Check out this NEW Android mobile benchmarking app!

On your mark. If you haven’t seen a DASH demo at an industry conference yet, you’ve got a lucky second chance in Las Vegas at NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), April 16th-19th. What’s DASH? It’s a new, better way to stream video because it adapts the stream to your viewing conditions to produce a smooth, enjoyable viewing experience.

There is a lot happening this week at CES. The awards are already rolling in and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) had its 2012 Design and Engineering Awards Honorees displayed Sunday night at a CES press event. One of the honorees, in the Software & Mobile Apps category, was Picitup for its computer vision (CV) based driving safety app, iOnRoad . We know these folks pretty well and we were psyched when they downloaded the FastCV™ SDK, quickly incorporated it into iOnRoad and significantly upped the performance.

In a previous post, I provided three reasons why developers should adopt WebGL and discussed the importance of enabling the next generation of use cases for “HTML5-related” 3D graphics within mobile web browsers. The complexity and richness of content on the web continues to increase, and there is a renewed focus from web site and web app developers to utilize the latest functionality--from enabling applications that work in off-line mode, to visually adding complex two and three dimensional graphical elements to enrich their sites.

We love the smarts that come with developers adding computer vision-enabled functionality into their cutting edge applications, but we needed the processing to happen faster. That camera on your mobile phone pulls in a lot of data, so we asked ourselves how we could retain the smarts while still processing the information efficiently so that users get great experiences without bogging down the device. That’s what led Qualcomm to launch FastCV, the first mobile-optimized computer vision (CV) library for ARM-based devices. Qualcomm is making it available to the industry so that CV applications can run efficiently on a wide array of mobile devices, even mass market handsets.

Do you like jittery, staccato playback and long buffer times when you watch video on your phone or tablet? Neither do I. Neither does Qualcomm.

Are you reading this on your phone or tablet? Did the page load as quickly as you wanted? Chances are that it didn’t. Here’s what’s going on. Compuware recently published “What Users Want from Mobile,” a 2011 survey of 4014 consumers worldwide on their expectations for mobile Web site and application performance. Let me cut to the chase:

If you develop native applications, you live on the left-hand side of this image. You’re close to phone internals and you can use hardware APIs to take full advantage of sensors, location based services , GPS, camera and other components inside the phone. Of course, that also means that you have to port, test and maintain versions for all the platforms your customers use — but you can’t have everything.

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky said that, and that’s how I feel about the momentum behind WebGL. I think that this web-based graphics library is going to help tear down the walls that separate native app developers from web app developers today and allow them to inhabit the same world.