by Jeff Glueck | July 22nd, 2010
July 22, 2010 – I want to address a topic on technology trends we’ve thought about at Skyfire for a while now. In short, we believe the consumer experience on smartphones has improved exponentially over the last few years, but it may have hit a friction point as we enter the next phase of mobile growth.
We in the technology industry are all used to citing the relentless exponential progress of “Moore’s Law” for desktop computing. But in smartphones, there are some special factors that are limits to growth, unless very novel solutions emerge. Moore’s Law is facing limits in cellular network capacity and mobile battery life, relative to the demands on the mobile system.
On a component level, devices will continue to improve, but we’re talking about smartphones and networks as a system. Contrary to conventional wisdom, once you factor in network capacity needs and battery size constraint, we don’t think the smartphone user experience will be able to catch up fully with the ever-increasing capabilities of computers, which enjoy fixed-line Internet connections…at least not in the next decade.
Conventional wisdom has held that Moore’s Law, named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his prediction in a 1965 paper, would apply to all parts of digital electronic devices. Moore predicted that integrated circuits would double in capacity at lower cost every two years, and that has proved true. Most technologists now cite Moore’s law as applicable universally in technology for memory, processing speed, and even pixels in digital cameras. It’s shorthand for how fast technology moves. And those who compare an iPhone or an HTC Evo to what ‘smartphones’ looked like before 2007 certainly have seen incredible advances.
Moore’s Law has become so ingrained that it’s admittedly controversial to suggest smartphoneswon’t catch up with desktop computers and the fixed broadband Internet.
We believe that if you look at mobile subsystems as standalone components, then Moore’s Law will hold. But when combined as a system – with RF towers and backhaul and bandwidth requirements and display and processing and battery – then we’re facing serious limits to growth.
So why would mobile be different than desktop computing?
The first big problem is network capacity. Although networks get better, what matters to users is the download speed relative to typical use cases, and throughput during peak daytime hours. Despite major advancements in smartphones and 4G network speeds, the explosion in mobile video traffic of nearly 6000 percent (per the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index study) over the next three years will strike as a tsunami crashing on the networks. This will create what I term ‘Mobile Warming’, the severe strain on mobile networks that could mean slow-loading content, dropped calls, and frequently-buffering video.
While in theory, 4G networks will improve by 4x-6x network speeds, in practice a network is measured by its capacity to handle increasing traffic. Video traffic, as noted above, will rise 59x, according to Cisco, and overall wireless data to 39x. That’s a mismatch. The latest broadband-to-home services promise speeds approaching 100 megabits per second, and developers will build applications to use that. Desktop users can look forward to HD video conferencing, HD telemedicine, 3D gaming on webkit browsers, and other bandwidth-intensive applications that just won’t port well to cellular networks.
4G speeds are touted between four and 12 megabits per second. But once more users sign up for 4G, and are farther from towers and sitting inside thick building walls, speeds will run well below that, most RF experts privately admit. When users stray from core coverage areas and find themselves on a 2G EDGE or 1x connection, they will find speeds closer to 100 kilobits per second today. That is 0.1 percent the bandwidth of the latest home broadband. In real life, mobile smartphone users will find their experience a long way from what they experience when connected via fixed line broadband.
John Donovan, the CTO of AT&T, predicted at MobileBeat last week that 90 percent of consumer traffic on AT&T’s mobile IP network would be from video by 2014. Video involves an order of magnitude more data than any other use case.
Paul Jacobs, the CEO of famed mobile tech leader Qualcomm, said at CTIA last fall that engineers have squeezed with 4G technology nearly everything possible from the limited radio spectrum for cellular networks. He called for the FCC to open up more spectrum via auctions. That, however, is probably a minimum seven year process before it could be concluded, built out, and new networks (and brand new matching devices) could go live. This June, speaking at the Uplinq conference, Jacobs called on developers to be responsible: “Total bits consumed by data traffic now exceeds voice traffic worldwide, but there’s only so much spectrum,” Jacobs said. “You guys have an obligation to build applications that are as network efficient as possible. We all have a responsibility to be as efficient as we can.”
The trouble is that this is a classic “tragedy of the commons” collective action problem. Any given app or developer or brand has little incentive to protect the network or sacrifice functionality … they don’t bear the expense. Some publishers will mobile optimize, others may not care, or may not have the resources. That means network owners need to defend the network against bandwidth hogs.
This problem will only partly be abated by data quotas and tiers being rolled out by AT&T, which are sure to be followed by other operators. The number of users maxing their quotas, and trading up to bigger plans, will keep increasing.
As Adobe and Android gear up to ship full native Flash 10.1 on a few superphones with 1 Ghz processors, a whole world of video content will be opened up to mobile browsing that is not optimized for mobile. If you complain it’s hard to get a good connection now, wait until the user at the next café table is downloading a 720p HD Flash video on the same 3G network tower you’re sharing.
