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February 28, 2007

Customer Round-up #0702

February round-up of customer stories. Enjoy.

Bilprovningen - the Swedish Vehicle Inspection Company - has the job of improving road safety, vehicle performance, and reducing the impacts of traffic across Sweden, with one of the principal activities being the regular inspection of the nation’s vehicles, primarily at 180 stations throughout Sweden. Each year, Bilprovningen handles more than 5.5 million customer interactions and completes millions of inspection reports.

With over five million reports a year and a requirement to archive reports for as long as ten years, Bilprovningen faced several problems, including managing such a large volume of archives and retrieving reports if questions arose from car owners, companies, or government officials.

To address the problem, the company wanted to replace its paper-based processes with more streamlined, automated workflows for capturing inspection data and generating required reports. After evaluating solutions for automating forms processes, Bilprovningen selected Adobe software to aid the solution.

INSEAD - the number one business school outside the United States - and number four in the world - was looking to optimize the long and arduous acceptance process that it's 800 MBA students annual need to endure.

Etheryl, a Paris-based an application service provider for academic institutions, devised a solution that could support the lengthy application document and the proper submission procedures. Prospective students applying to INSEAD must fill out the 30-page application that covers their profile, reasons for applying, and personal achievements.

The sheer size of the application file, along with the variety of information it contains and the information exchange processes, prompted Etheryl to integrate a number of Adobe technologies - including Designer and Reader Extensions - into the the INSEAD acceptance and registration platform to create a 100% digital application process and student file.

Nike -very cool, just check out the site:http://www.nike.com/nikeair/us/

Cuatrecasas - With 800 attorneys, 12 offices nationwide, and an international presence in Lisbon, Porto, Brussels, Paris, New York, and Sao Paulo, Cuatrecasas is the second largest law firm in Spain, and well-known as a technology innovator in the legal profession. Cuatrecasas was looking to implement a new and technologically innovative project to automate its invoice processes to reduce costs, as well to enhance the efficiency of internal operations and ensuring data integrity and confidentiality.

After evaluating a number of options, Cuatrecasas realized that electronic documents in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) were the market standard and the best solution to their problem.

 

AdobeEngage

Adobe ran a short unconference/eventlet earlier this week in our office in downtown San Francisco called AdobeEngage. The idea behind the event is to unveil a bunch of cool apps based on Adobe’s latest technologies, and to bring some smart people - bloggers, thinkers, developers - together to talk about them.

Rather than try to summarize the event - actually fairly tricky as I didn't get to go - here is a link list to what some of the attendees saw, thought and wrote.

Ryan Stewart:

http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=694

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/27/talking-apollo-with-kevin-lynch-at-adobe-engage/

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=292

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=290

Tim O'Reilly:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/creating_engagi.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/the_medical_moo_1.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/the_first_real.html

Cote:

http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2007/02/27/adobe-engage-good-morning-apollo/

The Governor:

http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/27/adobe-engage-fighting-against-the-architecture-of-the-space/

http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/27/acesis-simply-powerful-point-of-care-information-management-health-20/

http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/28/brightcove-towards-a-media-we-distribution-model/

Robert Scoble:

http://scobleizer.com/2007/02/27/killer-demo-listen-to-the-keyboards/

http://scobleizer.com/2007/02/27/drinking-the-adobe-coffee/

David Berlind:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=361

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=362

Richard Ziade:

http://www.basement.org/archives/2007/02/orbiting_the_user_at_adobe_eng.html

Chafic Kazoun:

http://rewindlife.com/2007/02/26/in-san-francisco-for-adobes-engage-event/

http://rewindlife.com/2007/02/27/from-enagage-apollo-new-flex-new-flash-media-server-and-stand-alone-flash-video-player-this-year/

February 15, 2007

3GSM - experience the experience

I'm back in the UK now - didn't get a chance to blog about the great and good at the show.  Anyway, I've decided to show off a few pictures from the show - and a little bit of comment!

The venue: I went to 3GSM in Cannes a few times before it moved to Barcelona.  Whilst Cannes was great - every thing and everyone right on-top of each other in a small space, I think the 3GSM event location in the Fira Barcelona is stunning - especially when the sun comes out and the fountains kick-in:

   

Adobe Flash Cast and Flash Home: Adobe were showing off a number of things at 3GSM including Flash cast (our client/server technology that delivers compelling and engaging data services on mobiles) and Flash home

|Flash home takes the concept of an active homescreen and adds the "richness" that Flash brings to the mobile experience.  Basically, it would allow a phone user to have all the information they need - both phone info (battery life, signal, call logs etc) and data services (weather, news channels etc) - promoted to the very first screen when you pick-up or turn on your phone.  Thing of a mobile portal that's always on, always up-to-date and always relevant!

Demo screens of Flash home - if you look carefully you can see the phone info (signal and battery strength) alongside "live" info (weather).  You can allow see the tabs along the top - news, call log, whatever the user, carrier or handset manufacturer wants.

 

Demo screens of Flash cast

Best "experience": I said in my blog from the show that the LG Prada phone was probably the prettiest (and most popular) item at the show.  It may be flashy, targeted at the "fashionita" and (likely) to retail for about 600euro, but it really shows what is possible in terms of both hardware AND software design - did I mention that the LG Prada (as well as the LG Chocolate range) use Adobe Flash to build and run the UI?

Anyway, not only did LG pull out all the stops with the phone, there stand at 3GSM was amazing.  Imagine a cross between an Apple Store and a really high-end jewelry store. The handsets were displayed like tiny pieces of sculpture and the somehow LG managed to provide a retail experience at an industry tradeshow. Well done LG.

 

Finally:

...End of a long day, Stefan??

February 13, 2007

Mobile Zoo-topia

Hola from Barcelona.  I'm at 3GSM this week - I'm going to take a wander around the show floor later today so I'll try and post some pictures of what I think is pretty cool,  but for now here's an update on the Adobe news.

Flash Lite momentum: more than 200 million Flash-enabled devices have now been shipped worldwide, being included in over 300 handsets and other devices. Last year we were saying 80 million devices shipped, most in Japan.  So the announcement this year represents more than 100% increase in shipped devices and much of this growth coming from outside the Japanese market. We're seeing uptake uptake across all the major handset manufacturers - including the LG with the Chocolate and the Prada phone.

Nice!

Welcome to the movies (sort of!): the next release of Flash Lite will support the playing of flash video on devices. Flash video is the most widely used video format on the web - being used by a wide range of site on the Web - YouTube, ABC and many many more. Anyway, video supported in Flash Lite (both streaming and cached) will mean that you can finally watch Ask A Ninja on the go!

Let's face the music: Viacom - media giant and owners of MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central have announced "innovative mobile media applications, available later this year, will deliver music, comedy and entertainment content from the MTV, VH1, Logo and COMEDY CENTRAL brands directly to handsets that support Adobe FlashCast."

FlashCast in Europe:Well, Sweden anyway. Telenor has announced that it will conduct the first FlashCast trials in Europe. FlashCast is very cool, delivering channels of content - news, entertainment, weather and pretty much anything else the provider or content owners can think of - to mobile phones.  The really cool part is that the content can be read on-line or off-line (of course updates to the content need to be delivered when the phone is on-line), but its a big differentiator from other mobile web experiences.

Anyway, quick update on the Adobe news. Check back for the my "what's cool" at 3GSM.