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With the impending launch of the Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company's shunning of Adobe Flash technology has been brought to the forefront of technological discussions. While it was one thing to forgo Flash on a small, mobile device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, some are questioning whether lack of Flash support is going to be a make-it-or-break it feature for the new slate devices arriving next month - devices which, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs - are "better than netbooks."

On the flip side, Apple supporters echo the company's sentiments that "Flash is a CPU hog" and including support for the technology in Apple's mobile line-up would negatively impact battery life.

While the government in Washington slowly inches their way toward a bill to create jobs for Americans, tech corporations and venture capital firms across the nation are teaming up in a private sector effort to create more companies and more jobs in the tech space. Led by Intel, the Invest in America Alliance, consisting of 17 companies and 24 VC firms, announced Tuesday that it has pledged to provide $3.5 billion in tech startup funding and jobs for over 10,000 new grads in the next two years.

One of the most common complaints about the new iPad is that it doesn't support Flash. In a recent criticism of the device, Adobe's Adrian Ludwig writes, "Without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web." While Adobe is offering a number of workarounds, dark horse Tobey Schneider's open source HTML 5 Flash Interpreter Gordon is an ambitious project with heroic intentions.

Applications that looked amazing on larger multi-touch experiences like Microsoft Surface may have a more affordable consumer-facing counterpart. While the iPad has been widely criticized, many startups are thrilled by its possibilities. In mid-November we featured Paris-based Pearltrees as a new design interface for remapping Web information. We spoke to CEO Patrice Lamothe to hear his thoughts on the release of the iPad.

A recently discovered security flaw in Twitter's Flash-based website widget may have allowed attackers access to the login credentials of any Twitter user. According to Mike Bailey, an analyst at Foreground Security, the problem involves a known vulnerability in Adobe's Flash programming language, the language used to code the Twitter widget. In response, Twitter has disabled the widget in question while they research the issue further.

Developer Tobias Schneider has created an interesting proof-of-concept Flash runtime that allows Flash to work on the iPhone. The project, a JavaScript with SVG called "Gordon," allows Flash files embedded in HTML to be viewed within the iPhone's web browser Safari. Although this workaround to Apple's restriction of Flash content on their ever-popular mobile device is a bit cumbersome and impractical for real-world use, it's a geeky and fun project for developers who want to run Flash on the iPhone...just so they can say that they did so.

Adobe's online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service's Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.

Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.

Today Adobe released new beta versions of the company's Flash Player and AIR. The Flash Player 10.1 technology now includes HTTP streaming and hardware decoding of H.264 video. The company plans to bring the updated Flash Player to mobile devices too, starting with the Palm Pre and then completing versions for other major smartphones by the first half of 2010 (with the notable exception of the iPhone, of course).

However, out of the two updates, it's Adobe AIR 2 that received the biggest overhaul. The new runtime allows developers to create entirely new types of applications that simply weren't possible using AIR 1. What sort of apps are those? Adobe's gallery of sample apps should give you some ideas of what's to come.

Adobe announced earlier this week that it plans to lay off almost 10% of its workforce. At the same time, though, the company also announced that it plans to expand its investment in e-books and digital publishing. Adobe is creating a new organization within the company that will focus on products for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. With Bill McCoy, however, the company is also losing one of its most visible advocates for open e-book standards in this week's layoffs.

Microblogging clients, media players, news tickers and more built on Adobe's popular Rich Internet App framework AIR will soon become a lot more powerful and efficient.

Version 2.0 of AIR will hit Adobe Labs later this year and be available for everyone in the first half of 2010, the company said this week. A good list of new features were blogged about by Adobe's Christian Cantrell yesterday and below are a few of our favorites.

Early this morning at the MAX 2009 Conference, Adobe previewed Flash Professional CS5 and announced that the new release will let Flash developers export their files as iPhone apps. The significance of this announcement is that development time for thousands of Flash-based gaming and music companies will be cut significantly. In the past, developers have had to create separate iPhone apps and web-based tools. While this is not the Flash plugin for Safari that many have asked for, the closed-beta version of Flash Professional CS5 eliminates the need for separate iPhone development. In other words, developers avoid building their applications twice.

