On Saturday, May 19, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen delivered the commencement address at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.  MBA graduates, family, friends, faculty and staff gathered in the Greek Theatre for the event.  You can check out the video and text of his speech online.

 

As the core of his message, Shantanu shared three secrets to thriving in the midst of constant change:

1) The answer isn’t in a spreadsheet (rely on your gut)

2) Know your Zen (understand and stay true to yourself)

3) Surround yourself with people smarter than you (build a team that brings out your best)

Through the course of the address, Shantanu shared a number of personal and Adobe stories, from the downpour at his own Haas graduation through the advice that Adobe co-founder John Warnock gave him when he took the CEO job:  “If you don’t like your job, you have only one person to blame.”

Congratulations to all the Haas MBA graduates!

Today, from the Cable Show in Boston, the Adobe Video and Ad Solutions team announced several updates to Project Primetime, the industry’s first fully integrated video technology platform to deliver seamless viewing experiences for ad-supported TV content across connected devices. These updates included Primetime Simulcast, Adobe Media Server 5, Access 4 and the next version of Adobe Auditude. Jeremy Helfand, vice president of monetization at Adobe, penned a blog post covering the announcements. To further expand upon the news, Ashley Still, director of product management at Adobe, shot a demo video to visually expand upon the news. Find out more about Project Primetime and all other Video, Gaming and Digital Publishing updates through our Digital Media blog.

When we re-launched our Adobe Stories site with the question ‘why do you create?’, we had no idea what kinds of tales we’d get or how “global” the stories would be. Well this one, from Martin Ngugi (artist mchoraji) got our attention immediately. He is from Nairobi, Kenya and born without forearms. For me, his work jumps off the screen and has a spark of “aliveness” that makes me want to see more…and we can! Check out more digital drawings on Facebook. Below is an image from the stories site, as well as part 1 of a local news piece on Martin.

Interested in writing your own story? We’d love to read it (or watch) it, and maybe we can promote it too. Martin’s story is just the first of the stories we’ll share with the community on this blog, on Twitter and Facebook. So keep checking back!

Today, Adobe is hosting its annual Digital Publishing Summit in New York City. Currently, the DPS team is live blogging from the event here. At the Summit, Adobe announced the next generation of digital publishing features including Content Viewer for iPhone, social sharing, expanded font licensing and enhanced integration with Adobe Creative Suite 6. These new features allow traditional media publishers, corporate organizations, ad agencies as well as individual freelance designers and small design firms to publish, distribute, monetize and optimize a new class of innovative digital media. See the full announcement here and participate in the live blog at http://blogs.adobe.com/dpsnyc2012/.

Today, our sold-out Digital Marketing Summit EMEA kicks off in London with several compelling keynotes and sessions led by industry luminaries and Adobe executives, as well as a series of key announcements.

For starters, we released the latest in our series of Adobe Digital Index reports on the digital marketing industry. The Digital Index is designed to provide marketing, e-commerce, and retail executives with critical, data-driven insights. The latest report examines how global website traffic and engagement differ when the visitor is on a tablet, smartphone or PC. The report had several key findings, including the following:

• Web traffic from tablets has grown 10 times faster than smartphones over the initial two years of availability
• In the last year, tablet traffic has grown over 300 percent
• Tablets need to be considered a unique and distinct category in mobile and therefore optimized accordingly
• The report predicts that tablet devices will generate more web traffic than smartphones by early 2013 and that consumers find browsing websites on tablets nearly as engaging as on PCs. You can check out the full report here.

We also made a trio of announcements related to our Web Experience Management solution and Adobe CQ web content management software, part of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. The advances cover the areas of cloud, e-commerce, and social communities, and expand our offerings in the market:

• First, we announced the availability of Adobe CQ Cloud Manager, a SaaS application that provides customers the ability to easily and quickly launch marketing campaigns in the cloud
• Next, we announced the availability of Adobe CQ eCommerce, which provides digital marketers comprehensive capabilities for managing and optimizing the entire online buying process
• Finally, we announced the latest version of Adobe CQ Social Communities, which provides organizations the ability to better leverage social engagement across owned digital properties to build loyalty and drive conversion. You can check out more about each on our Experience Delivers blog

We are also excited to announce a digital analytics package to help marketers act on big data, as well as a privacy solution for digital advertisers and publishers.

Stay in touch with us during Digital Marketing Summit EMEA on Twitter @AdobeSummit and #AdobeSummit. Also, keep your eye on the Facebook page and YouTube.

