Q: (to Matt Millar) What are you offering: a renderer, a language, tools?

A: All of those. Flash is integrated with Adobe CS.

Q: (Oliver Daniel, to Christian) Is Go! an extension of the Yahoo! service for Yahoo! customers?

A: Yes, primarily an extension to the many millions of Yahoo! users - mobilising them. Hopefully it'll also bring in new users.

Q: (Andy Tiller of Cognima, to Christian) App is using polling to collect data. Doesn't this add up to about 1.5mb of data pcm - and is this viable with todays data tariffs?

A: The amount of data is very small indeed. It won't burn a hole in the pocket. Clearly if you are taking lots of photos and uploading them etc, you'll feel it. (Presumably the target audience for this isn't going to be too fussed by an extra 1.5mb data pcm). Christians wife got offered flat fee data, 10 euros pcm in Finland. At the moment it will be a barrier to entry.

Q: Isn't a lot of this reliant on 3G, rather than GPRS?
A: (DanA) Depends what you mean. For photo sharing: yeah. But SVG/interactive content? Some of it is built to work over GPRS as a carrier. (Christian) It's not a bandwidth problem, it's a service design problem: browsers need to be a bit better. For full-track music downloads, obviously 3G is not going to scale (because of capacity) (?). "GPRS is great, you just need to move the *right* bits". (Matt) Bandwidth isn't the problem, it's latency that introduces delays - hence syncing in the background makes sense.

Wow: I've not heard this "3G isn't enough bandwidth" message so clearly at a telecomms event before.

Q: (to Christian) Can you talk about the flow of information between an operator and a service provider like yourself?

A: It's still "out there". First of all how do we get the users to feel comfortable? Yahoo! don't want to be a "big brother". It'll be a tango between users and Yahoo!, each taking a step forwards.

Q: Who's developing in SVG? How big is the developer base, and when will it eclipse the size of the Flash development community?

A: (DanA) This is about positioning Flash vs SVG. (Matt) One of the challenges with mobile is getting people to transition from web. Flash Lite 2 makes Flash Lite like Flash 7. Many of the skills involved in Flash development are the same as those used to produce SVG content. (Anton) The comparison needs to be made not on feature-by-feature, everyone is going in the same direction as far as features in the runtime but the big selling point for SVG is that it's a product of the mobile industry, and it's meant to be integrated into different aspects of on-handset software. SVG sits atop J2ME, native apps or browser apps. Flash Lite is a good selling point for folks coming from the desktop world, but it means rewriting what you've done because it's a different architecture. (DanA) Adobe needs to articulate a market positioning for Flash and SVG; this could be quite clear (and by extension, presumably isn't now).

Q: Is there a clear business model?

A: (Christian) Build reach, then monetise: just as with the Internet. There is a lot of conceptual work to do; it doesn't seem right to monetise before you have engagement.

Matt Millar, Adobe

Wants to talk about drivers for experience on mobile.

Mobile user experience is an undelivered promise. "The UE is your customers relationship with you". More enjoyable = more use = (for most folks) more revenue. As switching costs go down, experience matters more. We're all in the fashion business - it's good enough to be technically great, it needs personality.

Experience is *not* "making it pretty".

The WAP model isn't right. Chopping up the internet for a small screen doesn't work. We need (surprise surprise) a rich client model.

Cell phones operate more like game controllers - texting without looking. (Fair to note that predictive text makes this tricky/impossible).

Myth: chrome is cool. Surface content to the top. Feedback is more important than visual affordance. Use natural, visual metaphors.

Myth: animation is gratuitous. Actually, humans are good at motion tracking.

Myth: more visible features = more value. Every screen needs a clear call to action.

Myth: one size fits all.

Overall: he's very much trying to dampen down the worst excesses of Flash.

Canned demo of watching a film trailer, clicking to see more times, mapping, grabbing voucher, etc.. Looks either fantastic or a collection of mobile cliches. Memo to self: cut down on caffeine before next MoMo.

