The explosion of Flash content like widgets has created several complex problems, like how to index it in search engines, how to make it work on mobile, and how to track it. The latter is being addressed today at Adobe Max, where Google is announcing Analytics Tracking for Flash, which will let publishers track metrics for their flash applications from within Google’s popular stats package.
Aside from the unique file format, one of the major differences between tracking Flash and tracking webpages is that Flash can be embedded anywhere – meaning that analytics software needs to be able to measure interactions from not just a single location, but from within an application, regardless of where it’s placed.
To demonstrate how Google Analytics now does this, the company has teamed up with web-based Flash creation tool Sprout. Now, users who publish widgets and other Flash apps using Sprout can track metrics such as time spent, what links and objects users click within an app, and goal tracking – all from within the same Google Analytics account as their website.
Google and Sprout demonstrate how this works in the video below:
While Analytics for Flash is an interesting breakthrough in its own right, it also could be the dawn of a new era in marketing and how companies pay for advertising. As opposed to paying simply for clicks and for views, advertisers can now (in theory) pay for actual engagement, because it can be accurately measured.
Sprout is currently charging clients based on a “pay per publish model,” meaning the client pays each time someone actually does something with an app – like customize it (with Sprout’s “remix” feature) or republish it to a social networking profile. Sprout is marketing this new approach through a product they are calling SproutMixer.
Although most of the widget platforms like Clearspring and Gigya offer their own tracking solutions, Google Analytics adding its own support for Flash tracking is a big deal – it’s a solution that any Flash developer can implement into their applications – without the need for a middleman. As such, it could have significant implications on how online advertising is paid for, and how the widget companies evolve their business models.
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Want to watch a great boxing match? Just take a seat and watch the back-and-forth between Adobe Systems and Microsoft. I wrote about this is fight without an end last year, but now it seems the punches being thrown with more intensity.
No surprise - like two aging gladiators, the two software companies that have managed to outlive and beat most their peers. At face value, the fight is about Flash vs Silverlight. Look deeper and the tussle is over not just online video but about cloud computing, rich internet applications and mobile phones.
Microsoft has been jealous of Adobe’s Flash, a multimedia technology that Microsoft so desperately coveted that they tried to buy its then owner, Macromedia, without much success. Instead, Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 for $3.4 billion. Flash’s growing popularity as a core technology for online video, and Adobe’s efforts to extend it to web applications market hasn’t gone unnoticed by Microsoft.
The Barons of Redmond countered with Silverlight technology last year. They have upped the stakes by buying their way into the market - a time tested strategy for the software giant.
First it signed up MLB to get some mainstream usage. Then came NBC’s Olympics coverage online that led to a boost in number of people using Silverlight to watch video. Today, the company announced that it was going to invest in American Fork, Utah-based Move Networks, adding an undisclosed amount of funding to the start-up’s $46 million Series C round.
It will be money well spent: Move’s customers include large TV companies such as FOX, CBS and ABC. They use Move’s technology to deliver higher quality video to web-watchers. As part of the investment, Move will “now support Windows Server-based encoding, Microsoft codecs and Silverlight DRM.” So now those companies can use Microsoft’s back end products which can replace Adobe’s server side offerings, and halt the growing influence of Adobe’s DRM. In March 2008, Move had signed a deal where it integrated its video distribution technology into Microsoft’s Silverlight technology.
Behind Microsoft’s spending spree is realization that Adobe is a legitimate threat when it comes to cloud applications. When I spoke to Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s CTO, he talked at length about various Adobe technologies that could be used to build interesting cloud based applications, that could be used on new emergent Internet devices. Adobe’s CoCoMo can challenge Microsoft on “collaboration.” Lynch also pointed out his desire to turn Adobe’s Flash into a vital component of the mobile ecosystem, something Microsoft so sorely desires.
Microsoft’s true intentions and the extent of rivalry are best summed up in this comment by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Developer Division.