Creative Cloud is here! As the way we work evolves, so has Adobe’s offerings. You can now get your Creative Cloud membership, which starts with the complete Creative Suite 6, as well as Adobe Muse, our new visual web design tool, and Edge, the HTML5 animation app. Add in Business Catalyst for web hosting, Typekit for fonts, and up to 20 gigabytes of cloud storage for syncing and sharing your files. Why is Creative Cloud so transformative and what does its future hold? Get the story from Jeffrey Veen, senior director of products.

We’ve had the privilege of working with the best of the best when it comes to judging entries to the Adobe Design Achievement Awards (ADAA). Our judging panel for 2012 is no exception!

The ADAA program partnered with Icograda (International Council of Graphic Design Associations) to identify design luminaries from all around the globe and invited them to lend their expertise to the ADAA judging panel.

ADAA judges for 2012 include:

• Daniel Biasatti, Design Director, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia
• Gregoire Cliquet, Professor and Department Head of Experimental Applied Researches in interaction Design (READi), L’Ecole de design Nantes Atlantique
• Nancy Juliber, Strategic Creative Media Marketing Executive
• Mikael Kanfi, Partner and Chief Product Officer, Twist Image
• Richard Loveless, President, Global Connections: Art and Technology Consulting Services; Visiting Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Susan Metros, Professor of Visual Design, The University of Southern California
• Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Game Design, Interactive Media, Synesthesia, Q Entertainment
• Ravi Naidoo, Founder and Managing Director, Interactive Africa / Design Indaba
• Hephzibah Pathak, President, Ogilvy & Mather Advertising Mumbai, India
• Fernanda Saboia, Creative Director, Tatil Design
• Tina Shaw, Video Production Manager / Creative Director, NBCUniversal Digital Entertainment and Liquid Filmworks

ADAA 2012 judges’ biographies can be viewed at:  www.adobeawards.com/us/about/judges/.

This summer, our esteemed judges will review thousands of innovative award submissions by students and faculty from higher education institutions around the world. Work will be judged across 13 student media categories and 3 faculty categories, and three finalists and honorable mention recipients will be named in each category. Judges will ultimately select one winner in each category. Winners will be announced at the ADAA Awards Ceremony at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles, this October.

Tina Shaw, one of this year’s judges, shared with me how energizing it is for her to join design peers from around the world and be inspired by the work of future creative leaders in traditional and experimental media.  She added, “I take great honor in supporting the students and educators that rise to the challenges of their projects with remarkable/innovative/keen visual solutions.”

The ADAA is accepting entries until 5:00pm Pacific Time on June 22, 2012. Participants may enter each category three times.  Recent student graduates are also eligible if their entry was created after May 1, 2011, and they were a student at that time. Finalists and winners will receive Adobe software and travel to Adobe MAX. In addition, winners in each category will receive $3000US cash. For more information on Adobe Design Achievement Awards and the various categories visit: http://www.adobeawards.com/us/. Stay informed and inspired by fellow designers by connecting to our ADAA Facebook and Twitter channels.

Earth Day is an annual reminder of the ways in which individuals can pitch in to do something for our planet. At Adobe, we are proud to be recognized as a green company and to empower employees to create a culture of environmental sustainability. This year, the Adobe Green Team and Action Committees setup multiple opportunities for employees to contribute to a healthy, sustainable environment not just for one day, but throughout the month of April. Here are some highlights of the earth friendly events and activities that employees participated in:

Waltham Fields Community Farms: Boston employees volunteered at Waltham Fields Community Farms with transplanting, weeding, mulching to help support the farm’s mission to grow produce for local soup kitchens, shelters and food pantries.

Fremont Street Clean: Seattle employees participated in the Fremont Street Clean to help pick up debris and trash from adopted streets near the Adobe office.

Guadalupe River Cleanup: right behind headquarters, Adobe has an adopted area of the Guadalupe River and every year, in honor of Earth Day, San Jose employees volunteer to remove trash from the river that supports local fish and birds.

Adobe Green Team SunShares program: the Adobe Green Team successfully launched a SunShares residential solar program, a new initiative that educated employees about solar energy through webinars and workshops, enlisted employees in the contractor vetting and selection process, and provided discounts on solar energy solutions for employee family members, friends, and neighbors in California and Washington. The April event was an end of the program celebration, which included employee testimonials about getting solar installed, cool sustainable giveaways, and a solar panel cake!