Tomorrow at MAX, Adobe's worldwide developer conference, Adobe Systems
Incorporated will announce with partner Research In Motion (RIM) their progress in bringing Flash support to BlackBerry devices.

RIM, the company behind BlackBerry's wireless platform, including email and touchscreen technologies, is joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, a 50-organization-members-strong organization that aims to promote better apps for richer mobile, television, and desktop browsing experiences for users.

TinyChat, the popular Twitter-centric video chatroom solution, just launched a P2P-enabled version of its service. While the regular TinyChat routes its videos through the company's servers, the P2P version uses the Real Time Media Flow Protocol that Adobe builds into the Flash platform and Flash Player 10. As these video streams require a lot of bandwidth, this current version is limited to two active participants per room. For now, this version is more of a demo than a full-blown product, though the company plans to roll it into the regular TinyChat experience in the next few months.

Adobe just announced the launch of Flash Platform Services for Distribution. These new services will allow developers to make their applications more sharable on a variety of platforms, including a wide range of mobile devices. Adobe will give developers the ability to enable their users to embed applications on over 70 destination sites. In order to provide this service, Adobe has partnered with Gigya, a company that already has a lot of experience in giving publishers the ability to make their content sharable through social widgets.

Adobe is looking to stall falling sales and profit by entering into a new market: analytics. But rather looking to R&D, Adobe is instead coughing up $1.8 billion for analytics leader Omniture. This is the largest acquisition by Adobe since the purchase of Macromedia for $3 billion in 2005.

The acquisition has puzzled many, since Adobe and Omniture products really have no natural cooperation. There have been comments about the measurement capabilities that Omniture will give to content built with Adobe products. But in the end the entire deal revolves around two words: recurring revenue. Adobe's quarterly earnings have fallen due to declining sales of software licenses, and the SaaS model of Omniture will bring the company a recurring stream of revenue.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said at a company event for analysts today that a full featured version of Flash for mobile phones will be available in beta by the end of this year and by early next year the technology will be making use of multi-touch and accelerometer features on smart phones.

Ted Patrick, Adobe's Senior Manager of Developer Communities, put it like this: "I think we will see Flash on different devices support the soul of the device in capabilities and APIs" - including GPS. That's an exciting trajectory and more than we've heard before. Full Flash on phones by the end of this year is more or less on schedule, but the integration of these physical features certainly revs up the imagination.

Microsoft's Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 were released on July 9th to favorable reviews. The original Silverlight shipped in Fall 2007 as Microsoft's first programmable web browser plug-in. It's a 4MB Flash/Flex competitor that runs on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and mobile devices. While Flash definitely holds the market share for machine installs, according to Microsoft, "In less than nine months since its release, more than 1 in 3 Internet devices now have Silverlight 2 installed."

GridIron Software has finally brought Flow, its visual workflow manager, out of public beta.

This first stable version available for purchase ups the ante by allowing groups to collaborate on a workflow via the Share Maps feature, as well as adding direct access to Flow from within Adobe applications.

Flow was created with the help of visual designer Mark Coleran, who is known for his work on films such as The World Is Not Enough and the Bourne series. Though it's aimed squarely at creative professionals, Flow is probably the most advanced workflow manager out there, and is well worth a closer look by almost anyone.

Today, Adobe announced that their online office suite at Acrobat.com is moving out of beta and they will begin offering both free and paid subscriptions to the web-based suite of applications. For consumers, the change won't have that much of an impact since the core services at Acrobat.com will remain free: Buzzword (the word processor), Presentations (slideshows, still in beta), and Tables (spreadsheets, new today). However, business users will now face a dilemma as Adobe begins to charge for PDF conversion as well as their web meetings product, Adobe ConnectNow.

Financial services company Morgan Stanley released an incredibly ambitious new application this morning called Matix and many of its features will make hard-core web users hopeful that apps like this will emerge in other sectors as well. Matrix is a Rich Internet Application, or software that sits on the desktop but leverages web connectivity, and it's pretty as can be.

Adobe worked closely with the company to create what it believes is an app that pushes the envelope with regard to what can be done with Adobe technology. We believe there are a number of trends in play here that go beyond Adobe as well and are likely to be key features for many apps in the future.