Korea Game Conference 2008

I just returned from a business trip in Korea which was built around KGC (Korea Game Conference). I had the honor of being a speaker there and delivering a session about the new era of mobile gaming in Europe and the US - a certainly important topic on which I'll hopefully elaborate on one of my next posts.

It is a NextGenMoCo tradition to write about my experiences in such events - and this one is no different, and can be of great interest to people who are working in the game industry.

First of all, Being at Korea was a true experience. Everything on the street is Korean, which unfortunately for me I am not fluent in... Also not a lot of english speakers there (Even my session was translated simultaneously to Korean..) - so you have to get by, and I learned 4 basic words that helped me along my journey: Anyo-a-ze-ho (Hello), Kam-sam-nida (Thanks), Young-su-tzung (Invoice - for the expense report...) and Poo-ke (Fork - I just can't handle those sticks...).

Anyway, KGC is a business-oriented conference and in parallel to that there's an exhibition called G-star, that has a consumer side (not unsimilar to the late E3) and also a business side (Which is not unlike GDC). In addition there are other smaller conferences for serious games and culture in gaming etc. Obviously most of the visually interesting things are in the G-star consumer side, so here goes:

Best Booth Babes

Let's start with the best... No gaming show is complete without booth babes... And here there were indeed plenty of those. The first place goes to SK Telecom that provided a lot of attractions... Also most companies knew exactly how to unleash the potential of the boothbabes - they were posing all the time in front of posters of the game of the hour.... well done indeed (Full album here)

Most popular attraction: Booth babes...

And indeed it appears that using boothbabes to promote stuff really pays off in Korea. Near every boothbabe, and at any point of time, you could find an army of photographers.... I can't believe how these guys crowd around just to get some boothbabe glamour... Of course yours truly was one of these guys too... couldn't resist it...

Best Arcade

This is simply cool... As a kid I always liked arcade games that provided me with added value to the home gaming experience. I nthe past this wasn't difficult since PC games was a bit far behind arcade rooms (Wow, this game supports CGA and has 4 different colors on the same time!). Nowadays, you can get almost everything on a PC, and if not you have the killer consoles - so what's left are cool controllers like this drum set which is more impressive than the one you can get in Rock Band.

Trendiest Phenomenon: Board Games

Once upon a time, successful movies became games and also popular board games became computer games. Nowadays movies are made in thr image of successful games - and apparently so are board games. Meet Starcraft , the board game.... If you can't get enough starcraft and want to play it offline, you can use this board game...

Mobile Multiplayer Experience

Here again in the SK Telecom booth I am playing a zooma-like game against people in Japan via video conference. I guess the video conference is just to show I'm playing against real people (who kinda over-acted their part...). The game is connected to the internet and basically the last one to survive without disqualifying is the winner (And gets notified on realtime). Wasn't very exciting but an interesting concept. Guess we'll have to work harder to find the real multiplayer experience.

Best Title Ripoff...

Take Warcraft and Farcry and fuse them together, what do you get? WarCry... Korea has a massive local game industry, some or most of these games do not get to the western markets, but the Korean gamers are a wide enough audience. Sometimes the game titles sound a bit like the global hits - can't hurt - right?.. I myself am still waiting for Farcraft as well...

Lost in Translation

I am not sure how this Rockband clone is called in Korean but the transaltion says "Funny Band" and the sales pitch says "Funny Online Music"... Hmmm.. I am not sure I ever heard funny music, so it might be interesting to play that. Then again it is probably one of those things who don't pass translation (And there are many of those in Korea as the language structure is so different than western langauges...)

Lost in Translation 2

And from the same creator (or at least same translation company) of Funny Band, here is Love Beat which is not only Cool and Wow but it is also Normal! I wanted to play a normal game for some time now - it's such a strong marketing pitch... Anyway I have to go now to some party. I hear it's going to be normal...

Best Simulator (And worst gamer)

One of the fun things at game shows are the simulators. In this case I must say it was less fun - getting into this car looks simpler than it really is, and getting out even more so... And I also really sucked at this game and spent most of the time hitting walls and driving on grass... Still it looked like fun for those who are more gifted than me in the gaming art...

