Mr. David Mannl
Master of Arts, Media Design at the University of Applied Science in Brunswik, Germany
Germany / England

My first step into the mobile industry was more like an experiment: What happens if you put a creative type of designer into a room with loads of Symbian C++ programmers? It changed my life.

At the time, I was doing an internship at Siemens Mobile for the team that did part of the SX1 integration. The UI specification was a long, long document that nobody was really able to understand. So we decided to use Flash 6 on a Pocket PC to mock up certain scenarios in order to visualize the flow and user interaction of certain S60 applications. This then was used in my marketing and engineering to discuss problems and find the best solution prior to implementation in C++.

From then on, everything went really quickly. Macromedia (now Adobe) contacted me about helping them understand what a Flash designer/developer needs and wants from a mobile version of the Flash Player. I was creating various demos and prototypes for the Flash Lite 1.1 implementation on S60.

These demos were so compelling that T-Mobile International asked me to develop a service with a Flash UI on top of a native Symbian application. This award-winning application, called News Express, was the first commercial implementation of a Flash Lite-powered mobile service outside of Asia.

My latest project is what I call “my little baby.” Four work colleagues and I have managed to make the first MBO (management buyout) from T-Mobile. We have created our own company, Refresh Mobile, which is based in London. Our mobile multimedia service called Mobizines runs successfully in several markets and on a wide variety of Java™ and Symbian devices. For more information please visit www.mobizines.com

I'm also a regular beta tester of Macromedia products from Adobe, and I try to prove with my daily work that Flash technology is a serious UI technology and not just Skip-Intro Web site nonsense :)