October 14th, 2008

Brightcove overhauls UI with Brightcove 3

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:34 am

Categories: Brightcove, Online Video, Rich Media

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

Today Brightcove is rolling out a new application as part of their web platform for content creators (Update: here’s a post by one of the Flex developers who worked on it). The new user interface and features are some of the coolest things that I’ve seen in the ever popular rich media space. There are a few highlights of the new platform but the biggest takeaway for me was that Brightcove really wants to put people in control of how their content is displayed. To that end one of the things they’ve done is overhauled how people can create new video players. Using a XUL-like language anyone can create a template for video players that includes things like a horizontal list of related videos, meta data, and various other aspects of the video player experience. That can be saved as a template and then used across an entire network of sites. What’s nice is that you can then build on top of that template to customize the experience even more. In the demo I saw they used a nature show to demonstrate how you could add a playlist of rainforest videos and skin the original template with rainforest assets. You could then take that same template and customize it for an ocean themed show. They really nailed the branding aspect of video while allowing reuse of assets and a ton of control with the XUL-based interface language.

A couple of the other highlights include new APIs and dynamic streaming. The new APIs are expose in both Flash and JavaScript so that regardless of the technology you’re using, you can still get in and manipulate or access various parts of the video. Using the APIs you can pull out metadata, make changes to the playlist, or even alter how the video plays. It’s going to mean that developers and site creators can easily customize what and how they want things to appear on their sites. Dynamic streaming lets content creators encode multiple versions of a video at different bitrates so that the user gets the highest quality version available. Brightcove detects the bandwidth and then based on settings that the content creator establishes, the user gets the best possible quality video stream.

All in all Brightcove 3 is a big leap forward in giving the people who create video a ton of control over how that video behaves. It’s a good step for the rich media world and a great example of where the industry needs to go.

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 18th, 2008

NBA looking to stream live games

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:09 pm

Categories: Advertising, Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, User Interface

Tags: Web, NBA, Channel Management, Games, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Marketing, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Ryan Stewart

Rich media on the internet could be getting another big win if the NBA decides to go through with its plan to stream games to people in local markets. The NBA isn’t the first sports league to stream live games, MLB offers a streaming package and the NFL is going to stream some of their national games that are slated for NBC, but this is the first time that local games would be streamed. Traditionally local games are the crown jewels of local television stations because they’ve basically got a monopoly.

Just as with the Olympics, this could be an interesting experiment to see how a blend of traditional media and new media can affect ratings. As we saw with the Olympics, traditional media still rules the advertising roost. It draws the most viewers, it pulls in the most money, and it isn’t going away any time soon. But increasingly content seems to be moving to a “consume it how you want it” model where big content creators (if you can attach that term to the NBA) offer a variety of ways to consume content. I’ve called these “touch points” in the past but always talked about them in terms of the web. Now big media companies are getting into the touch point game.

In the end, this kind of thing is great for the web. It’s the first step in blending the TV and web experiences. A lot of people focus on interactive TV as a next step, but it seems to be moving more in the web direction. People like their TV the way it is, but with the technologies on the web, you can create that interactive content and increase the granularity of your analytics. I think the web-based TV experience will end up being superior than the general TV experience because of RIAs and better data. Keeping it on the big screen is still important but ultimately the web provides better platforms with which to make the most out of video content. I hope other sports leagues follow suit.

August 11th, 2008

Numbers on the NBC's Silverlight Olympic Coverage

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:05 am

Categories: Microsoft, Online Video, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: NBC, Microsoft Silverlight, Coverage, Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Ryan Stewart

Tom Steinert-Threlkeld has a great rundown of the numbers behind this weekend’s Olympic coverage. The highest day of coverage was on August 10th and it saw about 3.42 million video streams with 66.7 million page views and an average time spent on the site of 15 minutes. Pretty good numbers but as the BTL piece notes, that’s only about 2% of a typical YouTube day. So it didn’t exactly take the world by storm.

But one number I thought was interesting was that according to the Wall Street Journal, 90% of people watched the TV exclusively while only 0.2% watched the online version exclusively. But a decent number, 10%, watched both TV and the online version. This is the number I’m most interested in tracking through the games because I think that’s the best example of how people are changing their viewing habits towards rich media online. Giving up TV entirely would be a little ridiculous, but if the big media companies can augment TV coverage with more detailed (or more obscure) coverage on the web, that’s a winning formula.