Best Food

Oh, the food... I think I never ate so many new and interesting things. I like to try stuff out and this time it worked for me - most of the things were delicious. Korean food is simply great. It also helped that I could attend all the speaker events (i.e. welcome/farewell parties etc.) which featured the best of Korean food..

Best Supermarket Ever...

And last but not least, this picture was not taken at the show, but rather at a supermarket. The first thing you see when you go in is the game section. Hundreds of games for consoles, portable consoles and PCs. And a 5-year old playing the Nintendo DS.... You can see the same sights walking in the streets, especially in the great electronics market at Yongsan which is just full of gaming products - games, controllers, props and of course consoles at low prices (you just need to know how to operate these Korean menus...). All that shows how evolved is the gaming culture here.

Well, that's all for now, I really had a good time, so thanks to all the KGC/G-star organizers. Looking forward for the next time!

Israeli Startups - Register to the Mobile Peer Awards contest!

If you're an Israeli startup and haven't been in the last Mobile Monday Tel Aviv event, you might have missed our announcement of the Mobile Peer Awards contest.

Shortly, this is a contest organized in collaboration with the entire MobileMonday community (~70 chapters around the world), where each chapter sends its best local startup to compete against the others in a contest held at 3GSM/MWC in Barcelona.

This year for the first time Israeli startups can compete, since up until this year there was no MobileMonday chapter in Israel... So, hurry up and register at the Mobile Peer Awards site - you have only till Nov.30! More details are available at the MobileMonday Tel Aviv site.

Readers outside of Israel can register via their local chapters, assuming they have one, so check out the details at the Mobile Peer Awards site.

Mobile Summit Sweden

I am just returning now from a week in Stockholm, after attending MobileMonday's Global Founders Meeting (GFM) and Mobile Summit Sweden. I can't write much about GFM (top secret...), I can only say it has been a great experience, and was very nice to get together with Mobile Monday foundersry from all over the world.

As for Mobile Summit Sweden, The conference was organized by Ken Imamura, founder of MoMo Sweden, and a lot of the speakers were also MoMo founders since they stayed after GFM. There was also good content in the usual fields such as panels from VCs and incubators in the mobile field, sessions about mobile marketing, advertising, gaming and so on. It is nice to get to know the activities of Nordic companies in the mobile field - and some really have their game on.

But for me the MobileMonday stuff was the most interesting... for example, we heard about the story of MobileMonday from Peter Westerbacka, one of the founders of MoMo, always important to know our history...

The last part of the summit called Global Outlook was especially interesting - we got to heard about emerging markets from MoMo founders in the regions of South East Asia (Andy Zain, MoMo Jakarta), Latin America (Nidal Barake, MoMo Caracas) and India (S R Raja, MoMo Bangalore) - a real eye opener. In the same way we heard from Lars Cosh-Ishi, founder of MoMo Tokyo about the Japanese mobile market, which is the exact opposite: perhaps the most developed mobile market in the world.

All agreed that when dealing with an emerging market, one must recognize it and not just "copy & paste" the penetration strategies we use in developed market. The needs can sometimes be very basic (i.e. not 3D mobile games, but rather simple SMS-based solutions). Also business models needs to be rethought - for example, in south east Asia renting a game for one week (with DRM lock) can actually fit the model in which people are used to consume, and will definitely fit their pocket as well.

I'll spend now a week or two back in Israel before my next event, so a lot of work for me... See you at the next post!

Carnival of the Mobilists #142

I haven't written here in a while due to the preparation for MoMoTLV grand event last week and also some consulting projects that keep me busy - so it is my pleasure to make a great "comeback" by hosting Carnival of the Mobilists #142. The Carnival is a (relatively) old tradition where the best mobile posts of the past week are linked from one blog (More on this mobile tradition here).

Lots of good mobile posts this week... My personal favorite was the one from John Puterbaugh from Nellymoser who writes about the evolution of applications/content delivery in the various platforms in his very elaborate post Closed is the New Open: From Vending Machines to Marketplaces.

Following are several other posts that also touch the subject of appstores. It seems that due to the success of Apple's appstore, the idea of appstores and what are the secret ingredients of building a good one captures many of the bloggers this week. Starting with M. Radedeas from Techhype who asks How Many App Stores Does The World Need?

Another interesting post in the same area is The Happy Medium: Building a Smartphone App Store that Works by Malcolm Lithgow from Smart Dreaming. Malcolm explores the idea of creating an appstore for smartphones.

