The Chinese based development shop Gamegoo creates online games that take players to a fantasy land with its popular online games like “Might & Hero,” “Duel on Mount Hua,” and “Qi-Xiong Hegemony.”

Using Flash Player 11 and the Adobe Flash Platform , Gamegoo has created these highly popular and profitable Web games in China, attracting more than 1 million players daily. The key feature that the company used for to develop these games was Stage 3D, which provided Gamegoo with accelerated graphics and animation development. This allowed the company to providing gamers with enhanced 3D elements and a better gaming experience.  One of Gamegoo’s games, Qi-Xiong Hegemony, was developed with Flash Player 11 and has been a huge success China. Since it was released, it has brought in more than $780,000 each day and is now one of the top seven online games in China. To learn more about how Gamegoo used Adobe technologies to enhance the Web based gaming experience, read more here.

Video games provide you with the chance to be a fighter pilot, sharp shooter or warrior. With Tanki Online, the first, online multiplayer 3D action desktop game using Flash Player, you can be a pro on the battlefield and work with your team to destroy enemy tanks, help your team and build up your ammunition arsenal. More than four million people worldwide immerse themselves in this virtual battlefield.

AlternativaPlatform, a Russian based company that creates multiplayer browser games, created Tanki 2, the follow up to the popular Tanki Online,  with Flash Player 11, Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection components and Adobe Flash Builder, to create the 3D geometry and animation for the game. AternativaPlatform used Stage 3D to deliver Tanki Online as a cutting edge 3D experience for gamers. Stage 3D allowed AlternativaPlatform to create accelerated graphics and animation development, and create more realistic and smooth gameplay for Tanki Online.

To learn more about how Alternativa Platform used Adobe technologies for the best multiplayer, battlefield experience, read more here.

As loud as we may shout at the TV watching sports or offer our own advice during a talk show, the people on the tube never hear our insights—until now. U.K. based interactive content developer, Live Talkback, used the Adobe Flash Platform  and Adobe Creative Suite  to engage U.K. audiences during broadcasts with live polling, allowing them to use their PCs and mobile devices to vote during live broadcasts.  Live Talkback displays those voting results in real-time, keeping viewers on top of the buzz before, during and after these live events. Live Talkback applications include a “Clapometer,” which uses PC and mobile phone microphones to measure audience noise during a show.

An Adobe MAX 2010 award finalist, Live Talkback uses Adobe Flash Builder, Adobe Flash Player and the Flex framework because the technologies provide a flexible development environment and an easy integration process, allowing Live Talkback to create the polling tools in a fraction of the time and cost. Popular U.K. morning show, “This Morning,” and top soccer club, Liverpool FC, have used Live Talkback to engage with its audiences. “This Morning” received more than 57,000 live votes in a recent live broadcast segment. The company is looking forward to emerging in other markets, namely in the U.S.

To learn more about Live Talkback and how it used Adobe technologies to enhance audience engagement with live broadcasts, read more here and check out the video below.

Today’s technology savvy audiences want to experience content across multiple platforms and devices, and are beginning to move away from passive forms of entertainment—they want to participate and interact with others to shape their experience. EPIX—a multi-platform premium entertainment channel, video-on-demand, and online service– teamed up with Adobe to bring current releases, classics, and original entertainment to all video platforms—linear TV, on demand, online, and mobile—while also encouraging social integration and sharing to reach the broadest audience possible.

With the Adobe Flash Platform, EPIX, a joint venture of Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate, and MGM Studios, was given the necessary tools to create and carry out broadband authentication systems to over 30 million U.S. homes through its distribution partners including Charter Communications, Cox Communications, DISH Network, Mediacom Communications, NCTC, Suddenlink Communications, and Verizon FiOS with little to no development effort.

Using multiple Adobe technologies such as  Adobe Flash Professional, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash Media Server, Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash Builder, and Adobe Flash Player, EPIX delivers content beyond the Web by building a library of available movie titles, which are encoded for delivery to a specific platform across different devices like Motorola XOOM, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and Boxee Box. One of the notable capabilities in EPIX is “Screening Room: Watch With Friends,” a feature that includes sharing capabilities allowing users to watch movies in a social event, turning the experience into a more into viral, interactive, and engaging gathering. The Screening Room is great for large-scale events like concerts on-demand to bring fans together.

Learn more about how EPIX how it provides premium HD content to its subscribers on devices everywhere here.

Creating games is the easy part for developers, but finding ways to make money from their games is challenging because of resources and limited marketing experience. Marketers, on the other hand, don’t necessarily have the expertise to develop games, but they need them to drive traffic online for their brands. FlashGameLicense.com (FGL), an online marketplace engineered by the Adobe Flash Platform, brings them together.

Created by two previous independent game developers, FGL offers Adobe Flash game developers a venue to post games and an opportunity for sponsors to shop for games to feature on their sites. Lucrative deals between companies such as ArmorGames, Disney, Kongregate, Microsoft, The Cartoon Network, Viacom (AddictingGames) and Yahoo and tens of thousands of independent developers have been brokered throughout the years.

