Category: Adobe
October 10th, 2008
Is Google working on the synchronization problem?
ReadWriteWeb has a post up about the fact that Zoho has added offline access to Zoho Mail using Gears. Zoho continues to do a really good job of innovating when it comes to Ajax-based RIAs. They were very early to the game in creating offline support for Zoho Docs before Google beating them by almost 5 months.
As I’ve mentioned before, the hardest part of the online/offline problem is synchronization. I’m not exactly sure how Zoho is implementing that part of offline Zoho Mail but I have to wonder if one of the reasons that Google hasn’t added support for Gears yet is that they’re spending a lot of time on the synchronization problem. Both Adobe and Microsoft have products that help handle online/offline synchronization. Adobe has LiveCycle Data Services and Microsoft has the Microsoft Sync Framework. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Google was working on something similar and looking at how to bake it into Gears.
An open source synchronization platform would be a big deal and would go a long way towards blending the browser and the desktop. In a lot of ways I think that’s one of the major problems that has to be solved before we move on to the next generation of RIAs. I’ve been doing some thinking about the cloud and RIAs recently but you can’t fully jump into that unless you make it easy for developers to use the same piece of data wherever they are.
September 26th, 2008
Get your Flash on during the presidential debates
In a big indication that we’re only beginning the social revolution for politics and that RIAs will play a big part, CurrentTV is going to be doing live streaming and a real-time overlay of Tweets using Flash. The broadcast will be available on the CurrentTV Hack the Debate site as well as a number of regular TV broadcasts with Flash powering the Twitter visualizations.
We’re seeing a huge explosion in the use of rich media during the election. We saw an example with Silverlight being used to stream the Democratic National Convention live and now we’re seeing what I hope is a big trend - incorporating other data into the live streams. The power of using rich media in RIAs goes hand in hand with how much extra data we can bring in. That’s what makes it so much better than TV: we’ve got the web at our fingers! Why shouldn’t that be more interactive? This is a good first step, and I hope we see more down the road.
To participate all you have to do is tag your Tweets with #current and it will show up during the debate. Now if only we could get a backchannel that the candidates actually looked at and responded to.
September 4th, 2008
Adobe and NBC to provide live streaming of NFL games
Adobe just announced that the NFL is going to use Flash to deliver live, online streaming video for NBC Sunday and Thursday night football games. You can go watch the games on NBCSports.com right now. It looks like they used Flex to build the player and I assume they’re using H.264 as the codec.
The NFL is a really, really tough nut to crack. As the biggest sports league in America in terms of revenue and viewership, they can basically do anything they want. And their incentive to take risks is very low.
The video quality is pretty good and I love the fact that you can switch between cameras. They’ve got 5 live streams going at the same time and it’s going to be a great way to check out replays. And because it’s live, they’re still able to include advertising. The killer is a lack of full screen. The Olympics Silverlight app did this as well and I can’t figure it out. That should be such a key, easy feature. Hopefully this isn’t the start of a trend.
I think this is going to be a great example of Flash, a great showcase for RIAs, and hopefully a good point of comparison between the Olympic Silverlight player.
August 26th, 2008
How the world watched the Olympics online
Much has been made of NBC’s Olympic numbers, which had the rights for online video in the US, and what that means for Silverlight. I thought the app was solid, the video quality was good, and all in all it was a win for Microsoft and RIAs. In that vein, I’m pretty impressed with how Adobe did across the rest of the world. The BBC in the UK and CCTV in China were both big Flash users. There were a number of other countries using Flash as well (and a couple using Silverlight). I think the numbers show that there’s worldwide interest in rich media and strong adoption of Flash.
In fact, the majority of online video for the Olympics was delivered in Flash. There’s a great blog post up by John O’Donovan, the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC about their Olympic numbers. For Beijing they streamed nearly 40 million videos with up to 5.5 million Olympic videos watched each day at an average of around 3 million. In total there were 6.5 million hours of video delivered using Flash by the BBC. What those numbers don’t include are streams from the BBC iPlayer or the mobile platforms. It’s all Flash in the browser. Compare that to 72 million videos in the states, and it shows that in a country much smaller than the US, online the Olympics was a hit.
