Monthly Archives: September 2006

Revver Finally Using Flash

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I just saw that Revver, one of the interesting plays within the online video space is finally using Flash. Revver is unique because they give uploaders a way to monetize their videos which is something no one else really does, and especially not the “big guys”.

For a long time, Revver was using the Quicktime format. I’m not sure why they didn’t just start of with Flash originally, but I think it had something to do with they way they display ads. But it looks like they’ve finally found a way to monetize their site and use Flash at the same time. Now that they have the great video experience that YouTube and others have, I wonder if they will see more traffic, resulting in more money for their users.

[tags]Revver, Flash Video[/tags]

Apollo is All Over (the place)

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Seems like there has been a big ramp up in the amount of Apollo information out there. I was able to talk with Kevin Lynch last week about Apollo, and I published the information on my ZDNet blog.

In addition, Ted Patrick and Mike Chambers will be at Yahoo! Hack Day building Apollo applications “all day and night”. It’s going to be a great chance to see Apollo in action.

Lastly, Aral Balkan pointed out that AU interactive’s 10 Things that Will Make Or Break Your Website included a mention of Apollo at #9.

[tags]Adobe, Apollo, Yahoo Hack Day[/tags]

How can I get a Wallop Invite?

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Update: 5 seconds after posting this, one arrived in my email box via a different method. If you’re interested in checking it out, let me know and I can send an invite your way.
I first saw Wallop last night when I was checking out some of the DEMOfall applications and today there was a ton of buzz about the new social networking site. The AP did a piece on it and Seattle’s own John Cook wrote about the application.

I think it’s great to see a Flash application get this kind of attention. Flash just lets you build better experiences, and when that experience really differentiates you, people take notice. That’s what Wallop is doing and that’s why it is so exciting. But I have a problem, I haven’t ever logged in. It’s invite only, and I have no invite.

Do any of you Flash ninjas out there have access to the site and mind throwing me an invitation?

A Ton of Flash at DEMOfall 2006

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There are some very cool things going on at DEMOfall 2006. If you aren’t familiar with DEMO, it describes itself as “the launchpad for emerging technology” and that isn’t far from the truth. A lot of companies come to Demo to show off their products for the first time (including one we’ve become familiar with). This year, there are quite a few Flash applications showing how Flash is powering a lot of cutting edge ideas. My favorite is probably Wallop – it looks REALLY cool.

Pluggd – I love this company and I use their service every day. They centralize all of my podcasts and they now offer technology that allows you to search your favorite shows. The new podcast search/listening interface is written in all Flash, and it’s very cool. Icing on the cake? They’re here in Seattle.

System One – I have no idea what this company does. I looked around the website, but I can’t really figure it out. My guess is social networking for enterprises. BUT, they are using Flash for all of their visualizations proving once again, when you want to do something cool, you reach for Flash.

Eyespot – This company allows you to mix videos and songs together then provides the capability to upload them to your mobile phone. The “Trimmer” is in Flash, and they’re using Flash video for the desktop viewing. The rest of the site is Ajax and they do not use Flash Lite. (This is an updated description based on comments below).
Widgetbox – Okay, okay, they don’t technically use Flash. But they are a widget aggregator and a lot of the widgets they show are Flash based.

GrandCentral – Om Malik covered this today. GrandCentral is a phone number centralizer. You sign up, get a phone number, and you can have all of your calls forwarded to that number (work, cell, home). GrandCentral will allow you to set up rules so you can send everything to voicemail, or forward calls. They use a nice combination of Flash and JavaScript. Flash controls a good chunk of the UI including all of the message playback.

Wallop – Now THIS is Flash. I need to figure out how to get an invite to this thing. Mike Arrington has some info over on TechCrunch. Wallop is a Flash-based social network that looks really awesome. They are inviting Flash gurus to become part of the Wallop Modder Network. And to think, this is a Microsoft spinoff! This looks really awesome.

Scrapblog – I’ve seen this site around for a while and I’ve talked to some of the people behind it. Not only does it use Flash, but the app was developed in Flex. It’s an online Scrapbook that people seem to have mixed feelings about. TechCrunch covered it here. I think my mom would love this application. Flash – bringing Web 2.0 to moms!

iBloks – This is a Flash application done in OpenLaszlo. It’s kind of the same thing as Eyespot, it allows for mixing and remastering of photos and videos that you can share.