GRID Alternatives solar installation and fundraiser: a group of Bay Area employees volunteered with GRID Alternatives – a non-profit organization committed to empowering communities in need by providing renewable energy and energy efficiency services, equipment and training – to install a 3.88 kW solar system for a low-income family home in East San Jose. The Green Team and the San Francisco/San Jose Action Committees raised over $3,500, with donations matched by Adobe, for the GRID Alternatives workday to help bring the power of solar energy to a family in need.

Low-Carbon Living “Green Bag” Lunch and Learn: David Friedman, co-author of Cooler, Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living and deputy director of Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles Program, shared his thoughts around the most effective ways to cut our global warming emissions by twenty percent or more.

Community Garden Planting Day and Celebration: On April 23, Adobe kicked off the new Community Garden at the San Jose headquarters. Employees signed up in teams to adopt a garden box and planted their first seedlings. Guest speakers at the event included Rosalind Creasy, edible landscaping expert, and Rebecca Jepsen, “Ask a Master Gardener” Mercury News Columnist, who discussed warm weather planting.

For more pictures of the Earth Day activities and other volunteer efforts in April, visit the Community Action Month album on the Adobe CSR Facebook page.

How we connect with you, our customers, sure has changed a lot over the years. Snail mail and phones led to emails and web forms – and now Twitter, Facebook, blogs and even Instagram are the social communications tools du jour. There are so many different places we can chat that we thought it would be good to gather a public list of our main social channels. These are the top “corporate” (for lack of a better term) accounts where you can learn what Adobe is doing, connect with others in the Adobe community, and ask us questions. Remember that you can also find your favorite products on social channels too – just do a quick search.

Let’s talk! (And share, and chat, and send images, and post videos…)

Adobe on Facebook

• We’ve rolled out the new Facebook timeline and have a couple of cool new apps to check out, including CS6 Sneak Peek videos. We’ve also enabled Direct Messaging on the Page so if you are on Facebook and have a question for us, send it to us directly for a quicker response.

Adobe on Twitter

• We are online and ready to chat from 9am – 6pm PT Monday-Friday.

Adobe on Linkedin

• Right now our LinkedIn presence focuses on job opportunities and life at Adobe from the perspective of employees, but we’re currently updating it to include a ‘Products and Services’ tab as well.

Google+

• Do you live in your gmail account? We’re starting to up our Google+ activity so be sure to add us to one of your circles.

YouTube

• Like to watch? We have videos of products and people and events. We’re also in the process of redesigning our channel, so stay tuned…

Pinterest

• We find all sorts of things pinteresting, with a focus on design, web, video, photography and more – it’s all the great things you’re creating. Check out our boards.

Instagram

• It isn’t just for iOS anymore. Now that Instagram is on Android, most of the world can share their real-time photos. We share photos that give an inside look at Adobe — backstage at events, Adobe staffers, even lovely pics of our cafe. Join our stream, yes? We’re easy to find – look for “Adobe”. :-]

The launch of Creative Cloud and Creative Suite 6 has us all thinking about — creativity of course! Where do the creative juices flow from, when you’re designing a web page, making a movie, writing a song and even building out an entire ad campaign? Our Adobe & Stories site just re-launched and we’d love to read yours, see images about it or even “watch” it if you have a video.

And for all of you in North America and Canada, we’re giving away tablets to 6 lucky storytellers! A tablet of your choice – just check out the site for full terms and conditions.

We’ve had a few stories come in already that we think are pretty great:

• “Having developed an international reputation for creating altered photographs with ecological concerns, in Antarctica I became interested in creating an editorial (relatively unaltered) body of work to compare and contrast these two modes of perception and expression…A simple project initially, it continues to grow. A single exhibit and book has become multiple exhibits and books, lectures, a website and Antarctic workshop program…I started using Photoshop 1 as an artist in residence at Kodak’s Center for Creative Imaging. I beta-tested Lightroom 1…” — Read more about the project from the story’s author John Paul Caponigro

• “I’ve been looking for ways to make the color images from my Sony a850 pop a little bit more. I love shooting the camera in B&W mode and find that a simple conversion to grayscale in Photoshop and then some tweaking of the curves usually results in fantastic images. The same has not always been so with the different color modes on the camera. I usually shoot in vivid mode with the contrast and saturation bumped up a couple of steps, however differing light and weather sometimes still left the images looking a little bit flat. After reviewing many tutorials online about maximizing the look and feel of color images with Photoshop I came up with this simple method…” — Read more about Peter Ellenby’s method in his story

Now it’s your turn: Why do you create?