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At the Flash on the Beach 08 conference being held in Brighton, England, Adobe's Senior Director of Engineering, Paul Betlem, confirmed that a Flash Player is in development for the iPhone. The information was provided in answer to a direct question from an audience member during the Town Hall meeting sessions held during the conference, historically a good source of Adobe news.

NBC seems to be having a change of heart this week. The network recently wrapped up their streaming of the Olympics using Microsoft's Silverlight technology. However if you tuned in for this week's NFL season opener, NBC was using Adobe's Flash technology instead of Silverlight. Making some do a double take, here's a look at why NBC left Silverlight in a flash (pun intended).

Just when we thought the damn things were dead and buried, I ran across another Flash intro screen the other day. And like practically every other one I've seen, it was half useless puffery about the organization behind the site, and half lookit-this-kewl-effect self-indulgence by the designer.

But they can't all be bad... can they? Has anybody seen a Flash intro that doesn't have you scanning the screen desperately for the "skip intro" link?

The Beijing Olympics starts in a few days and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. This is the first in a series of posts that will look at the Web technologies powering this year's Olympics.

One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

PlayCrafter is a new web application that lets anyone create custom games by dragging and dropping elements around the screen. Built with Flex, Adobe's Ryan Stewart calls PlayCrafter part of "a whole new world of Flex!" It's really easy to use and a whole lot of fun.

If you read our coverage of the awesome drag and drop widget building tool SproutBuilder, think of PlayCrafter as the same kind of tool but for game creation. Read on for one example game and a demo video.

Adobe announced today the release of the Flash Player 10 beta, previously code named "Astro," on the Adobe Labs site. The beta is available for download immediately at the Astro web page and adds a number of compelling features to the Flash player. Adobe, which claims that the Flash player is on 98% of Internet connected PCs, says it has seen an acceleration in the penetration rate for new versions of the player which each new release. It took just 3 months to reach 62% of Flash users for the last version of the player (verion 9), according to the company.

At the Where 2.0 conference today Google announced the availability of a new Flash API for Google Maps. From Flash microsites to embedded media players to beautiful cross-platform AIR apps on the desktop - expect to start seeing interactive Google Maps embedded in a lot of unusual places soon.

A substantial portion of the web's creativity can be found in the Flash developer community.

Adobe is today announcing the "Open Screen Project" which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.

Today, Adobe is releasing the 1.0 version of its Media Player (AMP) software to the public. The player, which is an offline Flash video manager comparable to the Veoh player, was first released as a beta on the Adobe Labs site last September.

AMP runs on Adobe's cross browser Adobe Integrate Runtime (AIR), which saw its 1.0 release in February. AMP is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac from the official site.

Eagle-eyed ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley spotted a "rough timetable" for upcoming releases of Microsoft's Flash-killer Silverlight (check out ReadWriteWeb's previous coverage here, here, and here). The timetable pegs the full release for Silverlight 2.0 to come sometime over the summer. It comes via a FAQ posted on the MSDN blog of Microsoft blogger Ashish Thapliyal.