Both of the products are being released with a ‘beta’ label at the same time for all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and x86-based netbooks, and are available now via Adobe Labs.

Update: sorry, we unintentionally – no, really – jumped the gun on this one. The links to the products are now live: Flash Player and AIR.

People who were still hoping for a beta release of the new Flash Player for mobile will be somewhat disappointed by the fact that they’ll have to exercise even more patience.

But first things first.

Both the new Flash Player for desktop browsers and the latest iteration of the rather popular cross-platform runtime environment for desktop apps were announced in the beginning of October and previewed at the recent Adobe MAX 2009 event (see video below). That means there aren’t too many surprises left with regards to what the upgraded versions bring, so we’ll just give you a quick run-down.

Both Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1:

- boast support for multi-touch and gestures (yes, you’d need a machine with a touch screen)
- include a global error handler, which enables devs to write a single handler to process all runtime errors
- (finally) support local microphone access, so you’ll no longer need to first pass through a server in order to record audio locally on both Flash Platform runtimes

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 now also leverages hardware decoding of H.264 video on Windows PCs, netbooks and mobile devices.

Want all that goodness on your mobile phone, too? Hold your horses: while a public beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Palm webOS is expected later this year, Google Android support is expected no sooner than early 2010, and support for Blackberry smartphones will likely take even more time to be added.

Also new in Adobe AIR 2.0 and worthy of a mention:

- Native process API: enables apps to communicate with native applications on local machines
- Mass storage device detection: plug in your Flip camera or that USB stick you got as a gift at the last conference you attended, and AIR 2 applications will be able to detect them
- Open document API: with it, AIR apps can ‘ask’ the OS what the default application is associated with files and function accordingly
- Improved socket support: think AIR-powered local servers and P2P apps
- Speedier WebKit: updated version that includes a faster JavaScript engine and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities

(Original image via Ryan Stewart)

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We’ve confirmed with Adobe that the company is cutting 9 percent of its workforce, or 680 employees. Adobe filed an 8-K with the SEC today reporting the layoffs. Earlier today we heard multiple reports that layoffs were taking place at Adobe. There are also Tweets about the layoffs on Twitter. Last December, Adobe laid off 600 workers (or 8 percent of its staff) due to the recession.

A spokesperson for Adobe told us in a statement that “Adobe is restructuring its business to align costs with its fiscal 2010 operating plan and budget, the company’s three-year strategic priorities and the realities of the business environment, as well as to ensure its ability to continue investing in long-term growth opportunities.” In addition, after Adobe acquired Omniture, the company reduced Omniture’s workforce by 9 percent. According to today’s filing, the restructuring will cost Adobe between $65 and $71 million.

We’ve added the layoffs to the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker. This has been sobering week in the technology world, as Electronic Arts and Sprint both announced significant layoffs in the past few days.

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With all of its SaaS offerings, Salesforce.com is consistently integrating with other forms of cutting edge technologies, such as Twitter, Box.net, and more to offer clients more diverse and appealing options. Today, the company is partnering with Adobe to offer the “Adobe Flash Builder,” off of Force.com, Salesforce’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications.

The new offering is meant to allow developers and IT departments to build cloud-based rich media applications off of Force.com. Developers can use Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com to extend or enhance existing Salesforce CRM implementations and custom-built Force.com applications, or build entirely new applications to meet business needs.

Within the new offering, Adobe’s Flash Builder lets users build these cloud-based internet application that can be deployed to end-users via the browser though Adobe’s Flash Player or to the desktop through Adobe AIR.

The builder lets developers interactive UI features easily, such as drag and drop technology. Developers can also add data visualization such as charts and dashboards for better management and monitoring of applications. The new builder is also integrated with Adobe LiveCycle Data Services that lets clients automatically synchronize data between the Force.com database and an desktop-based Adobe AIR local data store, allowing developers to build apps that easily connect between the browser and the desktop. A screenshot of a application built with the Adobe Flash Builder is posted below.

Salesforce recently upgraded its Force.com platform by launching Force.com Sites, an application that lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. In terms of the enterprise, this is a big coup for Adobe’s Flash platform, which faces competition from Microsoft’s Silverlight product.

