November 10th, 2008

Aviary launches with brand new domain, pricing model

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:54 pm

Categories: Design, Flash, Flex, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Desktop, Domain, Pricing Strategy, Tool, Aviary, Productivity, Ryan Stewart

This is a bit old, but I haven’t had time to dig in and play with the public version of Aviary until recently. After a long beta period they’ve officially taken the wraps off of Phoenix, their bitmap editing tool and consolidated everything under the aviary.com domain. The launch not withstanding, the Aviary crew has been very, very busy and Aviary continues to be one of the most innovative set of RIAs that I’ve seen.

The beauty of Aviary isn’t the set of tools or the fantastic design and branding - though those all help - but how they’re building up their community. On their blog they’ve got a ton of samples to get you started. And baked into the tooling are all the steps that you take to create the end result. That means that if you want to, you can share all of the steps and settings that you used for your masterpiece. New users can look at that and figure out exactly how to get the most out of the tool. They’ve become famous on digg for their various creations. They’ve also started to roll out a way to make money by pricing the service at a couple different tiers. Hardcore users can choose between Green, for the people who mostly use Phoenix, and Blue, which gives you access to the whole suite of tools.

But one of the subtle beauties of Aviary is that it’s all cross platform. One of the reasons I’ve been using it lately is because I’m trying to switch more of my work to Linux. There just aren’t a lot of great design tools for Linux, but Aviary’s entire suite is built on the Flash Player and so it’s cross platform. They’ve even got a Firefox extension that lets you do things like take screenshots from the desktop and helps blend the browser sandbox with the desktop. It’s a pretty good bridge between online photo editor and the functionality people expect on the desktop.

So keep an eye on Aviary. They should be releasing more of their tools soon, but I think they’ve really nailed a lot of big parts of rich Internet applications. They’ve got a very functional tool, a rich user interface, and a passionate design community.

Thanks to Flash Speaks Actionscript for the reminder.

October 8th, 2008

AdSense for Games: Could RIAs be next?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:23 am

Categories: Advertising, Flash, Google

Tags: Google Inc., Advertisement, Rich Internet Application, Google AdSense, Games, Personal Technology, Ryan Stewart

Google today announced a public beta for AdSense for Games. What’s unique about it is that it’s primarily targeted at Flash games with partners like Mochi Media, Konami, Heavy Games and others. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, because the online casual game market is growing quickly. According to Google’s blog post 25% of internet users play games every week. But perhaps more importantly this is really the first time that AdSense has been incorporated into Flash. Google has built in hooks that allow content creators to show contextual advertising at the beginning, the end, or in between levels.

Using AdSense inside of RIAs has been all but impossible until now. Scribd had a hack that allowed them to show AdSense inside of their Flash-based iPaper but beyond that there haven’t been a lot of good examples of using AdSense inside of RIAs. In fact advertising inside of rich Internet applications is something that continues to be difficult to do based on the current web model. Matthew Johnson from blist has some good thoughts on this.

My hope is that AdSense for Games can be a driver for helping bring together Google’s advertising platform into the new real-time RIA experiences on the web. It continues to amaze me that a platform like Flash which is so much a part of advertising on the web has yet to really find away to incorporate that advertising in its applications.

September 26th, 2008

Get your Flash on during the presidential debates

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:32 am

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Rich Internet Application, TV, Rich Media, Ryan Stewart

In a big indication that we’re only beginning the social revolution for politics and that RIAs will play a big part, CurrentTV is going to be doing live streaming and a real-time overlay of Tweets using Flash. The broadcast will be available on the CurrentTV Hack the Debate site as well as a number of regular TV broadcasts with Flash powering the Twitter visualizations.

We’re seeing a huge explosion in the use of rich media during the election. We saw an example with Silverlight being used to stream the Democratic National Convention live and now we’re seeing what I hope is a big trend - incorporating other data into the live streams. The power of using rich media in RIAs goes hand in hand with how much extra data we can bring in. That’s what makes it so much better than TV: we’ve got the web at our fingers! Why shouldn’t that be more interactive? This is a good first step, and I hope we see more down the road.

