May 14, at the Flash and the City conference in New York City. Litl is co-sponsoring the conference with Adobe Systems, whose Flash Player is the underlying software environment for all Webbook channels.
To understand the Litl SDK and build a Webbook channel, in other words, you need to be a Flash programmer like Janousek. But that’s okay, because there are more than 2.5 million Flash developers around the world. They’re the same people who build video portals, casual games, and rich Internet applications that are flooding the Web today.
“The Flash community right now is known as one of the most creative in the world,” says Freedman, who walked me through Litl’s plans on Monday. “Because our device is built around Flash, it will support the seamless, uninterrupted experiences you are used to seeing on the Web with Hulu or casual games, except that we’ve taken Flash out of the browser and made a standalone implementation.”
By sharing its SDK now, Litl hopes to get hundreds of outside developers working on new Webbook channels. Then, in a few months, it will launch a “channel store” where developers could charge one-time fees or subscriptions for access to premium channels.
“There will be free content and fee-based content, and developers will pull a revenue stream from that,” says Freedman. “There’s also the fact that the device has Flash, which means developers could pull Flash-based banner ads from third-party services.”
The schedule for the channel store’s launch isn’t entirely clear, since it’s being built around the 10.1 version of Adobe’s Flash Player, and Adobe hasn’t said when 10.1 will be ready, only that it’s coming “in the first half of 2010.”
But the general process Litl is going through consciously echoes the evolution of previous platforms such as the iPhone. There were no third-party apps for the iPhone when Apple launched the device in June 2007. But in Februrary 2008, Apple put out an SDK, followed a few months later by the debut of the iTunes App Store. Now, App Store visitors can browse, buy, and download over 150,000 apps.
Given that the Webbook is still a niche product—Litl’s marketing vice president, James Gardner, says the company is “very pleased” with demand so far, but the company hasn’t revealed specific sales figures—no one is expecting that there will be thousands of custom channels anytime soon. But for an example of what these channels might look like, the company points to Bakespace.com, a Los Angeles-based social networking site for home gourmets. Bakespace worked with Litl to create a Webbook channel that lets users search Bakespace’s database of recipes and mark favorites for fast retrieval. In easel mode, individual recipes pop up on the screen in larger fonts, so that cooks can follow along more easily.
“We wanted it to be simpler to see when you’re in the kitchen, so you can cook with ease and joy,” says Freedman. “We’re setting the example for developers with channels like this, and I expect they’ll catch on and see what users are hungry for.” (So to speak.)
So much of Litl’s emphasis is on the channels and their content, rather than on the Webbook itself, that you can almost think of the device as a
