FORA.tv, a provider of online video content that focused on discourse, discussion and debates surrounding the world’s most compelling political, social and cultural issues, today announced the closing of its undisclosed sum of seed round financing with an investment from Adobe and venture capitalist Will Hearst, who also serves on the boards of Akimbo, Applied Minds, Juniper Networks, Oblix, OnFiber, and RGB Networks. Though the sum of investment was not disclosed, TechCrunch has reported the amount of investment is $2 million. FORA.tv has not been a surprise investment target for Adobe as Adobe announced at MAX last year that they will invest in companies that doing cool things by using their technology. In the matter of fact, FORA.tv is just the latest addition to the list of companies that Adobe invested in. Moreover, Adobe announced they will invest approx. $100 million in companies that leveraging Adobe AIR. As such, FORA.tv, built on Adobe Flash Player and Adobe’s new Media Player, has not only quickly attracted thousands of viewers but also caught the eyes of Adobe.

“Adobe’s investment in FORA.tv signifies our belief in the company’s great opportunity to deliver a rich online media experience to consumers worldwide,” added John Leckrone, director of Venture Development for Adobe. “FORA.tv is making innovative use of Adobe’s Flash Player compatible video technology. The fact that our shared vision for richer content delivery comes to life via the Adobe Media Player is a win-win for us all.”

Founded in 2006, FORA.tv is based in San-Francisco and its content partners include: C-SPAN; the Chautauqua Institution; the World Affairs Councils of Northern California, Dallas, Oregon, Philadelphia and Connecticut; The Brookings Institution; Hoover Institution; University of London; Cambridge University, just to name a few.

Adobe now faces the challenges of providing the patch in solving the security problem in its most popular programs. The failure of reassuring its users’ interests first has put the users that used Windows XP platform under a big security threat. According to the security advisory posted by Adobe, Adobe has admitted that a critical vulnerability can be found in versions 8.1 and earlier of Adobe Reader and Acrobat. This security flaw was first came courtesy of a security expert, Petko Petkov in a blog entry last month. Petkov said, “Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise your Windows box. Completely!!! Invisibly and unwillingly!!! All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds one.” In his February blog post, he also mentioned, “PDF is very interesting file format. It allows the PDF consumer to do almost everything they can think of and this is the reason why I find it quite insecure.”

Meanwhile, Adobe categorized the bug as a critical issue and recommended its users to apply the suggested workaround as stated in the security advisory. However, Adobe’s workaround requires their Windows XP users a flair of editing the Windows registry.

This week, Adobe has released the first version of Flex Builder for Linux operating system. It was a relatively new product concept, install as a plugin version and developers can use it to build the Flex applications on the Linux platform. Right from the beginning, Flex Builder was positioned as a cross platform and open source framework that helped developers to create Web applications. Realizing the difficulty in create the Flex UI (user interface) and due to the fact that the majority number of designers encountered the issues on designer/developer workflow, Adobe also developed another software, i.e. Thermo. It is still in the Adobe labs, and the main differentiator among the different products that Thermo offered is “the ease of use” feature. There are great examples can be found on this Thermo page, as one can easily convert an artwork into a working component and MXML file will be converted, according to this software and this is particularly useful for those who develop the front-end of a Web application.

Without using it before, I have to admit it is far too early to judge how good or how bad these Adobe Flex Builder and Thermo. However, there is a video clip that I found on YouTube may well explained its future prospect, as embedded in the below.

Adobe has acquired a Waltham, Massachusetts based startup Virtual Ubiquity for an undisclosed sum, according to this blog. This startup was founded in June 2005 and made their name on the Web by created a Web-based word processor application that called Buzzword. Obviously, this acquisition did not took people by surprise since Adobe and Virtual Ubiquity have pre-existing software relationships as the Buzzword, still a test version was built on Adobe’s Flex framework and users must enable their browsers the installed of Flash Player 9. While I attended an Adobe training today, I was told that the team made up of Virtual Ubiquity’s success, i.e. eleven (11) people, half of whom worked at Lotus Development Corp. in the 1980s and 1990s will join the Adobe family. What are the likely repercussions of this acquisition in term of the product development of Adobe? It’s indeed too early to tell that.

Meanwhile, this acquisition has given new prominence to the Adobe and Microsoft, both companies’ previously hidden rivalry, with Adobe indisputably has every right to integrate the Buzzword word processor into their Adobe Acrobat family or LifeCycle platform. In fact, the competition and struggle for market share has not been standing still but intensified over the months after both companies, Adobe and Microsoft have released the desktop video player and rich media browser extension, i.e. Adobe Media Player that built on Apollo and Microsoft’s Silverlight at the same time in April this year. However, the acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity definitely has been a source of competitive advantage especially for Adobe, with plans to push for the Web office market.

