20 January 2009

Video Intro Of The
Moket's Mobi Screen Maker

Mobi Screen Maker, from Brisbane, Australia-based Moket Pty Ltd., creates engaging Adobe Flash Litemobile content, enabling consumers to customise their own animated screen savers and wallpapersand have them delivered in real-time back to their mobile devices.

Mobi Screen Maker gives users access via their computer's web browser to an extensive library of branded images, and using a wizard-style interface helps them design unique combinations of the images to create their animated Adobe Flash Lite Mobi Screen. The application provides a link to the image that can be sent via SMS to a mobile device for immediate use as a wallpaper or screen saver.

The authoring interface is deployed as a mobile internet site or as a Flash Lite standalone application. Flash Lite lets developers create multimedia applications, wallpapers, screen savers, and games that can be displayed on S60 3rd Edition devices. In addition to offering the capabilities of Flash that are playable on Macintosh and Windows systems, Flash Lite adds unique mobile features such as the ability to vibrate devices and send text messages.

Many of the company’s Flash Lite animations for S60 3rd Edition devices are provide feedback received directly from the mobile device. For example, if the battery gets low, an animated character can appear on the phone’s screen and provide an alert. Moket’s MoCarbon products are screen savers that warn users when their phone needs charging, and reminds them to unplug their phone when the charging is finished, helping to save electricity.

Dale Rankine has bet the future of his company, Moket Pty Ltd., on Flash Lite from Adobe—and the bet, so far, has been a winning one. Since its founding three years ago, Moket has created a wide variety of Flash Lite content for S60 3rd Edition devices—everything from games to wallpapers, screen savers, and animated cartoons. The bet on Flash Lite has paid off so well that Moket has grown from a one-man shop to having seven team members in just 18 months. The company has become a Flash Lite aggregator for other independent developers, and it is in talks with international TV networks to create an animated show that could be played not only via television, but also on S60 3rd Edition devices.

Rankine, CEO and founder of Moket, attributes a good portion of his company’s success to Nokia. “Nokia has been a pioneer in the use of multimedia for smartphones, thanks to its early adoption of Flash Lite.” Nokia was the first company to launch Flash Lite-enabled devices outside of Japan,” he says, “and its focus on Flash Lite as a rich multimedia layer enables companies like us to develop the next generation of rich media for smartphones.”

“Nokia has been a pioneer in the use of multimedia for smartphones, thanks to its early adoption of Flash Lite.”—Dale Rankine, CEO and founder of Moket

Flash Lite lets developers create multimedia applications, wallpapers, screen savers, and games that can be displayed on S60 3rd Edition devices. In addition to offering the capabilities of Flash that are playable on Macintosh and Windows systems, Flash Lite adds unique mobile features such as the ability to vibrate devices and send text messages. Many of the company’s animated Flash Lite products for S60 3rd Edition devices are built around what Rankine calls “reactive content.” These are applications that react to the feedback they receive from the S60 3rd Edition devices.

“We don’t just create looped animations,” Rankine says. “The animations we create can respond to information such as the handset’s battery life, signal strength, and so on. So if the battery gets low, an animated character can jump onto the screen and warn you.” Perhaps the best example of that is Moket’s MoCarbon products. These are screen savers that warn users when their phones need charging, and remind them to unplug their phones when the charging is done. The software helps to “green” the planet, because a fully charged, plugged-in phone unnecessarily uses electricity.

Moket also uses Flash Lite to create games, but its most innovative use of Flash Lite for S60 3rd Edition devices may soon be showing up not just on mobile devices, but on TV sets as well. The company created a game built around a character called Dojo Monkey, and then after recognizing the character’s potential, decided to create an animation cartoon featuring Dojo Monkey that will be able to be viewed on S60 3rd Edition devices, television, and the Web. The company has already created a trailer and pilot episode for the cartoon, and is pitching the series to TV networks in Australia and around the world.

“Flash Lite will allow us to become a cross-content media company with very little effort,” Rankine says. “We’ll be creating a cartoon that from the beginning we know will be played on different platforms, including TV, S60 3rd Edition devices, and the Web. We’ll develop the cartoon with all those channels in mind, so it will take very little additional effort for us to create it for each channel. Someone who develops a cartoon in the traditional way, and then needs to port it to mobile devices, has a much more difficult time creating cross-channel content.”