Silverlight 2 delivers much more than just media scenarios. One of the key advantages of Silverlight 2 is that it includes a cross-browser, cross-platform version of the Microsoft .NET Framework, specifically optimized for rich Internet applications (RIAs). That means you can build Silverlight applications using .NET languages.
Recommended & Related Reading:
* How Microsoft is fighting a war on three fronts.
* Another fight… Microsoft vs Adobe.
* The GigaOM Interview with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.
Photo via Flickr courtesy of Markhillary
Bain Capital must be psychic. Apparently they’ve looked into the future and seen that TokBox, a San Francisco-based startup, will either grow into a large company or find a buyer for what is essentially a Flash-based, in-browser video chat service that’s gotten marginal traction. Sure, the company has a new desktop client that allows you to video chat with anyone, but then so does my iChat.
Bain Capital has led a $10 million investment in TokBox. The move comes less than a month after the company named a new CEO, Nick Triantos, who has worked for many tech firms, but has never before held that title.
The company launched in October 2007 and has thus far raised a total of $14 million from Bain and early investors Sequoia Capital. Scott Friend, Venture Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a press release announcing the Series B round, said:
“The company is executing well…We are excited to be investing with our partners at Seqouia in a company we believe has the potential to be the next ‘big thing’ in web communication.”
Just to put his words into context, TokBox recently fired its founder and CEO, Serge Faguet. And according to Compete.com, they had about 179,000 visitors in the month of July, though they did sign a deal with Meebo that stands to get them some traction. (For a list of their competitors, check out NewTeeVee’s round-up of video chat applications.)
From the way I understand it, TokBox is using the built-in video capture capabilities in Flash player combined with the Flash media server to offer in-browser video conferencing. When the company launched, I pointed out that it was an “interesting idea, but more of a feature than a platform for a standalone company or model for a viable, long-term business. If (and that’s a big if) TokBox is going to work, it will need to be rapidly adopted by the marketplace.” Rapid adoption hasn’t quite happened, however, and I wonder if it ever will.
But again, the guys at Bain must be able to look into the future better than us skeptics.
Sitting across from me in the lounge of a posh Half Moon Bay, Calif., resort recently, Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer of Adobe Systems, a software company based in nearby San Jose, outlined his vision of the technology world at large. In particular, Lynch, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Harry Porter (picture the impish wizard as a grown-up) talked about how the confluence of cloud computing, web-centric applications and the emergence of the mobile Internet was going to impact our collective future.
Below are edited excerpts from our conversation:
Om Malik: How is the emergence of cloud computing impacting desktop-centric Adobe Systems as a company?
Kevin Lynch: Adobe is a 25-year-old company and that’s a great achievement because we have had the ability to change. We have changed with technological shifts. And now we are in that situation again. How software is made and sold is changing, so we are changing.
We are taking a balanced approach, and are building a hosted infrastructure. It’s not just about the cloud, but also about the desktop. There are some who are all about the cloud while others think about the desktop first. We have a hybrid approach, and we are doing that with our products like AIR.
Om: Can you talk about your online software-on-demand strategy?
Lynch: We have products like Buzzword, Photoshop Express and Acrobat.com that we are doing online. We are not deploying at the level of raw storage and raw hosting. Instead we are looking at application hosting from our customers’ perspective.
We want to be very specific about hosted online services, which are essentially about the collaboration of creative services. For instance, Premiere Express is being used by MTV where we are enabling (and sharing) video.
We are working on something called CoCoMo, which is a framework that is based on our Adobe Connect conferencing offering and uses Flex front-end technology. It’s going to be available as APIs that are use-specific. We are essentially turning Adobe Connect into components and then allowing developers to do audio- and video-sharing, for instance.
Om: So that means you guys need to learn a whole new language of building scalable infrastructure?
Lynch: We have 600,000 users of Photoshop Express and 500,000 unique visitors to the site every month. About 8 million Flash players are installed every day, and that needs a lot of bandwidth and infrastructure. So we know that, but it is a question facing all software companies going forward.
