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Special Report: News from NEPUG
When Tapwave's David Wenning talks, Tapland listens
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by Brian G, Staff Writer - 8/19/2004 - 11:27am EST
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Page 3
- Content and Developers
Content
It's all about content, and content will drive the Zodiac. That was a major message David wanted to get across. Tapwave is very confident in the multimedia capabilities and power of the current Zodiac line, and according to David the current software is "only scratching the surface" of the Zodiac's potential. David went on to talk about how the current solutions for getting movies onto the Zodiac are cumbersome and time-consuming. The process of ripping movies then re-encoding using the bundled Kinoma Producer can result in a rich viewing experience on the Zodiac, but the whole process often takes several hours. David hinted that other solutions may be under development, and he has personally seen some amazing results from compression that is under development. One example he gave was fitting a feature length movie onto a 128MB SD/MMC card. He also mentioned several studios are excited about the possibility of offering mobile content for the Zodiac, and the potential market is huge. When asked about Zodiac compatibility with music downloading services using Digital Rights Management (DRM), David would only say that it was being worked on. He used this opening to give the floor to the fine folks from NormSoft, the developers of Pocket Tunes. Newly appointed Director of Business Relations Mark Belliveau introduced himself, made a quick Pocket Tunes sales pitch, and encouraged downloading the demo.
Developers
There are approximately three thousand registered developers for the Zodiac with only 25% having a Palm OS background. One of the reasons Tapwave is very excited about expanding into different countries is due to the overwhelming developer support by European and other foreign developers. These developers are embracing the Zodiac despite the current lack of official sales outside the US. David discussed a recent trip to Thailand where he saw a person using a Zodiac with an Asian language overlay created by dedicated users and developers. David mentioned several times throughout the presentation that the Tapwave Zodiac SDK is provided to developers "free of charge." When pressed later about Tapwave's business model, David again emphasized the current easy and free accessibility for developers while allowing for the possibility that this business model could change at some point in the future.
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