Beyond the Browser
May 5th, 2008 9:58 pm
by Dayton Pereira | Posted in Opinion, Tech
For a long time now, we have been talking about what the next generation of Internet technologies is going to be and where we may see the applications of those technologies. That is the basis of this post which attempts to look at things that go beyond the browser.
Adobe AIR
The first and most obvious one is the ever popular Adobe AIR. Now we all love AIR ’cause it could be very cool to work with, however, as a company we work for brands and believe it or not, we are finding it quite challenging to find ways to integrate it into brand experiences. Since AIR offers all the same functionality as a typical rich web application, it’s difficult to justify the building of a desktop application where the barrier to use it is far greater due to the sizeable download. Such as it may be, AIR does allow us incredible control over system-level access and offers the kind of functionality that can only exist on a desktop. It can be quite powerful to make applications that you would otherwise need C++ or visual basic to build - now you can build them in Flash.
One of the first AIR apps that I have seen in any marketing website is here: http://www.getahappyface.com/ by EVB. This is a series of widgets with various features - pretty basic but good on EVB for pushing technology. However, my guess is that there weren’t a lot of downloads as the work involved in downloading the apps outweighed their value, IMHO.
We are looking at AIR apps in a fundamentally different way, creating applications for things that we use all the time. The richFLV player is an awesome one as it can natively support the playback of FLV’s and can also inject meta data into your FLV - another cool feature. It’s these kind of applications that have a lot of return value that make for a good AIR app - a pizza ordering application would be another cool one - if you order a lot of pizza.
Mobile
Now, we are not talking traditional SMS that has been talked to death already. We are talking mobile in a completely different way, using some of the new technologies that are available with mobile, such as GPS on a Blackberry, applications on wi-fi enabled phones such as the iPhone, which just happens to support Unity3D so we can make games using the iPhone as the platform. Some of the other things we are exploring with mobile is using SMS to connect to web services so that SMS data can then be displayed on a website or projected on a space in real time. Mobile is a pretty cool space if you think beyond the traditional SMS and there will be more on this subject as it develops.
Arduino
So for those of you who don’t know what Arduino is, read this wiki post http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino. We have been chatting about this considerably and trying to find ways to integrate physical computing into the things we do. Take for example a website where a user could flick a switch and a light would turn on in the physical world, pretty cool things can happen if we can do that. Arduino is the gateway to those kinds of experiences where micro-controllers can be programmed to turn switches which would in turn control things like lights, motors, cars, planes etc. Now you take Arduino and couple it with some mobile and web applications and we have something to talk about.
So these are just the start of our discussions with some of the things that interest us as a company. There is much more to come and we really think that with what we know how to do on the web, and a bit more effort, these concepts can be applied beyond the browser. Look out for more ideas on this subject in the near future.
Tags: Adobe AIR, arduino, mobile, physical computing, Unity3D
