This has potential for a lot of interesting connections between mobile and online advertising: I can create (Flash-based) ad units that live anywhere, and allow users to get related mobile content directly onto their phone simply by entering their mobile number into the unit. Pretty cool. Not only speeds up the experience, but also blurs the line between the online world experience and “that” mobile world. We could relate the ad content directly to the mobile content. It would be great to start a game online, and then, when you need to go, you can grab it and finish it on your mobile.

In an industry-first, Flash-based “Online2Mobile” ad units streamline the process for acquiring of mobile content by eliminating the need for consumers to enter their mobile carrier, device make and model, or having to click through to a microsite; To begin downloading the Rogue advergame or wallpapers to their mobile handsets, consumers simply enter their mobile number directly into the ad unit and click “submit.”

MangoMOBILE created a series of online ad units that empower consumers to download “Rogue-themed” content for the Nissan Rogue Crossover Vehicle, including a fully-branded advergame, directly to their Mobile Devices.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/LATH00311102007-1.htm

Thanks again to Rick Mathieson for providing the source for this sweet info!

I had a great time at FITC Hollywood! Met some amazing people and had a great speaking session of my own. It went well, although most people were in the room next to me to see GMUNK! Thanks to everyone who attended my session; I’ve received some great feedback and a few folks have emailed me wanting to keep in touch.

All in all, I ate too well, attended some cool sessions and played a lot of poker thanks to FITC founder Shawn Pucknell, Josh from Big Spaceship, and Richard Galvan from Adobe, who taught me how to play Texas Hold Em. (I have always been a 5 Card Stud only guy.)

Big thanks to Shawn, Naomi and the rest of the good people at FITC for inviting me to speak and for creating such a valuable event for our community.

Sweet. My dream has come true.

iPhone SDK!

We can’t wait to start building native apps for the iPhone! I was talking with Richard Galvan from Adobe and we both agree that is was a great idea for Apple to wait a while before they released this; keeping the system closed and allowing for a real world test. Now we can’t wait for Flash support

Finally, posting some valuable info capture from the MAX show. Thanks to Crazy J!

The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit
The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit preview release includes a high-performance graphics programming language that

Adobe is developing for image processing, codenamed Hydra, and an application to create, compile and preview Hydra filters and effects. The toolkit contains a specification for the Hydra language, several sample filters, and sample images provided by AIF team members. The AIF technology delivers a common image and video processing infrastructure which provides automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware. It currently ships in After Effects CS3 and will be used in other Adobe products in the future. The next release of Flash Player, codenamed Astro, will leverage Hydra to enable developers to create custom filters, effects and blend modes. http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIF_Toolkit

Flash Player 9 “Moviestar”
This is the latest beta release of the Flash Player (not sure when they plan on releasing it publicly). Some of you may already be aware of the new features Adobe introduced in this player release, but for those of you who aren’t here are a few cool features. Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs. This means support for up to 1080P HD video as well as the ability to take advantage of existing tools and services that leverage this industry standard format. They demoed this technology during the keynote with 720P full screen video and it looked amazing.

Multi-core support for vector rendering. At MAX the Flash Player team explained that there is currently support for up to 4 processors (cores) and that this may increase in the future. They also explained that this ONLY affects rendering. It will NOT increase the performance of ActionScript. The reason for this is because Flash is a single threaded platform and script execution cannot be divided among several processors. The rendering performance improvement results from dividing the final render frame into pieces and sending each piece to a separate processor for concurrent rendering.

Full screen mode with hardware scaling. The new full screen mode allows you to choose a rectangular area of the stage to magnify full screen. This mode will also take advantage of the video card for high performance scaling. This is the reason the full screen video during the keynote looked so good and performed so well.

Flash Player cache for common platform components, such as the Flex framework. This is a very interesting feature but for security reasons it currently only affects Adobe signed components. They hope to extend the feature to custom components when they can determine a safe way to do so. It’s basically a cache, similar to a browser cache, but it caches flash components in a domain independent manner. What this means is that if your site uses a particular component, such as the Flex framework, it will be cached by the Flash Player. When users revisit your site, or visit any other site that happens to use the same component, the component will be retrieved from the cache instead of downloaded again. This can drastically reduce download times for complex applications that leverage frameworks such as Flex. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

Performance Tips for AS3
There was a very interesting session at MAX about performance in AS3. It compared the performance of various ActionScript statements that carry out the same task but are organized or structured in slightly different ways that have a significant effect on performance. The most important lesson from this session was TYPE YOUR VARIABLES! The performance difference between typed and untyped variables was about 10 fold! For those of you who haven’t gotten into this habit with AS2 now is the time start. It was also interesting to see that operations between two different types (such as int and uint) are much slower than if the types were the same. In the following example, the first for loop is more than 13 times faster than the second, and more than 23 times faster than the third:

var count:int = 10000000;
// comparing int to int (i < count)
for (var i:int = 0; i < count; i++);
// comparing uint to int (i < count), 13 times slower
for (var i:uint = 0; i < count; i++);
// comparing untyped to int and incrementing untyped, 23 times slower
for (var i = 0; i < count; i++);

There were some other performance tips that are a little more obvious and also have a benefit in AS2 as well as AS3. For example, assigning array length to a variable before using it in a for loop (some of you may already have a habit of doing this). In the following example the first for loop is almost 20 times faster than the second:

var a:Array = new Array(10000000);

// assign length to a variable

var len:int = a.length;

for (var i:int = 0; i < len; i++);

// use length directly, 20 times slower

for (var i:int = 0; i < a.length; i++);

The most surprising demonstration was the try-catch statement. In the demo, a complicated conditional statement that accomplished the same task as a try-catch statement was about 100 times faster! In my own experiments, a try-catch statement under normal conditions (i.e. no error is thrown) is a very small performance hit and is almost the same as there being no error handling code whatsoever. However, when an error is thrown, it’s about 300 times slower! The bottom line is it’s a good idea to use try-catch statements to handle unrecoverable scenarios and notify the programmer that they are doing something wrong (such as an index out of bounds exception). But it’s a bad idea to use them in place of simple conditional statements to handle valid scenarios that may occur under normal program execution.

Adobe MAX was last week in Chicago – I followed that with a trip immediately up to Microsoft, and back to San Francisco; so I’m lagging on getting my MAX post up. I went with Crazy J and we met up with Sam (now at Yahoo), Kaare and Yi from AKQA New York, Dave from AKQA DC, Nick Velloff and the Sauceman. We were totally surprised when Kevin Lynch showcased our Halo 3 Believe work during his keynote. It was especially cool for Crazy J to see his work up on the giant screen considering the fact that he masterminded the main video interaction and apparently stumped Kevin himself. Kevin, if you’re reading this, we did not use streaming FLV video; it’s not video at all. The rest of MAX was awesome; lots of great, inspirational stuff and I will be posting some cool things I learned over the next few days.