7 of the world’s most powerful tech companies have been accused of forming an antitrust conspiracy to suppress the compensation of their employees by entering into “no poach” agreements. Today, a San Jose judge heard a motion to dismiss a class action civil lawsuit in which former employees seek damages from defendants Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm.
The damning evidence against the defendants from a 2010 Department of Justice investigation and the plaintiffs’ statement indicate there is more than sufficient evidence for the case to proceed towards trial. If the defendants lose to or settle, tens of thousands of full-time employees of these companies could be compensated. [Update 4:30pm PST : The judge says “This case is going to survive the motion to dismiss”, meaning she’ll almost surely deny the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case when she soon files her official ruling. → Read More
Next week a class-action civil lawsuit will be heard in San Jose to determine if Google, Apple, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Adobe, Intel, and Intuit conspired to eliminate competition for skilled labor. In anticipation of the hearing, TechCrunch has obtained evidence from the Department of Justice’s investigation in 2010 which was made public this evening for the first time. It appears to support the plaintiff’s case that the defendant companies tried to suppress employee compensation by entering into “no poach” agreements. → Read More
Adobe this morning announced its acquisition of Efficient Frontier, a digital marketing company, without disclosing the financial terms of the deal. Adobe says the acquisition of the company will enable it to add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to its existing Digital Marketing solutions.
Efficient Frontier will bring to Adobe social ad buying capability for Facebook, employing the company’s optimization algorithms to predict results and drive greater digital marketing ROI for its clients. → Read More
It seemed, for a time, that the book on mobile Flash as we knew it was closed. Adobe announced just a few weeks ago that development for mobile Flash would cease, and their efforts and resources would soon be focused elsewhere. As it turns out, Adobe has one last project up their sleeves before they bid mobile Flash adieu: an update that includes support for Ice Cream Sandwich. → Read More
Adobe’s mobile Flash efforts have recently gone the way of the western black rhino, and Principal Product Manager Mike Chambers isn’t too pleased with how the Adobe chose to broke the news. In fact, he feels so strongly about it that he’s offered up his own clarifications on the matter.
“Our goal was to be very clear about WHAT we were doing, but in doing so, we didn’t pay enough attention to explaining WHY we were doing it,” he said on his blog today. Fair enough — the official Adobe announcement was pretty abrupt. So, now that everyone’s settled down a bit, why did Adobe really pull the plug?
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Adobe has discontinued development of Flash-Player plugin for mobile browsers.
This is a very important moment in the history of the mobile internet. Since 1997, Flash Player has been an important part of the web. From flash games, to streaming video, to sound, and sockets, many of the most important and central components of the online web experience have leveraged Flash-Player technology.
However, Flash-Player has failed to make the transition to the mobile web.
How could this have happened? How is it that a company with the resources of Adobe could possibly fail to overcome this hurdle? → Read More
I can’t help chortling a little in Schadenfreude at Adobe’s expected announcement that it is abandoning Flash for mobile devices. For most of the past two years, the anti-iPad contingent has cited flash incompatibility as the primary reason they weren’t going to give Apple their money yet the devices they did back – the Xoom, the Notion Ink Adam, the Playbook, and the like – all shipped with buggy or non-existent flash implementations. But I will not chortle, friends, because this is some serious stuff.
First, I want to say Flash wasn’t a bad idea for mobile. It would have been amazing in the early years of the smartphone revolution. It was comfortable, familiar, and a great way to get app-like functionality onto phones that might not have been powerful or popular enough for a real development platform. However, it was never implemented in a way that added value and what value it had value really peaked a few years ago and has progressively dropped over the past few months. If I’m to pick nits, I’d like to show this video from Lee Owen. → Read More
The year was 2008. I was at an event focused on mobile, sitting in on a roundtable discussion with several folks from key companies in the industry. One gentleman was from Adobe. The iPhone had launched the previous year, famously without any support for Flash. A lot of folks were up in arms about this — including several at this table. The guy from Adobe assured everyone: mobile Flash would be coming soon. And it was going to be wonderful. The notion that Apple wouldn’t include it on the iPhone because of performance issues was pure hogwash.
The same thing was said in 2009.
The same thing was said in 2010.
The same thing was still being said in 2011. → Read More
Today, Adobe is launching a hosted service for online ad testing which it’s calling Project Adthenticate. Available to publishers, rich media vendors and creative agencies, the service will help to test, validate and optimize ads based on the IAB’s 2011 Rich Media Creative Guidelines.