Apple and AT&T understood this constraint when Apple launched FaceTime, making video calling enabled only for WiFi. Imagine what video calling on the iPhone would do to AT&T’s network.
And in the race for networks to get ready, more compression solutions are needed, to keep what we call “mobile pollution” off the wireless networks. When a mobile user clicks on an HD or high quality video, the network is forced to download a mountain of pixels that the receiving smartphone can’t even display on a small screen, and at a frame rate that just won’t fit on a cellular connection. Most web video is intended for much bigger screens, for users on fixed broadband connections. Users are now getting the capability to “break out” of very limited “mobile optimized” sites and surf the real web, with all its fat multimedia. What is needed are network-side or server-side solutions to protect the networks from pollution by compressing it, and mobile optimizing on the fly.
4G is starting to roll out, yet its coverage won’t be truly nationwide in the US for a few years. Verizon’s CEO Lowell McAdamsaid publicly in May 2010 that Verizon was looking for technologies to compress video on 4G LTE networks.One has to expect, as the number of users and devices on 4G grows, that 4G systems will start to get more clogged, as 3G and 2G networks have. That is, unless compression and filtering solutions are found.
The second big problem is that Moore’s Law works wonderfully when you can plug devices into a power outlet. More powerful CPUs keep coming on desktops and in servers, but they eat more power. And when you need a lightweight device that fits in a pocket, a handset maker is constrained on battery size.
Unless there’s a major breakthrough in battery technology, we just can’t fit much more power into the same size battery; and bigger CPUs require more power. Electrical “leakage” occurs as battery transistors are shrunk beyond miniature size, meaning batteries can’t keep getting more microscopic as chips have. That’s why I find on the various Android phonesI test that they have trouble making it through a workday without charging. This is especially as we jump from 600 mhz to 1ghz processors on the latest “superphones.” If I do an hour of calls, check email a couple times and browse for a couple minutes, I get the red low-battery signal. That is before the demands of video, gaming, video calling, and more. All of this battery sucking will bring power management to the forefront of design priorities. This will have trade-offs resulting in larger processors.
Because of battery life, smartphone makers can’t keep throwing in bigger and bigger processors to try to catch up with the processing power of desktop computers. Unless users are willing to charge their phones every two hours – which would defeat the point of mobility – the jumps in CPU power each year on smartphones will have to slow down. Alternately, users will have to refrain from using their smartphones as intensely as their laptops.
Cooling makes for another factor. More transistors on a chip generate more heat. On a desktop, you add a fan. When the phone gets burning hot in a user’s hand, where would you put a fan? It’s a real issue in a small form factor.
If smartphones can’t catch up with the latest desktop-equivalent chips then they will have trouble keeping up with the most computationally-intensive tasks that are routine on desktops, like playing un-optimized Flash videos. Whenever a smartphone encounters a video in a codec that does not match the hardware-decoding configuration on the phone’s graphics processor (GPU), or even video in the wrong screen ratio, the GPU gives up and leaves playback to the main CPU.
For instance, on a desktop computer, handling a new codec like Google’s VP8 (christened WebM) would be simple. On a smartphone, where VP8 is not present on any GPUs shipping or yet announced, VP8 video will have to be decoded in software. Battery life will be significantly affected whenever you decode video in software on the CPU, running the processor at 100 percent capacity. Over time, we expect Google will convince top-of-the-line chip makers to add VP8 support and upgrade software to allow VP8 decoding in hardware. My point is, for any given example a solution might be a couple years away on the most cutting-edge devices. But it takes years to roll out widely, and there’s always some challenge.
Another Intel engineer, Randall Kennedy, coined the term “bloat” to describe how Microsoft Office in 2007 ran no faster than in 2000. The greater processing power from newer chips was eaten by more demanding software. The web keeps getting more and more complex, more “bloated,” with HD video and 3D animations. Smartphones will strain to keep up on these cutting-edge demands, even if they seem fine on basic text and photo websites.
The two problems—network bandwidth and battery life—get magnified by video. Decoding video that is not optimized for mobile will burn battery at incredible rates. The vast majority of smartphones today have hardware decoding only for limited codecs like h.264 “baseline” profile, but not for other flavors of h.264 such as “main profile” or “extended profile”. When users of the latest superphones encounter a Flash video in the wrong flavor, they will find choppy performance and fast battery burn.
