Peter Elst

Its that time of year again and decided to contribute in my own little way to the “Music for Life” campaign and help in the battle against malaria in Africa.

I’ve put up an eBay auction where you can bid to win the chance to determine what t-shirt I’ll be wearing at my next speaking engagement which will be the fantastic “Flash and the City” in New York. Whether it is your company logo, blog URL, twitter name or anything else you want to share — I’ll be showing it off and will give you a plug in my presentation.

This is your opportunity to get your message seen by several hundred geeks and gain some good karma points!

Please bid generously ;)

My second talk at the Adobe DevSummit Chennai was a 15 minute lightning talk on using SQLite in Adobe AIR. This is probably the fastest I’ve ever covered the topic but should still give you a good idea of what local database functionality is available when developing AIR applications.

Earlier this week I headed to the Adobe DevSummit event in Chennai and was pleasantly surprised of how vibrant the community here is. No less than 600 people turned up and the rooms were absolutely packed.

We had some great talks and hands-on sessions by the Indian Adobe evangelists and various people from the community (including Mrinal Wadhwa, Saurabh Narula, Yash Mody,…) presented in depth sessions on various technologies. I did two sessions on Adobe AIR, one of which covers various examples of AIR APIs and you can see some video excerpts of below.

I’m almost at the end of my first month in India and have met some fantastic people both in Bangalore and here in Pondicherry.

Next week Adobe is holding a DevSummit in Chennai and the week after in Hyderabad. I’m very excited to be invited over to talk about one of my favorite Flash Platform technologies: Adobe AIR. My sessions include a deep dive on various AIR API’s called “RIA meets Desktop” and a 15 minute lightning talk about using SQLite local databases with AIR.

I hope to see you there!

Its an impossible task to adequately summarize all the ideas and inspiration of this last week at TEDIndia in Mysore. Here are ten quotes – in no particular order – from various talks (attributed where I remember who said it) that stuck in my mind and are worth sharing.

 
“Getting more, from less, for more” – R.A. Mashelkar

“Being a girl is so powerful that we’ve had to train everyone not to be that.” – Eve Ensler

“Write your obituary. If you don’t like the way it reads, change your life, now.”

“If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” – Lakshmi Pratury

“It’s not charity. It is ourselves we are helping. It’s ourselves we are healing.” – Thulasiraj Ravilla

“We develop grand concepts of happiness, but there are little symbols of happiness in the breath we take.” – His Holiness the Karmapa

“To understand different viewpoints, we have to understand the myths and stories that shape them.” – Devdutt Pattanaik

“‘I do not know’ is the engine that powers the longing to know.” – Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

“Minds on the margin are not marginal minds.” – Anil Gupta

“We don’t enter the future, we create it. And we create what we imagine.” – Ramachandra Budihal

 
I’m sure there are several great quotes I’ve missed here, so feel free to leave them in the comments.

Earlier this week I visited the 13th century Keshava temple in Somnathpur, about an 1.5 hour drive from Mysore. One of only a few remaining temples of this era, it really has some exquisite architecture. If you’re every in the area, its well worth a visit. The site is now being maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Today was day 1 of the main TEDIndia event. I’ve been at the wonderful Infosys Mysore campus since Monday and have met some truly extraordinary people.

I couldn’t help but write a quick summary of todays sessions and what inspired me most.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Usha Uthup, legendary Indian pop singer, opened with a beautiful rendition of “Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram” — generally believed to have been Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite song, there were quite a few other direct and indirect references to the “Father of the Nation” later in the day.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

The first speaker was the incomparable Hans Rosling, showing some very interesting graphs on Asia’s past and future in terms of life expectancy and per capita income. He showed this against a historical context and predicted that it is possible for India – providing certain conditions are met – to reach the same average income as the United Kingdom by the year 2048 (July 27th, in the late afternoon to be precise).

First standing ovation of the day.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Next up was Devdutt Pattanaik, talking about mythology and cultural perceptions. He started with the story of the race around the world between Ganesha and Karttikeya — abstracting this down to subjective truth and personal context. He went on to discuss Alexander the Great and the gymnosophist, linear versus cyclical belief systems. I was most interested how he would be able to tie these ideas into the business world and he did manage to make some compelling arguments there.

Another well deserved standing ovation.

To round off the first session Usha Uthup again came on again to sing a medley from all around the world and got the crowd to stand up, clap, sing dance along. I don’t think anyone expected that to spontaneously happen and is – as I am told – generally referred to as a “TED moment”.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Jumping forward a bit the next speaker I would like to highlight is Dr. R.A. Mashelkar. Coming from an underprivileged background as a child, he grew up to become an eminent scientist. The mantra throughout his talk was: “Getting more, from less, for more” and the idea of “Gandhian Engineering”. He makes a good point that when targeting people that can barely get by, its not enough to think about cost cutting, it needs to be about ultra-low cost solutions. He showed various examples, including a very impressive prosthetic leg that could very easily be fitted, allowed to run, jump, climb tries and cost well under 100 USD what would otherwise be 20.000 USD.