Om: Adobe Flash is one of your most well-known products. There was some talk about the latest beta version of the software allowing P2P transfers. What are you guys thinking here?
Lynch: Our current goal is to lower the cost of online video deployments so you [can] take advantage of P2P. We are being super targeted in how it is being used. Most of the overall web video traffic is in Flash. (Ed. note: Popular services such as YouTube and Blip.tv use Flash for the playback of videos.) The way we see it, for the whole web [video] to work, Flash has to work reliably, so that’s why we are taking small steps here and using P2P in a very basic form.
Om: What new features are you cooking up in Flash?
Lynch: Interactivity in videos — that is, highlighting certain items in video and making them clickable — is something we are enabling.
Om: What about Flash in mobiles? I know there have been some efforts to marry Flash at the interface level with mobile operating systems like Java.
Lynch: Mobile is really happening right now. There are a lot of screens in our lives right now and to make information accessible across these devices is important. There is no consistent runtime across these devices.
Right now, there is no single technology that has a dominant reach. I think that’s going to change over next three to four years. We are working on that, and have initiated an Open Screen Project that will make designing for multiple screens less of a challenge.
Om: You seem to have strong views about mobile and how we need to think differently about mobile as an opportunity.
Lynch: People will start to think about the small screen first, and that is a sea change. Mobile is central to the future of computing and I think all software and web companies need to look at mobile first and then from there, extend to PCs.
Om: So you like these “mobile Internet devices?”
Lynch: I am a big fan of the MIDs. I think the form factor is the sweet spot and there will be some experimentation (on design) going forward. The big challenge there is power, and batteries are a big drain.
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It is easy to see by all the headlines today that Adobe, Google, and to a lesser degree Yahoo, are getting all the love. As Stan Schroeder posted earlier this morning, Adobe is getting together with Google and Yahoo to put some new technology in place that will make Flash enabled Web sites indexable by the two search engine companies. Everyone’s reaction so far has been to get all excited about the news with a few hold outs questioning just how practical this really is. Mathew Ingram said this morning:
Are people all of a sudden going to start linking to the content inside a Flash widget, or boosting their links to a page because it has searchable Flash now? I don’t think so, although I could be wrong.
But the biggest fly in the ointment for me is the simple fact that most Flash websites are — not to put too fine a point on it — crap.
As much as I might be in agreement with Mathew on this one, there is something else that is really bothering me about this whole deal that no one in all the posts that I have read this morning save for Jeff over at Blogging Pro has mentioned. Where is Microsoft in this deal? After all, they have a little search engine as well that some people seem to like using, myself included.
Now before you all start getting hot and bothered to yell at me that Microsoft, through some of its software is a direct competitor to Adobe, I want to point out something very simple. Search is not - or should not be - about the companies. It should be about all the companies being able to provide the best results they can to anyone who wants to use any search engine they choose. What this deal does though is put significant search technologies in the hands of two specific search engine companies thereby giving them an unfair market advantage. It would be totally different if Google or even Yahoo had discovered the magical elixir themselves, but they didn’t - they are being given the inside goods by Adobe themselves.
Sure, business is all about one company being able to do something better than another company and that would be fine, except here that advantage is being provided by what boils down to a third party. Even if they are the originators of the technology, the fact that they are making it available on what appears to be a biased basis to preferred companies is simply further consolidating search into a narrower and narrower number of companies.
Granted the flipside of this is that Adobe could have offered the same opportunity to Microsoft, but they said no. If that is the case then Microsoft is a fool and they should have sucked up their pride and joined in on the deal because like I said, this isn’t about the individual companies it is about the users of the search engines.
It surprises me though that in the current climate of social media and all that goodness why this question isn’t being asked by others. After all, isn’t this the age of transparency and doing things for the users? Why aren’t more questions being asked about why only Google and Yahoo were invited to this party? It’s not like they are the only search engines out there and I’m not just talking about Microsoft here either. Instead we are being treated to the crowning of two specific companies and the purveyors of a specific availability of search results that will not be available by any other means.
