Mobile Distillery Announces Commercial Launch of Celsius 3.0

3GSM Barcelona will see the introduction of a major version of its automation solution for porting Java Mobile applications across all mobile phones

News by GamesIndustry International Contributor

Published on Jan. 20, 2006

London, 16 January 2006 - Mobile Distillery announced the commercial launch of version 3.0 of Celsius, its automation solution for porting and optimising Java Mobile applications across more than 300 mobile phones. The launch takes place at 3GSM World Congress 2006 (Barcelona, Spain 13-16 February 2006).

Previously in production at a number of selected customer sites, Celsius enables interactive Mobile Java applications to be ported rapidly across more than 300 telephones, with a radical time-to-market acceleration as a result. "During the course of 2005, Mobile Distillery has worked with customer feedback and provided Celsius with multiple innovative features", explains Vincent Berge, co-founder and general manager of Mobile Distillery.

"The version we are launching on the market today will revolutionise the day-to-day life of publishers and application developers, not only in the video game sector but also in other fast-growing markets like mobile marketing and multimedia, or business applications and m-commerce."

Technology innovation

Celsius is based upon more than five years development of an exclusive technology, which includes powerful software optimisation algorithms. This new version is stronger, more flexible and highly integrated into the developers' workflow. Celsius has already been used to develop over 30 mobile applications, by customers such as Anxa, Exkee and Visiware or Kuju Entertainment.

"With the number and diversity of new mobile phones growing at a frantic speed and complicating the developer's task to modify and upgrade, it makes more productivity sense for developers to use a specialist tool instead of porting applications themselves from phone to phone", adds Vincent Berge. "Celsius enables them to limit their involvement in this complexity because they just have to manage one single source code".

The main benefits of Celsius 3.0 include:

Simplification of Java Mobile application development, allowing developers to focus entirely on the application itself and to perform intermediate porting at any time during development

Optimised management of sprites (graphic animations), sounds, fonts and Multilanguage versions via a specialised pre-processor and powerful compression softwares.

Correction and management of 90 to 95% of device specific bugs

Reduction of the porting cycle from 3-4 weeks to just a few hours or days

Integration in the programming workflow

Reduction of porting costs

Possibility of last-minute modifications

Simplified management of updates for forthcoming mobile phone models

A fast-growing sector

"The dynamics of mobile application markets are extremely encouraging. Editors' and developers' needs for porting their applications will represent a rapidly growing 60 million euros market in 2006, estimated to reach 500 million euros within 2008-2009", explains Eric Lemaréchal, co-founder and CEO of Mobile Distillery. "This projected growth is supported by the latest developments in different market sectors which Mobile Distillery addresses, i.e. mobile video games, mobile multimedia and marketing and m-business for mobile enterprise applications. These last two markets are experiencing strong growth as enterprises extend their go-to-market and customer relationship strategies to the wireless ecosystem."

Gartner's market forecast for 2007-2008 anticipates the availability of over 500 mobile phones, all with distinct performance levels, resolutions and functionality*. "Mobile device fragmentation has been identified as a major problem hindering uptake of new services. Java has therefore, become the most widely available technology, used on some 80% of mobile phones", Eric Lemaréchal continues. "Celsius provides the perfect answer in this environment as it introduces highly innovative solutions, configured to address optimisation and porting to over 300 currently available mobiles. Its flexibility and power enables customers to generate "ready to use" versions on each device in a fully optimised way."

Celsius 3.0 will be available from mid-February 2006, with prices ranging from 5.000-30.000 per project, depending on the required number of existing phones and updates for forthcoming models. Mobile Distillery will be demonstrating its solution at 3GSM Barcelona on the G88/G89 stand "Smart Communication Valley".

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TECHNICAL DATASHEET

Components :

- Celsius J2ME engine: Pre-processor which allows source code to be interpreted in order to generate optimised versions for each individual phone

- Celsius Sprites : compression tools with device specific management of images and graphic animations (sprites)

- Celsius Sounds: sound management

- Celsius Text: management and compression of texts and fonts with multi-lingual option

- J2ME Knowledge base: deep and rich knowledge base which collates bugs and specific workarounds for more than 300 J2ME mobile phones

- Constant integration of new mobile phones in the knowledge base

- Generator & Packager

Celsius 3.0 main features:

- One unique J2ME source code required to generate multiple versions for MIDP 1.0 and MIDP 2.0 devices

- Ability to choose number of optimisation levels and resolutions to be deployed from low to high performance phones

- Management of MIDP 1.0 device limitations

- Syntactic analyser

- Specific treatment of sprites (graphic animations), sounds, texts and keyboard mapping... for each device

- Daily, online access to updates for new device definitions

- Future-proofed developed application on forthcoming mobile phones

A sample of features addressed by Celsius 3.0:

- Sprites

- Sounds

- Screen size and resolution

- Text

- Fonts

- Keyboard mapping

- Heap memory management

- Processor

- Management of incoming calls and SMS

- Selective use of image symmetry for each mobile phone

Notes to editor

*Source : Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2005

16-21 October 2005

Walt Disney World Dolphin

Orlando, Florida

About Mobile Distillery

A specialist in mobile Java technologies, especially J2ME and Doja, Mobile Distillery develops and sells unique solutions, enabling the optimisation and porting of mobile Java applications across more than 300 Java handsets in just a few clicks. These solutions radically simplify and optimise application development processes, reduce porting cycles whilst generating cost savings, and accelerating time-to-market. Mobile Distillery's customers include game and mobile application publishers and developers, mobile marketing agencies and mobile Java engineering companies.

For more information, please visit: www.mobile-distillery.com

For further information

Vincent Berge

Mobile Distillery

Email: vincent.berge@mobiledistillery.com

Nadia Nizar/Juliette Doel

The Whiteoaks Consultancy

Tel: +44 (0) 1252 727313

Email: nadian@whiteoaks.co.uk

Juliette Doel

Account Executive

The Whiteoaks Consultancy Limited