[tags]Flash, DEMOfall 2006, Pluggd, System One, Eyespot, GrandCentral, Wallop, Scrapblog, iBloks[/tags]

Web Office and Adobe’s Strategy

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Richard MacManus has been tracking the web office space as long as anyone and he always has good analysis. I also think his ideas are the perfect example of why Adobe’s strategy is so good – because it’s flexible.

In Richard’s article last week on ZDNet, he talked about Nick Carr’s timeline for Office applications and explains his belief that the office suite will be fully web based in 5 years. I can agree with that, I think we’ll be uber-connected in 5 years and that a web office is in the cards. But that’s still 5 years away, and we need to innovate in the meantime.

This is where Adobe has the perfect strategy, and I can’t believe Richard doesn’t give it more attention. If you’re building an office suite for the future, Adobe technologies have you covered for both today and tomorrow. You can build your suite in Flex 2 (but it needs much better Rich Text Support…*ahem*) and deliver it as an Apollo application. When your users want the web, they have it, when they need to move to the desktop, they have it.

But as we become more connected, you have a code base and a technology that is fully backwards compatible and can help you make that web only transition. If the core of your application is built in Flex, you’ve already got a fantastic web based experience, Apollo just makes it available offline. When you no longer need to have it work offline, you’re underlying technology stays the same.

Richard, technologies like these are the absolute best way to make the web-only office come true. You have to take the intermediate steps, and Adobe really does provide the tools to do that.

[tags]Web Office, Web 2.0, Adobe, Apollo, Flex[/tags]

Bruce Chizen Interviewed by John Battelle in Business 2.0

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Kendall Whitehouse just pointed me to an article from this month’s Business 2.0 in which John Battelle of Federated Media interviews Bruce Chizen about the future direction of Adobe. It’s a very good interview and John touches on a lot of points with Bruce regarding the competition that Adobe is facing. Most of the information isn’t new, but there are a couple of interesting nuggets.

One is regarding Adobe’s mobile strategy. John asked Bruce how Adobe is making money off of Flash, and Bruce said, “Let’s start with cell phones”:

DoCoMo has also launched a new service, I-Channel, that has attracted 2 million new subscribers who pay $4 a month on average. It’s a huge success, and we partake in that And we expect to launch a similar service with a major U.S. carrier early next year.

I’m not sure I’ve heard about this last part, a deal similar to I-Channel with an American carrier, so if you know more than I do, let me know.

The other quote that I liked is one that I actually disagree with Bruce on:

John Battelle: You’ve done a software distribution deal with Google. But is there some point where you two run into each other?

Today, our customers need the power of a CPU on their desktop.  But there is a scenario in which, as broadband speed gets greater and greater, Google uses its advertising model to deliver applications over the Web for free, potentially replacing the desktop applications we make. 

I’m sitting here telling you that it’s coming. I recognize that, our strength is on the desktop, not the Web. I don’t know whether it’s going to be three years or five years, but we have to get there before Google. And we’re starting.

I don’t totally buy it. Obviously Adobe is very desktop-centric, and they are also very tools-centric. If Google can somehow undercut them and offer free web versions of their software, they are in trouble – but they have a great head start when it comes to building applications on the web. Google has invested a ton of money in Ajax, but in order to deliver the kinds of applications that could challenge Adobe’s product line, you need much, much more than Ajax. I don’t think Google has an answer to that, but Adobe does – Flash and Apollo. That’s not to say that Adobe can let their guard down, but it does mean that Adobe isn’t just starting – they’re leading.

I don’t have a link to the article, but when I get one, I’ll update the post.

[tags]Business 2.0, Adobe, Flash, Google, Bruce Chizen[/tags]

Adobe gets into Vlogging and Podcasting

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I think this indirectly fell through the cracks earlier this week with the Adobe Acrobat 8 announcement. PodTech, employer of Robert Scoble, has an Adobe channel with podcasts and vlogs galore. They have a similar channel for SAP, and I’m pretty sure SAP hired PodTech, so I wonder if Adobe has entered into a similar arrangement.