This fragmentation is also why it’s a myth so far that HTML5 video tags will prove any better at solving the mobile video problem than Flash. HTML5 rightly has many proponents, Skyfire included. Yet the battle over what the HTML5 standards will be is just beginning. Like Flash, the HTML5 video tag is really just a container. Publishers can put video in with any video codec and streaming protocol they want. There are no universal standards today. Apple has favored h.264 and its own flavor of HTTP streaming protocol. Google now pushes VP8 (webM). Microsoft favors Silverlight and IIS streaming protocol. Mozilla has categorically refused to enable h.264, due to rights issues and fear of licensing fees, and now plans to endorse VP8 or OggTheora. What’s a publisher or handset manufacturer to do?
It’s very expensive to build and maintain separate sites for each mobile and OS ecosystem. Fragmentation is proving very persistent, which makes optimizing battery life even harder. Anytime the video codec, screen resolution, and bit rate is not tuned adaptively to network conditions and device capabilities, then performance and battery life suffer.
Clouds Help Avoid Mobile Warming
Our company, Skyfire, believes that solutions will be found in cloud computing, among other new technologies. Skyfire itself aims to tackle these issues with its cloud-computing Rocket platform, which enhances mobile video browsing by compressing video by 75 percent on average, in comparison to native Flash on high-end smartphones. Skyfire’s real-time transcoding also pre-processes video to translate it into the right format for each device type, enabling 100 percent hardware decoding of video, which can boost battery life by over 30 percent for users who play a lot of video.This means less buffering, faster video load times and smooth video playback. Essentially, Skyfire uses the cloud to normalize the messy fragmentation of the web, and give the best user experience for each user in adaptive real time.
Summing Up
In the end, Moore’s Law at the component level probably will continue to hold true. We are all indebted to Gordon Moore’s insight. But as a system, I’d argue that mobile will face special constraints that will keep a material gap with the desktop Internet, unless special solutions are deployed on the server side.
- Jeff
by Robert Oberhofer | July 14th, 2010
Today we are excited to release a new update to Skyfire beta for Android.
The update is available in the Android Marketplace and the full version number is 2.2.0.18794.
What’s new in this release?
- GeoLocation Support. Skyfire now supports the HTML5 GeoLocation feature. Thus, for example, Google and other web pages that use the location feature will be fully working.
- Vertical Search Results. When searching with Skyfire several result options are available, such as Google, Videos, Trends, Twitter and Amazon. We will add more providers from time to time, so send us feedback.
- Set as Default Browser. For Android 1.5 to 2.1 Skyfire supports setting the default browser option within Skyfire. Unfortunately, Android 2.2 does not provide that option.
Enhancements in this release
- Android 2.2 / FroYo enhancements: Fixed some cosmetic and crash related issues that were FroYo specific.
- Flash 10.1 related enhancements: Addressed UI overlap and background audio issues with Flash. We recommend that users change the Plug-in setting to “On Demand” under the Browser Settings tab for snappier browsing experience.
- Updated Video startup behavior: We optimized the video start sequence to clearly differentiate between pre-loading and buffering.
- Disable standard Zoom buttons: we reintroduced this feature (was missing in Skyfire 2.1). Thus you can remove the +/- zoom buttons if they are not wanted.
- Improved Pinch to zoom for HTC devices (Evo, Incredible etc). We found a way to reduce the page shifting behavior after pinching that was systemic to some HTC devices.
- Fixed some crash and force close related issues that we found.
Known Issues
- Finding videos and 25% stuck issues. Supporting videos from millions of websites on the Web is not a trivial undertaking. We are getting better and better at it and support more than 100,000 websites and counting. Another major upgrade due out soon so stay tuned.
- Hulu: Won’t work since Hulu does not have the rights to support content for mobile devices and thus is blocking Skyfire.
Thanks,
Your Skyfire Team
by Jeff Glueck | June 29th, 2010
Focus is critical for any start-up, especially one growing as fast as Skyfire. We’ve grown users 400% in the last year. We’ve launched Skyfire 2.0, which is an entirely new architecture and our flagship going forward. We added some 600,000 users on Android in our first few weeks, and Skyfire 2.0 for iPhone and iOS is coming soon for submission to the Apple AppStore. Meanwhile, we’ve been approached by a number of major wireless operators and handset vendors about embedding Skyfire 2.0 into their default browsers, out of the box.
Our team took a hard look at where we could double down our limited resources on these “hockey stick” growth opportunities, and on Skyfire 2.0.
As a result, we have decided to stop all future development on the old “proxy” Skyfire 1.0 (including version 1.5) architecture, and focus on the 2.0 product, which is our future. With 2.0, Skyfire has introduced the first “hybrid browser” in the world, combining the best of native webkit rendering with the best of cloud web services, including our famed rich media engine, mash-ups, and more.
Yesterday we began notifying 1.0 users outside of North America and Western Europe that we will phase out the 1.0 service. Because 1.0 is only on Windows Mobile and Symbian, only those handsets are affected. Our 2.0 product is growing incredibly fast and continues worldwide. Skyfire 1.X will no longer be supported outside of North America and Western Europe effective July 1st, 2010.