More importantly, the numbers out of China are fantastic. In the first 10 days CCTV’s website streamed Olympic coverage to 100 million people according to the New York Times (registration required). CCTV used an innovative system which combined Flash Media Server with their own P2P technology which made it easy for anyone in China to watch the Olympics regardless of bandwidth. So in China we’ll have 2,900 hours of Olympic content backed up and ready to watch with Flash Video.
What’s also interesting to see is how the BBC got more comfortable over the course of the Olympics with their video content. By the end of the Olympics they were actually putting the live video stream on the front page of the BBC News homepage as the lead story. That’s pretty impressive and I think it’s a very good sign that rich media is creeping even more deeply into a role as a primary way to consume content.
August 14th, 2008
Metadata in Flash Video
Beet.tv has a post on the news that Adobe is going to be adding voice-to-text functionality inside of Flash video that will be added to the video as metadata. What basically happens is that any speech in the video will be converted into text which would then be accessible in a number of different ways. Beet.tv was the first to mention the news back in July and it sounds like it’s getting closer.
This comes at a good time. With the improvements in Flash search this would expose all of that video data as text to search engines. It would make searching video easier as well as drilling down into specific parts of the video based on content.
I still hate that everything boils down to text and that video and audio haven’t become first class data on the web but text is still the name of the game. The easier we make it to shoehorn rich media into the text world, the easier it will be to insert them into more core parts of the web. It still feels hacky to me, but hopefully it’s a good first step.
July 15th, 2008
Using Flash and Silverlight to move web standards forward
Via John Carroll I saw a blog post by Paul Ellis in which he talks about the shortcomings of open standards, or more specifically, standards bodies, and how that affects the open web. In short, it’s led to the innovation and widespread adoption of proprietary technologies like Flash and Silverlight. If you really step back and look at it, despite all of the amazing things people are doing inside of the browser, real, ground-level innovation just isn’t happing unless it comes from companies like Adobe or Microsoft.
People are definitely doing innovative things with Ajax, but they’re taking the same basic set of technologies and rearranging it in different ways with varied results. All of the Ajax frameworks? Great stuff, but there’s not much in the way of core technology innovation going on. Flash and Silverlight on the other hand are pushing the boundaries when it comes to video, cross-domain security, offline/desktop access, deep zoom technologies, manipulating sounds, file access, filters and effects, and more.
I’m not trying to disparage the open web. I think if the open web could move at the speed of a private company, we’d all be better off. But it can’t, and really, the W3C wasn’t made for innovation and people are starting to realize that. Alex Russell realizes it, and more importantly Google realizes it. And they realize that lack of innovation is actually starting to hold them back as a company that relies very heavily on the browser. That’s one reason you’re seeing so much going into Gears. Google needs to move the open web forward but the W3C is too slow, so they’re coming up with their own solution.
In the end, I think the web is pretty robust and it’s self-healing. The W3C and other open web advocates should look to technologies like Flash and Silverlight as a way to see what works on the web and what doesn’t. If there’s a genuine threat, then hopefully that causes people to get up and help fix a broken standards process. The open web is in a good position. It’s still the best solution but now it has a bunch of companies fighting to innovate around it. The community can pull good ideas from that battle and move everyone forward.
July 1st, 2008
Search-ability in Flash
Last night Adobe announced that we’ve given a special version of the Flash Player to Google and Yahoo that will more accurately let them crawl through Flash content. Even though Google has been indexing .SWF files for a while and even been able to pull out some text, they haven’t really been able to send their spiders through an application and pull out links and context. Flash applications are dynamic in nature, so having the special player means that Google will be able to pull out more relevant information than it could before. But in our community there seems to be a lot of concern and questions about how this is going to work.
