I met with Tucker Snedeker, VP of Mobile Business Development of Bluestreak, who demonstrated Bluestreak’s technology, which runs even of 50 MIPS processors with less than a megabyte of memory. It competes with Adobe/Macromedia’s FlashLite player, and runs SWF files natively. Bluestreak’s primary successes in the past three and a half years have been with cable TV set top box deployments, and they are now pushing into mobile.

Bluestreak is not a FlashLite player, but can read and run Flash files. It’s a multimedia engine that “just happens to support the Flash format.” It is also an ECMA script engine. FlashLite 1.1 is not supported, but instead Flash as web developers know it, a more robust, capable scripting engine with a Flash 7 development profile. ActionScript is a mirror image of ECMA script.

Bluestreak leverages the Flash authoring environment with a set of tools that plug in and enhance the authoring environment especially for mobile deployment. Bluestreak does not support every feature, such as Flash Video—FLV. Instead, 3GPP, Windows Media, and other standards are supported by Bluestreak.

Bluestreak is deployed on Orange for their Orange World TV, a 52-channel live streaming TV service, launched in February 2006. Also, Bluestreak supports Orange’s League One soccer product. Tucker demonstrated the Orange World product, and it was fast, smooth, and played video like a champ. He even showed me a rich SMS authoring application, proving their tight integration with native phone functions.

The key advantage of Bluestreak is terrific performance even on very low end hardware, with a truly attractive price point.

Posted by Scott Weiss at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Van Toffler, President of MTV Networks’ Music/Films/Logo group was full of surprises. He spoke about the new programming coming down the pike from MTV Wireless. They’re planning to (first surprise) develop original audience-generated content. They are getting back to their “ADD roots” by deploying shorts in the five to fifteen second time slice, similar to the original MTV “art breaks”. MTV’s third pillar of content is music—another big surprise. MTV channel on the handsets will break bands—another surprise. MTV was once a pioneer, and they still refer to themselves that way.

BET (Black Entertainment Television)’s Debra Lee, Chairman and CEO, spoke about the artist D4L launching four million ring tones and achieving success through ring tones purchases by their audience. Hip hop is a recurring theme at CTIA; I remember hearing P. Diddy speaking at CTIA in Atlanta a couple of years ago. The hip hop audience is full of wireless early adopters.

Amp’d Mobile and Verizon, mobile video purveyors, were notably absent from CTIA, though each had announcements. Amp’d plans to launch its own original television content. I suspect they’re getting it for free, as a means to launch indie artists. It’s a great gig for both parties.

Posted by Scott Weiss at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Haptics is the technical term for adding the sense of touch to a human-machine interface. In a mobile phone context, the simplest implementation is full-fidelity vibration. Immersion Corporation in San Jose, California, is the world leader in haptics technology. I met with Jeff Eid, VP of Mobility Business Development at Immersion Corporation. He demonstrated Immersion’s latest deployments of touch technology in mobile telephone handsets from Samsung, shipping through ten operators around the globe today, including Orange and T-Mobile in Europe, Verizon, Sprint and Alltel in the US, SKT and KTF in S. Korea, and China Mobile.

According to Eid, “Immersion’s full-fidelity vibration, called VibeTonz, has found its initial application in gaming. With the advent of music handsets, we expect the technology to be used more widely to identify callers through vibration-enhanced ringtones. We see additional applications in mobile user interfaces to enhance things like the use of touch screens and various alerts.”

Touch screens offer no affordances for when buttons are pressed. People touch the screen and don’t feel anything. Haptics is an almost magical solution to that problem, offering force feedback to indicate to the user the button action is initiated. Button size too small? Make it larger. Too much information to fit on two soft keys? Add buttons to the screen.

Gaming: Highway Racer from Pulse Interactive is a fast paced motorcycle game deployed through BREW on Samsung N330 handset from Verizon. When the accelerator (2 digit) is pressed, the driver can feel the acceleration. Similarly, driving off-road feels rougher than driving on the road, and crashing feels like a thundering explosion.

Contact Jeff Eid for information about Immersion’s haptic technology.

Posted by Scott Weiss at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jim Mueller is the Project Director of User Needs Assessment for the Wireless RERC (Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center) in Atlanta, Georgia, a US Department of Education-funded research center endeavoring to work with mobile carriers and handset manufacturers to create products that are usable by people with disabilities: sensory, cognitive, and physical. Sensory disabilities include hearing and sight—and not only complete blindness, but differing levels of sight, which is true for each of the disability classes: some people can’t walk, and others have difficulty walking but can walk with assistance.

Jim is speaking at the Wireless Accessibility Workshop at CTIA on Wednesday 5 April 2006, and he was kind enough to speak to me the night before the workshop about how his group can most effectively support improvements to the wireless user experience for disabled people. I suggested that Jim contact carriers, who are the true customers of the handset manufacturers—mobile phone end users buy from the carriers, after all.

Reader challenge: if you know someone or are yourself involved at a manufacturer or carrier, and have interest in helping people with disabilities, please contact Jim directly. He is seeking contacts who are responsible for handset buying, specification, and marketing. His group is working to put numbers to the buying power of people with disabilities, whom we all agree are under-served.

Posted by Scott Weiss at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)