On a related topic, iPhone being the connecting line, Ram Krishnan dives into recent web browsing statistics, and tells us that while that showed the iPhone is considered a significant growth factor in this market, the numbers tell a different story. All this in his post Revisiting iPhone’s Browsing Market Share.

And some more interesting thoughts on mobile web/apps come from Ajit Jaokar from Open Garden who asks Can Carriers execute Long Tail / Web 2.0 applications? discussing how can the longtail model that works so good on the web be translated to the carrier dominated mobile world.

You can find more On Mobile Browser Based Applications in About Mobility by C. Enrique Ortiz, founding member of Mobile Monday Austin, who takes a deep look into the cons and pros of mobile web vs. mobile client applications, and provides guidelines to choose between the two.

And since we mentioned Mobile Monday, James Cooper from Mjelly writes Mobile Platforms - MoMo London September notes which is about MoMo London's last event on Mobile Platforms. On a personal note, I'd like to believe that I had something to do with the rise of that topic as a MoMo event - I posted my article on the battle of the mobile platforms (see below in this blog) in MoMo London's discussion group and it spawned a discussion thread from hell... This subject is definitely hot, and a few weeks later it became an event...

You can find more on platforms in Capuchin: Sony Ericsson strikes back in the Application Environment, a post by Thomas Menguy in Vision Mobile that discusses Capuchin, a technology that combines flash lite with J2ME, which is supposed to take the best of both worlds: UI from flash and engine from J2ME, sounds like voodoo to me... (Just kidding, it's actually a very good idea given the what these platforms can acheive when combined).

And speaking of UI, Barbara Ballard from Little Springs shares with us an interview with Jason Ward, head of UX for Sprint, about mobile UI design, always a very interesting subject.

And last but not least, on a less mainstream subject but certainly a fine one, Antoine RJ Wright claims in his blog that Reading Shouldn't Require an Interface shares a very interesting vision of how reading on mobile should look like.

That's about it for this week, stay tuned for NextGenMoCo next posts and if you liked this carnival (and even if you didn't..) you can follow the next one at The Smartphones Show.

LWUIT is out in the open!

Just a quick follow-up post: LWUIT, Sun's new UI toolkit for J2ME has been released as an open source project . I wrote about LWUIT before - it was announced on Sun's JavaOne conference and was destined to become open-sourced, but it actually did just last week.

The toolkit has picked up a lot of interest from the developers community, and several companies are using it, or exploring the option of using it. I have been involved in a UI project in one of the companies I am consulting to, and I've digged deep inside LWUIT, and I must say it is really an upgrade for the J2ME world, coming probably not a moment too soon to give some weight to the Android/iPhone attack...

In addition, the LWUIT team is very responsive and listens to the community, and this can be seen by the vast number of (releavant) features that were added to it since it was launched. They also keep in touch via a Shai's Java & LWUIT Blog and the LWUIT Forum (And since their offices are close very close to one of my clients, I've had the chance to meet them several times and give them some feedback, and I hope I helped and contributed to the later versions).

I can also see the level of interest in a personal level - the term lwuit is one of the most popular search terms that lead to this blog, and up until now there was only one post about it...

So if you're in the J2ME world (or looking to enter to it) and still didn't saw LWUIT first hand, download it here and you'll see what I'm talking about...

World's most ancient cameraphone...

Hmmm... Not what you expected, right?... This image here is not a photoshop work, it is an actual physical "cameraphone". I took this picture in my visit to the graduates exhibition held in the Bezalel Academy of Arts here in Jerusalem.

I doubt if it actually works (In fact I'm sure it doesn't...), but the concept which was displayed in the art department is interesting and surprising... I didn't get the artist name, if this is yours let me know and I'll credit you here.

Anyway, I had to share it with you - quite hilarious... There were other neat exhibits (not necessarily mobile realted...) from the Animation, Industrial Design and other departments, if you're in the area in July, this exhibition is very recommended.

Also, on an unrelated matter, my post The battle of the mobile platforms which raised a lot of interest in the mobile community was published in the Carnival of Mobilists (CotM) #135 hosted this week at Paul Rupert's Mobile Point View. This is the third time at the CotM, so I hope to host one myself sometime in the following months. Till then...

