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).