Bluestreak Technology receives $20M

By Heri Oct 11th 2007 in Mobile

Bluestreak Technology is the third MontrÃ©al startup to receive VC funding this week. Iris Capital, Solidarity Fund QFL, BDC Venture Capital and First Capital Group have invested $20 million into Bluestreak.

bluestreak technologies

Buestreak makes MachBlue, which is more or less Flash 7 for mobile phones and for digital TVs. It allows users and service providers to get “rich applications” without downloading any (java) software. MachBlue is used by many carriers in Europe and Asia, as well as media companies like Time Warner. With MachBlue, it has become very easy to create games, provide services like weather, news, TV games, etc. as you only need flash programmers and the software from Bluestreak.

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Comments

stephdau October 11, 2007

Nice tech (from their videos) but one thing puzzles me: the SWF file format licensing agreement specifies the following:

Can I use the File Format Specification to create a SWF interpreter or player?

No, the File Format Specification is provided for the specific purpose of enabling software applications to export to the SWF file format.

Which leads me to 3 questions:
- does it use the Flash Mobile player? http://www.adobe.com/mobile/
- if yes, why Flash 7 only?
- if no, were the Flash 7 licensing terms less restrictive and became more draconian in lights of the apparent competition these companies brought forward?

Yeah, I know, I’m way too curious. ;p

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stephdau October 11, 2007

PS: a reference for the SWF & FLV File Format Specification license terms mentioned above can be found at http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileformat/faq/#item-1-8

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Heri October 11, 2007

stephdau,
i really don’t know how bluestreak managed to do it.

i saw a couple of guys from the company once, they were hiring flash developers like crazy. but they were not techies, and couldn’t answer my questions about their platform.

i also don’t know what they have developed that is so different from Macromedia/Adobe. The big problem here is that their website doesn’t give much info. They have all those fancy words like compatibility, rich interface etc, but there are nothing too advanced about their tech.

you got there an interesting question, and I really wonder how they are doing it. But I guess there is an answer, because they just landed 20 million $, and the investors should have cleared this question and other Intellectual Propery matters

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stephdau October 11, 2007

Oh, I definitely see value over just Flash Mobile.

The kind of functionality they are describing sounds like they used Flash as an rendering engine for OEMs to develop branded GUIs with, but also developed a slew of services that the Flash object interact with through the standard integration avenues Flash provides (REST+XML, etc).

Very clever and forward thinking too, given they’ve been around and at it for a while.

If you think about it, it’s exactly what Adobe is pushing for, on the desktop (though not limited to), with Flex, AIR, Thermo, etc.

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Frank October 12, 2007

I wouldn’t call a Series D company a start up. I’ve known Bluestreak for 7 years.

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stephdau October 12, 2007

@Frank: you’re bringing a good point there. The term startup is so relative these days…

I’ve seen companies living by the “badge” even though their company has been around for close to 4 years now (hardly a startup as well), and other loathing the term from the beginning.

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Sylvain Carle October 13, 2007

One thing about Bluestreak is the functions to call specific services on the hardware they run on. For IPTV installations that would be the ability to call from Flash hardware or broadband services, a simple example would be changing the channel from a flash interface or calling the video stream to do “picture in picture” interfaces.

That’s what I know about their platform, I did not get a chance to see it in action on mobiles only in IPTV scenarios.

Other interesting companies (not from Montreal) doing IPTV platforms are Orca and Minerva (there’s another one that start with M and ends with T but I just can’t name them, their platform s*cks).

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Heri October 15, 2007

stephdau: for me, startup is like “web2.0″ nobody really knows what it means, but we don’t really have a better word to use

sylvain carle: i understand the part about IPTV but there is still a problem with machblue. but as stephdau says, Adobe has already flashlite for mobiles which already calls specific services like calls, address book, web access etc.

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