Adobe MAX 2007 Sessions

Adobe has posted it's session list for this year's MAX conference. Overall, it looks like a good lineup! There are quite a few intermediate to advanced Rich-Internet Application sessions aligned with Flex and AIR. Hopefully, the speakers will be an improvement over last years.

I had a nice conversation with Ted Patrick regarding the speakers from last year. I voiced our concerns over the quality and professionalism of non-Adobe presenters. He assured me that this year was going to be different. It sounds like most of the speakers will be Adobe employees or very qualified partners.

We're excited for the new products coming out of Adobe. Hopefully, this years MAX will inspire us like it did 2 years ago in California. We changed our corporate focus based on the knowledge we took from MAX in Anaheim.

New Knoware Website

We've launched a new version of the Knoware website at www.knowarefast.com. This new design showcases some of the fantastic work that the team has been cranking on. We wanted to take a story telling approach in this version of the site. Christian has always been an advocate of digital story telling and it certainly shows from his work on this launch.

There are still some sections of information that we'd like to include on the site, case studies for example, but those will come in due time. Cheers to everyone involved! It looks great.

New Blog Launched: MyPhoneWidgets.com

With the much anticipated launch of the iPhone less than 2 weeks away, I've created a place for 3rd party developers to showcase their applications. It's a blog called MyPhoneWidgets at http://www.myphonewidgets.com. If anyone would like their application added to the list and reviewed, please forward an email to submissions@myphonewidgets.com and I'll do my best to get them up on the site in a timely manor.

Adobe MAX 2007 Site Live

Adobe has made live it's MAX 07 site for the public to consume. We're excited and hopeful that this years MAX conference will be an improvement over last years. I'm not sure if it was the venue or the speakers but we here at Knoware didn't get a lot out of it. It's unfortunate because we really enjoyed and were energized by MAX 05 in Anaheim. That's the year that Flex made it's big splash and we were giddy with new ideas and inspiration.

The common opinion from the Knoware team for last year's event in Vegas was that it was rather weak. The speakers who were not Adobe or Macromedia personnel seemed to be giving sales pitches for their respective companies instead of giving us insight into the technology.

Ted Patrick is on the case though. He writes in his blog that he will be taking on a new role in promoting the conference. So I guess we can all blame Ted if things don't meet our expectations ;) We're looking forward to seeing you in Chicago Ted!

'Widget' Article in the Wall Street Journal Relating to SeeSpotSlide

Today's edition of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the pervasiveness of 'widgets' in social networking sites. They define 'widgets' as a snippet of code (for us that's the Flash embed code) that is created on these aggregating sites and posted to social networking sites. It specifically points to Slide, RockYou and a few others we built SeeSpotSlide to 'compete' with. The article goes on to describe the inability for these services to publish advertising to the widgets, based on rules that have been put in place by MySpace and others.

"New data on viewing photos, videos and music on the Web may have an impact on the way advertisers and social networking sites perceive firms that help create this content. Nearly 177.8 million people world-wide viewed Web content in April made with online tools from companies that let people post photos, videos and music on other Web sites, according to data that Web-tracking firm comScore Inc. plans to release today."

'Widgets' May Snag More Ads - WSJ.com

ComScore has released new service today that tracks widget use across the web. In it, they report on the penetration numbers of widgets, where they originate, and where their audience is located. It demonstrates the importance of widgets to the advertiser community and can provide widget creators a means to promote the value of their services.

It seems then, that our concept was at least somewhat on target - create a service to generate slideshow widgets where an advertiser could have their ads placed and distributed. Now if we could just get a few more million people using it and get a couple of big advertisers on board...

technorati tags:seespotslide, flash, flex, comscore, advertising

Blogged with Flock

Adobe's OnAIR Bus Tour

Adobe's AIR team has announced a summer bus tour to promote the AIR platform. They will be travelling across the country and providing camp-like activities to push the new technology. It looks like it will be finishing up in Chicago for the 2007 MAX conference. Check out the details at the AIR Bus Tour site.