve taken our eight years’ experience selling cell phones to create a new site that makes a potentially confusing transaction much easier for customers,” Paul Ryder, Amazon’s vice president of consumer electronics, said in a statement. “The step-by-step purchase process on AmazonWireless makes it easy for customers who already have a plan to upgrade their phones. If you want to establish new cell phone service, we’ve made it simple to find the right phone, service plan and options for your needs. We’ve also eliminated the technical jargon and frustrating rebate paperwork that customers often face when buying a phone.”

AmazonWireless currently offers more than 120 phones. Customers can shop for phones by carrier, phone feature, price, color and brand. The site’s shopping cart guides customers through each stage of the purchase process, where customers will find typical Amazon features such as bestseller lists, detailed product descriptions and customer reviews. Read more

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