In general, I’ve been pretty happy with the NBC and the Silverlight Olympics experience. Though some of the criticisms are well founded, that’s more to do with failure in the actual application than it is technology.

More info at Beet.tv.

August 5th, 2008

Interactive video: Why the video tag won't cut it

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:07 am

Categories: Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

As we approach the Olympics we’re seeing a lot of different experiences being created around video content. I was recently quoted in a Denver Post article about Silverlight being used as part of the Democratic National Convention and when looking at the Aurora project (Techmeme discussion)I thought it would be a good time to break out a “why the < href="http://www.w3schools.com/tags/html5_video.asp">video tag is inadequate” post. It won’t be enough because we’re finally reaching a point where video is just a content type and not the entire experience.

There’s only minor value in standalone video content. Sure, YouTube is popular (and even YouTube has started enabling related videos right inside of the player) but “video in a square” is going to get less and less useful as the web involves. What’s going to be important is how people incorporate video into the overall experience. Video adds that extra real time/real life element. But being able to bring in related content and add that to the video experience is what really makes using video great. We can have that very human interaction and feel with video but then drill down into data as our video is intermingled with text, charts, and numbers.

Watching video of the Olympics is great, but that’s not any different from television. Watching video of the Olympics, being able to instantly get information about medal standings and athletes right inside of the same application without having to open up a new tab and search is the kind of interactive experience that the web should be all about. The video tag just treats video as another box on the page like a div tag or an image. That’s going to be good up to a point, but as we move around video standards and the web becomes more distributed people are going to consume the exact same video clip in different ways (desktop apps, the browser, mobile devices, offline) so the content and the format become a commodity. To really stand out and draw people into your video application you’ll have to start providing that interactive content.

That’s a core part of the RIA experience and it should be a core part of the web video experience. If this summer is any indication we’re moving in that direction and I don’t think the video tag will be able to keep up.

July 20th, 2008

Rich Internet application startup ideas Y Combinator wants to see

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:15 pm

Categories: Online Video, Rich Enterprise Applications, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Rich Internet Application, Rich Media, Site Builder, Ryan Stewart

Y Combinator posted a list of a bunch of different startup ideas they’d like to see and fund. It’s a sizable list with 30 different thoughts waiting for enthusiastic entrepreneurs to take a shot. But what struck me most about the list was how RIA-heavy it is. I as much as anyone feel that RIAs are the wave of the future though it’s difficult sometimes to articulate how, why, and when. But this list provides good indication that even though people may not realize it, they want more RIAs:

2. Simplified browsing.
Sure you could create a simplified browser in a native language, but I see this as a great use case for Adobe AIR. You get the web technologies and you can easily customize it so it feels very web-centric. Plus you can provide it on Mac/Windows/Linux so wherever they go, they’ll have the same, simple UI. For that target demographic that’s a good thing.

5. Enterprise software 2.0.
This one screams for RIAs. In fact the entire enterprise screams for an RIA makeover, but the enterprise moves slowly. If you want to target the enterprise why not make your application look fantastic and stand out. Since you’re starting from scratch and aren’t really beholden to legacy systems like the big enterprise players you can create rock-solid code and then put an intuitive, meaningful user interface on it. That will turn heads.

6. More variants of CRM.
Why not add a little rich media to the CRM world? Incorporate some video chat, maybe some real time messaging, add the ability to synchronize data online and offline and provide a mobile interface for use on the go. CRMs could be greatly overhauled with RIAs.

9. Photo/video sharing services.
This one is a no brainer, but I think we can definitely do better than the sites we have now. Add some more interaction. Add collaboration, real time communication, a better user interface. People want to share and you can make that experience extremely engaging with RIAs. Make them feel like they’re sharing in front of a room full of people instead of a website with avatars.

10. Auctions.
Another place with rich media or collaboration could make a huge difference.

11. Web Office apps.
A gigantic market with high expectations. People have been using office apps on the desktop forever so in order to get them to switch you have to provide great functionality as well as a user interface that feels like a desktop app. RIAs provide that capability.

