Keitai

I’ve read a few posts lately that talk about Flash Lite as a killer marketing tool on mobile devices. The most often noted reasons are:

• ease and speed of development and testing,
• the rich UI and design capabilities
• the ubiquity of the platform (ubiquity’s is not here yet, but it finally seems to be well on its way)

I totally agree with all the above but I think the promise of Flash is more multi layered than just marketing. If through high adoption Flash Lite turns into a ubiquitous mobile publishing platform—it opens up a whole other list of possibilities.

(I hate generalizations so all examples below are of products or services that I think would have been of use in places i’ve worked or situations i’ve encountered over the years.)

Training and Orientation

Company ‘x’ operates concession retail stores within a major department store chain and has thousands of employees scattered around the country. District managers travel to each location on a weekly basis but this is often the extent of the employees’ contact with the corporate office. The company chooses to use Flash Lite to deliver short reference and learning applications to their staff. Topics cover internal policies and procedures such as expense report submission, health insurance cover, directory of key representative by region, corporate acronym guides and part number decoders.

Why Flash? Easy to update and allows them to present these somewhat boring or arcane bits of information in a fun way and at low cost.

B2B Support

Company ‘x’ is a mid-sized manufacturer with a small number of big-ticket industrial products. These products are sold and serviced through a large distribution base that spans North America. The most common requests to their customer service are the faxing (or snail mailing) of service bulletins and technical sheets for 5-6 popular products. As many distributors work in the field, there is often no way for them to request a copy of these bulletins when they actually need them. Some carry them around in binders but they often get wet, greasy or forgotten on-site. The company decides to offer mobile versions of these bulletins that can be downloaded free of charge and stored on your device.

Why Flash? Vector line art is perfect to represent technical documents—all-be-it on a small screen. Each technical bulletin is only 50-100k making it easy to download and store, even on devices with no memory card.

Customer Relationship Management/After Sales Support

Company ‘x’—a large handset manufacturer—begins to offer user guides pre-installed on their devices. Not meant to be a replacement for the O/S based help-system, these guides offer users tips on the most commonly requested problems logged by their customer service department. The guides also provide lifestyle tips for the device allowing the up-sell of peripherals, partner services and accessories. Some guides go a step further to reinforce brand perception or ensure users derive the most value from the product (ex. photography guide for camera phone with a Carl Zeiss lens, a ‘Discover Urban Jazz’ guide for a co-branded music phone etc.)

Why Flash? Allows the easy and economical creation of a multitude of mini-apps with different goals and demographics in mind.

Pre and Post-Sales Marketing and Value Added

Company ‘x’—a eco-travel company—begins to offer Flash based content to its audience. As a pre-sales tool, they offer mini trip guides and experiences. Audio clips, video and photography from real trips are incorporated into small content applications designed to entice prospective customers to make a booking. The content is fun and meant to be shared. Once a trip is booked, travelers receive a small set of cultural, historical or language guides to help pass the time at the airport or on those long bus rides.

Why Flash? Content can be updated relatively quickly to account for new trips and itineraries. Flash Lite 2 has good video and audio support which makes it ideal to deliver such a wide variety of content and media.

Ok, but what about J2ME, XHTML, mobile AJAX etc.?

I’m not trying to suggest that Flash is the only technology that can do all this. As a matter of fact, most of my examples don’t even begin to deal with content that requires large data updates or needs a more robust interaction with the handset itself. In some of those cases, another technology may make more sense. What i’m simply responding to is this:

• Flash Lite applications are easy to develop
• The content is self-contained
• It can be shared (not so good if it’s being delivered as a licensed product but absolutely ideal for things that are meant to be shared)
• Flash Lite offers rich UI and design capabilities as well as a strong existing developer base

All the above allows you to experiment, be creative and respond to user comments, industry trends or new services very quickly—whether you’re selling travel, industrial products or specialty natural food products at the local health store. And that’s part 2 of my point. Many of the above examples could be considered enterprise level (not a bad thing with Nokia’s new E Series devices—my E60 came pre-installed with Flash Lite) but the above could also easily apply to smaller specialty businesses, industry associations, non-profits etc. Any business that wants to add value for its stakeholders in a mobile context.

All you need is a ubiquitously installed run-time, creative ideas about what mobile content and applications can be, and an easy authoring platform.

(Many thanks to Carlo and all the folks at MobHappy for including this post in the 32nd edition of Carnival of the Mobilists)