The battle of the mobile platforms

I have been hearing a lot lately from various people, especially those who are starting now new ventures, but also established companies about their tendency to develop their apps to the new kids in the platform block (iPhone and Android) while abandoning older and more established platforms, especially J2ME.

The claim is that J2ME is too much of a hassle, first because of its porting problem, then because of the carrier related problems, and in the end the result on devices doesn't look too good anyway due to the platform limitations.

I agree that J2ME hasn't been very pleasant for developers in the past few years, and same goes for other platforms such as Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile to some extent - each with its own problems (Flash Lite is somewhere in between it's relatively new and promising but didn't make as much noise as iPhone/Andorid). But things are changing and it would be a shame to drop these platforms just when they are maturing and go to new and shiny platforms that is still in its boot camp...

But let's go back a bit, and ask first the very important question: Who is your target audience? This marketing 101 question will lead to the next question: What devices does your market audience use? (or in other words: What are your target devices?)

I believe asking this question, while ignoring technology aspects for a second, is very important since it makes the distinction between which devices your target audience uses to which devices you would have liked them to use...

Yes, there are new shiny platforms like the iPhone and delayed but soon to be launched Android, and yes, you can do great things with those. Things you wouldn't have dreamed about doing in J2ME. But, your users are not necessarily using them. To be exact, whatever your target is, 0% use Android currently.... And as for the iPhone it is true that it has gained a very nice chunk of the smartphones market share in the US (27%), but its global marketshare when you take into account all phones (not just smartphones) is 0.14%...

Also actual handset market share data may surprise you sometimes. For example in the US you will find that the top phone is Motorola V3, which really doesn't have a strong J2ME virtual machine, and my guess is that its Brew version strength is similar... Other phones in the top places are not that strong either. Note that I am not talking necessarily about currently selling phones, but about handsets that are currently in the hands of the American people, and until iPhone/Android will crawl up to the top of the table it will take time.

The reality is that sometimes your target audience uses low-end devices. Take gaming for example. I believe that the true promise of mobile gaming is bringing games not just to those with the newest smartphones, or niche gaming devices, but rather get them to everyone - to those "dormant" gamers, that would love to kill 5 minutes on their way to school/work/senior citizens house... And experience has shown that you do not necessarily need a game with killer graphics/FX - in fact the most simple games such as trivia games (who wants to be a millionaire, wheel of fortune) and puzzles such as Tetris have been the best selling games, you don't have to take my word for it - check out Jamster's top mobile games list.

So my bet is that J2ME will stay a solid platform for gaming and even the first choice as it is today, even if the new platforms offer more stuff.

On the other hand, if you are developing business applications that require anyway devices with good internet connectivity, big screens and maybe even full qwerty keyboard and/or touch support, naturally your first choices will be smartphones platforms like those who've been around (Symbian, Windows Mobile) and also the newer iPhone and Android.

In any case, don't forget that all the childhood sicknesses that J2ME has been having in the past few years are still waiting to happen on iPhone/Android... It is true that iPhone is less problematic in the same way that Mac hardware and drivers was less problematic than what we used to call "IBM-compatibles" (now known as PCs...) - simply since in the PC world there were hundreds of hardware suppliers and in the Mac just one... However, Apple might also release several devices for different profiles - even now we already have 2 devices: iPhone and iPhone 3G. Now what about the rumored iPhone Nano (Some say it's a hoax), or the other iPhone flavors that will be launched in the future? (iPhone Air?...)

One of things the mobile market has proved is that people like to differ themselves with cool new gadgets... The iPhone definitely hit that spot, but you can't do it twice - people will be looking for the next cool thing, and I have no doubt Apple will know how to provide it, but once you issue different screen sizes and different capabilities, you break somewhat the promise of no porting problems (And don't forget the iPhone look alikes coming soon from all the major handset vendors, each of those have the potential to become a hit, but they won't have the same platforms at all..)

And the irony is that just now when people have given up on J2ME, it is finally getting stabilized... it is not there yet - but definitely going in the right direction. For example, many developers can tell you that porting to the new breed of devices is not that hard as it used to be. In fact MIDP 2.0/CLDC 1.1 devices actually sport reasonable if not good VMs that are less buggy and less quirky. This led to the one-JAR-fits-all approach, that could have never worked in the past, but surprisingly enough, it works now. It may not fit 100% of the devices, but it fits a very large proportion of the newer devices.