We will bring Skyfire 2.0 to more operating systems over the next year, after Android and iPhone. The exact sequence will depend in part on discussions underway with potential OEM partners, to embed the SkyBar service on devices “out of the box,” as part of the default browser. Skyfire 2.0 is not a browser as much as it is a “cloud service” that boosts the performance and features of the native browser on any device. When you download Skyfire 2.0 as a consumer, you get everything your default browser would do, and more.
Skyfire has been a free, ad-supported app, and as such, it does factor into our decision that the cost of operating the 2.0 product runs a fraction of Skyfire 1.0 per user. 2.0 is not a proxy; only SkyBar services call on our cloud data centers, not the basic page load.
As an ad-supported app, we have seen that in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and other emerging markets, the mobile ad market and search monetization are very early stage. They are not mature enough to support the Skyfire 1.0 service operating cost. Skyfire had only officially-supported North America and Western Europe launches, but users in over 150 additional countries had “unofficially” downloaded the product. It was time to focus our resources on officially-supported countries, and on Skyfire 2.0 going forward.
We know this decision is an inconvenience to many Skyfire 1.5 users in emerging markets, and while it’s a free service, we appreciate how important and valuable Skyfire has become to people. We have read the many impassioned messages from users in affected countries, and the choice to focus on our flagship product does involve trade-offs which are never easy. In the book Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christianson argued the biggest mistake a company can make is straddling its original product and its next-gen product. With 2.0, Skyfire is going all out to support webkit, html5, and cutting-edge web services. In the long run, everyone will be better off if Skyfire focuses its resources on innovating our flagship product for years to come, bringing it to more users, across the most popular smartphone and multimedia phone platforms.
So stay tuned – there’s lots of good 2.0 product news to come….
- Jeff Glueck, CEO of Skyfire
Note: Skyfire 1.0 and 1.5 will remain available as a free service in the following countries after July 1st: United States, U.K., Canada, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Korea and Taiwan.
by Jeff Glueck | June 24th, 2010
Over this past weekend, Skyfire for Android passed 500,000 new users, six weeks from launch. Skyfire activations on Android have made the all-time top 1% among the sixty-five thousand apps on the Android Market. Thank you to all of our fans for helping to spread the word!
Skyfire’s success on Android raises the bar for the mobile internet in general. Android users have demonstrated that smartphone users want all the content on the Internet to work on their devices, not just one or two ‘mobile’ sites. The content that matters changes each day and runs across millions of ‘long tail’ sites. This is where the true power of Skyfire’s cloud technology comes to play and why our browser delivers content that no other browser can.
Skyfire’s Cloud Solves Mobile Video Problems that Adobe Flash 10.1 Will Strain to Resolve
You may have heard the exciting news about Adobe Flash 10.1 coming to a few high end Android devices in the coming weeks. We are excited about this update too. Congratulations to the Adobe 10.1 team and thoughts from Skyfire For the many Android devices that will not be compatible with Flash 10.1 (especially Android 1.5-2.0 devices), Skyfire is available now and into the future. For the super-powered latest Android phones, Skyfire is available as a capable alternative for video, especially when you’re not on WiFi connections. We will shortly deliver a Skyfire update for phones with Flash 10.1 so that the user can more easily choose to have any given video delivered via native Flash, or the SkyBar toolbar and cloud service.
When it comes to playing video on mobile, it’s simply hard for any other browser to compete with Skyfire’s cloud acceleration service – it’s what we do.
Skyfire enables Flash video from across millions of web sites. Skyfire plays Flash video by transcoding video files into HTML5 in the cloud and optimizing them for mobile delivery. Skyfire’s cloud technology means videos play faster and smoother, with less buffering, less “stuttering”, and better battery life.
Many Android devices will not be offered support for the Adobe Flash 10.1 capability. For these device owners, Skyfire will remain the only way to enjoy Flash video content. Those that do gain access to this update in the coming months will want to know that the Skyfire solution and our optimized mobile delivery will continue to offer faster load times, higher quality/transcoded videos and conserve significant battery life when compared to the Android 10.1 video experience.
A side-by-side comparison
We wanted to put Skyfire to the test vs. the pending Adobe Flash 10.1 update for Android. We were pretty excited about the results and hope you will be too. Skyfire, users were able to watch twice as many minutes of video per hour due to the fast load times, and conserve 30% more battery life, when compared to native Flash 10.1.
The vast majority of Flash video content on the internet is designed for desktop computers with high-speed connections. When it comes to mobile, this makes playback difficult, especially on crowded 3G networks. Skyfire’s cloud ensures that each video is adapted to the right bandwidth, as well as the right format to ensure hardware decoding, which saves battery and preserves video performance.
