There were a bunch of product demos today at Adobe’s Engage event, but there were a few that stood out and should have a big impact on the startup world. They also happened to be some of the best demos of the day.
Virtual Ubiquity - Rick Treitman demoed their word processor application, BuzzWord, which was built entirely in Flex 2 and looks like it could be a direct competitor to Google Docs. The team focused heavily on making sure pagination and typeography were first class, something Flash has been bad at. They’ve created a great UI around the document workflow and have features like ruler tooltips when embedding assets that help people work with their documents. They are focusing on the collaborative document space so that users can be designated as reviewers, read-only, or actual authors and discuss the document. They are aiming for a public beta later this summer.
Scrybe - Faizan Budar presented Scrybe and showed the features that were in the video that generated so much buzz. He demoed all three major features live and made a point of saying that everything in the video is now working in the application. He showed off the calendar portion of the application, which has a great UI, the “PaperVision” which allows you to print your information into special pocket size chunks, and the option to save content to your Scrybe account from any website. The user interface is clean, useful, and it all works offline. They’ve opened up the beta to a limited number of people and hope to open it up to the general public after their next round of features are complete.
yourminis - Alex Bard, the CEO of Goowy Media , demoed what yourminis is working on. A lot of it has been covered by TechCrunch, but they really dug into Apollo and the API that they plan to release next week. With Apollo, they are building out a widget platform that will touch the web, embeddable properties, and the desktop. Alex took a yourmini widget and dragged it to the desktop straight from the browser which made for a poweful demo. Their API is going to enable developers to create their own widgets on the yourminis platform. They built a Twitter widget using the API that is great, so I think content providers are going to be excited about the freedom that the API allows.
Intelisea - One application that didn’t fall into the category of web startup but demonstrated how far the Flash application has come was an app from Intelisea. The application, built in Flex 2, is the front end for controlling a yacht. It runs on a touch screen interface and allows the user to look at engine stats, fuel levels, weather and GPS coordinates. There’s also a security feature that uses RFID tags to track the people on the boat and sounds an alarm when someone falls overboard. It displays a red dot on a schematic of the ship to indicate where the person fell off. It’s something that will never be seen on Web 2.0, but makes for a fun story when it comes to the Flash Platform.
Engage did a good job of showing how diverse the Flash platform is. There were a lot of great questions about the role Adobe needs to play in the design community and what makes web apps better (it’s not gratuitous animation or UI). And there are a lot of interesting startups using the Flash platform. Luckily we got a look at some of those today.
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Man… I can’t freakin’ wait!
i just installed one of the yourminis’s widgets on our blog. its the digg one on the far right. kinda big for a blog imo.
http://blog.honestforum.com
Hey Dave, you should be able to resize it and customize it so it fits on your blog. I think you can do that with the other minis, so the digg version shouldn’t be different.
Who will win the war AJAX (js, dhtml, css, etc) or Adobe products????
Sam, there’s no war if only one side’s fighting. Apollo supports AJAX just as well as Flash. It’s not just a desktop Flash Player; it’s a Flash Player plus web browser. And, the browser engine is WebKit [http://webkit.org/] - is the same core powering Apple’s Safari browser.
I have been using Scrybe for some time now, and though it is really a well made calendar application, it is missing the point.
The power of using an internet based productivity tool is in the collaboration, and as of now Scrybe fully misses the boat in that regards. Though the look and feel are terrific, what it really needs is Google Calendar like capabilities that let you create and share multiple schedules. Isn’t that the whole point of using a web enabled service?
Wow thats cooool…
“Intelisea … The application, built in Flex 2, is the front end for controlling a yacht.”
Developing a real-time application that controls a yacht and is responsible for the life of its operators using Flex, Action Script and Javascript… yeah, sure, that will happen.
Apparently the person who thought about this unrealistic demo was a Marketing executive that doesn’t understand much about software architecture.
What happens if google apps are “ported” to the apollo platform?
Hey Doron, actually the yacht app is in production. It’s running on a ship right now.
I think the intellisea apps is one of the best applications I’ve ever seen. I’ve been a charter captain and a software developer. Doron is a moron.
I love this forum because people so often ask the questions that I would. With this post, however, I actually agree that I’m not as worried about the revenue. So many companies these days play what I call the “YouTube Lottery.” Everyone knows about the crazy money YouTube got, but not much is written (even on TechCrunch) about the 100s of companies that made it nowhere, They didn’t win the lottery the way that YouTube did.http://www.onedownload.org
“DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS”
its funny, but he had some truth to his words.
This will only allow those devs to shine more, and hopefully make a bigger difference.
How can Scrybe be an Apollo app when the minimum requirements for Scrybe is Flash 8, and according to the videos it runs inside of a browser.
Apollo is Flash 9 and does not run in a browser. Do more research TechCrunch.