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Adobe is a big company, with a lots of products, but one of its strongest brands is Flash. So when Adobe contacted Envato, an Australian startup that operates a set of popular marketplaces for digital creative goods to change one of their marketplaces names, Envato had no choice. Envato operates a property called FlashDen, which sells Adobe Flash and Flex files like preloaders, galleries, site templates and utilities. Files are created and sold by a huge community of authors from all over the world.

Last week Adobe contacted Envato and asked Envato to change the name and URL of FlashDen so that it would no longer contain the term ‘Flash’, which is a registered trademark of Adobe. With little time, Envato changed the name from FlashDen to ActiveDen.

Seeing this change, we reached out to Collis Ta’eed, the CEO of Envato, and he mentioned that Envato received a letter from a law firm representing Adobe asking to change FlashDen’s name. Envato followed through, not wanting more legal problems with Adobe. Ta’eed also mentioned that “FlashDen” was filed as a trademark in Australia in January 2008 and entered on the Australian trademark register in August 2008. Envato is based in Melbourne, Australia.

I guess the main takeaway here is that if you are trying to help Adobe build its ecosystem of apps around Flash, don’t try to communicate that by including the word Flash in the name of your site.

Envato currently operates five “marketplaces” including ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, AudioJungle, VideoHive and now ActiveDen.

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A couple of demo applications made by third-party developers are already available on the Apple App Store and are built using the brand new Flash Professional CS5, of which a public beta with pre-release support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year.

You can sign up here if you want to be notified when the beta kicks off for real.

Basically, Flash Pro CS5 allows developers to use Flash technologies to develop content for iPhone and iPod Touch devices that were previously closed to them.  The Flash developer tool converts Flash apps into ones that can work on the iPhone, since the iPhone still does not support Flash.  So this is a workaround.  But developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build applications for the devices, and because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes (Adobe AIR and Flash Player) it is aimed to also give developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments.

Note that this does not mean you’ll be able to watch Flash-based web content on your iPhone just yet:

The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.

Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.

Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple’s App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod Touch.

More information is available here and soon, also here.

These are the example applications that you can test now if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch (any model):

Direct links:

Chroma Circuit
Trading Stuff
Ficklebox
Just Letters
South Park
That Roach Game
Red Hood

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The value of venture-backed exits (which is almost entirely M&A these days) might be down about 50 percent in the third quarter, but total M&A activity (including public companies) is seeing a noticeable uptick.

We ran some numbers on Crunchbase, which keeps track of all announced acquisitions, and in the third quarter $31.8 billion worth of acquisitions were announced, double the amount from the second quarter and up fourfold from the $7.6 billion low in the fourth quarter. That number was even up 23 percent from the year before. Update: Those original numbers were based on a preliminary run. We’ve since done a final run, and the the value of deals in the quarter were even higher: $45.1 billion (versus $15.4 billion in the second quarter).

Many of the bigger deals involved publicly traded companies, such as Xerox buying Affiliated Computer services for $5.75 billion, Dell purchasing Perot Systems for $3.9 billion, and Adobe picking up Omniture for $1.8 billion.  There were also a lot of biotech and pharmaceuticals deals such as Abbott Labs swallowing Solvay Pharmaceuticals ($6.6 billion) and Dainippon Sumitomo eating Sepracor ($2.6 billion).

The actual number of M&A deals is pretty flat at 213 231, which is about where it’s been for the past four quarters. But the average value of each deal in the quarter was $349 million, up 85 percent from last year. So buyers might be more picky, but when they do pull the trigger they are willing to spend more money. And they are more willing to spend money for companies with established businesses, which often means they are publicly traded or have been around a while.

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Adobe Systems has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Omniture for the former to acquire the latter in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion on a fully diluted equity-value basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash. The proposed offer represents a premium of 45% over Omniture’s average closing price for the last 30 trading days through yesterday’s close.

The completion of the transaction, pending regulatory approval, is expected to close in Q4 of Adobe’s fiscal year. The company believes the acquisition will be accretive to its non-GAAP earnings in fiscal year 2010.

