A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A Skype visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Israel Derdik and his high-flying media suite, Aviary, a Web-based media-editing platform that enables users to alter, save and present their multimedia creations, all in the cloud.
In a development that only Scrooge and the Grinch would find amusing, the tech industry has entered into a fevered period of pre-holiday job cuts.
In a lengthy filing with the SEC, Omniture provides a detailed time-line of the events that culminated in its agreement to be acquired by Adobe Systems for $21.50 a share. There are several fascinating aspects to the company’s account.
On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.
A group of 10 tech-industry executives spent Tuesday and Wednesday lobbying members of Congress and the Obama administration on issues like taxes, immigration reform, and software piracy.
The group, which included Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, and Sybase CEO John Chen, met with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, among others.
It’s not much of a secret that a lot of software has security flaws. One reason is that there aren’t any real standards for designing secure software. In fact, the right way to secure programs is rarely discussed at all.
A new group is hoping to change that.
Amazon has caved into demands from the Authors Guild that it disable the ability of the Kindle to read a book aloud. This is very bad news.
Adobe shares are trading lower this morning after RBC Capital analyst Robert Breza trimmed his estimates and price target on the stock, noting that the upgrade cycle for the recently released Creative Suite 4 has been slowed by the weak economy.
Adobe Systems may have a claim to the world record for most software downloads in a day–if the company wants to push its case.
Over the summer, the Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox Web browser, started a campaign to break the Guinness World Record for the most times a piece of software was downloaded in a single day.
Steve Jobs didn’t show up to the first Macworld Expo, which was held in San Francisco in January 1985, one year after the introduction of the Macintosh. He was in the city, but he spent most of his time holed up at the Union Square Hyatt Hotel with his strikingly beautiful blond girlfriend, whom I only knew as Tina.
Adobe (ADBE) this morning officially launched the latest version of its flagship software package, Creative Suite 4. The announcements included a variety of versions and slices of the new software: There are Design, Web and Production versions, a “Master Collection” with all versions of the new software, 13 standalone products …
During a recent earnings call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said that his company will “work with Apple” to ensure that Flash apps would run on the iPhone. This after Steve Jobs publicly dissed Flash as being “too slow to be useful” and its stepsister Flash Lite as “not capable of being used with the Web.”
But like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” Flash is not going to be ignored.
On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone. This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world’s casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world’s video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cellphone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone. This is a HUGE opening for Microsoft to take momentum and mind share away from Flash/Flex/AIR with its Silverlight set of technologies (which, based on my Twitter conversations, is winning developers over at a pretty good pace).
The line between software that people access over the Internet and software that resides on their PCs will blur over the next several years, as an announcement from Adobe reminds us.
Adobe today introduced AIR, an application that lets people access Web sites even when they aren’t online. Someone who wants to put an item up for bid on eBay, for example, could fill out the form through the AIR software while the PC isn’t connected to the Web. The software would automatically post the information to eBay the next time the computer is connected to the Internet.
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