This talk to me reinforced the idea that “constraints are the best breeding ground for innovation”.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Moving on to the last session of the day, one person you’ll no doubt here a lot more from in the future is Pranav Mistry. The work he did on Sixth Sense technology, essentially bringing together the physical and digital world, was also featured at a previous TED by Patty Maes (a Belgian native) but he showed a number of interesting new applications. It was great to hear about some of his earlier experiments and more of the vision behind the project.

What I am most excited about here is that, in talking to Chris Anderson, after his talk he said he would like to open source the software and encourage different people to make their own implementations. While I could still see some teething problems with the technology I have no doubt a lot of us will be using this in some form or another within the next 3-5 years.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Another fantastic talk that really resonated with me was one by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an India mystic like no other. He shared his life story and explained what he called the “field of perception” which we put up in our mind, something that can be expanded to encompass the wider world around us. As such he says that the idea of empathy is built into our very systems. Sadhguru certainly is a profound and profoundly entertaining speaker including references to stolen sandals at temples, “divine versus dosa” and the hilarious punch line “hey woman, its your dream”. Turns out he is a pretty good singer as well. Be sure to watch for that when the recording goes up on TED.com.

The last session of the day got closed by an impressive musical duo, Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan bringing a unique mixture of classical piano and carnatic singing. Its hard to imagine that combination of East and West would work well together but it makes for a unique sound. I’ve certainly become a big fan of their music.

 
I hope some of you have been able to follow along on the free livestream, they’ll be doing the same for the last session of the conference on Saturday at 11am Indian Standard Time.

This has certainly been a memorable first day and can’t wait for the rest of the conference!

The last two months have been hectic to say the least attending and speaking at conferences in Singapore, Brighton and Los Angeles and most recently giving some workshops in London.

I’m looking forward to settling down in India to start a new chapter and get Project Cocoon off the ground. Before that though, one more conference, and one I’ve always wanted to attend: TED.

TED is coming to India this November and I am extremely excited. This should be an opportunity to meet some inspiring people and get renewed energy to work on a couple of personal projects I’ve been postponing for far too long. I thought it would be fun to share some of the people I’m most looking forward to hearing speak and perform.

Usha Uthup
Devdutt Pattanaik
Hans Rosling
Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan
Shekhar Kapur
Shashi Tharoor
His Holiness the 17th Karmapa

I’ll be heading out to India end of the month and will be back for a few weeks over the holidays end of December. After TEDIndia I have a few days off in Bangalore, if anyone would like to meet up feel free to get in touch — following that I’ll be flying to Chennai and on to Pondicherry to meet up with the rest of the team.

Definitely one of the biggest announcements at todays Adobe MAX keynote was the ability to compile Flash applications to native iPhone ARM binaries. Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean Flash Player runs on the iPhone or SWF files get interpreted at runtime.

I’m happy to see Adobe push things forward for mobile and not having Apple restrict innovation. One of the interesting consequences of being able to export to native iPhone code from Flash CS5 is that developers are no longer required to develop on a Mac, opening up a whole new developer ecosystem.

There are more signs Adobe is putting additional pressure on Apple, whether this will be successful or not is another issue. At least it makes it perfectly clear that Adobe is committed to supporting the iPhone as a platform, whatever it takes.

An example of this is the page iPhone users get to see when they try to install Flash Player.

Lots more interesting information coming out, especially around Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 — I’ll blog more about that as I find out.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend all four editions of Flash on the Beach since it started in 2006, three of them as a speaker and hope to get invited to do many more. Looking back I can honestly say this year was the best one yet — it had something for everyone and think John got the mix between creative and technical sessions just right.

My personal highlights of the conference were Joa Ebert’s mind-blowing display of Flash Player optimization and Craig Swann’s inspirational session that went on to cover some unexpected topics. I’d say those two were definitely the buzz of the conference and rightly so.

Flashmagazine has excellent write ups of all three days of the conference. Here are a couple of interesting things that get announced:

• Flash CS5 will have code hinting for custom classes and integration with Flash Builder as a code editor
• AIR 2.0 will allow you to bundle native code and execute it, has a new FileMonitor, VolumeMonitor and StorageVolume API for accessing USB connected drives
• Joa Ebert wrote a C# and Java to SWF compiler
• Ralph Hauwert is leaving the Papervision3D team

I’m yet to hear anyone say he was disappointed attending Flash on the Beach in these four years. I can’t wait for the fifth edition — go John go! best. conference. ever.