Omniture will become a new business unit within Adobe. Omniture’s CEO, Josh James, will be joining Adobe Systems as the unit’s Senior VP, reporting directly to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.

At the same time, Adobe reported that third-quarter earnings fell to 35 cents per share from 50 cents per share a year ago. Adobe shares fell 3.6 percent in after-hours trading to $34.34. Omniture shares were halted after the close.

From the official statement:

By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, Adobe will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices.

The combination of the two companies will increase the value Adobe delivers to customers. For designers, developers and online marketers, an integrated workflow—with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools—will streamline the creation and delivery of relevant content and applications. This optimization will enable advertisers and advertising agencies, publishers, and e-tailers to realize greater ROI from their digital media investments and improve their end users’ experiences.

Omniture was founded in 1996 and currently counts approx. 1,200 employees worldwide. It’s the largest worldwide provider of Web analytics, with a product portfolio of 12 products serving over 5,000 customers across the globe. It reported revenues in fiscal year 2008 of about $300 million.

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Obviously, trying to create what would essentially have to be a new web standard is no small task. But the group behind Fhtml thinks they have a shot to do it because Flash is so widely used by millions of sites on the web who want a better visual appearance than HTML can offer. Aside from just Flash, Fhtml is also going up against Silverlight another Adobe framework, Flex. But Fhtml claims to be not only simpler than both Flash and Silverlight, but more powerful than Flex.

Another downside to Flex, Silverlight, and Flash is that they all must be compiled. Fhtml, like HTML, does not need to be. This makes it a lot easier to edit on the fly. And because all of those are more complex, they often require a special developer with just those skills to create a site using those technologies, Fhtml promises to be much simpler. And because it’s server side, the company says that Java developers, PHP developers, Ruby developers, .NET developers and Python developers can all write Fhtml in their native language.

Today on stage, FluidHTML CEO Michael Collette and Founder Jim Kremens prototyped the Southeby’s (one current partner) website in FluidHTML. They also showed a Hulu media player made in Fhtml. They’re looking for $1 to $2 million in funding in October.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Don Dodge, Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, George Zachary, and Jason Hirschhorn.

Q: How does this compare with HTML 5?

MC: I expect HTML 5 is a big leap forward, but what happens after that?

JK: And HTML 5 won’t be fully implemented until 2014.

Q: What has Adobe said about it?

MC: We haven’t spoken to them. (Laughs)

Q: Making Flash searchable is a big plus, but getting developers to switch their language is tough, how do you deal with that?

JK: The product is free to developers. And we think it opens them up to be more creative than HTML, while not having to deal with some difficulties of Flash.

MC: It runs at the full speed of Flash too.

Q: What’s the business?

MC: We charge a low fee to publishers.

Q: Have vast is the object library?

MC: It’s extensible, which is great. Developers will expand it beyond what it is now. And an open API in January.

Video

Other Coverage:

TC50: FluidHtml builds a more web-friendly version of Flash VentureBeat.
FluidHTML seeks to bridge Web programming divide CNET.
FluidHTML seeks to bridge web programming divide Builder.au
FluidHTML: A Markup Language That Generates Flash Content Flash Speaks ActionScript.

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I assumed the problem was Yammer, and emailed for support, but they threw their hands up. We narrowed down the problem – it was affecting only those of us on Macs with the Leopard operating system (not the brand new Snow Leopard, which would make more sense). Other people were discovering the same thing and Tweeting about it.

Adobe was responding promptly to inbound messages to their Twitter account, but didn’t seem to know what the problem was, either. And, oddly, Robin Wauters, who’s on a Vista machine, complained of issues as well.

We’ve heard scattered reports of Tweetdeck and other Air Apps having issues today as well. Anyone else out there notice any problems today? Adobe says they didn’t push any updates to Air today, and nothing changed on our machines. It’s a mystery.

In the meantime, we all downloaded Gabble, a native OSX Yammer client, and everything is smooth sailing again.