The Adobe Flash Platform helps both groups reap the benefits. Adobe Flash Player’s reach helps companies and their developer partners ensure the widest reception and best performance across multiple platforms. Mentorship, centralized technical resources, peer review and analytics provided to developers guarantee that the best game possible goes live. The quality of the site and its games are such that 30 percent of FGL users come back and uniquely visit the site monthly.

FGL’s strength is allowing developers to focus on what they do best—creating games. For example, Berzerk Studios created the hit games, “Homerun in Berzerk Land” and “Gunbot,” leaving marketing and monetization to the FGL platform. The games, sponsored by SlixMedia, have received 15 million and 16 million plays respectively. The team’s also excited about future endeavors into multi-screen and multiplatform Flash game development. FGL encouraged former game hobbyist-turned-developer Ben Olding to release “Warlords: Call to Arms,” which has accumulated 121 million plays in less than two years and still enjoys about 50,000 plays a day.

Adobe is also proud to work with FGL to further mobile game development. Last year, Adobe sponsored FGL’s contest, “Cell Your Flash Game,” to encourage more mobile game development. The competition generated 260 submissions either built from scratch or ported to mobile from web, up from its original goal of 150 entries.

To learn more about how FGL works with the Flash Platform to effectively match independent developers and designers with sponsors to not only deliver the best game experiences but also effectively monetize them, visit here.

Canadian-based game development firm Frima Studio boasts a client list that includes Electronic Arts, Warner Brother and Nickelodeon and a reputation for high-quality 3D games such as Zombie Tycoon, one of the original six games available in the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) Mini. Looking to expand beyond the console, Frima Studio uses the Adobe Flash Platform to bring those same, engaging 3D experiences to the widest number of devices.

Zombie Tycoon is a single-player game in which zombie squads take over the world. The game is full of puzzle-filled cities, 360 degree animations, and skybox effects, which have delighted PSP Mini gamers for years. But to bring that same 3D experience to web gamers, Frima tapped Adobe Flash Player and Stage 3D APIs, a new method of 2D and 3D rendering in Flash Player.

The Frima team recognized a number of other advantages in the Flash Platform for its gamers.  Since Flash Player is everywhere—98 percent of the world’s Internet-connected computers—concerns about downloading a separate player to play these games are dispelled.

Using the Flex framework to build the tools to create the 3D apps, Adobe Flash Professional and Adobe Flash Builder to build the game UI menus and Adobe Photoshop CS5 to texturize images, developers reap the rewards too. Flash Player’s reach across screens worldwide offers developers greater monetization opportunities, particularly for Facebook games and free-to-play games. The new set of Stage 3D APIs, allows Frima developers, most of whom are ActionScript developers more versed in 2D game building, to easily create rich effects, texture and atmosphere in its games without sacrificing performance.

Frima is also very excited about its future 3D games for multiple device platforms using the Flash Platform. Learn more about how they engage a new gaming audience with immersive 3D experiences enabled by the Flash Platform here.

During RIM’s BlackBerry World developer conference, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Danny Winokur, Adobe’s VP of Flash Runtimes, discussed how our developer community has embraced the opportunity to create innovative apps for the PlayBook. Shantanu announced that a large majority of the 3,000 apps in App World today are AIR apps, including the new Facebook app, which was built using Creative Suite tools like Flash Builder.

Check out the presentation and the demos of Flash Player as well as the Adobe Reader and Reader’s Digest apps below.

The industry continues to rapidly innovate, continuously introducing devices with new CPUs, graphics processors (GPUs), operating systems and browsers. We are excited by this progress and the new opportunities it provides for end users to enjoy increasingly rich experiences enabled by Flash Player and AIR on their favorite devices, including PCs, tablets, smartphones and TVs. Our work with more than 70 leading partners through the Open Screen Project has delivered Flash Player and/or AIR for Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, iOS, Google TV, and Samsung SmartTVs and Smart Blu-ray players, complementing our long-standing support for major desktop platforms.

With the new Creative Suite 5.5, including Flash Builder 4.5, millions of developers and designers are able to accelerate and simplify development of rich applications for the web and top mobile devices including Android smartphones and tablets, the BlackBerry PlayBook and all versions of the iPhone and iPad. We anticipate that we will certify Flash Player on more than 40 smartphones and 50 tablets for release this year, bringing Flash Player smartphone installations to more than 130 million by year’s end. More than 200 million devices will support AIR applications by this same time.

We continue to work closely with our silicon, OS and browser partners to provide users with regular performance and feature enhancements that build on the latest device hardware and software updates across this vast array of devices. This cooperation is critical, as Flash Player and AIR deliver rich web experiences and mobile applications, including HD video and immersive gaming, through a reliance on each layer of the complex and evolving technology “stacks” that embody modern devices. As these stacks deliver new optimizations and support new capabilities, we will take advantage of them in ways that deliver value to both end users and content developers.