Using the cloud, in short, Skyfire optimizes almost any video in seconds, to enable a great user experience. And we are continuing to add thousands of additional site support each day.
Watch this video to see Skyfire compared to Flash 10.1 in a side-by-side test:
Skyfire Mobile Browser vs. Android 10.1 | Battery Life Comparison
Enjoy your mobile browsing!
- Jeff
by Robert Oberhofer | June 24th, 2010
We are excited to release our newest update to Skyfire for Android. Version 2.1 (beta) provides many enhancements on both client and our service.
The update is available on Marketplace and the full version number is 2.1.0.18455.
What’s new in this release?
• New home page. We updated the look and feel of the home page and included both a search box and trending topics of the moment.
• New Plug-in options. This allows a user to modify the loading behavior of plug-ins, such as Flash on FroYo. Options are: Always, On-Demand or Off. Handy to give control when and in which way Flash is used.
• Support for contextual ads from Google. We believe that the current ad placements are unobtrusive and provide good relevancy.
Enhancements in this release
• Improved video streaming reliability and reduced occurrences of 25% stuck problem. Some users may still experience this issue; solving this for all of our users continues to be a top priority for our engineers.
• Updated “Load Page As…” icon The icon shows the current state (mobile or desktop mode). In addition we removed the ‘iPhone’ option.
• Butter-smooth pinch zoom for Android 2.x devices. Some HTC devices behave differently, still investigating.
• Updated tab behavior Now when opening a new tab beyond the limit (e.g. 8 tabs) the oldest tab will be automatically reused.
• Updated back key behavior to allow simpler exit from Skyfire. This improves navigating in and out of Skyfire from other programs. Plus click-and-hold of the back key provides additional options (minimize, exit, cancel, clear session history).
• Updated default zoom levels. More options and the default is closer than before. Thus it should be possible to find a good match that provides the right compromise between page view and text readability for different devices.
• Improved mobile page handling. Pages will better adjust to the width of the screen.
• Fixed streaming issues on Samsung Moment (with 2.1 Android)
Known Issues
• Finding videos and 25% stuck issues. Supporting videos from the wide-ranging ways in which they are provided on the internet is not a trivial undertaking. We are getting better and better at it, thus expect more updates to come.
• Pinch to zoom on some HTC devices shifts page (Incredible etc). This is a HTC specific issue, where the page is reflowed after a pinch action. Thus the center-point of the pinch moves. We are looking to determine whether we can find a work-around.
• Froyo and Flash: The Flash window overlaps some of the UI elements in Skyfire and there are other bugs. We will focus on this for the next release.
• Hulu: Will not work since Hulu does not have the rights to support content for mobile devices, and thus is blocking Skyfire.
Thanks,
Your Skyfire Team
by Jeff Glueck | May 20th, 2010
Today at Google’s I/O conference, Adobe previewed the forthcoming June release of Flash 10.1 for mobile, for Android 2.2 OS. Congrats to the 10.1 team as this has been a multi-year effort by Adobe to bring the “real” Flash player to mobile for the first time, instead of Flash “Lite”, which supported very little of the web content you wanted to watch.
Skyfire is delighted to see this long-awaited development. Some may be surprised to hear that. I’m often asked if Skyfire’s value would be diminished by the arrival of Flash 10.1, given Skyfire’s fame at making Flash video work on hundreds of smartphones. The answer is that it’s actually the other way around. Skyfire adds more value than ever on phones that run Flash 10.1. And for the majority of phones in the world (both smartphones and feature phones) that have nowhere near the processing power to run Flash 10.1 for years to come, Skyfire continues to add value by making Flash and other plug-in content accessible.
Here’s a few reasons why Skyfire’s cloud platform and Flash 10.1 are complementary initiatives, each benefitting from the other:
TOO MUCH WEB CONTENT IS NOT READY FOR MOBILE. Most content on the web is made for consumers with a desktop computer, plugged into a power outlet, and a broadband connection. HD videos or 480p videos on the web just weren’t made to come down cellular networks. A site like Hulu needs 4 megabits per second to do high-quality video. I test my connections all the time and I’m often on an AT&T or T-mobile phone with a 100 kilobits per second connection. Even 4G towers won’t deliver the speed to do even near-HD video, unless you’re a few yards from the tower (most people aren’t), and not indoors or behind any obstruction.
Skyfire solves this problem by using our cloud computing servers to identify video “not optimized for mobile,” converting the Flash video instantly to a format and size that is optimized for mobile networks and devices.
BATTERY LIFE DEPENDS ON THE VIDEO FORMAT. Moore’s law has been bringing cheaper and more powerful chips to desktop computers and servers for decades. But Moore’s law has not applied to battery life and network bandwidth. Because of battery limits in small devices, there are very real limits in mobile. You can’t put a dual core PC chip into a cell phone without burning the battery in lightning speed, so no one does it. And most people in the world will be connecting on 2G and 3G connections for years to come. Cell phone networks are overloaded, and the tsunami of data is now going to get worse with Flash 10.1 unleashing the “wild west” of the open internet.