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Details are scarce since there’s no press release or official word from Adobe yet, but Business Catalyst has published a couple of Q&A on its website that shed a minimal amount of light on the agreement. From what we can gather at this point despite the vague wording used for the announcement, there won’t be too many changes at Business Catalyst as the products, partner agreements, team, pricing, etc. should remain largely unchanged. GoodBarry, on the other hand, being merely a Business Catalyst brand set up for their retail operations, will be gradually phased out and morphed into the Business Catalyst offering:

Most importantly, we’ll be refocusing our marketing and sales efforts on the web professional market (via businesscatalyst.com), as opposed to web-savvy DIYers such as you. In other words, this means that eventually we will cease “retail” operations and focus on our wholesale operations, and we will only be selling subscriptions to our software via our partner and reseller network.

As a result, the GoodBarry brand as such will cease to exist as of the 1st of October 2009, although the company says changes for customer will be mostly cosmetical (the billing and branding will be all Business Catalyst as of the aforementioned date).

The most important question however is why Adobe bought Business Catalyst in the first place and what its intentions are with the company in the near future. We’ve contacted the company for more clarity on that but in the meantime here’s what we know.

Business Catalyst / GoodBarry provides tools that help web designers set up online businesses for their clients with minimal cost and effort and no programming skills required, combining website content management, e-commerce features, e-mail marketing, business analytics and basic CRM tools into one system.

Adobe evidently offers a wide range of tools for web professionals, but in the near future does not plan to integrate Business Catalyst’s products into its own offering, although they are clearly looking to hosted services to deliver websites and online businesses more and more. There will be an initial transit period, but with regards to what will happen after that both companies remain mum and mention only that they are currently in ‘planning stages’ and will provide more information in the following weeks.

We’ll update if and when we hear more.

On a sidenote, this isn’t the first time Business Catalyst CEO and Founder Bardia Housman sold a company. In 1997, he co-founded Start (start.com.au), Australia’s first free e-mail service provider, which in two years became the largest trafficked website in Australia as measured by Hitwise. In December 1999, Looksmart was acquired Start.

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With the newly added video upload capabilities, Photoshop.com users can now upload videos up to 200MB in size through their browsers, or up to 2GB through the Adobe AIR Uploader in most file formats. The videos can subsequently be viewed directly on Photoshop.com (like this one). All Photoshop.com users receive 2GB of free storage.

Since Photoshop.com is (obviously) mostly known for its smooth photo-editing features, there doesn’t appear to be an option to edit videos yet, although I suspect these capabilities will be added soon enough.

Adobe is also debuting a Group Albums feature in Photoshop.com today, enabling users to group specific photos and videos together into one album and easily share that with your friends or relatives. Update: Adobe got in touch to point out that multiple people who are part of a certain group can add photos to the same album set up by one user, which should lead to a more collaborative experience. Definitely a cool feature if you look at it that way.

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For your reference: PDFs (Portable Document Format) can be encrypted so that a password is needed to view or edit its content, and they can also contain embedded DRM restrictions that provide further controls that limit copying, editing or printing.

Turns out the “View in HTML” feature in Gmail can display an HTML version of the encrypted file, stripping out the restrictions. Part of the layout might be lost in the process, but the text can easily be extracted with a simple copy/paste command. In case the original PDF file had printing restrictions, those are stripped as well.

I searched a bit for similar reports and found this article, dated April 2006, which was one of the first to discover the trick. The same blog later updated readers on the situation, stating Google crippled the security circumvention so that DRMed PDF files could no longer be opened in HTML mode, but a quick test with a secured file just worked fine right here and now. (Update: apparently, it doesn’t always work)

I don’t know about you, but this’ll save me some trouble next time someone sends me an encrypted Adobe PDF file that I’d like to copy or edit. Unless it’s illegal, in which case this post doesn’t exist.

(Via @Toon)

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Adobe has rolled out two new open source initiatives aimed specifically towards developers for media companies and publishers. Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework lets developers build more robust, feature-rich media players optimized specifically for the Adobe Flash Platform. The second initiative, the Text Layout Framework (TLF), will help developers create sophisticated typography capabilities to Web applications.

OSMF basically lets developers easily build media players for the Adobe Flash Platform. Adobe says the structure of OSMF lets developers leverage plug-ins for advertising, reporting metrics and content delivery along with standard video player features such as playback controls, video navigation, buffering and Dynamic Streaming. The OSMF source code and software components are available under the Mozilla Public License. Adobe is also partnering with content delivery service Akamai to create a cohesive standard to support Adobe media players that support Flash.