Today we are releasing Flash Player 10.2 for Android Honeycomb devices, available for download from Android Market. This final release will take advantage of Google’s enhancements in Android 3.1*, including hardware accelerated playback of 720p high-definition video referenced in our earlier blog post. Users of Android 3.0.1 will not experience these improvements until their devices receive the update to Android 3.1*. In addition, this Flash Player 10.2 release includes a security update addressing the Flash Player vulnerability announced on April 15th for all versions of Android.

Our plan moving forward is to continue delivering improvements in performance, quality, security and/or new features with each new release of Flash Player and AIR in accordance with our regular development schedule. Devices and software updates from our partners which introduce new technologies are being developed on varied schedules that are different from our own. Flash Player and/or AIR may not be optimized or supported on some of these devices until a subsequent release. We will continue to provide developers with access to pre-release features through early access programs on Adobe Labs so that they can test their content and provide us with feedback prior to final release.

*Blog post UPDATED on May 10, 2011 to reflect Adobe Flash Player 10.2 support for Android 3.1, announced at Google I/O.

With global warming on the rise, Lucid Design Group, a privately held cleantech software company, wanted to create something that would educate and inspire people to change their daily habits to help reduce consumption in their homes and offices (like turning off lights and unplugging appliances). Lucid developed Building Dashboard, a data visualization and communication application that monitors the use of electricity, water, natural gas and heating, and encourages social networking around the topic of resource conservation. It’s available via the Web, kiosks and mobile devices using the Adobe Flash Platform and Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium. With Building Dashboard (a MAX 2010 award finalist) in place, Fortune 500 companies, universities and residential customers saw consistent energy reductions up to 20 percent.

Coined “the first social network for buildings,” Building Dashboard employed the Flash Platform to help develop and deliver widgets, apps, maps and flow lists to encourage users of all technical backgrounds to save resources and understand their resource consumption levels. Currently, nearly 100 U.S. colleges and universities are using Building Dashboard to support key sustainability initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions across campus.

To streamline the developmental process behind Building Dashboard, Lucid used a variety of Adobe products including Flash Catalyst, Flash Player, Flex, Flash Professional, Photoshop and Flash Builder. The advantage of working with various Adobe products is seamless integration. For example, Adobe Flash Builder helped improve the Flex development process while Adobe Flash Catalyst and Adobe Flash Builder expedited design/developer workflow, ultimately reducing design and development time by one third. By adding Adobe Flash Player to the mix, Lucid developers could run their product across different platforms, devices and operating systems, while cutting testing time in half.

To learn more about how Lucid worked with Adobe technologies and to see how New York-based Hamilton College uses Building Dashboard, read their story here.

Adobe teams have been working hard to innovate around new tools for HTML5 and the Flash Platform. We truly believe that it’s important for the web to have a driving force for innovation and consistent playback of rich content across platforms and browsers regardless of what codecs are used – H.264, VP8, VP6, Sorensen, AAC or others.

We see several key opportunities for the Flash Platform that are not fully enabled by standards and other formats available today:  Rich, casual games; premium video with content protection and video enhancements like overlays and other effects; rich Internet applications in enterprises and on the web with data-driven features; and digital publishing.

Following the release of AIR 2.6 for Android and last week’s Incubator release of the new “Molehill” 3D GPU accelerated APIs at the Game Developer Conference, Adobe today released a beta version of Flash Player 10.3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Flash Player 10.3 provides key features to developers, content publishers and end-users. And we expect to bring them to mobile devices in the future.   Try them out and let us know what you think.

• Media Measurement – Measuring video just got easier. With Flash Player 10.3 and Adobe® SiteCatalyst®, developers can implement video analytics with as little as two lines of code for the first time.  Web analytics solutions can use a new set of open APIs to easily implement consistent video analytics irrespective of implementation or delivery protocol.  Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of channels driving viewers to videos, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played.

• Acoustic Echo Cancellation – Flash Player 10.3 enables developers to create real-time online collaboration experiences with high-quality audio, such as telephony, in-game voice chat, and group conferencing applications. Developers can take advantage of acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, voice activity detection, and automatic compensation for various microphone input levels. End users will be able to experience higher quality audio facilitating smoother conversation flow, without using a headset.

• Integration with browser privacy controls for managing local storage – Users will have a simpler way to clear local storage from the browser settings interface – similar to how users clear their browser cookies today. Flash Player 10.3 integrates control of local storage with the browser’s privacy settings in Mozilla Firefox 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and higher, and future releases of Apple Safari and Google Chrome. Also see a related post by Emmy Huang in January.

• Native Control Panel – Flash Player 10.3 provides users with streamlined controls for managing their Flash Player privacy, security and storage settings. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can access the Flash Player Settings Manager directly from the Control Panels or System Preferences on their computers.

• Auto-Update Notification for Mac OS – Flash Player 10.3 supports automatic notification of software updates on Mac OS, making it easier for Mac users to stay current with new capabilities in the latest version of Flash Player.

To download the beta release of Flash Player 10.3, visit Adobe Labs. We look forward to hearing your feedback, which will help us make Flash Player better for you.

P.S. For a preview release of Flash Player with 64-bit support, please check out Adobe Flash Player “Square” for developers on Adobe Labs.