The last MAX 2007 conference is finished and it's been an amazing tour de force around the world. First Chicago, then Barcelona and now Tokyo. It's incredible to see presentations by designers and developers in each region and the ideas that they're sharing. There's definitely a wide range of Flash Lite that's being created and sold here in Japan, some of it is only applicable for the market here while others could easily be re-purposed in other countries.

Mobile is alive and doing very well here in Japan. Besides 3G being everywhere (which is nice), 85% of all handsets that are shipping in Japan are Flash enabled, meaning they have some version of Flash Lite pre-installed. That number will increase over time.

There were five mobile related sessions here in Tokyo on Thursday and even though four of them were presented in Japanese the information presented was so good that I was able to follow along and get a good idea of what was being shown. Some of the highlights included presentations from CELL mobile, DeNA and Neuromagic. I'm trying to get some of their content to share in another post to help inspire others of the types of experiences they're creating.

For my presentation I showed examples of Flash Lite content from developers around the world as well as numerous handsets that use Flash Lite for the UI. Thanks to all of the developers who allowed me to show their work to the attendees - they really liked it. There's a lot of innovative uses of Flash Lite for UI that I'm just recently learning about and will be posting some video clips shortly. If you're interested you can download my MAX 2007 Japan presentation but be warned it's in Japanese.

Now off to some sightseeing and eating some of the best fresh fish in the world.

Tonight I'm leaving for Asia for the next 10 days where I'll be speaking at two conferences about Flash Lite. First I'll be speaking about developing Flash Lite applications for Nokia devices at the Nokia App Summit 2.0 in Bangkok. Attendees are Forum Nokia PRO developers from all over APAC and I'm excited about the opportunity to discuss with them creating and selling Flash Lite content.

Then the middle of next week I'm off to Tokyo for MAX Japan where I'll be speaking about Flash Lite with an appropriately named session "Must-see! Adobe Mobile Device from overseas and the possibilities for streaming Flash content to mobile devices in Japan". What I'll be showing is a wide and diverse range of Flash Lite content from developers around the world and several examples of UIs built with Flash Lite from various OEMS including LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

Like my other presentations I'll be posting them here on my site once I'm done.

This post is a few days late due to travel through Europe but I wanted to say 'gracias' to everyone I met in Barcelona from this past Saturday through Wednesday. The MAX Europe event in Barcelona had a great turnout and I got a sense of talking to attendees and walking around that the vibe there was good.

Monday evening was especially fun when we had a little get together for food with local and regional Flash Lite developers and some people from Nokia. Having a chance to talk face to face with developers to hear what's working, issues they're having, how we may be able to help out and to see what they've been working is so valuable and I hope to do more in person developer meetings starting in the next few months.

There's a lot of cool Flash Lite applications being developed in Spain and Italy and once their work is exposed to more people I'm sure they'll get more attention. I don't have any photos from that evening but I'm sure if you do a search on Flickr you will find them soon.

On Monday my Flash Lite 3 session was well attended and even though I finished my presentation and demos earlier then I planned it allowed time for a lot of Q&A. Given the amount and types of questions being asked I get the feeling that the developer community is really interested in Flash Lite 3 and is waiting to start creating some new types of experiences.

Tuesday evening I did the sneak peek for Flash Home and it was awesome to show some new stuff that we're working on. The response to one of the features I showed (automatically changing the home screen background based on the location of the incoming call) was very well received. Thanks to all of the engineers and QA back in San Francisco who have been working on Flash Home over the past several months - the attendees really liked it.

Over the next few days expect more posts on Flash Lite 3 and other topics.

Less than one week away and I'm really excited to be presenting my session on Flash Lite 3. Lots of very cool things to show besides support for Flash Video which we've already mentioned earlier this year. I will be giving my session twice:

• Monday, October 1 (3:15-4:15pm)
• Tuesday, October 2 (4:00-5:00pm)

Don't forget to sign-up for the other mobile sessions - lots of good topics being presented by some of the best mobile Flash developers today.