TLF lets developers layout text on web applications with support for complex languages, bidirectional text, multi-columns and other advanced typographical features and controls. TLF is an ActionScript library built on top of the text engine in Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 software. Similar to OSMF, TLF is available as open source under the Mozilla Public License.

Adobe’s product manager for Flash, Tom Barclay, says that these new initiatives are mainly targeted towards media companies who want to leverage typography technologies and rich media players off of the Flash and Adobe AIR platforms. The New York Times TimesReader 2.0 and The Boston Globe’s GlobeReader are both powered by TLF, and leverage the typography features of the open source code. Barclay says that Adobe saw an opportunity to open code to Flash applications that could prove to make interactive rich media applications. In the past, Adobe has also opened up the Flex Platform and launched the Open Screen Project.

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Google is starting to respond to questions about the just announced Chrome operating system. In a short FAQ today they talked about cost and initial partners.

First of all, the software will be free, which was an easy assumption to make since it will be open source. Like Android, Google will not charge users or device manufacturers to use the Chrome OS.

Yesterday Google said they were already working with device manufacturers to roll out Chrome OS devices late next year. Today they announced at least some of those partners: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments.

Acer and ASUS are the no. 1 and no. 2 netbook manufacturers worldwide. HP and Lenovo are also large netbook manufacturers. Freescale, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments are chip companies that Google is likely working with to ensure a good user experience. What I’d really like to know is if Google is working with these or any other partners to release products off the ARM or Atom processors. A desktop or even dual core laptop running Chrome OS would be a compelling device too.

Google is clearly aiming Chrome at Windows, and focusing less on battery management (Android’s strength) to focus on robust driver support. Users will not be happy unless they can plug any printer, camera, or other peripheral device into these computers and have them work properly.

The other focus is on speed, which is why Google is working so closely with the chip guys. This isn’t going to just be Linux with a browser bolted on. It will be (or should be) a compelling user experience with super fast boot and web surfing times.

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With the new Flash Player 10 just around the corner and HTC officially joining the Open Screen Project, Android, Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, and Palm WebOS will be among the first platforms to support full web browsing and access to virtually all Flash-based Web content.

The HTC Hero phone will come with Flash Lite 3.1, which means it’ll be able to cope with anything written with ActionScript 2.0 and thus be very well equipped for interactive content as well as streaming online video and audio. Adobe says about 80% of all online videos are delivered in Flash today and Adobe Flash Player content reaches over 98% of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide.

See Flash in action on the HTC Hero in this non-embeddable demo video.

Now, when is Apple finally going to play ball and get serious about Flash support?

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Aviary, the small New York-based startup with the ambitions of recreating Adobe Photoshop’s most popular design tools in the browser, has launched a simple, free tool, called Falcon, that lets you quickly grab and edit images within the browser. Falcon, since it is web-based and works in any browser, can be used on a Mac or PC. Skitch, another similar fast, simple editing tool, is a desktop app that only works on Macs. Both Skitch and Falcon offer a simple subset of tools which was previously only available in Photoshop. As we’ve said in the past, these simple tools are especially useful to bloggers and others who spend a lot of time manipulating and editing images on the fly.

The beauty of Aviary is in its Firefox plugin, called Talon, which let’s you grab a screen shot or portion of a screen at any time and automatically imports the image into Aviary’s browser-based editing platform. When you click on the icon on your browser when you are on a page you want to capture, you are given the choice of capturing a portion of the screen, the entire viewed screen, or the entire page (below the fold). The option of capturing the entire page is a useful; and a feature that Skitch currently doesn’t allow. Once you capture the image, Falcon gives you the option of editing the image on Aviary.com, saving the image to your desktop, copying it to your clipboard or hosting the image at Aviary.com.

Aviary’s in-browser editing platform is similar to Skitch’s desktop app and adds much of the same functionality. You can add arrows and text to an image, as well as crop, rotate, and resize your image. Falcon also has a built-in color picker tool to extract web color values from images and screenshots. For more design power, you can port your image into 4 different powerful Aviary tools, including color editor, advanced image editor, effects editor and vector editor.

