ndWare make games and mobile production tool Richmotion.

mo:life:
Can you give a run down of what Richmotion Live actually does? And, ideally, how do you see people using it?

Robert Murray:
Richmotion Live is the first in a range of products based on our core Richmotion technology. It is a tool that allows you to compose sophisticated animations and export them into a format ready to play back on your mobile phone. To the first time user it will look a lot like Flash or Director. Under the hood it is very different.

The important distinction with Richmotion Live is that it doesn’t require a player to be installed on the mobile handset, so anything you produce can be distributed to a huge existing market. At the same time the technology is built from the ground up for mobile phones, so your content comes out small and fast.

Ideally and ultimately, I see Richmotion technology being used wherever a rich, animated interface is required for a mobile phone. Its uses vary from producing entertainment content to rich consumer interfaces for data services.

In practice, the earliest uses of Richmotion Live will likely be to produce entertainment content like a series of short animation episodes or amusements. There is a quick and easy business model in that which can hit a similar market to ringtones and wallpaper. I think marketers and promoters will catch on very quickly also and see the tool as a way to broaden their offerings in a very cost effective way.

As we release more of the core technology people will see how deep the technology really goes and we will see some extremely sophisticated applications emerging.

mo:life:
How do you see mobile content development playing out? Will there be a relatively content developer community, or we see hundreds of thousands of users creating their own innovative (and no so innovative) mobile content?

Robert Murray:
If you referring to worldwide figures then I would expect something more like the hundreds of thousands of commercial content creators. I don’t think anything in the mobile space will be small (except the devices themselves). We have not yet seen a computing platform that has reached the level of market saturation and usage that the mobile device will.

mo:life:
It’s great to have rich content, but in Australia we’ve got some absurbly high bandwidth rates. What’s your advice to telcos? What’s your advice to users?

Robert Murray:
I think the Telco’s know what they need to do, they just have to find a way to make it work for them commercially. I believe the general consensus is that a flat monthly rate for data or packaged content is the way to drive adoption. They are well aware that data costs are currently a significant barrier to the adoption of content services, so they will drop prices, it’s just a matter of when.

As for users, my advice is to be discerning. If users start demanding cheaper data and gravitating to plans that offer that then Telco’s will get the message.

In the meantime, we have designed Richmotion to produce extremely tight content. Generally your download should be about 60Kb or about one dollar of data costs.

mo:life:
Macromedia recently released Flash Lite. Obviously they want to get in to the business of enabling the creation of rich media. How can you compete with products such as Macromedia’s Flash Lite?

Robert Murray:
What Macromedia have more than anything is some really strong marketing and great brand recognition. Fortunately we don’t have to compete with them.

Richmotion works on a huge market of existing handsets (virtually any handset that supports J2ME), Flash Lite doesn’t, and it won’t for many years to come (if at all). So we are not yet in the same market, we are providing a solution now, Macromedia is promising one for the future.

I may need to explain that a little more, there are two key problems with Flash Lite:

1. The first is that Flash Lite requires a large player program to be installed onto the mobile phone before any content can be viewed. Your mass market consumer does not have this player on their phone, so they can’t view your content. The trick for Macromedia is to try to convince 100’s of handset manufacturers to install Flash Lite on their handsets before they are sold and then to pay Macromedia for the privilege. Even if they do manage to convince those manufacturers to install Flash Lite on some of their handsets, they will have to wait 2 years for the handsets to actually sell enough to form a good sized market.

2. The second problem is that Flash Lite has a very high minimum spec in mobile terms due to its PC heritage. Only high end smart phones can run the player. This rules out 90% of your market who buy cheap pre-paid mobiles.

Another big advantage of Richmotion is that it can evolve to take advantage of new features. This is because Richmotion bundles your content with the player into one application (like a Director .exe except designed to be very small). So as Richmotion evolves or as new functionality emerges on new mobile phones you can have immediate access to it. This will be very important in the rapidly growing mobile market.

My advice in the mobile content space is once again to be discerning. Mobile manufacturers and Telco’s want you to focus on the newest shiniest mobile phones and technologies that are available, or might be available around the corner. They have no interest in the existing market because it has already been sold. However the existing market is exactly what content providers need to sell.

So in summary - be wary. We will tend to tell you that rich content is what you need, but in actual fact a simple SMS based service may be much better suited.

mo:life:
Can you give us an update on rich media standards and formats relating to mobile phones and content? Is there one format that works on all mobile devices?

Robert Murray:
There is only one rich media standard that works on a broad slate of mobile devices and that is Richmotion. I don’t just say that to be dramatic, it is true - because it runs on top of J2ME. However if you loosen up the definition of rich media then you can encompass a broader range of standards.

The following standards are pretty much ubiquitous on colour screen GSM handsets today:
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SMS
WML
J2ME MIDP 1.0

The more recent standards below have a very strong and growing market:
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J2ME MIDP 2.0
MMS

I would include some sort of XHTML based standard here but each mobile phone and its browser software varies in what tags it supports and how it renders, so the word ’standard’ is not very applicable. In any case, most new color mobiles on the market support some sort of HTML style markup that is more feature rich than WML.

Some 3G handsets and Smartphones support the following standards:
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MPEG4
MP3 music

In the near future you may see the following important rich media standards emerge:
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SVG Tiny
mobile ECMA Script

We are already developing our Richmotion technology to make the most of SVG Tiny and mobile ECMA script as they emerge.

mo:life:
From your vantage point, can you signpost the next few years of mobile development?

Robert Murray:
Well I think 2005 - 2007 will be the 3G years, as 3G services roll out and become adopted worldwide. This will see a strengthening demand from Telco’s for content that helps them distinguish their 3G offering from their existing 2.5G networks.

Mobile games will continue to thrive and 3D games will be seen as a driving factor in the adoption of more powerful 3G handsets.

We are still on the same trend of the big players in the mobile space trying to differentiate themselves via content. I see this strengthening further as technology makes more and richer content possible.

I believe that technology like Richmotion and SVG Tiny will enable a broadening of content possibilities. Alongside cheaper and faster data, this will see broader commercial content offerings emerge than just games, ringtones and wallpapers.

I basically expect it all to get bigger, it is just a question of how fast.