In addition, capabilities that in the past were non-existent in the Java world because of the sandbox approach are now available on most new devices: Starting with bluetooth, advanced networking (Not just HTTP), which were here for a long time now, going through addressbook and file system access, location based services, 3D graphics, vector graphics which are available on most new devices and till newer features like content handling (your java app can be registered as a handler for a content type, so you can write a video player that automatically launches when the user clicks on video file even outside of the java context).

And the best thing is that all those capabilities are better standartized than before. And also Sun is actually taking a proactive role both in the standartization and also in introducing new frameworks that makes things easier for developers such as their new UI toolkit, LWUIT.

To sum up - don't get me wrong, I believe that iPhone and Android are both great and promising platforms that open new possibilities for mobile developers, and we can already see its effects on the platforms market. There's nothing like a competitor "breathing on your neck" to get you finally going faster... But: Don't focus all your energy there. Pay attention to the platforms that are currently in the hands of your users, and that in spite of how things look like now, will probably stay there, at least enough to make you get used to them...

Mobile Advertising

Last Sunday I attended the IMA Mobile Advertising event. I wrote here before several times about the potential that mobile advertising has to open the mobile content market, and it's good to see that there was some progress in this area.

The event featured lectures and panels from all the "involved parties": Advertisers, advertising agencies, content companies, enablers and operators. It was interesting to see how the various parties see the issues from their perspective. I won't quote anyone here, since I am not sure who said what... but these are my general impressions (And you can take a look at the link above to see the participants list):

To get some proportions I'll start by saying that the actual advertisers (i.e. Cocacola) said that mobile advertising takes a few percents out of their budget (few=single digit, my guess closer to 0 than to 5...), and these are advanced advertisers that experiment with new media and create cool stuff online and mobile. So the market is still in its infancy. However, a few years back it didn't exist at all, and let's not forget how traditional advertisers treated the internet in the past...

As for the agencies, one of the trends we saw in recent years is the rise of online/mobile agencies, usually subsidiaries of the big agencies but sometimes independent. Most of the agencies in the panel said that this is turning around and that the new/old thing is working by concept rather than by media - i.e. unify all the activities of a certain brand - paper, tv, online, mobile under the same team, thus consolidating the online/mobile agencies back into the traditional ones. At first it may look like a bad sign for online/mobile - but i think it is actually a good sign - since the online/mobile activities are not considered an odd thing anymore.

As for content - the promise of sponsored content always seemed to me as the right thing for the mobile world. Instead of paying for games, videos etc. - users would be able to download those for free, with ads. However, it seems that there are several approaches here: One approach is that everything can be sponsored, while the other approach says that advertising applies to the mobile web (i.e. banners in wap pages) but premium content should and stay paid, since even premium content in the internet is paid (i.e. songs/videos from iTunes).

My take on this is that it all depends on what the end user gets, and that sooner or later the models we see on the web will become the standard for mobile as well. For example, if the user gets a whole song or a whole TV episode to his mobile, then the web model applies and he will pay. But if it's just a short funny video he gets, or a news-item video, this will probably be sponsored in the future, again - as it is on the web. As for games, there's an interesting question here since most games you would call "premium games" on mobile, would have been considered casual games on the web - ones you wouldn't even think of paying but rather play online and see some ads while you're out it....

Anyway, everyone agrees that advergames and adver-content (i.e. content which is the advertisement/brand itself) which are distributed free is a sustainable model, and often a good way to interact with consumers and raise brand awareness in a unique way (until it becomes mainstream...).

Technology enablers still play a major role in this market and it will be interesting to see who will rise up as the DoubleClick/AdSense of the market - in the meantime there's just a lot of competition and noise... I guess good solutions in this field need to address all of the above complexities and supply one framework that "eats all" (Easier said than done...)

And operators? Well, while everyone says they will end up being the pipeline and nothing more, they still have quite a grip on what is being done in this space. Some of them are quite afraid of ad-based content since when the user doesn't pay for the content - they don't see a piece of the action. Others are exploring this space carefully, and while you can see banners in their WAP portals, when it comes to sponsored content - there have been a few experiments, but nothing mainstream. Turkcell (who spoke at the event) did some nice projects in this field, but I'm not sure it's a good sign when advertisers approach operators directly.