To participate all you have to do is tag your Tweets with #current and it will show up during the debate. Now if only we could get a backchannel that the candidates actually looked at and responded to.

September 4th, 2008

Adobe and NBC to provide live streaming of NFL games

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:10 pm

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., NBC, NFL, Video, Live Streaming, Video Quality, Corporate Communications, Games, Marketing, Personal Technology

Adobe just announced that the NFL is going to use Flash to deliver live, online streaming video for NBC Sunday and Thursday night football games. You can go watch the games on NBCSports.com right now. It looks like they used Flex to build the player and I assume they’re using H.264 as the codec.

The NFL is a really, really tough nut to crack. As the biggest sports league in America in terms of revenue and viewership, they can basically do anything they want. And their incentive to take risks is very low.

The video quality is pretty good and I love the fact that you can switch between cameras. They’ve got 5 live streams going at the same time and it’s going to be a great way to check out replays. And because it’s live, they’re still able to include advertising. The killer is a lack of full screen. The Olympics Silverlight app did this as well and I can’t figure it out. That should be such a key, easy feature. Hopefully this isn’t the start of a trend.

I think this is going to be a great example of Flash, a great showcase for RIAs, and hopefully a good point of comparison between the Olympic Silverlight player.

August 26th, 2008

How the world watched the Olympics online

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:33 pm

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Microsoft, Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: China, Olympic Games, British Broadcasting Corp., Video, Flash, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Much has been made of NBC’s Olympic numbers, which had the rights for online video in the US, and what that means for Silverlight. I thought the app was solid, the video quality was good, and all in all it was a win for Microsoft and RIAs. In that vein, I’m pretty impressed with how Adobe did across the rest of the world. The BBC in the UK and CCTV in China were both big Flash users. There were a number of other countries using Flash as well (and a couple using Silverlight). I think the numbers show that there’s worldwide interest in rich media and strong adoption of Flash.

In fact, the majority of online video for the Olympics was delivered in Flash. There’s a great blog post up by John O’Donovan, the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC about their Olympic numbers. For Beijing they streamed nearly 40 million videos with up to 5.5 million Olympic videos watched each day at an average of around 3 million. In total there were 6.5 million hours of video delivered using Flash by the BBC. What those numbers don’t include are streams from the BBC iPlayer or the mobile platforms. It’s all Flash in the browser. Compare that to 72 million videos in the states, and it shows that in a country much smaller than the US, online the Olympics was a hit.

More importantly, the numbers out of China are fantastic. In the first 10 days CCTV’s website streamed Olympic coverage to 100 million people according to the New York Times (registration required). CCTV used an innovative system which combined Flash Media Server with their own P2P technology which made it easy for anyone in China to watch the Olympics regardless of bandwidth. So in China we’ll have 2,900 hours of Olympic content backed up and ready to watch with Flash Video.

What’s also interesting to see is how the BBC got more comfortable over the course of the Olympics with their video content. By the end of the Olympics they were actually putting the live video stream on the front page of the BBC News homepage as the lead story. That’s pretty impressive and I think it’s a very good sign that rich media is creeping even more deeply into a role as a primary way to consume content.

August 14th, 2008

Metadata in Flash Video

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:36 am

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Rich Media

Tags: Video, Beet.tv, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Beet.tv has a post on the news that Adobe is going to be adding voice-to-text functionality inside of Flash video that will be added to the video as metadata. What basically happens is that any speech in the video will be converted into text which would then be accessible in a number of different ways. Beet.tv was the first to mention the news back in July and it sounds like it’s getting closer.

This comes at a good time. With the improvements in Flash search this would expose all of that video data as text to search engines. It would make searching video easier as well as drilling down into specific parts of the video based on content.

I still hate that everything boils down to text and that video and audio haven’t become first class data on the web but text is still the name of the game. The easier we make it to shoehorn rich media into the text world, the easier it will be to insert them into more core parts of the web. It still feels hacky to me, but hopefully it’s a good first step.