These guidelines provide a list of requirements for online advertising units, including things like maximum frame rates, max CPU usage, length of in-ad video play and more. → Read More
Adobe has just launched a version of its PDF Reader, Adobe Reader for iOS devices, which supports iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The new, free application, available here in iTunes, lets users view PDF files opened via email, on the Web or from within any application that supports iOS’s “Open In” functionality.
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Adobe’s had a busy day. Along with the acquisition of Nitobi Software and TypeKit, the company has also made a clear push into the tablet space, looking to bolster content creation. At the Adobe MAX 2011 conference in Los Angeles, Adobe officially announced the Creative Cloud — its very own cloud storage offering — along with with six new Adobe Touch apps for Android tablets and the iPad.
Creative Cloud lets users sync, share and view files from both the Adobe Creative Suite (desktop) and the Adobe Touch apps. It offers 20GB of free storage, though pricing and availability won’t be announced until November. However, the Creative Cloud (once it’s in action) will certainly boost the value of the six new Touch apps, most notable of which is Adobe Photoshop Touch. → Read More
Adobe has acquired Nitobi Software, the creator of HTML5 mobile app framework PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
PhoneGap’s open source platform allows developers to build cross-platform mobile applications with HTML5 and JavaScript, and distribute these applications to a variety of platforms. To date, PhoneGap’s open source framework has been downloaded more than 600,000 times and thousands of applications have been built using PhoneGap on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and other operating systems. The company also just launched a PhoneGap Facebook Connect plugin to allow HTML5 developers to simplify the log in process for their apps by allowing users to login with their Facebook credentials. → Read More
Ardent iOS supporters have been clamoring for true Flash support for years, and with the announcement of their new version of Flash Media Server, Adobe completely fails to deliver. Instead, they’ve managed to update their media server with a way to get streaming Flash video running on Apple’s myriad iOS devices. → Read More
The ink on the acquisition agreement documents signed – perhaps electronically – by Adobe and e-signature technology company EchoSign hasn’t even dried yet, and already dark clouds appear on the horizon.
An EchoSign rival called RPost, a self-proclaimed pioneer of electronic signature services, is suing Adobe and EchoSign over patent infringement. → Read More
Adobe this morning announced that it has acquired EchoSign, a provider of electronic signature solutions and signature automation.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the founders as well as all full-time employees of EchoSign, which has offices in Palo Alto, California, the UK and Germany, will join Adobe. → Read More
As you may have heard, Apple’s new version of its video editing software, Adobe Final Cut Pro X, has received considerable backlash from users. And as Jim Dalrymple reports, video editing rival Adobe has been welcoming these disheartened Final Cut Pro users with open arms. Now Adobe is taking it one step further, announcing a formal ‘switching program’ for any Final Cut Pro or Avid Media users.
Adobe says that anyone who has purchased any version of Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer and want to switch to Adobe’s video tools (Production Premium or Premiere Pro) will be eligible for a 50 percent savings on Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5 Production Premium or Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. → Read More
As you may have heard, Apple’s new version of its video editing software, Final Cut Pro X, has received considerable backlash from users. And as Jim Dalrymple reports, video editing rival Adobe has been welcoming these disheartened Final Cut Pro users with open arms. Now Adobe is taking it one step further, announcing a formal ‘switching program’ for any Final Cut Pro or Avid Media users.
Adobe says that anyone who has purchased any version of Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer and want to switch to Adobe’s video tools (Production Premium or Premiere Pro) will be eligible for a 50 percent savings on Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5 Production Premium or Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. → Read More
Adobe reported strong second quarter earnings at market close today, posting revenue of $1.023 billion, up 9 percent year over year. The Company says revenue came in at the higher range of its targeted revenue range of $970 million to $1.020 billion.
GAAP diluted earnings per share grew 61 percent year-over-year to $0.45. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share grew 25 percent year-over-year to $0.55, beating analyst expectations of $0.51 per share. → Read More
Adobe is today pushing updates to its application development software product Flash Builder and the open source Flex framework to enable developers to build apps for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry PlayBook, following support for the Android platform (added last April).
Developers can now opt to use Adobe’s platform to build apps that work across the Web, the desktop and a range of tablets and smartphones, with the ability to reuse most or all of their existing code and use common logic across all platforms. → Read More
Adobe Flash is to the smartphone as an unwanted cousin is to your wedding: necessary, yet painstaking. Apple CEO Steve Jobs seems to hate the software, neglecting to support it on all four models of the iPhone. Google’s done a better job of incorporating Flash support into the Android operating system, but still, most of the time Flash ends up being a battery killer, a security risk, not to mention a total bandwidth hog. That could change very soon though, as Qualcomm and Adobe have announced the development of optimizations for better Flash Player support in mid-level to high-end Android smartphones powered by the Snapdragon family of processors. → Read More
