Well, I thought it was about time I started a Blog! Ive been working with Flash Lite for 4 years now and have gained a lot of knowledge and experience of both Flash technology and of the mobile phone ecosystem.

Im not quite sure yet what this blog will contain, or where it will go, but I'll try my hardest to update it regularly, give honest opinions and hopefully offer some experience and advice to anyone interested in Flash Lite.

For those who dont know me, my name is Paul Lamonby, I'm 34 (last week) and I'm technical director at Blueskynorth Limited a Flash Lite company based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. I'm also an Adobe Community Expert for Mobile and Devices, as well as an Adobe Certified Professional and Trainer in Flash Lite. I have spoken at many industry events and contributed to several documents on Flash Lite development.

My working life has taken quite a few directions, I studied 3D Design and Furniture Making at Northumbria University (1994 - 1997), after which I started my first company designing and making contemporary furniture. At this point the only computer I had used was a ZX Spectrum 48k (>20 GOTO 10) back in the early 1980s! Setting up a company in the late 1990s was a wake-up-call to me and my complete lack of any computing knowledge, so I went on a course at Newcastle College to learn Computer Aided Art and Design (C.A.A.D.) This was fantastic! I was using Photoshop, Freehand, Director (ugh... LINGO!) Strata Studio 3D, QuarkXPress and of course Flash.

I seemed to pick it up like a duck to water, it was great, I designed all my Furniture Business marketng materials, business cards, letterheads, promo cards, leaflets, and my first Flash web site (damn it was shit!) Anyway, I was hooked. I was also using Strata Studio 3D to design and model my furniture, building each piece like I would in real life. It was stupid really, as it took just as long to model it on the computer (an iMac 350Mhz at the time) as it did in real life. The wierd thing was that I was making furniture for a lot of shops and start up businesses, so I was also offering them a design service for business cards, letterheads, logos, websites, etc.

I realised that web design and corporate identity design was much more lucrative than furniture, and no Spelks! So my second company, Pop Images, was born. This was a one-stop-design-shop business, touting for work for all sorts of clients, an airline, a health shop, an auto industry directory, and many, many more... In 2 years I must have had about 30+ clients, but by this time, after client revision on client revision, I was sick of it. Everyone and their dog thought they were a web designer, and the "99% of Flash website are crap!" slogan was born. I needed out of the web design world, I needed a new challenge that wasnt swamped by wannabees, I wanted to be at the start of a new technology, not clutching on the the tail wind of one.

At this point I was working with Chris, who also knew Graham, and we started talking about Flash for Mobile Devices down the pub. It was an emerging area, and one we saw fantastic potential in. Flash Lite had just been released in Japan to great applauds, and Flash was being used on PDAs and starting to appear on other mobile devices (Motorola A920.) Actually, it was the Motorola A920 UIQ device that got us started. We noticed a competition run by Motorola and Symbian to design software for the A920, which included a category for Flash content (Flash 5 was installed as a browser plugin on the device), sponsored by Macromedia. We worked day and night to come up with ideas for the competition. The A920 was available on the 3 Network in the UK, so we popped down to the nearest 3 Shop and asked the sales guy if we could bluetooth our software to the device to see how it ran. This became a weekly ritual, we finally turned up with a laptop and took over a corner of the store and were there for 2 or 3 hours testing the software! :) The sales guy finally decided enough was enough and put a stop to our testing, but by this time the competition deadline was looming, and we had 5 games and applications ready to go. BlueskyNorth was born.

A couple of months later we finally got an email from the competition saying we were one of the winners! Fantastic. It was the demo application we did for BALTIC, one we thought had no chance, but it seemed to hit all the right buttons, and looking back at it, it was a pretty cool application at the time. This got us the exposure we wanted and we started talking with Macromedia about the forthcoming Flash Lite 1.1 release for Series 60 1st and 2nd edition devices in June 2004. We made loads of demo content during the BETA stages, including the still popular Go Sushi, and as such we were invited by Macromedia to speak at the MAX 2004 event in New Orleans. What a great honour, in less than a year we had become experts (apparently) in a brand new technology and recognised by the owner of the technology, Macromedia, as pioneers in the field. MAX 2004 in New Orleans was great, we met up with Bill Perry, who was also a pioneer at the time with his work on Flash for PDAs and with Flash Lite. This was before he became the 'Adobe guru' he is now, and a lot less grey hair :)

A couple more years working with Flash Lite 1.1, 2.x and 3, Flash Cast, iRiver Clix, Speaking at MAX all over the world, meeting all the great guys from the Flash Lite community and seeing all the work Macromedia and Adobe have done to push Flash Lite into the mobile ecosystem, and here we are, December 2007. Its been a great few years, since the heady days of furniture making back in 1998, but 2008 I feel is going to get even better.

I look forward to meeting and speaking to you all in 2008.