Hopefully you've already registered for MAX North America because as of yesterday it's now sold out. This is awesome and the first time it's happened, however if you didn't already register or were planning on registering on site then you won't be able to attend. Don't worry though because I will be posting my presentation around mid-October and I believe the MAX events team is looking at ways to film most of the MAX sessions and to make them available for viewing.

There are still a few spaces available for the Introduction to Flash Lite 2 session that is being held the day before the official start of the MAX North America conference. If you're getting into mobile this is a great crash course to help you understand the mobile ecosystem, leverage your existing desktop/web skills and find out how to create Flash Lite content.

This is an all day session (9am - 5pm CST) on Sunday 30 September and does require an additional fee to register. You can sign-up for this session when you register for MAX or modify your existing registration.

The Adobe MAX North America conference is one month away and I thought I'd ask you (the community) if you would find it beneficial to have a mobile conference guide for the MAX conference. Something that attendees could reference easily on their phone without having to flip through a printed brochure. For previous MAX conferences and other events (Flashforward, 3GSM, etc...) some Flash Lite developers created mobile conference guides and most of them were really good.

Is anyone working on one? I was thinking about creating one but wanted to see if there were other Flash Lite developers already in the process. Some of the things I'm thinking about are: distributing the app to attendees, providing updates, screen sizes and the addressable devices.

If you're attending MAX North America or Europe and are interested in a mobile version of the conference guide, what are the top 3 features you'd like to have? Leave your ideas in the comments section.

If you haven't already heard we've announced our upcoming MAX 2007 conferences - which are Adobe's annual designer/developer conferences. This year we'll have three conferences around the world to allow creative professionals, students and hobbyists to hear from speakers who are very knowledgeable with a wide range of topics including Flash Lite, Flash Cast, AIR, Flex, Flash, Dreamweaver, Premiere, etc... This year will be my 6 MAX US conference and I'm really looking forward to meeting everyone who is interested in developing mobile Flash applications/content as well as hearing from other speakers on what cool things they've been working on.

Here are the dates and locations of the MAX conferences:

• MAX US: Sept 30 - Oct 3 (Chicago)
• MAX Europe: Oct 15 - 18 (Barcelona, Spain)
• MAX Japan: Nov 1 - 2 (Tokyo, Japan)

For the US conference we currently have the following mobile related sessions scheduled:

• 20 Tricks to Improve Flash Lite Development
• Creating Flash Cast Channels for Verizon Wireless
  
• Creating Flash Lite Multiplayer Games
• Designing for Mobile Experiences
  
• Flash Lite 3 Development
• From Desktop to Mobile: New Revenue Opportunities
• Introduction to Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium
  
• Introduction to Flash Lite 2

As the US conference date gets closer we'll be finalizing these sessions and speakers. For the other two regional MAX conferences we're putting together a list of topics to cover but if you plan on attending these and would like to see a specific mobile topic covered, please let me know by leaving a comment here.

After 15 hours of traveling from San Francisco, I arrived last night in Taipei and this morning (2 Nov) I gave part of the mobile portion of the key note for MAX Taipei. Overall the keynote went very well and talking to several of the 500 attendees they were excited about Apollo, future versions of our products and the new mobile emulation tool.

There were a few familiar people that I spoke with this morning and I'm looking forward to my mobile session tomorrow where I'll be talking about "Future of Mobile Content Creation". If time permits I'll also be showing a Flash Lite 2.0 wallpaper created and running on the new Nokia 5300, which is a Series 40 device.

This is my second time to Taipei and the people here are very pleasant and friendly, however both times I've been here it's been raining. Good thing is the weather is starting to clear up so hopefully I'll be able to take a walk this afternoon and go to the top of the 101 tower - the tallest building in the world.

Tomorrow afternoon I leave for Singapore where I'll be meeting with some customers and also speaking at MAX Singapore which starts next Tuesday (7 Nov). I'll post more info about my trip early next week.

So with MAX US starting on 24 October I thought it would be good to see if anyone is planning on creating or has already created an event guide using Flash Lite. It can be either Flash Lite 2.0 or 1.1 and would work on any handset that supports Flash Lite, wheter it's pre-installed or using a developer version of Flash Lite player.