July 15th, 2008

Using Flash and Silverlight to move web standards forward

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:24 am

Categories: Adobe, Ajax, Flash, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Innovation, Web, W3C, Microsoft Silverlight, Standards, Alex Russell, Channel Management, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Via John Carroll I saw a blog post by Paul Ellis in which he talks about the shortcomings of open standards, or more specifically, standards bodies, and how that affects the open web. In short, it’s led to the innovation and widespread adoption of proprietary technologies like Flash and Silverlight. If you really step back and look at it, despite all of the amazing things people are doing inside of the browser, real, ground-level innovation just isn’t happing unless it comes from companies like Adobe or Microsoft.

People are definitely doing innovative things with Ajax, but they’re taking the same basic set of technologies and rearranging it in different ways with varied results. All of the Ajax frameworks? Great stuff, but there’s not much in the way of core technology innovation going on. Flash and Silverlight on the other hand are pushing the boundaries when it comes to video, cross-domain security, offline/desktop access, deep zoom technologies, manipulating sounds, file access, filters and effects, and more.

I’m not trying to disparage the open web. I think if the open web could move at the speed of a private company, we’d all be better off. But it can’t, and really, the W3C wasn’t made for innovation and people are starting to realize that. Alex Russell realizes it, and more importantly Google realizes it. And they realize that lack of innovation is actually starting to hold them back as a company that relies very heavily on the browser. That’s one reason you’re seeing so much going into Gears. Google needs to move the open web forward but the W3C is too slow, so they’re coming up with their own solution.

In the end, I think the web is pretty robust and it’s self-healing. The W3C and other open web advocates should look to technologies like Flash and Silverlight as a way to see what works on the web and what doesn’t. If there’s a genuine threat, then hopefully that causes people to get up and help fix a broken standards process. The open web is in a good position. It’s still the best solution but now it has a bunch of companies fighting to innovate around it. The community can pull good ideas from that battle and move everyone forward.

July 1st, 2008

Search-ability in Flash

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:03 am

Categories: Adobe, Flash, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, Google Inc., Search Engine, Flash, Search, Marketing Research, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Last night Adobe announced that we’ve given a special version of the Flash Player to Google and Yahoo that will more accurately let them crawl through Flash content. Even though Google has been indexing .SWF files for a while and even been able to pull out some text, they haven’t really been able to send their spiders through an application and pull out links and context. Flash applications are dynamic in nature, so having the special player means that Google will be able to pull out more relevant information than it could before. But in our community there seems to be a lot of concern and questions about how this is going to work.

As I see it, not a whole lot changes for the Flash world over night. I think this puts Flash more on par with HTML and Ajax applications when it comes to search engine optimization. We still have a lot of basic issues with how searching an application even works. How do SEO Microsoft Word or Photoshop? This doesn’t address those issues and it is by no means a silver bullet for RIAs and search engines. What it does do is start to expose a ton of the data inside of Flash applications that just wasn’t accessible before. Kevin Merrit of blist had a great example. They use deep linking in their Flash application to let you dive into a specific blist. Now, in theory, Google can index the content of that blist as well as the fact that it has a unique URL associated with it. That wasn’t possible before.

Show me the money
From an Adobe side, it sucks not to be able to tell our community more about what’s going to happen or how things will get indexed. But we just don’t know. We’ve simply given Google a better look into Flash movies and they’ll decide how that plays into their algorithm. There’s so much energy and time going into figuring out the secrets of SEO and now the Flash community has a horse in that game. Smart, entrepreneurial people are going to quickly figure out what exactly is being indexed by Google and what the best ways to expose Flash content to the search engines are. It happened with HTML and it now, finally, it can happen with Flash. But my hope is that this will help tie RIAs and Flash/Flex applications into the wider ecosystem of what Google does. Could we see AdSense for Flex apps? What about Google Analytics? As Google gets better at crawling Flash movies and we start to understand more what’s going on, developers should be able to expose content in the right way and tie into some of those advertising services.