To me that is just plain wrong.
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Remember All Those SEO Tips You Read? They Are Wrong
Well, not all of them. But the one you’ll very frequently encounter went something along these lines: a search engine likes text. Therefore, if you’re building a Flash website, its position on search engines will, by definition, suck.
Not any longer. Google, Yahoo and Adobe have worked together on a technology that will enable search engines to crawl Flash - not just static text, but dynamic web content, too.
Even more importantly, anyone who already has Flash technology deployed on their web site won’t have to alter it or enter any new data as it will be immediately searchable by search engines.
SEO experts already know that optimization for search engines is an ever-changing game. There are no fixed rules that are set in stone, and everything can change on Google’s whim. This change, however, alters one of the fundamental SEO rules - the one that says that text is king. I’m looking forward to reports from various SEO experts who will inevitably track how these changes are affecting real life search results.
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Docstoc has just launched a new desktop utility that totally kills the need to send email attachments – at least if you’re a PC user (a Mac version is in the works). Dubbed DocStoc OneClick, the new app allows you to right click any documents on your desktop and have them automatically uploaded to Docstoc, where a link is generated and inserted into a new message in your default email client (Gmail in my case).
Beyond the right-click feature, OneClick also lets you simultaneously upload multiple files, grab embed code, and add other meta data to your documents. So, if desktop apps are more your style, Docstoc now offers a simple solution for sharing your documents online that offers the same functionality as the web site.
Of course, this doesn’t kill email attachments completely, because if you’re on the receiving end of a heavy PDF or PPT file, you still have to download it and open it on your desktop. But it’s a big move, and could drive some serious user adoption of Docstoc for a couple reasons. First, it makes it way easier to get your documents on the site, which will increase the volume of files flowing through the system. Second, and perhaps more importantly for Docstoc’s growth, it introduces a highly viral element, as users who download the app will start sending out files with Docstoc links as opposed to PDF files.
The challenge for Docstoc is of course the competition. Scribd just teamed up with Drop.io to integrate its iPaper solution, while the 800 pound gorilla that both startups are trying to unseat – Adobe – just launched their own web-based document sharing service at Acrobat.com. Docstoc recently raised $3.25 million to fuel its growth, and assuming they can continue to stay nimble, they remain a strong darkhorse in the race to kill email attachments.
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Adobe’s popular AIR runtime is gaining more and more fans, and with that, far more applications than ever that cover a broad spectrum of tools. From fun applications that let you order pizza from your desktop to applications that let you track your investments online and off , the entire spectrum is out there, and this guide should help you find at least one or two that fit your life.
Financial and Productivity
Agile Agenda - Helps with project management, letting you schedule and assign tasks, assigning priorities and more.
Google Calendar RSS Invoice Creator - If you use Google Calendar to track your work on projects, you can use this app to parse your RSS feed and create invoices for your time to send to your clients.
Klok - A tool for freelance workers to manage their billable hours to clients. Also gives you tools for visualizing what you spend the majority of your time on, managing your projects and more.
NASDAQ Market Reply - A powerful tool allowing you to look over the history of any security and study its trends.
Portfolio Viewer - View multiple investment portfolios, and you can view them offline as all information is stored locally.
StockQ - Start streaming stock prices to your desktop without having to belong to any other sites. Set refresh intervals from 1 sec to 5 minutes, you have complete control.
Wicked Stickies! - Make post-it-like stickers where you can put down notes to help with your GTD activities, even set them with an expiration date so they won’t clutter up your desk.
(more...)
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Adobe is jumping head first into web-based software this evening, announcing the launch of several new services at Acrobat.com. The launch essentially moves Adobe’s traditional strengths of document creation and management software (Acrobat / Adobe Reader) into an online environment, allowing users to create, manage, and share Adobe documents through an account at Acrobat.com – for free and over the Web.