There are a lot of concerns about Flash and battery life. There’s also a lot of myths. What people don’t tell you is that Flash video can be done in many different flavors, and using many different codecs. And which video codec is selected makes all the difference for your battery and performance. For instance, many Flash desktop sites use h.264 “main profile” video. But not a single smartphone has hardware decoding for “main profile”, which is computationally complex. So when Flash 10.1 users encounter “main profile” video, they will often see choppy, stutter-prone, slow-motion video, and meanwhile they are burning battery like crazy, because the phone is decoding “in software”, using the CPU and burning hot. Battery life will go fast.
Skyfire solves this problem by using our cloud computing servers to translate any video codec into the perfect hardware-friendly format for each phone. For instance, we can make a “main profile” video into a “baseline profile” format that sings beautifully on an Android phone. (And there are more competing video formats every day, Google just added another one to the long list of contenders yesterday.)
MOBILE WARMING – THE CELLULAR NETWORKS ARE UNDER STRAIN. Because of the unleashing of high-quality video that starts today with Flash 10.1, the big wireless carriers around the world are going to find congestion issues just got worse. Cisco has projected a 3900% increase in data traffic on mobile in the next four years, 69% of that driven by video. Today Skyfire announced Skyfire Rocket a platform which device makers and operators can license on a SAAS model to compress Flash and other video and make it work better for consumers and networks both. (This service also helps html5 video, which has the same problems when it’s not adapted for cell towers).
MOST MOBILE DEVICES WON’T BE PREPARED TO RUN DESKTOP FLASH FOR A LONG, LONG TIME. Analysts project that world cell phones in use will grow from 4 billion today to 7 billion by 2014. Smartphones will represent about 1 billion of these, and high-end feature phones with touch screens and browsers and apps possibly another 1 billion. Adobe has said in a blog post that their BEST case is that half of smartphones would run full desktop Flash by 2012. So while a few ‘superphones’ will get Flash this year, only very expensive phones with cutting-edge processors and GPUs will run Flash with any performance at all. That leaves probably 1.5 billion phones through 2012 where the users need a solution. And in a complementary way, Skyfire’s cloud service can provide that “booster engine” to make the rest of the world have access to all the richness of the web.
I could add more, but I hope this gives you a little perspective about why we are excited about Flash 10.1’s arrival, and why Skyfire sees our technology as complementary and more relevant than ever. And of course, Flash 10.1 also opens up Flash games and interactive applications where we think a native runtime is the right solution, while we focus on our toolbar services and video in the SkyBar in our Skyfire 2.0 product.
Happy browsing!
Jeff
by admin | May 20th, 2010
Skyfire Rocket Enhances Native Mobile Browsers with Rich Media and
Cloud Computing Services
Mountain View, CA – May 20, 2010–Skyfire, maker of the award-winning web browser for mobile devices, today launches Skyfire Rocket, a B2B product that allows mobile OEMs and Carriers to integrate Skyfire’s famed rich media and video capabilities into existing browsers and apps from third parties. Skyfire’s proprietary cloud-computing technology offers an open standards-based solution to major challenges with mobile video, including network data congestion, battery life, and the ability to play the many different formats seen across the web that are often unworkable on mobile devices.
Skyfire Rocket Offers:
• Adaptive Video Streaming– Skyfire Rocket transcodes Flash and other rich media into HTML5 and optimizes data delivery based on real-time network conditions. That means a better user experience, faster load times and less re-buffering or choppiness.
• Data Compression and Optimization– Skyfire Rocket optimizes web video for efficient and reliable playback on mobile devices, decreasing the associated wireless network traffic by 75%.
• Better Battery Life – Skyfire Rocket transcodes web video into formats, like h.264 baseline profile, that utilize built-in hardware graphics acceleration on mobile devices, significantly extending battery life.
• Power Surfing – Skyfire Rocket enables smart browsing recommendations, one-click sharing, and cloud-powered toolbars, the same technology recently offered in Skyfire’s 2.0 consumer browser for Android. This includes contextual advertising services that offer new revenue streams for carriers and OEMs.
Skyfire Rocket Takes on Mobile Warming:
Skyfire helps to reduce the mobile bandwidth required to keep up with consumers’ demand for video content on-the-go. Video’s explosion is already straining networks, causing congestion and poor service in major US and European cities.
Cisco’s Visual Networking Index study projects that mobile data will grow to 39x today’s levels by 2014. By that year, 69% of mobile data traffic will be driven by video use. Skyfire compresses video by 75% on average, to use cellular networks more efficiently. This not only helps carriers but also creates smooth video playback without constant stuttering and re-buffering.