As I see it, not a whole lot changes for the Flash world over night. I think this puts Flash more on par with HTML and Ajax applications when it comes to search engine optimization. We still have a lot of basic issues with how searching an application even works. How do SEO Microsoft Word or Photoshop? This doesn’t address those issues and it is by no means a silver bullet for RIAs and search engines. What it does do is start to expose a ton of the data inside of Flash applications that just wasn’t accessible before. Kevin Merrit of blist had a great example. They use deep linking in their Flash application to let you dive into a specific blist. Now, in theory, Google can index the content of that blist as well as the fact that it has a unique URL associated with it. That wasn’t possible before.
Show me the money
From an Adobe side, it sucks not to be able to tell our community more about what’s going to happen or how things will get indexed. But we just don’t know. We’ve simply given Google a better look into Flash movies and they’ll decide how that plays into their algorithm. There’s so much energy and time going into figuring out the secrets of SEO and now the Flash community has a horse in that game. Smart, entrepreneurial people are going to quickly figure out what exactly is being indexed by Google and what the best ways to expose Flash content to the search engines are. It happened with HTML and it now, finally, it can happen with Flash. But my hope is that this will help tie RIAs and Flash/Flex applications into the wider ecosystem of what Google does. Could we see AdSense for Flex apps? What about Google Analytics? As Google gets better at crawling Flash movies and we start to understand more what’s going on, developers should be able to expose content in the right way and tie into some of those advertising services.
Where’s Microsoft?
The one thing that I was disappointed in was that we didn’t offer this special player to more people. I get the sense that there was some work on both sides that had to go on to really fit the special Flash Player into the search ecosystem. The Register said we had discussions with the Live Search team but that they’re not currently active. I’m not sure of the state of things but I’m in the process of finding out. It would be great if this was open and anyone could use it. That’s been the direction Adobe has been going so hopefully it turns out that way soon.
In general, I think this is a big milestone for Flash and RIAs. It’s kind of confusing, kind of hard to wrap your head around, but developers are smart people, and there’s too much money at stake not to figure it out. I think what will happen is that over the next 6 months people will figure out exactly what is being indexed and how it affects search engine rankings. Then we can all start to create some best practices around SEO and Flash. Then I’m sure Google will change the algorithm again and we take a few steps back before moving forward. In the end, that’s what’s good about this. Flash can now play the same SEO game as HTML and all that it entails.
June 2nd, 2008
Adobe merging desktop and web with Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com
We made a few announcements today around our Acrobat 9 product and a new portal called Acrobat.com which is aimed at helping people work better. I think it’s significant because as a company we’ve released web-based applications like Photoshop Express and Buzzword but Acrobat.com represents something of a combination between the old world of Acrobat and PDF and the new world of Flash, Audio/Video, and real time communication. I also think it’s the best example of Adobe leveraging it’s own platform to deliver value to users.
The new version of Acrobat, Acrobat 9, includes the ability to deeply integrate Flash. It’s the fruit of the combination of Macromedia and Adobe finally coming together in each companies core products. With the new embed-ability you can incorporate movies as well as use Flex/Flash as a front end to your PDF content.
The more significant announcement in my mind is the roll out of Acrobat.com. As Scoble notes, we’re trying to change the way people work. Flash has been associated with video, animation, and annoying ads, but underneath all that is a platform that’s perfect for real time communication and a more engaging collaboration toolset. We’re finally bringing all of the pieces of the platform together to provide that.
It starts with Buzzword, which hopefully will become a hub for anyone working with documents on the web. You get a great UI and the ability to quickly add multiple users to a document and then see where changes have been made. But it also spans regular document management. We’ve had a beta of Share up for a while but now Share is integrated with Buzzword and with Acrobat 9 so you can share any document or any piece of information and then embed it on a page ala Scribd or Docstoc. As part of the service we’re also allowing you to convert your documents to PDF. The final piece is ConnectNow. Connect is a online meeting application similar to WebEx. But Connect uses the Flash Player so it works cross-platform on Mac, Windows, and Linux (the add-in which enables screen sharing isn’t available on Linux however).