"Of course we have a lot of servers, but they're quite boring".

Demoing Yahoo Go!

Mobile business currently: operators/service business vs device manufacturers/hardware biz.

This is changing to something like:

Device manufacturers + operators (added value transport) + internet service biz.

Isn't this what we have today (replace "internet service" with "content providers", then have an argument with yourself about what's content and what's a service).

"You cannot shrink the Internet to a 5-line display". Colour screens + packet data make a difference. You need to build a decent user experience around communications devices.

Search will be important. Shrinking desktop search is not the point (yay). "Users want answers, they don't want to conduct an act of search" (yay). Search + portal as a "fusion experience" (ow). The importance of "glanceability" for interfaces: you don't link to the weather, you see the weather.

Data routing: Yahoo has huge server assets built on leveraging users personal content (e.g. 250m email users, 2b photos on Yahoo servers - presumably incl Flickr). Even photos are getting quite large - so you need a data router to move content intelligently between Yahoo servers and handsets. Performs scaling etc. Mentioned scaling for TV as well as mobile.

Distribution and awareness are the key problems to solve. User experience optimised for device. A personalised experience (cue promise of targeting - I wonder if Yahoo can really deliver on this better than all the other folks who promised this over the last decade?).

Uses on-phone applications. Extends them where Yahoo can add value and improves the native user experience. Question: who's fault is it that the S60 user experience is inadequate ;)

Hacked native mail application has been extended to add Yahoo-specific commands.

Seems to have a decent slideshow app (something missing from the N70). Nice integration for accessing Yahoo photo albums over the net - can definitely see the value here. Hmm, Flickr client for reading via mobile *would* be nice - that's a weird inversion, most of the time I find myself complaining that folks just think of mobiles as a content consumption tool, as opposed to production... Don't think I'd want all the other stuff tho.

They're not using SyncML for this stuff, but their own proprietary protocols.

This is very much about putting ideas from the previous presentations into practice.

SVG Tiny = 2D graphics that scale. Subset of larger SVG specification. Deployed today is SVG Tiny 1.1+ All done in XML, which is apparently a strong selling point. "Integrates into developers workflow" - sounds painful.

It's open and royalty-free - yay. Big ecosystem around it (compared to what - how big?). No lock-in to a single company (wonder who he's referring to there?).

You can't shove SVG desktop content onto a mobile, but there are "synergies" between the two. You can use the same basic data and do a bit of pipelining to sort it out. Scalable *and* sexy!

Has committments from operators behind it: Orange, Voda, Au, DoCoMo are making SVG a device requirement and shipping services based on it. Every top manufacturer ships SVG-capable devices. Third party browser providers also support it. SVGT is deeply integrated with J2ME via JSR226 (joint effort between Sun and Nokia). JSR248 will put all these features into a "mobile service architecture" package.

Cue big slide with LogoSpurt.

Hardware chips with SVG are being manufactured - that's really interesting. Has anyone done equivalent with any competing technologies. 95 handset models, 80m SVG-capable handsets shipped.

Services using it: Vodafone Live-cast (Germany); Au/Voda/DoCoMo office document viewing; Sony Ericsson/Nokia themes.

Authoring tools: Adobe CS2.

Compound documents: XHTML + SVG as mobile equivalent of HTML+Flash then.

2006 is the year of SVG Tiny 1.2 and CDF. Better support for pushing technologies. A strong format for describing rich media content, and presumably a competitor to Flash Lite.

These things seem to be iterating quite fast... 1.1 isn't out there in big enough numbers yet (80m is a big number but not really huge in mobile adoption terms) and the focus seems to be shifting to 1.2

Demo (from handset): EPG using nested JavaScript stuff. Looks pretty but way more primitive than the demos he's shown running on t'Mac. Nice integration with video.

This weekend has been brought to you by the letters K and R, and the number C.

Reassuring to discover that the old magic's still there...