“Skyfire Rocket is the first technology to make a full Internet browser that is ‘network friendly’”, said Jeffrey Glueck, CEO of Skyfire. “By allowing carriers and OEMs to embed Skyfire’s technology into their existing native browsers, rather than replacing them, Skyfire is making it easy to deploy adaptive video data delivery. With Skyfire Rocket, mobile operators and device OEMs can deliver the web video experience that consumers are demanding.”
Rocket Technology bridges PC and mobile content:
Skyfire Rocket supports emerging open standards such as html5, webkit, h.264, and http streaming, including Flash and other rich media content. As standards develop and transitions take time, Skyfire provides a bridge between all popular PC web standards and current mobile standards. This means web content can work on any device offered by operators or OEMs, including more affordable, less powerful smartphones and feature phones that would not have the hardware specifications to run full Adobe Flash 10.1. For the few “super-phones” that do have Flash 10.1 capabilities, Skyfire Rocket can work in tandem with plug-ins to improve their performance.
For more information on the Skyfire Rocket platform, visit www.skyfire.com/partners
And to download Skyfire on your Android phone, go to Android Market and search “Skyfire” or go to http://get.skyfire.com.
by Jeff Glueck | April 29th, 2010
Today I am really proud of the Skyfire team. They have worked very hard to make something truly revolutionary. Skyfire 2.0 does not just bring Skyfire to the rising Android arena, it really reinvents Skyfire completely.
Skyfire 2.0 was built for the way people use social media and the web today. More people are now arriving at websites primarily from links off Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, or iGoogle. Those feeds don’t point to mobile apps, but to the “real” web. When you are on your smartphone, why should your web experience be dumbed down? Our new browser allows you to open those links and view the videos, including in Flash, which your friends or news feeds have suggested.
In Skyfire 2.0 we have introduced the SkyBarTM, a new toolbar that lets users enjoy millions of videos previously unviewable on mobile, discover the latest buzz on any topic they browse, and forward any page to their social networks. The basic page loads via a version of the Android default browser, and the SkyBar brings in the magic of Skyfire’s additional features.
The SkyBar gives your phone a booster engine from cloud-computing. The benefits include faster and smoother video playback, and extended battery life by offloading more of the work to cloud servers. At the same time, since Skyfire 2.0 is built on a webkit core, users get all the functionality they know on the default Android browser, such as smooth scrolling with no checkerboards, pinch to zoom, copy and paste, find text on the page, the ability to open up to eight browser tabs, and more.
You may hear Skyfire described as “making Flash run” on mobile phones. Yet with Skyfire 2.0, we’re actually doing something distinct. We’re translating Flash videos (and soon others like Silverlight and WindowsMedia and Quicktime) into a format easier on your phone: html5 video. And beyond video, we believe that mobile has been missing features popular on desktop browsers, in toolbars, add-ons, and extensions. Before, these might have strained the device and network, but by using the power of a cloud platform, we can enable new features and do the hard processing work on our side.
We chose in Skyfire 2.0 to focus on the problem of web video which has been a gap on Android and other smartphones. This browser will not enable Flash games or applications, because we think there’s a quite healthy ecosystem of native games and applications on mobile, and the response times for a game that users expect don’t work well with the latency of cellular networks. But video is all about the latest content, and that means streaming. And the big problem has been two-fold: How do you make videos play that today error out, but also do that without straining the overtaxed 2G and 3G networks? This is Skyfire’s wheelhouse. We compress video by an average of 70%, varying and adapting the stream to your network conditions. That means video that starts faster, plays smoothly without all that buffering, and more efficient use of the network and your battery.
A special thanks to our alpha testers who have helped improve the product, and all of our users who have made Skyfire among the fastest-growing browsers in the world. Our usage has increased 500% year over year, and we are currently streaming over 25 million minutes of Flash and Silverlight and other plug-in video every month, more than any other mobile browser globally.
This product is labeled a beta and it will get better each week. We ask for your feedback to help make it better. There are tools in the browser menu to report sites that don’t work for you, and to send feedback and suggestions. Our web site forums allow praise, problem reports, and questions; find that under the Support menu. You can even vote on top ideas for our engineers.
There are more details in our official press release and on our all-new website. Make sure to check out the product video to see Skyfire in action!
Happy browsing Android-ites.
by Jeff Glueck | April 29th, 2010
Mountain View, CA – April 29, 2010–Skyfire, maker of the award-winning web-browser for mobile devices, today launchedSkyfire 2.0 for Android, making the mobile internet experience faster, Flash-enabled and fun, with media recommendations and social features. Skyfire is one of the fastest growing mobile browsers in the world and is now being used in over 160 countries worldwide, ranking in the top 10 apps in the Nokia Ovi Store and Windows Marketplace.