I think that’s the main appeal of something like Acrobat.com. It’s built on Flash so you get the same experience on Mac, Windows, and Linux. The team has also released an AIR application so you can access some of the services by dragging and dropping your files. The integration with Acrobat 9 further closes the web/desktop gap. We’ve also exposed a set of APIs that developers can use to take advantage of some of these services. We’ll be rolling out more of these soon.
As an employee, I think this is a big step for the company. It’s a good use of the platform, it shows that we have a life beyond shrink-wrapped software, and it plays to our strengths - PDF, rich media, collaboration, and Flash. I think it’ a good example of RIA technologies being more than just fluff and fancy user interfaces.
May 29th, 2008
Knowledge@Wharton interview with Kevin Lynch
Kendall Whitehouse has an interview up with Kevin Lynch at Knowledge@Wharton in which he discusses everything from Adobe AIR to the Open Screen Project. It’s one of the better interviews I’ve seen and gets into a lot of aspects of Adobe’s strategy around RIAs. They also talk about Kevin’s new role as CTO and what that means for the company.
Some of the best information comes when Kendall asks about the different ideas between Microsoft and Adobe. Kendall got to interview Scott Guthrie at MIX and this interview with Kevin is a nice compliment to that. On Adobe AIR and desktop application security, Kevin does a good job of setting everything straight:
AIR is enabling applications to be built with web technologies — using things like HTML, Flash and Flex — and it brings those applications to the desktop with the rights of a desktop application. Otherwise, there’s not much point in bringing them to the desktop.
The installation process for AIR lets the user know that this application was signed [with a digital certificate] by a particular vendor. You can approve or disapprove it. If you approve it, then it does have capabilities like other applications you install on your computer. It’s very much following the desktop application model in enabling these applications to be more functional and act like desktop applications, but run across operating systems.
In the rest of the interview Kevin talks about how Adobe AIR fits into the next generation of cloud computing and then a bit about the Flash/Silverlight competition. Kendall always does a good job of getting good answers by asking good RIA questions. This one is well worth the read.
May 27th, 2008
Mobile advertising: “The next big wave” and a golden opportunity for RIAs
Eric Schmidt has an interview that was posted today in which he declares that the next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet:
Second: The most obvious large space of advertising is the mobile internet. Every German has a mobile phone. Just take the success of the iPhone: It has the first really powerful web browser on a mobile device - and many more are still coming. Nokia has one coming, Blackberry has one and Motorola has one. They are all supposed to be released this year. By these products, the advertising gets more targeted because phones are personal. So targeted ads are possible. And that means the value of the ads will grow. The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet.
I just got back from a trip to China where I did a bunch of customer visits for Adobe so for me, this interview hit at just the right time. Everyone knows the mobile internet is a big deal, and advertising will play a big part in that. But I think the confluence of mobile devices and advertising is a place where RIAs can really come into stride. Video, customizations, interactive games - all possible on mobile devices with RIAs. People are already spending money to customize their phones - something RIAs are a natural extension of - but they’re increasingly doing more sophisticated tasks like gaming and video consumption on their devices.
Having a rich environment on a phone allows advertisers to target not only at a very personal nature (due to the information on the phone) but to do so in a very engaging way. That’s key. SMS advertising is annoying and spammy. You have to be more sophisticated and I don’t think the search metaphor fits on devices as well as it does in the browser. So you can use video, use interactivity, use games, use the kind of higher-level display advertising that RIAs enable.
That’s why this is a big battleground. Microsoft is working with Nokia, Adobe has the open screen project, Google has Android, Sun is working on JavaFX for mobile devices; everyone wants a piece of what will be a lucrative pie. Things are going to get very interesting in the world of mobile RIAs over the next couple of years.
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