Once you are finished with editing your image, you can save the image as a PNG or JPG either on your desktop or host it on Aviary. Aviary Pro members can gain additional storage options like privacy and watermark control for $24.99 per year. Like with Skitch, images that are uploaded to your Aviary account can be commented by other users, and there are a number of options to embed that image in other websites or link to an image from other sites, like Twitter or Facebook. Aviary has also released the API for Falcon, so that any website can integrate the tool. The drawback of Falcon is that if you don’t use Firefox, the tool isn’t as simple as with the plug-in. You have to import a image into Aviary’s browser editing platform or or you can paste link into the platform to get the entire page imported in, which you can then edit.

Since we first covered the company, Aviary had kept most of its tools in private beta. Only four have become publicly available: Phoenix, an image editor along the lines of Photoshop; Peacock, a so-called “visual laboratory” for pixel-based images; Toucan, a color palette tool; and Raven, a vector-based image editor that mimics (and therefore competes with) Adobe Illustrator.

Adobe also released a simple, browser-based photo editing tool at Photoshop.com, but it is designed more as an application to edit photos as opposed to grabbing and editing items and screenshots from websites .

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On to the news: by means of a blog post, Adobe Systems has just confirmed the number of installs for Adobe AIR that had been floating around the Web ever since CTO Kevin Lynch mentioned something along those lines at the recent Flash Camp Keynote in San Francisco: 200 million, double the amount the company touted at the end of January 2009. The number was reached a little over two weeks ago, about 16 months after its debut on the market.

Whether you’re aware that you’ve installed Adobe AIR at some point or not, or whether you think the 200 million installs is actually on the low rather than the high side (I think the number is fairly moderate), there are some really good applications out there that you don’t know yet but might want to check out:

imeem Uploader :

Allows users to upload music, videos, and photos to imeem. This app will automatically discover all your iTunes playlists and enable you to easily zip them over to your imeem profile. You can also drag and drop your desired tracks for upload to imeem, create custom playlists and share your music with others.

Flair:

An elegant search tool for Flickr, which utilizes several methods of its public API. Flair matches search queries by tags and makes it easy to jump to the original resolution upload (often easily wallpaper quality) and the source photographers photostream (by clicking their user icon).

Comapping:

An intuitive and extensive desktop app for mind-mapping purposes, tied to web app Comapping.com. Use it to manage and share information more efficiently.

NetBook:

Ebook reader for the Gutenberg online book library. Ebooks are available free of charge in both text and audio format. NetBook lets you search the Gutenberg database, download and read/listen to ebooks and store them in cache for offline use.

MyMediaPlayer:

Yes, Hulu has an official desktop application too, but this one is worth a second look (we’ve covered this one before). MYMediaplayer allows users to browse the Hulu library while watching videos, and you can dock the window to the side of the monitor so you can work and watch TV at the same time. Perfect for procrastination!

You can find these and 500 other applications on the AIR Marketplace.

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The blog, Cateto blog dug up this seemingly small detail that was overlooked during all the other Snow Leopard WWDC announcements. But it’s anything but a small detail. Because if it’s true, that means that this same functionality could very well make it to the iPhone and iPod touch, as Cateto points out.

Unfortunately, Cateto doesn’t offer any further detail about how he found out about this .flv support. He simply states is as a fact (I’m going to presume he’s being playing with the developer builds), offers a screenshot, and goes into some detail about how it will work on Snow Leopard. Apparently, after taking a little bit of time to load (depending on the size of the file), the Flash video files will start playing in QuickTime without any conversion needed. And if you want to convert the file to something like H.264 (the video compression format Apple loves to use), you can do that too.

So while this is by no means a surefire proof of Flash video support coming to the iPhone or iPod touch (as many commenters are noting, the .flv support doesn’t necessarily mean QuickTime would be a Flash player, it could simply play those files if you can get them from somewhere), it is pretty interesting. Apple has so far resisted allowing Flash videos to play on its device because it claims Adobe’s Flash Player offers poor performance on the mobile side of things. Perhaps Apple has taken a backdoor way to add a certain level of support for Flash video.

