It's been a good week for a few FP clients past and present, and seeing as FP is a hefty chunk of my life, you get to read about it here ;)

• Locomatrix won the "Most Awesome Use of Digital Media" award at the Brighton & Hove Business Awards, last Friday;
• Trutap have partnered with Sony Ericsson, getting global distribution through their downloads portal;
• Flirtomatic have announced they've reached the magic million registered users - nice one guys :)

Flash on the iPhone?

"At the Flash On The Beach (FOTB) conference in Brighton, Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems Paul Betlem, confirmed that Adobe is indeed developing a Flash Player for the iPhone. However, Apple calls the shots as to when it'll be available."

What's that saying about the fat lady? I'd draw precisely zero conclusions from this. The fact that Adobe have someone writing some code for the iPhone doesn't mean that Apple will permit the Flash player to work on the iPhone or that they'll do any more than sandbox it within the browser. The latter would let them boast Flash support (and deliver a good full-web experience) without fragmenting iPhone development further (into native app/web app/Flash).

• An interesting debate comparing performance and accuracy of DeviceAtlas and the WURFL;
• Palm is having trouble getting profits from its sales. Have to say, I hear practically nothing of them in Europe nowadays. A shame as their Vx was one of my favourite handhelds for years (and I loved reading the story behind it in Designing Interactions);
• Android is estimated as getting 4% marketshare in the US. Gawd knows how you can work out such numbers ahead of time, but I'm intrigued to see how it works out... not that the first handset launch will definitely make or break the platform (or is even a proper Google phone, apparently), but Android and iPhone seem to symbolise openness vs closed-ness. And whilst my heart's with open, I can't quiet that nagging voice whispering to me that the best user experiences come from tight control, end-to-end. Openness is the new freedom.
• And then a story comes along to remind you that humanity is not homogenous, and hey, some places they might not even *want* the same stuff that gets the 2.0 crowd drooling: "Pricey, slow, feature-free phone fails to catch on in Japan", heh.
• Fun to see people starting to worm their way around Apple restrictions - not that a few edge cases doing it before they're shut down really points to any sort of real change.
• Linux-on-mobile is creating fragmentation; well, yes. Sharing an operating system with another device doesn't imply compatibility, much more than sharing chip hardware does. Android seems a brighter hope for Linux on mobile than anything else I've seen out there yet (most of which seems aimed at hobbyists so far).
• "DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy" - Big Steve on music.
• "Rejecting an application because it might compete with Apple is simply indefensible". Apple doing what's best for Apple - film at 11. Nothing new here, and it's not like this isn't covering familiar ground for them.
• RIM are quietly launching a flip-phone (quiet being a relative term when most of the industry seems to be being drowned out by a Sauron-like roar from Cupertino).

Bedtime for Tombo.

Bill Buxton came to Brighton. And I missed him.

/me hangs my head in shame.

So, I'm back from a weeks holiday and full of beans, and looking at my diary the next few months are fuller than I realised:

• I'll be attending the Brighton and Hove Business Awards next Friday (26th September), where LocoMatrix has been shortlisted for Most Awesome Use of Digital Media;
• On 29th September I'm heading up to a SkillsMatter talk on Pragmatic Agility. If you've never been to one of these, I thoroughly recommend them;
• The next day I'm on a panel at a Mashup event being held at the offices of BBH, on the topic of iPhone, Android and Symbian;
• On 15th October Joh and I will be doing a talk at the Werks in Brighton, expanding on my Barcamp presentation to cover off our experiences adopting Scrum at Future Platforms - very much following on from the talk we gave at SkillSwap nearly a year ago.
• The Symbian Smartphone Show follows on 21st and 22nd October; I'm expecting this one to be particularly interesting, given the changes going on in mobile right now;
• On 6th November I'll be talking at the Sussex University Enterprising Engineers evening, on experiences at Future Platforms building all sorts of lovely mobile products;
• And last but not least, I'll be speaking at Future of Mobile London on 17th November, on the strengths, weaknesses and tradeoffs of various mobile platforms;

Phew. All that and the Brooks 10k run on 16th November to keep me busy ;)

If you're going to any of the above and fancy catching up for a chat, do drop me a line...