12. Fix advertising.
Don’t even get me started. I hate annoying Flash ads as much as anyone. I think the interactivity of RIAs could be used in such a more responsible and valuable way - we just have to think of it.

13. Online learning.
Another case where RIAs can help jump over the walls so to speak. Real time messaging, collaboration, and rich media are absolutely necessary to create something worthwhile in the online learning space. You have to be able to create emotional connections which is tough to do over the web. In all honesty I’m not sure the technologies exist to make this a reality yet, but they’re getting there.

16. A form of search that depends on design.
Design is still very, very important. I’d love to see one outcome of the innovation around designer developer workflow to be a search engine that provides good, fast results, and has a stellar design.

18. The WebOS.
The cloud combined with a good user interface. If you’re replicating an OS you have to have power under the hood and make it easy and engaging for people to use. How are you going to create Vista or Mac OSX in the browser? Lots of useful transitions, usability tweaks, and rich media.

22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.
Another design problem. Code a great database and then put a friendly, usable interface on it. Make it fun to use, make it intuitive, and show off your design chops. Another thing that would be helped by an overhaul of the designer-developer workflow.

26. Better video chat.
How do you make video chat feel more real? Good UI, lots of rich media are a good start.

29. Easy site builders for specific markets.
Another great place for RIAs. Site builders are important and it’s always good to lower the barrier to entry of the web for everyone. But they have to stand out. You’ve got to let people get creative and put those creative designs to screen. An RIA that lets people build those kind of RIA-like experiences would be a huge help.

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.

April 14th, 2008

More money pouring into rich media; Move Networks adds more funding

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:11 pm

Categories: Online Video, Rich Media

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Network, Media, Video, Microsoft Corp., Plug-in, Move Networks, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Update: Couple of corrections/clarifications. The Move’s total funding is $67.9 million, not $91.3 million, thanks to Dan Rayburn for the tip. Also, I thought this was implied, but Move will be using Silverlight as a way to distribute video, so Silverlight gets the adaptive streaming and Move gets more penetration. Thanks to Don for the comment.

Move Networks is announcing that they’ve raised a $46 million C round today from a variety of interesting companies including Cisco and Comcast Interactive Media. Move has gained a lot of ground as a high definition delivery mechanism for ABC.com and others. One of the things that makes Move interesting is the ability to change the bitrate of the streamed content based on how much bandwidth is available to the person watching the stream. They partnered with Microsoft around that feature so that Silverlight could take advantage of it.

The downside to Move is that they require their own browser plugin in order to view content. I haven’t seen any kind of penetration numbers for the plugin but the company says it reaches 6.5 million people a month. Not a huge number when you consider the number of people on the web but they’re definitely doing a number of things right when it comes to HD video.

I think Move helped paved the way for HD video and has been great for the web. It’s encouraged companies like Adobe and Microsoft to be better about their HD offerings and because it’s been laser focused on one thing, video, it’s been able to innovate. I’m not sure what will happen in the long run as both Adobe and Microsoft keep getting better, but with a total of $91.3 million raised, they’ve got a big warchest.

March 5th, 2008

MIX08 keynote rundown

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:18 pm

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Online Video, Ooyala, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Silverlight Penetration, Productivity, Business Structures, Advertising & Promotion, AJAX, Finance, Marketing, Internet

I was at the Microsoft MIX08 keynote today and Microsoft unveiled a few really cool things and a few not so much things. Obviously I work for Adobe so all the standard disclaimers apply.

First things first, lots of new bits. They dropped versions of Silverlight 2 Beta, Internet Explorer 8, Expression Studio 2 Beta and hooks for Silverlight and Visual Studio. Silverlight penetration is coming along at a rate of 1.5 million downloads a day and growing. That should get them to their number of 200 million downloads by June of this year. Flash has about 12 million downloads a day for comparison but I think that’s a very good number for Microsoft. No big news but some fun stuff to play with. Now on to the announcements.

