Great use of Flash video shot, edited and developed by Flash video guru Graeme Bull for the MXDU conference that he and I spoke at last week.

I really like the idea of shooting short videos asking people about their experiences with the conference and then posting them online. Really nice!

http://www.mxdu.com/votp/mxdu-votp.html

After meeting with the Sony Vaio team for dinner earlier tonight, it has become crystal clear that I really need to get one of these super-slick, super-slim VAIO x505 laptops. As a person who spends most of my time jumping between meeting rooms, beating back the incoming flood of emails in Outlook, giving countless presentations, and traveling around the world doing speaking engagements - this laptop is a perfect fit.

It’s less than 2 lbs, features a 1.1 GHz Centrino, 512MB RAM (I’d max that out), and a 20GB HD (I’d probably try to replace that with a larger drive). It also has USB 2.0, iLink (firewire), ethernet, and built-in 802.11g. That’s all I really need in an ultra-portable. I still have my workhorse IBM Thinkpad T41p to do the heavy lifting when I need it (which is becoming less and less often).

I think Tokyo is having an effect on me. All I can do is think about electronics and gadgets. I’m like a child in an enormous toy store!

…and Akamai completes the set.

Now all of the big players are a part of the Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS) allowing customers all over the world to benefit from high-quality, streaming Flash video.

It’s really been amazing to watch the astronomical growth of interest and implementation of interactive video experiences powered by Flash. Check out the Flash Video Gallery for some examples.

Why the overwhelming interest?
1. The most widely available client on the planet (over 30% more people have Flash Player 6 than Windows Media Player)
2. Full creative control over how you use, deliver, and brand your video experience
3. The rich, contextual and interactive nature of the Flash platform

Standard Features Found in All Versions of Flash Video Streaming Service

- Automatic tracking and report generation at the click of a button
- Fastest way to deploy load-balanced, fully fail-safe Flash Video
- Video streaming that starts the instant viewers click Play
- High-performance network that ensures video isn’t clogged up on the Internet
- Built-in load balancing to scale video despite the heaviest traffic
- Upload of Flash Video (FLV) files to a ready-to-go streaming network without having to set up and maintain video servers

Learn more about FVSS and Flash video here.

Read the press release here.

Very exciting!

Business Week’s Sarah Lacy writes about recent news from Macromedia that it is expanding it’s partnerships with wireless carriers and device manufacturers including Nokia and Samsung.

“Some analysts estimate nearly half the phones shipping next year will have enough memory to run Flash. If current growth rates keep up, that’s roughly 500 million phones with Flash potential.”

Read the article here.

Very cool Flash-enabled phone

Originally uploaded by Mike_Downey.

This is one of the many phones offered in Japan that feature the Flash Lite player. Notice that this particular KDDI model even promotes Flash as a feature and a reason to buy the phone!

After a fantastic time “down under” at the MXDU conference in Sydney, AU, I caught a flight on Qantas to Tokyo, Japan.

I’ve been here since Sunday visiting with customers in the vibrant mobile content industry. We’ve been speaking with Flash design shops, mobile content development companies, device manufacturers, service providers, and hardware manufacturers in an effort to better understand the requirements for authoring mobile content.

We ultimately want to provide the best mobile authoring tools in the industry so we’ve been asking a lot of questions about how people design, code, test, and deploy content.

In our many meetings this week, we’ve found the following to be rather consistent:
- Animated ringtones and wallpapers are a huge business here
- Animated ringtones are now being referred to as “FlashTones” by a variety of companies
- Mobile games are the fastest growing content type
- BREW is a popular platform for developing high quality games, but developing, testing, and debugging is a big problem
- Flash has a lot of mindshare in the mobile market - even with consumers
- Several customers commented that traditional mobile developers are used to having poor tools and dealing with a lot of pain when developing
- People are doing some really amazing things with Flash Lite that I never realized were possible

We’ve learned a great deal more on this trip. It’s been such a pleasurable experience.

I’ll be posting some more tidbits from this week’s trip including some of the many photos that I’ve taken of the cool gadgets I’ve encountered (and drooled over).

For you ColdFusion developers out there…

Partial Page Caching in ColdFusion MX Macrochat

Wednesday, February 16, 2005
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM US/Eastern

Learn how to write a custom tag that allows for simple caching in ColdFusion MX. Ray Camden will lead this discussion on creating a CF tag for partial page caching of information. Ray is the Director of Development for Mindseye, Inc., a Team Macromedia member and Macromedia User Group manager.

What You Will Learn

- Existing ColdFusion Caching (query caching and cfcache)
- Persistant Scopes
- The ScopeCache Custom Tag

You must register for this event at:
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=137271&loc=en_us

Two seminars down, one to go - then on to MXDU!

I completed my second seminar today in Adelaide, AU. This is a beautiful city on the southern coast of Australia.

I’ll be delivering an online seminar via Breeze Live on Flash video tomorrow morning at 9am Sydney time. Special thanks to our ANZ office for arranging for a seminar so early in the morning. We wouldn’t want to let me sleep in or anything, would we?
More details on tomorrow’s event here.

Special thanks to the great audiences in Auckland and Adelaide for being so friendly and not playing “stump the product manager” during Q&A time.

Vitalstream and New Toronto Group are offering a fantastic two-day course on Flash video development in Los Angeles on March 31 - April 1.

I’d highly recommend this course to anyone interested in Flash video.

Details: http://www.vitalstream.com/vsa/news/02-14-05-newsletter.html

I finally arrived in Auckland last night after a 14-hour flight from San Francisco to Sydney, then another 3-hour flight to Auckland. This is my first time here and all I can do is ask myself why I didn’t come here earlier. This place is beautiful! The people are really friendly and the weather is a great break from the San Francisco winter (currently 73 degrees F*).

I’ll be presenting a Macromedia seminar here tomorrow (Monday morning) on Video, Training and Web Publishing with Macromedia ANZ sales engineer Brian Chau - details here:
http://www.macromedia.com/ap/events/0305_vtwp_seminar_anz_ap.html.

If you’re a New Zealander and are in the area tomorrow, make sure to stop by and say “hi”.