Apple’s current page for QuickTime X doesn’t mention .flv file support, but it’s a skeleton outline of the software right now.

UPDATE: As many of the commenters have pointed out, and the Cateto blog has just confirmed, it looks like he simply had the QuickTime add-on Perian installed without realizing it. Sorry for the confusion. It looks like Flash will remain on the iPhone wish list for some time.

[via Daring Fireball]

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Flash has been supported since the launch of Facebook Platform in 2007 through tags, embedding Flash in Feed stories, and multiple client libraries, which have helped developers make Facebook API calls directly from ActionScript (see example on the Red Bull website). But Facebook felt the exisiting ActionScript client libraries were not up to par, so it teamed up with Adobe to tweak the open source version to support all Facebook APIs and add some features to better support authentication for both Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.

After the PHP, JavaScript and iPhone client library, the all new ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform is now the fourth officially supported client library for the Facebook Platform. The code can be downloaded here.

Facebook and Adobe Systems will share more about the new partnership on April 2 at a San Francisco event.

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But the makeover isn’t the whole story. Zoho is also introducing a couple of enhancements and new features worth highlighting. The menu toolbar, for example, has been completely redesigned and renamed to reflect these changes. Now called the ‘MenuTab’, it categorizes the features as tabs based on functionality and mimics the familiarity of traditional office software by opening a drop-down menu upon clicking. This should make users who are making the switch from the well-known desktop word-processing software programs feel right at home, unless of course they’ve grown accustomed to Office 2007’s ‘ribbon’ menus by now (which I have, by the way).

The sidebar in Writer has also been changed to look more like the sidebar in Zoho Sheet. It now includes search functionality (very welcome), multi-selection of documents and support for performing several actions in one go. There were several other enhancements to the application in Header/Footers with support for auto-insertion of fields, Collaborative Editing, inclusion of Word and Character count in status bar, and so on, but maybe it’s best if you just give it a spin yourself. After all, it’s free.

Also worth noting is the fact that the changes will be reflected to all applications using Zoho Writer, including internal applications and third-party ones making use of the Zoho Writer API.

Update: here’s a screenshot tour (best watched in fullscreen)

I like Zoho a lot, especially because of their offline capabilities, easy access thanks to support for Google and Yahoo IDs and the group sharing across different apps feature. That said, some people will simply stick to desktop software for office tasks no matter what, and Zoho is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep the rest of users from flocking to the web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.).

Or maybe Zoho will keep on surprising everyone.

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Today at Davos, Mike just finished moderating a panel on the Next Digital Experience with Chad Hurley (YouTube), Craig Mundie (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Shananu Narayen (Adobe), Hamid Akhvan (T-Mobile) and Eric Clemons (Wharton). I will put up the video as soon as it is available.

The wide-ranging discussion focused on how the mobile Web is becoming increasingly important, and in many countries, the primary way people connect to the Internet. A good chunk of the panel was spent talking about the implications of sharing where you are and what you are doing all the time because mobile phones make it easier to do so. Chad Hurley noted that the rate at which YouTube is serving videos to mobile devices is growing at a faster rate than the site as a whole. Mike asked Chad Hurley how long would it be before people started using their mobile phones to upload videos to YouTube in a serious way. Hurley’s response:

It is available on some devices, but mostly you still have to connect to your computer to upload. But it will become a larger part of what we show. People on the street, sharing their thoughts and experiences.

For Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg agrees, mobile access to the Internet simply makes it easier for people to share information. Speaking like a true technologist, he thinks this is good because it will make society more efficient:

People are becoming comfortable sharing more and more because it is valuable. By sharing where you are at a certain time you might make it so you can meet up with people who are around you or get advice on what to do. This happened to me in New York before I came to Davos. I didn’t realize it was one of my friend’s birthdays. It is really useful, it creates a lot of efficiency within society. We want to push people to share more and more information, because we think people will evolve to use more and more of these [services], which is why we want to go to mobile.