Still advertisers can promote their adver-content off-deck and some did great in this way (at least in countries where operators don't block your app...)

Overall, the topic is very hot and "happening" and the event hit the right spots. We'll certainly address advertising in one of the next Mobile Monday Tel Aviv events as well, so stay tuned...

Looking for the next big thing...

I've been very busy these past few weeks. First, I am consulting to several companies on issues concerning Mobility - mainly R&D stuff (High level architecture and design), this alone can take all my time, but I am trying to take only a few selected projects to make some time for my other main activity...

And this activity is "looking for the next big thing", I definitely know I will launch a new startup some time soon. The only questions remaining are in what field, with who and which funding to take.... 3 simple questions...

As for the first question, there are a lot of interesting fields out there. The field I've been engaged with the past few years is mobile content (and more specifically games). I still think there's a great potential there but some of the problems that should have been solved by now, are still here (i.e. operators closed gardens, device fragmentation etc.). However, the opportunity seems to be around the corner as devices are becoming easier to handle, so everything is still open.

There is of course a broader field and that's mobile. Working in the mobile content field requires deep understanding of all things mobile, and I am very familiar with other fields within the mobile space. In fact, many of the problems and challenges are the same. And the good thing is that all the problems in the mobile space that I've been surprised to discover time after time are now known and easier to handle - "Know thy enemy..."...

So mobile is definitely a good sweetspot for me, but I am also looking at other ventures some in the (non-mobile) gaming field and some in the IT/Security field, in which I have a long history (I've been in this space for about 5 years, all before my deep descent into the mobile space).

Regarding the second question (with who), I have been meeting with several entrepreneurs groups this past month with ideas in all the spaces I mentioned above. I must say that all the ideas I saw are quite good - but I am trying to figure out whether they're excellent... Some of these entrepreneurs are old friends, so it's fun to catch up. There are a lot of advantages going with other entrepreneurs as a group rather than founding a startup alone (which is what I did in GamearraY), but it all depends in the opportunity and the situation.

And last but not least - funding... the first thing is when to seek funding - on one hand developing the product in a garage company mode, coming with more to show, is a good approach - on the other hand if the vision is clear and the opportunity is there - why waste time and sit in the garage instead of getting funding and increasing the workforce from the start? Of course the first approach is better in terms of evaluation - but - you can rarely get to a point that your garage work made your company pass the seed stage and get immediately a round A.

There are also 2 smaller projects I am thinking about that can reach the user phase without funding (aside from me not working...). In fact a lot has been said about the trend of entrepreneurs that try to postpone as much funding of any kind. It has been claimed that Web 2.0 apps can be easily written by 4 capable entrepreneurs in a garage mode. However I think that's not enough since you have to "make some noise", go to conferences, spend some marketing dollars and constantly improve the application (And if it really has a great potential you'd rather have dozens of programmers working for you), so I still think that for most projects VCs/Angles will be necessary - but it is true that a lot can be achieved without funding, which may improve the term sheet you get at the end.

Well, these are my thoughts, I plan to settle on one idea sometime soon... however, setting up the startup and get the funding can easily take 6-12 months, so in the meantime I am still accepting consulting projects. The ones I have taken so far are interesting, sometime not less than the startup "scene"....

P.S. - My post on deploying J2ME apps in the US was published on Reddit's programming community. This led to 7,500 visits to my blog in two days (4,500 in one day), definitely a record for me.... Thanks to whoever posted it. This post seems to attract a lot of attention and in fact it is the entry point to my blog for most new visitors. Just shows how the closed gardens issue is bothering the industry.

P.S.2. - Since this is a mobile blog, I can't end without saying something about the iPhone 3G: It looks like Apple is going to create another revolution, and aside from the added GPS, I am talking about the platform openness on one hand and the surprising price on the other hand. If technology advances failed so far to drive sophisticated devices to the hands of mainstream users around the globe, the significant pricecut has a great potential of doing it. However, I was disappointed to learn that the 2MP camera was not upgraded.

P.S.3. - I should get a Sony PS3...