A lot of the demos were things that we’d seen or heard of before like the Olympics site in Silverlight but there were a few gems that I think flew under the radar of some people. One is the adaptive streaming bit with Silverlight. In my opinion that was one of the coolest features of the day. I know that the Ooyala team has something like it in their video player. Adaptive streaming lets you provide the best experience to the user based on their system. If the bandwidth is slow and/or the machine isn’t up to speed, the stream automatically adjusts the experience so the user gets the highest watchable quality possible. This was one of the things that has made Move Networks so successful. That was the biggest surprise for me - the announcement of a partnership with Move and Microsoft around Silverlight. I don’t have any details of what the partnership looks like but that could be a big deal.

The coolest demo of the day was a deep zooming feature that was used on the Hard Rock Site. Microsoft has features in their tools that will let you stitch together a bunch of images and then a component that displays them so you can use the mouse wheel to get insane levels of detail on the stitched-together image. Pretty neat stuff. The rest of the demos were kind of blah. The AOL Mail application was good looking after they switched the skin to the Halo version but they showed things like “sorting a grid control” which is doable in Ajax. Even as a big Flash guy I wasn’t sure that using Silverlight on that application was a great showcase of the technology. They did do a fun/cool demo of WPF and Cirque Du Soleil

The other big news was the fact that Silverlight mobile will be released on Nokia devices. The showed a couple of demos (one good, one bad) of Silverlight applications running on a S60 device. It sounds really cool and the way I understood it you could take the same Silverlight code and run it on the phone or browser. Two big questions were when will it be available and what is the licensing model. It seems like Microsoft is trying to get Silverlight mobile deployed in a number of places so I would imagine they’ll make licensing as easy as possible.

Overall the keynote was good but not spectacular. Ray Ozzie talked a lot about “meshes” and how the ecosystem fits together. There were some very cool technical things with Silverlight but not a lot of examples to differentiate it with Flash. I was also hoping to see more about the workflow. At this point you can pretty much do anything you want to with Flash or Silverlight so what matters most in my mind is the tools. Blend got a few mentions but they were small bits and I would have liked to know more about their designer/developer story. They did show a “dev-igner” slide so that was cool. Maybe I need to go to the sessions to learn more.

Overall, even as an Adobe employee, I was hoping to see them push the boundaries and provide a ‘check’ to Adobe in the chess game. There was some of it, like the Silverlight mobile bit and adaptive streaming, but I was hoping for more tool innovation and more info about Silverlight 2 that we hadn’t heard about. But the crowd was energetic and it’s clear there’s a ton of RIA interest in the .NET world so we should see some great apps down the road.

January 10th, 2008

Rich Internet application predictions for 2008

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:31 pm

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Ajax, Apple, BuzzWord, Curl, Devigner Workflow, Expression Studio, Flash, Flex, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Online Video, OpenLaszlo, Rich Enterprise Applications, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Google Inc., AJAX, Microsoft Silverlight, Rich Internet Application, Apple Inc., AIR, Ryan Stewart

2007 was a great year for rich Internet applications. The combination of Microsoft and Adobe in the space took it to the next level. More bloggers started talking about it and the definition of what an RIA even started to expand with things like AIR and Prism bringing RIAs to the desktop. We also saw a lot of traction in the enterprise space with companies like Oracle and SAP looking to augment their user experience with rich Internet applications. 2008 is going to be even better and here’s why (hopefully I’ll do better than my 2007 predictions):

1. Silverlight will get to 200 million installs by the end of June, but it won’t be for 2.0. The stated penetration goal of Silverlight is to get 200 million installs by June. I think they’ll hit that number. Partnerships like Netflix, the Olympics and Jackass are great moves and will push them over the edge. On the downside I think you’ll see a 60-40 split on those installs with 60% of them being the better Silverlight 2.0 runtime and the other 40% being stuck in 1.0 land.

2. AIR changes how people think of the web. Big claim, and obviously as an Adobe evangelist I’m biased, but I love AIR. The 1.0 release of AIR will be cool, people are already starting to check it out and I think people are thinking differently about how to create applications. But I’m most excited about two things on the AIR platform; Linux and version 2.0. If 2008 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop then AIR is going to help. With a 2.0 release of AIR (I doubt this will be before the end of the year) we should start having things like being able to leverage native code and access devices. Those are going to take the platform to the next level.