Given the saturation of the Adobe’s existing markets for their core products which are Acrobat and Web design softwares, Adobe definitely seeks to expand into other fields. Things are getting more interesting now. While Adobe was still perceived as immature in developing its enterprise market, albeit that they believed the growth must come from the “enterprise market,” Adobe’s main strength was more likely to be appealed to the desktop buyers. They simply have no credibility to the enterprise buyers, especially for now. I’m sure they know building its integrated Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) software product line bundle with Buzzword is less difficult and yields profits faster than developing the products and solutions that geared toward the enterprise businesses.

Recent buzz in the market about the Adobe Creative Suite (CS) 3 and today Adobe has confirmed the shipment of this new release. This is the largest ever softwares that released by Adobe, other than the Adobe CS3 full package, the standalone software application such as Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Flash CS3, InDesign CS3, Illustrator CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, Fireworks CS3, and Contribute CS3 was available in the market now. This CS3 suite had took Adobe for more than two (2) years after the precede CS2, code-named Cookie Dough, was released in April 2005. Though I read some news stated that Adobe had an intention to revamp this product suite in every 12-18 months, but it took approx. 2 years for Adobe the aforesaid new suite. One remarkable feature of this product suite would be the Mac Leopard’s compatibility issues. Most of the CS3 standalone products will run on both the old Macintoshes, the Power PC-based architecture as well as the Intel-based architecture, as reported by this article.

Photobucket has just announced that it released a new tool that will allow its users to edit the web-based videos. This is a tool that powered by Adobe Systems, a lightweight version that compared to Adobe Premiere. One of the advantage for using this web-based video editing is the users do not need to download it on their PCs. They can instantly use it, and do some editing on their personal media, only if they have installed Adobe Flash Player on their PCs. According to the above mentioned press release, Photobucket users can combine images and video with captions, bubbles, frames, transitions, music, and other effects by dragging and dropping content to a sceneline. Clips and content can be reordered, trimmed, and split directly in the sceneline in a web-based environment. Additionally, users can work with content from their own albums, or access over 2.5 billion publicly-shared images and videos on Photobucket. Once editing is complete, the resulting video mashup can be embedded into any web page, blog, or social network profile by copying and pasting a snippet of HTML code.

In my view, this is not the first company that I heard launching this web-based video editing, some companies have successfully delivered this same type of services for quite some times, including EyeSpot, that required a Macromedia Flash Player to run it, and Jumpcut, that also make use of Adobe Flash Player. All these companies were developed the web-based video product with new features in order to get a bigger chunk in the video blogging industry.

Furthermore, I quite impressed on the product strategy deployed by Photobucket. It is currently the third largest video hosting site after YouTube and MySpace, they have overcome some of the problems in startup phases and successfully moved from the concept to reality in just few years. Though the video sharing phenomenon is so popular today, most of the users are not just uploading their videos “for fun”, there is an indication that most people are looking ways to watch the original contents on the video sites. In this case, the development of these tools that edit videos sowed the seeds for the video creators that would only upload original contents in the future.

Adobe just ran an excited news that entitled, “New Release Joins Adobe Flex 2 for Linux-based RIA Creation“. They released the Flash Player 9 and it will enable users to open and read any Flash contents and applications on the Linux platform. According to the aforesaid news, it will also vastly enhances user experiences with new capabilities such as efficient memory utilization, advanced features for graphics, video and text, as well as the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), which allows up to 10 times faster scripting performance.

I see this year will becoming one of the best years Adobe has had since its first inception in 1982. I read that Adobe has previously released RoboHelp6, and Flex Builder 2 for Macintosh in the beginning of this year. Moreover, they have announced that they going to launch Adobe Production Studio, the integrated video and audio post-production tool set that is part of the Creative Suite family, will be available for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. In the setting of technology marketing, a growing number of softwares released by a particular company would enabled it to meet the variety needs of the growing number of online and offline consumers and vendors. When a software giant gained a brand name in the market, retailing looked very easy for the company. For example, “How do you sell something that no one have seen or heard before?” This will be a tough question for most of the new start-ups that struggling in everyday. For Adobe, a well-established company in the software sector, as I mentioned above, retailing “looked” very easy for them, they’re do not need to promote or sell the new products that they released, what they do is: They just upgrading their current portfolios, and users would eventually pay the upgrading fees. For most of friends, they used Dreamweaver 8, they’re now just waiting for the 9.0 version to be launched. Money will not be a constraint for them anymore. Adobe thus do not need to approaching any consumers and consumers perceived that they will benefited from the Adobe’s new products. That’s why the elephants can always dance.

By the way, you can download the Flash Player 9 if you’re running Linux platform on your PC by clicking here.

Adapted from: http://www.it.com.cn/f/dc/071/15/373013.htm

As Adobe released its Photoshop CS3 beta recently, I’ve been surfing on the web and trying to get some photo images that could demonstrated the feature-rich of this software. I just came across a website and it has showed some photos that derived from using the Photoshop CS3 by an user at the CES 2007 in Las Vegas. You can go to this particular website (in Mandarin) and have a view on those photos.

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? It seems that the powerful features of Photoshop CS3 would definitely capture the users’ attentions and thus, give us a strong and valid reason why we should download it and buy it as well. In this case, images are far more effective than the well-chosen words.