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This Friday (4th April) Adobe are sponsoring the Over the Air conference in London. Interest in the free conference has been fantastic with over 400 attendees planning to come and join in the fun.  Other companies presenting are Vodafone, BBC, Sun, Yahoo, Google and our friends from forum Nokia.

Over the Air focuses on Mobile development, including the mobile Internet, multimedia, design and future technology. There are four sessions on Flash technology for mobile and devices, and prizes too.

Developers are the conference will get involved in a hacking session and on Saturday the 5th April prizes will be handed out for the best in category. As part of that I’m going to award several prizes including $15,000 of Creative Suite tools and mobile phones from our friends at Sony Ericsson.

Now is a great time to get started, learn about flash technology and win some really amazing prizes!

Here are the Adobe Mobile and Devices related sessions:

1pm-2pm Flash Lite Sony Ericsson Masterclass
Speaker: Atish Nazir
title: Engineering Manager, Custom Solutions (EMEA)
Brief: Learn how to build Flash Lite applications for the SEMC platform and easily build mashups using Java.

2pm-3pm Kunerilite Masterclass
Speaker: Ugur Kaner
title: CEO Kuneri Ld
Brief: Learn how to build Series 60 applications using simple tools and Flash Lite.

3.30pm-4.30pm Flash Video Nokia Masterclass
Speaker: Dave Williamson
title: Engineering Manager, Custom Solutions (EMEA)
Brief: Learn how to create video applications with the most popular online video format on Nokia devices.

7pm-8pm Flash Cast Vision
Speaker: Matt Millar
title: Director, Mobile and Devices (EMEA)
Brief: Learn about Adobe’s open content platform launching in Europe. Find out how you can engage media companies, brands and services and deliver widget applications and services direct to the consumer.

See you at the event!

This month on 24-28 March Adobe are hosting a developer week. This is your chance to get some free training and background on our technology.

The sessions are presented by Adobe or a member of the developer community on a variety of subject including games, video and simply getting started. If you are new to Flash on mobile devices then these sessions are going to be invaluable tools to help you get started.

Getting Started with Flash® Lite™ 3 and CS3
Presenter: Bill Perry
Monday, March 24, 2008
11:00 A.M. PDT
Sign up now

Flash Lite and Flex for Tourism
Presenters: Michael Epstein/Ira Hochman
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
11:00 A.M. PDT
Sign up now

Blood from a Stone: Flash Game Optimization on Low-end mobile devices
Presenter: Evan Kirchhoff
Thursday, March 27, 2008
1:00 P.M. PDT
Sign up now

We do expect the sessions to be very busy so be sure to register right away.

So now that the hype has died down following the iPhone 2.0 announcements maybe its time to discuss it. As you know, Flash or Flash Lite will not be used in the Safari mobile browser. While this is disappointing we have to accept that the majority of mobile devices cannot run the desktop Flash player.

Our own tests show that Flash Lite 3 is capable of rendering 92% of Flash content on the Internet currently. The remaining sites use Actionscript 3, which is a desktop only technology at this time. So while Adobe mobile technology is designed for the majority of devices, we simply don’t have a product for Apple at this time.

So on to the SDK… highlights of the SDK are on device debugging, a proper emulator and a nice developer environment (mac only). On the device side we saw the additions of enterprise grade WIFI support and exchange support for email and calendaring. Great features!

For developers there is a $100m dollar iFund in venture capital, which is pretty incredible but I would suggest that 10m devices is too small a market to invest in iPhone only C code, unless you’re building something really cool. Building widgets is one solution that enables you to target a larger cross-platform market with the same or very similar software.

Overall, it looks set to be a great platform for mobile developers.