You can visit the Adobe MAX US event web site to gather images, schedule, session information and other information you can use in your application.

This is not an official Adobe MAX conference request, instead I thought I'd reach out to the community to see what could be created. Next week I will be adding a page to my site for the downloads of these event guides by the community so anyone can download them. They can be either submitted as a SIS file (Symbian installer package) or SWF file.

If you have any questions about this you can leave a comment. If you want to share your Flash Lite MAX US event guide you can send it to me and I'll upload it to my site (b perry at adobe dot com) for anyone to download.

Today Adobe announced the agenda for this years annual developer conference "MAX 2006" which will be held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas from the 23-26 October. You can go directly to the event page to get all of the information including pre-conference events, the agenda and hotel and travel and of course registration.

For those of you interested in the mobile and device sessions this year I've listed them here for you:

• Brand X = "Extending our Brand into the Mobile Space with Flash Lite"
• Connecting to External Data Services using Flash Lite
• Cool and Compelling Use Cases with Video in Flash Lite 2
• Creating Flash Content for Consumer Electronics
• Creating Flash Lite Content for Verizon Wireless
• Flash Lite Case Studies: Breakdesign
• Flash Lite Development for Nokia Series 40 Devices
• Flash Lite Game Development for Nokia S60 devices
• Future of Mobile Authoring: Preview of New Tools
• How to Make Money with Flash Lite
• Optimizing Content for Mobile Devices
  

This year we're planning for more technical oriented sessions and have invited speakers from around the world who are experts in the Flash mobile area. By the way I'll be presenting the session "Future of Mobile Authoring: Preview of New Tools".

For complete information you can check out the sessions by track.

It was great meeting a lot of you at MAX two weeks ago and being able to see and hear first hand your thoughts about Flash on mobile devices as well as your excitement about the next version of Flash Lite - Flash Lite 2.0.

For those of you who weren't able to attend MAX you can watch the keynotes from days 1 and 2. Day 2 has three seperate clips pertaining to mobile and devices: Mobile and Devices, Mobile Demos and Mobile UI.

I wanted to let those of you who I met at MAX that I haven't forgotten about you and will be touching base later this week as I finish catching up on emails.

Heading to Anaheim, California this afternoon for the next 4 days of MAX and I'm really looking forward to the conference - being able to see old friends, make some new ones and to share some of the cool stuff we've been working on.

I'm involved with a few sessions in addition to showing some new ideas during the sneak peeks session Tuesday late afternoon. I'm bringing several devices that use Flash technologies, either as playing back content, used for the UI or both. From left to right:

• Kodak EasyShare-One Digital Camera
• Samsung SCH-V730
  
• KDDI au WIN W31S
• Nokia N90
• Nokia N70
• Nokia 6680
• Sony Ericsson W800i
• iRiver U10
  

If you're attending MAX here are the specific mobile sessions and times:

• Sunday, 16 Oct
• Full day seminar: Developing Flash Content for Mobile Devices (9am-5pm)
• Monday, 17 Oct
• Various mobile sessions throughout the day (8am-5:30pm)
  
• Birds-of-a-Feather mobile session: Mobile 411 (7-8pm)
  
• Tuesday, 18 Oct
• Various mobile sessions throughout the day (8am-5:30pm)
• Sneak Peeks (5:30-6:30pm)
• Wednesday, 19 Oct
• Various mobile sessions throughout the day (9am-3:45pm)
  

Some of you have contacted me directly about meeting up and I'd love to hang out with everyone while I'm there. My schedule is a bit hectic but if you find me let's chat about things and perhaps we can have some type of group get together Wednesday evening. I'll try to post more details later this week.

If you're not able to attend don't worry - I'll be posting nightly updates to keep everyone informed.

With MAX a week away I thought it would be a good time to ask the community the following two questions:

1) If there were a Flash Lite conference guide for MAX would you use it?
2) If you've created one would you mind sharing it?

If you've created a conference guide and would like to share it please send it to me (bperry at macromedia dot com). We're looking for a few good conference guides to promote during MAX and afterwards in various marketing efforts.

Also if you're planning on attending MAX and have a supported Flash Lite handset leave a comment - thanks.