Q&A
Q: (to Matt Millar) What are you offering: a renderer, a language, tools?
A: All of those. Flash is integrated with Adobe CS.
Q: (Oliver Daniel, to Christian) Is Go! an extension of the Yahoo! service for Yahoo! customers?
A: Yes, primarily an extension to the many millions of Yahoo! users - mobilising them. Hopefully it'll also bring in new users.
Q: (Andy Tiller of Cognima, to Christian) App is using polling to collect data. Doesn't this add up to about 1.5mb of data pcm - and is this viable with todays data tariffs?
A: The amount of data is very small indeed. It won't burn a hole in the pocket. Clearly if you are taking lots of photos and uploading them etc, you'll feel it. (Presumably the target audience for this isn't going to be too fussed by an extra 1.5mb data pcm). Christians wife got offered flat fee data, 10 euros pcm in Finland. At the moment it will be a barrier to entry.
Q: Isn't a lot of this reliant on 3G, rather than GPRS?
A: (DanA) Depends what you mean. For photo sharing: yeah. But SVG/interactive content? Some of it is built to work over GPRS as a carrier. (Christian) It's not a bandwidth problem, it's a service design problem: browsers need to be a bit better. For full-track music downloads, obviously 3G is not going to scale (because of capacity) (?). "GPRS is great, you just need to move the *right* bits". (Matt) Bandwidth isn't the problem, it's latency that introduces delays - hence syncing in the background makes sense.
Wow: I've not heard this "3G isn't enough bandwidth" message so clearly at a telecomms event before.
Q: (to Christian) Can you talk about the flow of information between an operator and a service provider like yourself?
A: It's still "out there". First of all how do we get the users to feel comfortable? Yahoo! don't want to be a "big brother". It'll be a tango between users and Yahoo!, each taking a step forwards.
Q: Who's developing in SVG? How big is the developer base, and when will it eclipse the size of the Flash development community?
A: (DanA) This is about positioning Flash vs SVG. (Matt) One of the challenges with mobile is getting people to transition from web. Flash Lite 2 makes Flash Lite like Flash 7. Many of the skills involved in Flash development are the same as those used to produce SVG content. (Anton) The comparison needs to be made not on feature-by-feature, everyone is going in the same direction as far as features in the runtime but the big selling point for SVG is that it's a product of the mobile industry, and it's meant to be integrated into different aspects of on-handset software. SVG sits atop J2ME, native apps or browser apps. Flash Lite is a good selling point for folks coming from the desktop world, but it means rewriting what you've done because it's a different architecture. (DanA) Adobe needs to articulate a market positioning for Flash and SVG; this could be quite clear (and by extension, presumably isn't now).
Q: Is there a clear business model?
A: (Christian) Build reach, then monetise: just as with the Internet. There is a lot of conceptual work to do; it doesn't seem right to monetise before you have engagement.