10 mobile technologies to watch.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Jon Fortt

Under the sun in La Jolla, Calif., two weeks ago, participants in the annual DemoMobile conference showed off technologies poised to make a splash in the next three to five years. Here is an early peek at what's in the oven, including phone software and pocketable wireless printers.

FlashCast

Macromedia

Who likes surfing the Internet on a cell phone? Probably nobody. Loading any kind of Internet content is agonizingly slow, even on today's next-generation networks _ and once you get it loaded, it's still ugly by Web standards. Macromedia's FlashCast has a pretty snazzy way of changing that. FlashCast has three components: a phone-screen-size Flash template that's a 200 kilobyte download, a FlashCast server that updates content for different channels, and a tool that channel operators can use to update the template occasionally with new information.

The result is an animated, interesting look that doesn't take forever to load because the template's already in the phone; you just have to download a little data in extensible markup language (XML) to get updated stock quotes, celebrity news, weather or whatever suits your fancy. The downside is that Flash probably won't be the final standard for cell phone content the way HTML was for PC browsers; from what I've seen so far it's not simple enough to create, and it's too hard to link around to different content on the wireless Web. For the wireless world we live in now though, FlashCast looks like a nice compromise.

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