For Flash Lite developers: New zone at Forum Nokia PRO is formed. Check out the benefits. Notice the word ‘pro’ is all caps; I guess that means for real professionals only – with a membership fee of 4000 Euros (just a little over US$5000), per year.
Don’t worry though, because “Forum Nokia PRO program and its services are targeted for the most visionary mobile developers, not all (membership) applications can be approved.”
Okay.
According to Adobe, there are now over one million Flash developers around the world. How many are Flash Lite developers? How many companies would pay 4000 Euros a year to join this zone when there are various other sources of information, and Adobe labs.
The Flash developer community is rather unique, compared to other developer communities I’ve been in. I believe this is because it is a mix of creative and technical people, achieving innovation on web design, application design, and now mobile design. The openness and sharing of open source material helps this community grow.
Personally, I’d love to be part of this forum, except I can’t see how to justify the entry fee.
3 replies on “Forum Nokia PRO: Flash Zone”
Agree with you, but I think we won’t have to wait so long for starting earn money with Flash Lite.
So, be patient !! 🙂
Coming from the web/flash world I’m finding the mobile world to be VERY different. The mobile world is built on open standards (the voice stuff blows my mind) and typically it’s been a pay-to-play environment as most mobile players are heavily invested. The 4,000 Euros is just seen as the cost of doing business, of being part of the community – something that is very alien to those of us coming from the web.
I hate to say it, but I’m not nearly as optimistic as Marco. Macromedia has been moving too slowly in the mobile space and OEMs are investing in SVG, real browsers with Javascript, CSS and even XMLHTTP.
Check out the phones already shipping with SVG:
http://svg.org/special/svg_phones
Also, note the diversity of OEMs involved thus far. Having Nokia play around with Flash Lite on a few devices does not a platform make.
Unless Adobe really starts shipping Flash Lite soon (in a relevant way outside of Korea and Japan) I don’t think it’ll matter.
Lastly, something that has somewhat shocked me recently is how many mobile developers are finally getting to a stage where Java MIDP 2.0 is somewhat useable and realistic for their projects. There has been a lot of investment to this point, jumping to Flash Lite better be REALLY compelling.
Actually, recent stats from Macromedia put the number of Flash developers at over 2 million now…
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2005/flashlite_brew.html
“As a result of this agreement, the large BREW developer community and more than two million Flash developers will be able to create rich, engaging mobile content on the Flash Platform for the BREW solution, QUALCOMM’s established content delivery and monetization system.”