Skyfire 2.0 for Android is built upon many of the popular features of Skyfire’s 1.0 browser including desktop-internet page displays, server-side rendering of rich-media and optimized delivery of all content for faster load times. More importantly, Skyfire 2.0 for Android takes mobile browsing to an entirely new level with the addition of the SkyBar, a new innovation around enjoying and discovering relevant mobile media.
What is the SkyBar?
The SkyBar brings the best of the Internet to a mobile user’s fingertips, without any additional searching. By activating the SkyBar with a single touch, users are given access to any broken embedded video, related content, as well as the ability to share content to their social networks.
• Video –The “Video” icon repairs any broken Flash and rich-media video content embedded within a webpage. Goodbye, question marks and blue Legos.
• Related Content – The “Explore” icon brings the most relevant content on the Internet to a user’s fingertips based on what they are viewing at the time, without the need for arduous time spent typing in often unreliable mobile searches. The related button pulls video, buzz, news, images and other sites from the web based on what is on the current page.
• Sharing – The “Share” icon lets users update their social network profiles like Facebook and Twitter with a single click.
The mobile browser for the social media generation:
“Skyfire 2.0 was built for the social media web world. People are now starting their web experience by scanning their Facebook and Twitter news feeds,” explains Jeff Glueck, CEO of Skyfire. “Our new browser ensures that many of the embedded links, such as Flash video in those feeds actually work on a mobile browser.”
The Power of Cloud Computing:
Like previous iterations of Skyfire on Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, Skyfire 2.0 uses sophisticated cloud computing technology to render Flash video and websites on Skyfire’s servers. The server-side rendering not only allows Skyfire to deliver pages faster, it optimizes Flash video and compresses data for an appropriate delivery on mobile devices. This means faster page load-times, smooth Flash video and extended battery life. It also means less network congestion by sending up to 70% less data down already-clogged 3G networks.
Skyfire 2.0 for Android is available for download for users in US, UK and Canada free at http://get.skyfire.com
About Skyfire
Skyfire is the creator of the Skyfire mobile browser, which enables the “full internet” including rich media on mobile phones, at desktop computer speeds. The browser won the Best Mobile Application-People’s Voice at the 2009 Webby Awards and was named a Top App of 2009 by the New York Times’ Gadgetwise. Skyfire is based in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. For more information, visit www.skyfire.com, or follow Skyfire on Twitter attwitter.com/skyfire.
by Jeff Glueck | April 7th, 2010
I wanted to comment on a topic about which we get a lot of questions: our timing around release on Android, Blackberry, and other operating systems. Much as we would like to provide full transparency on our roadmap, we have to keep in mind that we are a Silicon Valley start-up in a very competitive space, and we cannot give away our development plans to competitors.
That said, it’s a good moment to share with people some decisions we’ve made. We decided to place Android development ahead of Blackberry a few months ago. We’ve since put all our efforts into Android and have some great stuff to show for it (soon!). This required us to pause our Blackberry work for now. Here’s why we took this approach:
- We see Android as a fast-rising ecosystem, with a rich, totally open developer environment, a healthy app market and a healthy advertising and search ecosystem. The Android OS has a tremendous amount of interest from handset makers and carriers, and also has a strong need for making the explosion of video more network optimized (Skyfire’s wheelhouse).
- The Blackberry developer environment is not as favorable for cutting-edge application development. The APIs are fragmented and inconsistent, and the Java virtual machine Blackberry requires is not efficient. While Blackberry users are desperate for a better browser – we know, and we hear them – we only want to bring out something that meets our high standards and is truly great.
- The timing makes sense to return to Blackberry in the future. Blackberry has pledged to improve their developer environment in their 6.0 OS coming at the end of this year, and we can’t wait to see it. Blackberry has said at that time they will introduce a webkit browser with server-side assist on html and text, developed based on their acquisition of Torch Mobile. We understand it will be a long way from able to handle native Flash 10.1 and similar rich media plug-ins, and we think we can build on that webkit engine and add cloud-based new features around it.
The bigger picture is that Webkit based smartphone browsers are proliferating, and we are aligning in that technology direction. We see a lot of need to make these browsers better, and believe that our cloud platform can be the answer. We’re looking at other Webkit platforms beyond Android already, and will share more information when we feel it’s appropriate.
We appreciate the community’s efforts to help us refine our products. We’ll definitely be incorporating feedback from Blackberry Alpha testers when the time is right – and we owe a great deal of thanks those Blackberry alpha testers for their time and input. As you may have read, we just announced our Android alpha and got a resounding response – we heard from over 3000 applicants in just a few hours and selected 30 Alpha testers who are getting their invitations today.
Look out for more exciting announcements from Skyfire soon. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook to know as soon as new launches are available. Thanks for your interest and support.
Jeff