3. The browser rides tall with the help of plugins. I talk a lot about the desktop but the browser world continues to innovate. Silverlight and Flash Player in a heated competition is only going to move that forward. We’ll release Flex 3 this year and Silverlight 2.0 should ship this year which means browsers everywhere have the runtimes and programming models people need to create great rich Internet applications. I think this is the year we see browser vendors (even Mozilla) work closely with the creator of runtimes to take advantage of the new features so they can focus on making browsers faster and more stable instead of full of new features.

4. Collaboration becomes a big battle in the RIA space. The battle for creating the best collaboration experience is going to be fought by a number of big companies including Google, Microsoft, Adobe and a number of smaller but important players like Zoho. Web workers are going to be more important this year and they want solutions that help them work. We’re seeing some of that with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, we’ve got Adobe Connect as well as Share and Buzzword and Microsoft’s Office Live. That’s a great first step but this year companies are going to focus more on audio, video, real time data, exchanging smart documents and data visualization. That will help drive both adoption of RIA technologies and the features of RIA platforms.

5. Ajax gets closer to the rich Internet application platforms. I think a lot of people in the Ajax community didn’t see the value of incorporating things like Flash or Silverlight into their applications other than for a small video or for charts. Towards the end of this year I think that attitude changed. RIA companies are going to make it easier for Ajax developers to take bits and pieces of their platforms and Ajax developers are going to respond. We’ll see a lot more “hybrid-RIAs” where developers use a combination of technologies. That will be another reason for the browser vendors to play nicely with plugins.

6. The designer/developer workflow gets a quality overhaul. Helping designers and developers work together on the same project is a hard problem. But this year we’ll make big strides. The interactive designer community will get involved and help hash out some of the biggest problems. Thermo will be a huge step forward and will push Microsoft to do more with Blend. We won’t be perfect by the end but we’ll be engaging new communities and we’ll have a lot of material to draw from to help really solve the problem in 2009.

7. The days of smaller RIA technologies are numbered. I hate to say it but I think technologies like OpenLaszlo and Curl will continue to gain traction in some niches but won’t see widespread adoption. Those companies will still bring revenue but Microsoft and Adobe are pushing too hard and putting too many features into their runtimes for the smaller companies to keep up.

8. Apple makes a land grab for rich Internet applications but no one realizes it. This may have already happened but by the end of the year people will be talking about Apple’s RIA strategy. They’ve got Safari/WebKit, they’ve got the iPhone and they’ve set the bar when it comes to experience. They don’t have as many developers but that’s starting to change so the only thing they need is an RIA tool that competes with Flash. I think that tool has to be coming this year and when it does people will start to talk about Apple and RIAs. They already have a great platform they just need to let people create on top of it.

9. Real time data becomes an important selling point for RIAs. I really hope this is the year of real time. I mentioned the collaboration angle above but I also think that the entire web is going to move in a more real time direction. Instead of sites that use the polling method to get data we’ll see them start to use messaging to send data to the clients. This will have an impact on social networking, gaming, collaboration, finance, and every Web 2.0 startup. It’s going to be a competitive advantage by the end of the year and if you don’t have it you’ll be out of luck. We’ve got BlazeDS an open source project that enables some of that functionality, LiveCycle DS, our big suite and Microsoft has Windows Communication Foundation which is one of the top selling O’Reilly books of last year. We’re close.

10. There will be a fight for HD video on the web. Online video exploded last year and with the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD fight looking like there will be a winner people will turn towards the next generation of distributing media - the web. The web won’t overtake those mediums overnight but the groundwork will be laid this year. I think penetration and runtime quality will be big factors as people want flexibility in how they consume media. Both Adobe and Microsoft will make an HD push with their runtimes as consumer demand goes up. You’ll also see these technologies more easily incorporated downloaded files so they won’t be used only online. Both have been able to do that for a while but recently with AMP we’ve seen more focus in that direction.

11. (Bonus!) Google. I have no clue what Google will do. They’re going to be under more pressure to incorporate some aspects of RIAs such as richer collaboration, real time data and multimedia experiences. Do they push HTML 5 harder? Do they partner with Adobe or Microsoft? Apple? Google Gears will continue to get traction but I don’t think we’ll see widespread adoption even when they finally incorporate it into GMail. They’ve also got the Google Desktop which could play in their strategy at some point. Google is a big question mark for me.