Qik, the live streaming service that lets you use a cellphone as the video camera has raised $3 million in funding according to VentureBeat. Qik uses a lot of Flash video and I think they even use Flash Media Server to help support the site.

There are two times that the benefit of Qik really came home for me. The first was at Engage when Robert Scoble had the best video coverage of anyone at the event with his little Qik-enabled phone. He got great video of the event and got people talking about it. The second has been the bus tour. Danny Dura has been streaming Qik movies at the venues and on the trains and it’s been a lot of fun to go back and watch them.

[tags]Qik, Flash, Mobile Devices[/tags]

Geoff Stearns of SWFObject fame is in desperate need. His girlfriend created a website because Geoff needs a haircut. He’s rocking the business in the back and she’s fearful for his well-being. She blames San Francisco and I’m not sure I can disagree.

Who better to help Geoff than the Flash community? We look after our own and the fatal condition of mullet can’t be ignored.

[tags]Geoff Stearns, Flash, Mullet[/tags]

The update to ColdFusion 8 that supports Leopard is now available. I’ve been using it lately as I’ve been jumping in to more LiveCycle Data Services and ColdFusion makes it super, super simple. I started out as a ColdFusion developer then kind of moved on to Flex/AIR and didn’t really do much with it for a while. But ColdFusion is doing some really cool stuff and what’s most interesting to me is that they’re adding a lot of value to the rich data part of rich Internet applications. You can still do rapid development with ColdFusion but that’s not as much of a differentiator because most web development languages are moving in the rapid application development direction. But ColdFusion can plug into your existing Java stack and provide you a way to get very powerful functionality like gateways and LiveCycle Data Services very quickly. I’m excited to see what’s in Centaur, ColdFusion 9.

[tags]ColdFusion, LiveCycle Data Services[/tags]

Kevin Dangoor has a post over on SitePen that starts like this:

“We at SitePen are very strongly in favor of the Open Web concept, because it’s the Open Web that has gotten us what we have today and will ultimately lead us to the best “web of the future”.”

As a Flex developer building on Flash, I have to laugh at that statement because in the rest of the article Kevin goes on to dismiss Flash as part of the “Open Web” when Flash has been a huge, huge driver in the browsers supporting richer functionality. It’s Flash that has been pushing video on the web, it’s Flash that has been pushing animation and rich content, and it’s Flash that has been pushing vector graphics. And developers are responding by adopting Flash. It’s taken the browsers years to get to this stage and the popularity of Flash has helped light a fire under the people who are looking to narrowly define the open web and get them to make real, valuable enhancements to the browser and standards.

I also think some of Kevin’s attack on Flash shows he doesn’t understand the platform and how Adobe is working to add the traits of the open web as defined by someone from the Google Gears team. The first is view source. Kevin may not think view source is a core part of the open web but Adobe made it VERY easy with Flex for any developer to add view source to their Flash applications. We want developers to have a choice but we think the ability to see how something is built is a great driver of community and education.

Another is openness. Kevin and many, many other people think that because the Flash Player isn’t open source it can’t be considered part of the open web. He talks a bit about why open is so important and uses the example of Microsoft and it’s terrible support for IE after it “won” the browser wars. When in the history of Flash has Macromedia/Adobe exhibited any of that behavior? As a company we listen very closely to our community and even before Silverlight we continually pushed innovation in the Flash Player. That’s part of the reason the browsers are still trying so hard to catch up. We innovate because we want our customers to keep building great applications on our platform. Not to monopolize anything.

Kevin also lauds Microsoft for being open by pointing to the Moonlight project and using it as an example that someone could create an open source version of Silverlight for any platform. Luckily one of his commenters sets him straight. Moonlight works partly because of the work on the Mono project, the Linux implementation for .NET. I’d love to see someone try and get away with creating an alternate implementation of .NET on the Windows platform or try anything without working for/with Novell.

Adobe is an incredibly open company. We’ve released the Tamarin project, the VM for the Flash Player, as an open source project. We’ve open sourced Flex. We’ve open sourced BlazeDS which enables rich, real time data communication. And we’ve opened up the AMF specification which is a much faster way to transfer data between clients and servers. We’ve been a long time supporter of our runtimes on Linux which includes a public beta of Adobe AIR. We continually solicit feedback from our community, our customers, and our partners in making sure that we innovate on our tools and our platform.

Furthermore, we want to engage with the open web. We think that it benefits everyone if Adobe’s rich platform and the browsers/standards committee all continue working towards a richer web. We want to be a part of that discussion and in some cases we’re leading by example. We’ve set a pace of innovation that I hope everyone can follow and gets the standards bodies to keep moving forward and browsers to continue to build in more functionality. Instead of constantly going back to the fact that the player isn’t open sourced, I think more open web advocates should engage Adobe in meaningful, constructive conversation about the future direction of the web. RIAs are setting the standard and people are adopting them based on the fact that they’re a superior technology. Talking about how we can all move forward together instead of acting like the open web is under siege will result in a lot more progress.

Note: I’m heading to bed, so if you comment but it doesn’t show up, I apologize. I’ll approve all the ones stuck in the queue when I get up in about 8 hours. I’m not trying to hide your comment or anything.

[tags]Open Web, Flash, Standards, Open Source[/tags]

The on AIR Tour is in full swing. We had a great event in Madrid. We’re about to get started here in Paris. We’ve been taking a ton of video from the event, the live page has all of our videos, photos and Twitters and we’re going to be bringing back a delayed version of the GPS tracking. We’ve got a GPS unit on the tour and we’ve been keeping it tracking while we move so you’ll be able to see where we went and more importantly, how fast we go . We were hitting 190 mph on the train and tracking it all with the GPS.

I’ll be posting some of the videos and photos to the Facebook page as well, so if you’re on Facebook and want to follow along, become a fan.

[tags]onairtour, onairtoureurope[/tags]

I owe MXNA a lot. I can still remember how awesome I thought it was to get aggregated on MXNA because it opened up a whole world of Flex/Flash developers who would be seeing my blog posts. In a lot of ways I owe my job to the fact that I got aggregated by MXNA because it helped me get noticed. I always thought it was a great resource for aspiring and established developers and I’ve checked it every day since I joined Adobe.

Unfortunately it’s had some issues. It’s been down and the number of blogs that we aggregate has led to more noise on MXNA. As a result, we’ve decided to take it down. It’s tough to see such a huge part of the community go away but I hope that something else can rise and take its place. Ideally Adobe can find some resources to resurrect it because for many, many people it’s been a great resource and a great way into the community.

I’d love to hear your favorite MXNA stories, especially for those of you who, like me, were stoked when you got the email that you’d been added.

[tags]MXNA, Adobe, Macromedia, Blogging, Todays Date[/tags]