ARena

News from the Zend/PHP conference....

Zend Technologies yesterday announced a collaboration with Adobe to bring together the flexibility, productivity and enterprise reliability of Zend’s PHP technologies with the user experience benefits of Adobe Flex. The two companies will deliver technologies, content and services to make it easy for enterprise developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) using Flex on the client and PHP on the server. These RIAs are easier to use, speed real-time decision-making and increase employee productivity.

For more info, see here.  If you would like to talk to Abobe about this announcement email me here, if you would like to talk to Zend, then email Brad here

Posted by Timothy Brook at 07:54 PM | Permalink

I found out today that Michael Selwyn, my friend and Adobe's AR contractor in France, passed away late last week.

I first meet Michael a few years ago when he was the analyst relations lead at Firefly.  He later struck out on his own, and carried on doing great work for Adobe in France as an independent AR contractor.

Michael was a great AR pro, smart, incredibly nice and diligent. I know he'll be greatly missed.

R.I.P. Michael

Posted by Timothy Brook at 09:14 PM | Permalink

Evening sports-fans...

Now anyone would think reading the last few entries to this blog that I am big on watching sport!  Anyone who knows me would know that's not really true - although I did just watch the final of the US Open, live, on-line, via Flash.

Anyway, little news round-up from the last few days....

Today, Adobe announced that DIRECTV is powering its next-generation NFL Sunday Ticket SUPERCAST service for SuperFan customers on the Web with Adobe Flash technology and Adobe AIR software. DIRECTTV customers can stream live NFL games, DIRECTV’s Red Zone Channel and up-to-the-minute scores and statistics in the browser using the free Adobe Flash Player. In addition, DIRECTV is also providing SUPERCAST as a downloadable AIR application. You can read all about it here.

(American) Football fans without access to DIRECTV aren’t left out in the cold however.  Late last week, Adobe announced a partnership with The National Football League (NFL) to deliver live online video streaming of NBC Sunday Night Football games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com using Adobe Flash technology. Again, read all about it here.

Of course, as a Brit I have not the slightest comprehension about American Football, so I'll finish off with a bit more general technology! In just 6-months since its release, we announced today that there have been more than 25 million installations of applications deployed on Adobe AIR. I'm sure you all have your favourites.  Mine is a dead-heat between Tweetdeck and Keeley!

Anyway, to read more about all the other great AIR applications available, read the press release here, or check some of them out here.

Posted by Timothy Brook at 12:42 AM | Permalink

A number of blogs have been posted that might be of interest to you,
including:
John O'Donovan from the BBC and Adobe's Ryan Stewart

Ryan makes some very interesting points, including:
* The majority of online video for the Olympics was delivered in Flash.
* For Beijing the BBC 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.
* In the first 10 days CCTV's website streamed Olympic coverage to 100 million people...So in China we'll have 2,900 hours of Olympic content backed up and ready to watch with Flash Video.

You can find more information about the CCTV solution from the Adobe press release, but if you would like further information, please contact me.

Posted by Timothy Brook at 07:10 PM | Permalink

It's been a while since my last blog post - but I am going to try and get the blogging frequency turned up a little moving forward! As a kick-start I thought I'd give an update on press releases over the last few months.

First up, the Olympics (what else!). Adobe has teamed up with CCTV International Networks Co., Ltd (the company that owns the mainland China and Macau online video media rights to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games) to deliver over 5000 hours of video content (3,800 hours of Olympic game video and 1,200 self-made video) from the games.  You can read the press release here, but essentially the 5000 hours of Flash video content will be delivered to millions of sports fans in mainland China and Macau through the "Olympic Network TV Station", CCTV.com’s next-generation online experience based on Adobe Flash and Flex technology.

Still on the subject of Flash video, back at the beginning of July, Adobe announced that we are working with Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the SWF format.  The press release is here, but essentially this announcement will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

Just in case you haven't had enough video news, one more piece to wrap up.  In mid June (I know, I've been absent from blogging for some time!) Adobe provided an update on the uptake of the Adobe Media Player.  The press release is available here and the player is available here - unfortunately it is only available in the USA at the moment, but I know the team is working hard to change this!

On a more enterprisey note, in mid-June Adobe announced the a significant update to the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES). Major additions to the suite include LiveCycle Content Services ES - based on the Alfresco Open Source CMS - and LiveCycle PDF Generator 3D ES. You can read the press release here.

Finally, MAX time is approaching fast. MAX USA is in San Francisco (Nov 16 - 19), and MAX EMEA is in Milan (Dec 1 - 4). Press release is here and MAX info is here.

Posted by Timothy Brook at 09:46 PM | Permalink