Update: Robert chimed in below. This wasn’t a paid thing.
One thing I noticed is the channel only talks about Acrobat., which I think signals that despite the merger, Adobe and Macromedia are more independent than I thought. I know they keep separate offices, with the majority of the Macromedia staff still in San Francisco, but the Podtech channel seems primarily to cover the old Adobe stuff. There are a bunch of new, interesting Adobe products, but Acrobat gets the PodTech attention.

This could just be because the Acrobat team chose PodTech as a promotional delivery medium, but it would be great to see some Macromedia-based products get exposure like this. Any company willing to lure Scoble away understands the changing world of the web, and I think it’s fantastic that Adobe recognizes how powerful this kind of discussion can be. Bravo guys. Can we do Apollo and Flex next?

[tags]Adobe, Acrobat, PodTech[/tags]

I guess I like to post things 20 times on MXNA

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Sorry about my throwing up all over MXNA with my Scoble post. Usually I figure it’s better not to add ANOTHER post to MXNA, but this one was pretty bad so I wanted to give a quick explanation. and no, it’s not that I just really wanted everyone to read the post.

I wrote it last night, but when I went to submit the post, my blog gave me a 500 error. So I refreshed the page a bunch of times throughout the night trying to get the post up, but kept getting the 500 errors. I left the page up and then refreshed it this morning in the hope that the bugs had been worked out. They had, but all of those previous refreshes where somehow cached and I ended up reposting it 10 times. I deleted the previous versions, but I’m sorry to have blown up all over MXNA.

Microsoft goes for Flash Video…..sort of

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Supposedly MSN is going to launch their video service, Soapbox today. Right now there is a beta signup which takes you to a waiting list screen, but information from Kurt Shintaku is giving us a glimpse of what to expect.

And that something is Flash, at least for some users. According to Kurt’s blog, if you go to the site with Firefox or Safari, you get a version of the video in Flash format. If you visit it using Internet Explorer and Windows, you get a Windows Media version. It’s an interesting tactic, and it will make for a good experiment to try the two formats side by side.

It also shows that Microsoft is catering to other users, something they haven’t done well in the past. The fact that Flash is a centerpiece of their site is an indication of just how pervasive the technology has become. Launching without it would have been a death knell, and this approach is a win-win for Microsoft; handle all of the traffic and promote their media format at the same time.

[tags]Flash Video, Microsoft, Soapbox[/tags]

Scoble, it’s because the “A-list” doesn’t care about Adobe.

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Robert Scoble noted the lack of discussion amongst bloggers about the recent announcement of Acrobat 8 and it resonated with me because I’ve noted the exact same thing for some time now and it continues to annoy me. Why on earth don’t more people talk about Adobe when they do something cool? John Dowdell and Marc Orchant both said part of the reason was because the product wasn’t shipping until November, but I don’t really buy that. How often have we seen an Apple announcement or a Google announcement that gets all kinds of press despite being in the distant future – all the time. But Adobe gets no love, why?

I think two reasons, both related. The first is that Macromedia, and now Adobe, are simply ahead of their time. Part of the reason I liked Macromedia was because their products always seemed a step ahead of what was going on. Part of that was luck with the Flash Player, but part of it was a genuine understanding within the company of what the web could be. That understanding has translated to Adobe, but what has come with it is the inability for the company to present the message of the products in an understandable way. When Adobe hypes their products, the wider tech audience just doesn’t seem to get it, which leads to the second reason.

Adobe hasn’t “knocked one out of the park” yet. What I mean by this is that Adobe has a ton of great technologies, but none of them has made a huge splash in the tech world. I realize that they have the Flash Player installed on 95% of machines, but a lot of people still associate Flash with games and funny animations – not things that the big “I’m very important” bloggers want to talk about. Part of the reason they haven’t been able to knock one out of the park is again, because their technologies are ahead of their time and it’s difficult to get people excited about things if they can’t understand where it will be used. But Adobe is getting better at this also. There has been some buzz about Apollo recently, and Flex 2 is starting to turn heads.

At the end of the day, Adobe straddles two worlds. On one hand, they build creative tools. This is their bread and butter, but it isn’t really hip and new. But on the other hand, they are revolutionizing the web with Rich Internet Applications and the Flash Platform. This is very hip and new, but people are unsure of what it all means and how the pieces all fit together. Luckily, Adobe is starting to paint that picture for people, and it’s paying dividends – for all of us.

[tags]Adobe, Scoble, Acrobat, Flash Platform[/tags]