So I was perusing the Adobe site last night and I suddenly found myself saying, “Hey, that’s a picture of me on adobe.com!” The very nice people running the Adobe Design Center have posted another chapter (chapter 10 - Preparing and building microsites) of my book so I just wanted to take a second (again) to publicly thank Jen, Sara and anyone else involved in making it happen.
Thanks everyone!
I’d like to take a minute give a BIG thanks to Jen deHaan and Sara DiGregorio at Adobe for taking time out of their recent days to talk with me and my publisher about including an excerpt from my book on adobe.com. I’m obviously very excited about this and I hope that the excerpt, which is chapter 4, will peak your interest enough to check out the rest of the book.
Thanks again Jen and Sara!
The Escapist magazine interviews Dan Ferguson of Blockdot.
Here’s the link to the interview.
And here’s the lead-in:
Office managers can thank Dan Ferguson for helping reduce their workers’ productivity. He pioneered the concept of the “advergame”: easy-to-play, casual videogames that pitch a product, service or company’s brand. Often played within a web browser and running in Flash, these innocuous looking games can suck up a lot of hours during one’s workday - and that’s how they are intentionally devised.
Ferguson began making such time-wasters when he, along with his business partner Mike Bielinski, created Elf Bowling as a promotional tool for their design company. Released in November 1999, it capitalized on the holiday season and served over 7 million downloads. Buoyed by this success, Ferguson and Bielinski sold their company and formed a new one in 2001, which would marry their ad design experience and newfound game design skills: Blockdot.
Since then, Blockdot has made over 800 games hawking its clients’ wares and names. Blockdot cranks out one to two games per week. This modest-sized company (they employ just over 50 employees at their Dallas office) could likely be considered the most prolific game developer in history.
On Thursday, July 05, Mark Berghausen wrote a post to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog with the title of “Best uses of Flash” and today I’ve read a few posts in response.
I understand all of the points that are being made in the Google post when it comes to search and I don’t entirely disagree with them. However, Mr. Berghausen’s post came across (in my opinion) as stating that they are Google and they know best. That if they say these rules set forth by them are the “Best uses of Flash”, then the rest of us should simply accept and adhere to them.
Now, I DO know that search is VERY important to many, many sites out there. However, as Benny asks in the comments, “Isn’t it time to accept that there are sites (e.g. depending on audiences) for which it perfectly make sense to offer full flash sites?”
The question I pose is this: Are these REALLY the “Best uses of Flash” simply because a giant like Google says so or is this more along the lines of Google simply trying to persuade developers to do things the way Google wants them done?
I just finished reading this nice little article in the Technology section of Guardian Unlimited. In the article, Charles Arthur talks about Flash with Mark Anders from Adobe. They discuss where Flash has been, how it got where it is today, and where it is headed with technologies like Flex and Apollo. Following are a few snippets, but go read the full article when you get a minute. Nice work Mr. Arthur.
And everyone has now joined the developers in loving Flash - even if they don’t know it. YouTube uses Flash. The photo site Flickr uses Flash. Google’s finance pages generate stock graphs built in Flash. Newspaper websites use Flash to illustrate complex timelines or subjects. It’s everywhere.
“Flash always had some acceptability,” says Anders. “It’s incredibly compact for what it does. But if you compare something like Flash with, say, Java - which is a very robust technology - how often do you see Java being used?”
“Adobe can claim that the Flash Player is on 97.3% of all of the internet-enabled computers in use today. Microsoft’s Windows Media Player is on 83% of computers, QuickTime is on about 66%, and Real is hovering at 56%.”
For, as he points out to me, “We’re on 100m mobile phones. In Japan, DoCoMo has a huge business using Flash.”
As if 98% of the world’s personal computers weren’t enough. If you’re Mark Anders, that’s not enough.
Here’s a nice little article I just read by Ryan Blitstein over at Mercury News. Ryan writes about the history of Adobe and how it came “from $83,000 in revenue in 1983 to $83 million five years later” and continued to rise to “an expected more than $2 billion this year.” He also writes about how John Warnock and Charles Geschke “launched the desktop publishing revolution” starting with a little thing called PostScript and how they “were heavily involved in Adobe’s $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia”.
It’s a good little read. Check it out here.
Via Light Reading:
ATLANTA — Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP - message board), a leading provider of performance network services over the Internet, today announced it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire VitalStream Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: VSTH - message board). VitalStream is a leader in audio and video streaming services and a global provider of integrated rich media content delivery services that enable businesses to broadcast digital media content to worldwide audiences via the Internet.
Read more HERE.
The 5 “most popular video sites” seem to have something in common. What is it? They all use Flash!
From TechWeb:
…AOL Uncut Video, Blip.tv, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and YouTube. All of the services use Macromedia Flash for formatting and displaying video content. Flash is perfect for this role, as it is cross-platform and eliminates any complications with video file types or having to install specific players or codecs…
Flash video is most definately here to stay (as if there was ever any question).
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Speaking of user generated content and video, I’ll go ahead and plug the Patrón Simply Perfect site again here since you can upload your own audio and/or video to it.
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From The New York Times:
Saturday Interview With Bruce R. Chizen - Adobe Reaches Far and Wide
I just came across this piece with excerpts from an interview with Adobe’s chief executive, Bruce Chizen. In it he speaks “about the competitive landscape, about being on pace to surpass $2 billion in sales for the first time and about how far-reaching Adobe has become in Americans’ daily lives.”
Q. Verizon Wireless is now offering Adobe Flash-enabled handsets. How are consumers taking to them?
A. We are working with carriers in enabling the handsets to deliver rich and compelling content. This is really about the explosion of digital content that is happening in society. Everyone is creating content. Web sites like YouTube.com and MySpace are great examples of that. Anyone who is trying to create and communicate this content is trying to figure out how to do it in a much more reliable, impactful and engaging way. Fortunately, that is Adobe’s specialty, and Adobe is everywhere you look.
And here’s the link.
I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had much time to post between a pretty large project at work and going through the first steps of getting a book started. However, it seems that the work project is complete now and I’m just waiting on the launch date of August 1st. I’m pretty excited about this one and I can’t wait to see how it performs after it is set free to live on it’s own in the world of the internet. Anyway, I wanted to post real quick because I was excited to hear that the site I’ve been working on was mentioned in an article in The New York Times titled Finding ‘Perfection’ in a Bottle. It may ask you to sign up and it’s a free subscription, but I’ll include a bit of the article below incase you don’t want to.
…The same concept appears in online banner ads, running since mid-June on a variety of sites, including Businessweek.com, Comedycentral.com, Gay.com, Rhapsody.com and Sportsillustrated.com. One ad on the last site has boxes that read, “Russian models†and “Brazilian models,†and lets viewers vote on which they prefer on a new Web site, www.simplyperfect.com; this will launch August 1 and carry a running tally of which nationality of model receives the most votes…
So after August first, I’ll post again to let people know it’s up and running.