Where’s Microsoft?
The one thing that I was disappointed in was that we didn’t offer this special player to more people. I get the sense that there was some work on both sides that had to go on to really fit the special Flash Player into the search ecosystem. The Register said we had discussions with the Live Search team but that they’re not currently active. I’m not sure of the state of things but I’m in the process of finding out. It would be great if this was open and anyone could use it. That’s been the direction Adobe has been going so hopefully it turns out that way soon.

In general, I think this is a big milestone for Flash and RIAs. It’s kind of confusing, kind of hard to wrap your head around, but developers are smart people, and there’s too much money at stake not to figure it out. I think what will happen is that over the next 6 months people will figure out exactly what is being indexed and how it affects search engine rankings. Then we can all start to create some best practices around SEO and Flash. Then I’m sure Google will change the algorithm again and we take a few steps back before moving forward. In the end, that’s what’s good about this. Flash can now play the same SEO game as HTML and all that it entails.

June 17th, 2008

Brightcove refreshes with brand new service and new focus

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:27 am

Categories: Brightcove, Flash, Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Brightcove, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Today Brightcove, one of the first RIA companies and one of the first to use Flex, announced that they’ve overhauled their service and dubbed it Brightcove 3. The primary goal of the new Brightcove is to provide better support for “long-form video”, or full length shows instead of smaller clips that we’re used to seeing. Brightcove has done a really good job of incorporating brand, usability, and distribution with their current Flash video player, so it makes sense for them to continue that momentum and focus on the more interesting and more lucrative long content. As NewTeeVee noted, this move (bad pun intended) is aimed directly at Move networks. Move has gained a ton of traction with companies like ABC and Fox and Brightcove wants a piece of that market. Brightcove said there will be some cost savings over Move and that they’ll be using the mostly-already-installed Flash plugin versus Move, which has it’s own plugin.

Another big piece is a new publishing model which finally includes a Brightcove API that helps content creators insert video meta data into their pages making it easier to search and more meaningful for the semantic web side of video. The new publishing model also gives the content creators a lot of control over how to access video. They can now choose URLs, display descriptions, and decide when and how to highlight related videos. It should make it easy for users to jump from video to video all in the Brightcove player.

The final piece of the new rollout is a brand new user interface which is built all in Flex and according to TechCrunch has an iTunes-looking control panel and the ability to do drag and drop editing capabilities.

According to CrunchBase, Brightcove has $91.1 million dollars in funding putting it pretty close to the top of the video startup space and just a tad shy of Move networks $91.3 million.

May 29th, 2008

Knowledge@Wharton interview with Kevin Lynch

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:17 pm

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Flash, Flex, Kevin Lynch

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe AIR, Knowledge@Wharton, Kendall Whitehouse, Desktop Application, Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

Kendall Whitehouse has an interview up with Kevin Lynch at Knowledge@Wharton in which he discusses everything from Adobe AIR to the Open Screen Project. It’s one of the better interviews I’ve seen and gets into a lot of aspects of Adobe’s strategy around RIAs. They also talk about Kevin’s new role as CTO and what that means for the company.

Some of the best information comes when Kendall asks about the different ideas between Microsoft and Adobe. Kendall got to interview Scott Guthrie at MIX and this interview with Kevin is a nice compliment to that. On Adobe AIR and desktop application security, Kevin does a good job of setting everything straight:

AIR is enabling applications to be built with web technologies — using things like HTML, Flash and Flex — and it brings those applications to the desktop with the rights of a desktop application. Otherwise, there’s not much point in bringing them to the desktop.

The installation process for AIR lets the user know that this application was signed [with a digital certificate] by a particular vendor. You can approve or disapprove it. If you approve it, then it does have capabilities like other applications you install on your computer. It’s very much following the desktop application model in enabling these applications to be more functional and act like desktop applications, but run across operating systems.

In the rest of the interview Kevin talks about how Adobe AIR fits into the next generation of cloud computing and then a bit about the Flash/Silverlight competition. Kendall always does a good job of getting good answers by asking good RIA questions. This one is well worth the read.