Java Day and LWUIT

Earlier this week, on Monday, I've been to Sun's 2nd Annual Java Day here in Israel. It is a kind of a mini version of the famous JavaOne conference (which is held in San Francisco).

The conference started with keynotes from Boaz Yehuda, Sun Israel's CEO for quite a lot of years (I know him for almost 8 years now) and Vineet Gupta, Sun's Java CTO and then split to tracks including a mobile track which yours truly naturally went to (Surprise surprise)...

The highlight of the conference for me and for other technologists and developers I spoke with during the conference and afterwards was definitely LWUIT. LW what now you ask?.. Well LWUIT is Light Weight User Interface Toolkit. It is developed in Sun's development center in Israel and was announced recently at Sun's JavaOne conference about 2 weeks ago (And has been making a lot of buzz in the J2ME community since).

LWUIT solves one of the pains that J2ME developers handle with since... hmmm.. well, since J2ME existed... The thing is that the UI classes in J2ME are very basic, and moreover render differently in every device. Moreover, their implementation is bug infested, and it seems that every handset vendor has its own "interpretation" on the spec provided by Sun.

This led most if not all J2ME developers not to use J2ME's UI and instead develop their own UI over low-level classes that the platform supplies (Canvas). Now, obviously UI development is not at the business core of most companies (Aside from UI companies...), but many simply had to really dig deep and develop all sorts of proprietary UI, to supply some kind of a decent experience for their users.

According to the development team from Sun who developed it in their labs in the last couple of years, LWUIT comes to bridge between the current situation and what's to come at newer versions of MIDP (And mobile technologies in general).

The result is very impressive. I downloaded the demo app and played with it on a couple of devices and it works quite smoothly (Better on Sony Ericsson as usual...), and also took a look at the API (And part of the 115-pages developer guide...) - and it looks very comprehensive and well-thought through.

LWUIT supports a lot of cool stuff such as screen transitions (Fade, flip and even 3D cube), themes for dynamic look and feel of the UI and most importantly it features a real UI model that resembles Swing (Container-Component model) including a layout manager with several layouts, menus, tabs, animations, standard components that render nicely (buttons, checkboxes, dropdown lists etc.) and event handling. Simply put, forget everything you knew about GUI in J2ME - this is a different story...

The toolkit also includes a resource editor in which graphic designers can design the look and feel of the UI and the various themes - load backgrounds and animations, set colors and fonts to the various objects on screen and more. Now granted this is not as user friendly as Photoshop, but a tech savvy designer/HTML-ist can probably handle it.

In addition LWUIT is already integrated with NetBeans Matisse GUI builder, so you can basically build an application by dragging and dropping components (That is unless you are a real programmer of course ;)

What's the catch? Well, the footprint of LWUIT is not that small, but then again also not that big for today's devices. The PPT at the conference claimed that it can be as small as 50KB (Don't know if that includes everything). The demo app, which is basically LWUIT and classes that demo all its capabilities is 123KB (Without any resources).

It also supports MIDP 2.0 and up, so if you're planning to use MIDP 1.0 - forget it... (But you probably forgot MIDP 1.0 before LWUIT anyway...). On the porting issue, LWUIT promises to work on all MIDP-2.0 compliant devices with the same JAR, and indeed I've seen it running on a multitude of devices, but I'm sure there are weird JVMs out there just waiting to crash with it...

Anyway it looks like a good solution, and if you're not sure whether to use it in your project at least take a look at it, there's a lot to learn from the API. In terms of licensing you can integrate it even in commercial apps. However changes to LWUIT itself if you make them should be shared back to the community as it is open sourced under the GPL+CPE license (Anyway the source code is not available yet in the site - so we dodged that bullet...)

The toolkit can be downloaded from LWUIT site (There's also a video demo of the demo app). For more info you can check out Shai's Java & LWUIT Blog (Shai is on the LWUIT R&D team).

Thumbs up for Sun for making it up for us after all these years... Keep up the good work! I am looking forward to the next Java Day to see what will we see from Sun's Israeli labs this time...


P.S. - A year ago in Sun's 1st Annual Java Day in Israel, Sun's UI team guys saw our GamearraY application and were fascinated with the GUI capabilities that included animated menus and other shiny UI components, and said they haven't seen anything like it... Now I understand the full scope of this compliment.. obviously these guys saw and did things in this area...