There are, of course, huge privacy concerns here which every company making a push into mobile needs to be careful about, but the bigger issues the panelists agreed are simply technical. There are too many mobile devices to support. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that the primitive state of the technology is holding companies back more than the privacy issues, which he thinks are manageable if you let users control who sees what. Says Zuckerberg:

The platforms aren’t there yet. With all the mobile platforms—iPhone, Blackbery, Android, the mobile web—it is difficult to develop for all of them. When the number of platforms consolidate it will become a powerful thing. And when GPS becomes more available in phones. It is not the privacy issue.

Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer agrees “what people need is notice and choice.” He also thinks that the bigger barrier to making the mobile Web more like the one on our OCs is technical right now

You are too early in the cycle. No uniform way to get at those capabilities even within the devices. As people who write the apps will exploit it more. When there were few cameras in phones there was little photo integration. Now you can click the photo and move it to an app in a few button pushes. It is just a matter of evolution.

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The company made the announcement at the Adobe MAX Japan event, notably less than one year after the official release of Adobe AIR.

Adobe says the 100 million mark for Adobe AIR installs is a minimum for the total install base of the AIR runtime (read: they think it’s actually more than that) since they only count the ones that are deemed 100% successful (i.e. they can be confirmed by code running after the installation). As for developers building Web applications using the Adobe Flash Platform, the company claims that in the last 12 months there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder.

Based on the results of a Millward Brown survey, Adobe also boasts that Flash Player 10 has been installed on 55% of computers worldwide, and they expect to surpass 80% penetration by next quarter. In total, no less than 99% of internet-enabled desktops are said to have at least some version of Flash Player installed. You can see the percentages broken down by version here but keep in mind that the numbers come from Adobe.

As we’ve noted before, Flash Player is still struggling to make the jump to mobile phones.

For the sake of comparison, the last time Microsoft shared numbers on its Flash Player competitor Silverlight was when the company released Silverlight 2 in October 2008. They didn’t publish actual install numbers, but said the adoption rate was nearing 50 percent in some countries and 30 percent in the U.S.

Going back to Adobe AIR, in a blog post the company’s Group Manager, Flash Platform Product Marketing Adrian Ludwig says that the vast majority of installations are driven by applications rather than people going to Adobe.com to install the runtime environment.

Ludwig cites TweetDeck, Twhirl, AOL Top 100 Videos and eBay Desktop among the most popular applications (full list). I personally use AIR powered desktop applications Twhirl, Yammer, Google Analytics Reporting Suite, Finetune Desktop and Snackr the most.

What about you?

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Adobe’s experiment with allowing publishers to place contextual ads directly inside PDF documents is coming to an end. The Adobe Labs project was launched just over a year ago in November, 2007.

The idea was that out of the billions of PDF documents produced every year, some of them get passed around enough to warrant advertising, especially those produced by traditional print publishers. Adobe teamed up with Yahoo to provide contextual text ads similar to what you would find next to that document if you were reading it online. Hey, inventory is inventory, right?

In a note to program participants, Adobe fobs off the failure of the PDF ads on the economy and its need to focus on its core products. But it was simply a bad idea. Trying to turn PDF files into an advertising vehicle was just never going to fly.

First, who wants to click on ads in a document? It is an unnatural act. Second, unlike a Website where advertisers at least have some sense of who the audience is, PDFs get passed around and downloaded willy-nilly. There is no good way to track who receives them, or who ultimately might click on those ads. Incidentally, this download problem also plagues ads in videos—advertisers are more comfortable paying for the ads watched in a stream than ads bundled with a download. Third, if the content in your PDF is so compelling that you think you can run ads against it, you are better off turning it into a Webpage.

And that’s my problem with PDFs, I guess. Adobe has done everything it can to protect the format instead of making it easy to publish PDFs as full Webpages.

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Today, Adobe announced it would lay off 600 workers, or 8 percent of its total headcount. The recession is forcing it to reduce its sales forecasts for the next two quarters. No wonder it canceled its booth at Macworld. When the big guys are hurting, everybody hurts.

That brings our Layoff Tracker up to 76,000 tech jobs lost since late August. Adobe joins Leapfrog, which announced on Monday it will cut 70 people (10 percent) and Trutap, which will let 25 people go (80 percent) and is looking to sell the remains of the company.

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