At the heart of the new launch is Buzzword, the web-based word processor that Adobe acquired last year. Buzzword’s full functionality is integrated into Acrobat.com, allowing users to create documents and collaborate on them with others. Different permissions can be assigned to each collaborator, and edits all tracked and saved with version control. Of course, since this is all done over the Web, these documents can be accessed by anyone from anywhere – a big shift from the days of emailing documents back and forth – much like what Google is attempting to do with Google Docs, and Microsoft with Office Live Workspace.
Along those lines, Acrobat.com includes a number of sharing features that move things away from the inbox and onto the Web. Documents uploaded to Acrobat.com can be shared via a URL, and rather than offering a downloadable file, they load in the browser via Flash. These flash files can be embedded on any web page – hence bringing Adobe into direct competition with startups Scribd and Docstoc who were previously “PDF killers” of sorts. Of course, if you’d like to just create standard PDFs, Acrobat also includes a conversion tool where you can upload your documents and have them turned into PDFs.
Beyond document sharing, Acrobat.com is also offering web-based conferencing, a lightweight version of the products offered by WebEx and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Meetings allow the presenter to share their desktop on-screen, and let participants can chat and interact over VoIP. Dubbed Adobe ConnectNow, Adobe says the service is initially being targeted at individual professionals and small businesses.
Much like competitors Google and Microsoft, it’s hard to call Acrobat.com a total replacement for desktop software at this point – but it’s a big and aggressive move in that direction. The business model is clearly pay-for-what-you-use; while right now the service is just a free beta, restrictions on things like file space and number of users will presumably be addressed by monthly subscriptions – moving Adobe from a licensor of desktop software to a web-based software-as-a-service company. We’ve already seen that with Photoshop Express, and with Acrobat.com, Adobe now has all of their major applications available in a Web-based version too.
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In thinking about the desktop/web hybrid platforms that have launched or are about to be launched, I’ve decided that even if last year they were overhyped, this year we’re going to see real adoption and applications. But that presents an interesting problem for developers and eventually, for users. The vast array of options and functionalities not only makes the web experience different for different users, but it makes developing sites more complicated, much like the rise of different browsers and the proliferation of Flash has in the past.
I’ve written about MySpace using Google Gears for email, but apparently WordPress is going to take advantage of Gears in its next version, too. Twhirl uses Adobe Air to bring Twitter to the desktop and a fun program called Snackr pulls random bits from your RSS feeds to stream across the desktop. We’re still waiting for Prism from Mozilla, and yesterday Yahoo launched BrowserPlus. Again, the sheer number of these presents its own set of problems.
I have copies of Air, Gears and BrowserPlus on my machine, and each have their pros and their cons. Air essentially brings the browser offline, while BrowserPlus runs outside of the browser to make your desktop an extension of the web. Gears runs inside the browser, making Firefox even more unstable, but does make my web browsing faster. (Getting it to work with Gmail is my top request, mind you.)
It’s my job to play around with these sites, but I can’t imagine the average user wanting to download three or four different programs in order to optimize their browsing experience. I still get irritated about upgrading Flash. As for developers wanting to take advantage of extending web functionality, deciding which platform to use will be an exercise in decision-making. Do they go with a platform that has more downloads, or better features? Do they integrate with several platforms if the feature sets are similar, or hope that users download multiple programs? These are similar questions they had to ask when designing for Explorer, Firefox or Netscape.
Skylar Woodward, a software engineer at Yahoo who helped build the BrowserPlus program, thinks eventually some of the code behind these efforts will be opened up to the community, making it easier for developers to implement multiple platforms on their sites. In the meantime, he champions the idea of “graceful degradation.” In that scenario, a user can see the site without downloading a platform, he just might miss out on a few nifty features in the process.
So for those of you too lazy to click through on those installs, welcome to the gracefully degraded Internet.
