Windows Phone Thoughts: Mobius 2006 Thailand: Day One

The next presentation was from Sebastian Schmidt from Spb Software House. Spb has a long history of Windows Mobile development – they've won many awards, including Handango's Developer of the Year twice. Spb develops consumer applications, but they also create tools for developers, and OEM/ODM development (T-Mobile, Intel Siemens, HP, Microsoft, and others). They also do custom development – Yahoo! Go was created by Spb, which brought many surprised looks from the Mobius group. They have 60 full-time employees, and only focus on Windows Mobile development. Sebastian delved into the way Spb operates internally – they have an intranet system that allows them to track bugs, deal with customers, and keep track of all aspects of the business. They officially support 11 languages currently, and are working on simplified Chinese and Japanese next. They had a release chart that showed the history of their applications, and by the end of 2006 there will be at least three new applications released. Sebastian asked us not to write about these applications, so I won't, but I will say that they all look quite interesting and innovative in the Windows Mobile space.



The last presentation of the day was from PocketCaster, and I was extremely impressed. The concept is actually so powerful it's hard to easily wrap your brain around, because the possibilities are vast. In essence, PocketCaster is a Windows Mobile client that does real-time encoding and uploading of video to the Web. That's something I've simply never seen before – in the demonstration he passed around a Jasjar, with all Mobius attendees looking into the camera. Within 10 seconds or so the video recorded on the Jasjar was being played back on the Web page with an embedded Windows Media Player client. He gave a compelling example of reporting in the field, streaming live from a mobile device, and having the camera confiscated by someone else – it wouldn't matter, the video is already up on the server. Using a Windows Mobile device with UMTS, his tests have resulted in video at 65 KB/s and 25 frames per second. The service scales with better quality equipment – there's a Windows XP desktop client that can be used with Web-cams or DV cams and WiFi where quality full-screen video is realistic. The optic quality of Windows Mobile devices is limited today, but as that improves so too will the quality of the video.

The service is aimed primarily at carriers - they want to sell their software so the T-Mobile and Vodaphones of the world will license it and offer it as a service to their clients, giving the end-user a way to broadcast videos up to their MySpace page, YouTube, personal blogs, etc. After seeing a demonstration of how it worked with Google Maps - they encode latitude and longitude information in every single video frame - my jaw was on the floor. It was amazing to see a video on the left of someone driving inside a car, and on the right a live satellite map showing a real-time movement of the vehicle along the road. Very impressive stuff.

And that's a wrap for day one of Mobius – tonight we're all off for dinner and a Muay Thai fight at a local arena. I hope you enjoyed the detailed coverage, and be sure to check back tomorrow for the final day of Mobius. Tomorrow will be less presentation-oriented, and more discussion-oriented, so there will be less coverage from me.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's loving Thailand!