When it comes to digital magazines, why should tablet owners have all the fun? That’s the sentiment Adobe was espousing earlier today at an event held in New York where they officially pulled back the curtains on their updated Digital Publishing Suite.

You’d be forgiven if you haven’t stumbled across Adobe’s DPS before — as the name sort of implies, it’s meant for publishers to prepare digital editions of their print content for consumption on all sorts of gadgetry. Given their size, tablets have been the obvious focus for content creators, but Adobe’s new update brings (among other things) the ability for them to whip up digital magazines that work well on the iPhone too.

One publisher has already signaled their commitment to tailoring their digital magazine experience to the iPhone — Conde Nast leans pretty heavily on Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite to layout their digital editions, and they revealed that an iPhone-friendly makeover for The New Yorker was in the works. Here’s hoping that some of Conde Nast’s other properties (my fingers are crossed for the exceptionally handsome Wired) get the same treatment, though the shift toward smaller screens will force designers to rethink how users read and engage with that content.

Even with the process for creating rich media content for smaller screens streamlined (Adobe offers up their own best practices here), it’s still no easy feat to devise a handsome, thoughtful way to dive into that content on a smaller screen. That lack of real estate means that publishers will have to get really creative in order to deliver the sort of experience that make digital magazines more compelling than their dead-plant counterparts.

[via Gizmodo]

Getting a new laptop or buying a new license for an operating system is often cheaper in the U.S. than in most other countries. Europeans, for example, are used to paying a hefty premium for Apple products and the situation is similar in Australia, where the cheapest MacBook Air currently costs about 15% more than in the United States. Now, however, the Australian government is starting a parliamentary inquiry into these pricing schemes. According to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, the politicians behind this inquiry hope that calling these companies out publicly will result in prices dropping.

The final details of this inquiry are still being finalized, says the Sydney Morning Herald, but the committee that will oversee the proceedings plans to invite “all the big computer and software companies including Apple and Microsoft.” The committee will also look at the price differences in eBooks and games in different markets.

Ed Husic, a member of the Australian Parliament and a member of the committee that has been asking for this investigation for the last year or so, argues that “small to medium-sized businesses might pay over $10,000 more on software compared to overseas counterparts.”

The standard argument for higher prices in these markets is that local taxes and the cost of setting up overseas operations increase cost, which are then passed on to local consumers. According to a report by Australia’s Productivity Commission, however, “these excuses, in most cases are not persuasive, especially in the case of downloaded music, software and videos, for example, where the costs of delivery to the customer are practically zero and uniform around the world.”

[Image credit: Sydney Morning Herald]

Today is a big day for Adobe. Not only is the company officially unveiling the next versions of virtually all of the applications in its Creative Suite, but Adobe is also launching its Creative Cloud online offerings. This marks a major change in how Adobe is selling and marketing its flagship product: while the company will continue to offer a shrink-wrapped version of CS6, it’s also introducing a subscription service with this update. For $49/month with an annual subscription or $79/month for month-to-month memberships, users can now get full access to any CS6 tool, including Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and AfterEffects. The suite will also include Adobe’s new HTML5 design and development tools Muse and Edge, and will be deeply integrated into the company’s tablet apps. Users will be able to download and install these apps on up to two machines.

Photoshop, the most popular application in the suite, will also be available through a stand-alone subscription for $19.99/month with an annual membership and $29.99 without.

Adobe will also offer a student and teacher edition of Creative Cloud for $29.99/month. Current CS3, CS4 and CS5.5 users will qualify for a special introductory offer of $29.99/month. In the coming months, Adobe will also launch a version of Creative Cloud for teams, though the price for this one hasn’t been determined yet.

Oddly enough, the company hasn’t announced an actual launch date for these updates and new services yet. According to today’s announcement, however, these products “are scheduled to be available within 30 days.”

The updated Creative Suite apps obviously include a number of major changes, but maybe the most interesting change – and likely also the controversial one – is Adobe’s move toward a subscription service for CS6. The company obviously knows that quite a few of its users still want to buy the standard shrink-wrapped versions of its apps and will continue to offers these as well.

As Scott Morris, Adobe’s senior marketing director for the Creative Pro product line, told me last week, though, the company expects that most of its users will slowly migrate to the subscription service over time. In Adobe’s view, this gives users more flexibility to use apps when they need them and put their subscription on hold when they don’t. Adobe also plans to release a steady stream of new tools and updates to subscribers that won’t be available to users of the standard version until the next major update. Lightroom 4, for example, won’t be finished available at launch, but Creative Cloud subscribers will get it, as well as the final version of Adobe’s HTML5 development program Edge, the moment it becomes available later this year. (Correction: this story previously stated that Lightroom 4 hadn’t been released yet. It was actually released last month, but won’t be included in the CS6 suite until later this year.)

Photoshop, of course, is among the most pirated applications and while Morris stressed that the subscription service shouldn’t be seen solely as a way to combat piracy, he did acknowledge that it has the potential to help Adobe with its piracy problem.

Creative Cloud isn’t just a subscription service to Adobe’s tools, though, it also includes an online storage and sharing component. Adobe itself calls it its “hub for making, sharing and delivering creative work.” Subscribers will, among other things, be able to sync their files to Adobe’s cloud and then edit them with the company’s mobile tools on the iPad, for example, or just upload their files Dropbox-style to the web and share them with their clients or colleagues. Initially, users will have access to 20GB of online storage, with additional storage purchase options coming soon.

Creative Cloud subscribers will also get access to Adobe’s publishing and web hosting services, which will allow them to easily publish their apps, magazines and catalogs to iOS, Android and the web. Members will also get access to Typekit, which offers web designers access to 700 fonts.

The forthcoming team version of Creative Cloud will give users access to more storage and administrators will be able to allocate disk space depending on individual users’ needs. In addition, Adobe will provide these subscribers access to something akin to Apple’s Genius Bar where users can get one-on-one advice and support.

Another aspect of Creative Cloud will be its community site that will include a deviantART-like component for publicly sharing work with others.

As for the individual apps that are getting updates today, there are too many changes to list them all. As Morris told us, the focus here, for the most part, was on making the apps more responsive and smarter. Here are some of the highlights from the individual apps:

Flash is a main technology that developers use to power social and casual games, but Adobe has struggled to make money from its popularity over the years. Now, the company is planning to charge a 9 percent revenue share for higher-end Flash games that make more than $50,000 in revenues — and many developers aren’t happy.

First, here’s what it’s going to offer. It just announced a new set of features for developers who create very graphics-heavy games with the launch of Flash Player 11.2. It also unveiled a partnership with Unity Technologies, the Sequoia-backed company with a popular gaming engine that powers titles like Mika Mobile’s Battleheart.

This could bump up the overall quality of browser-based games, considering that the new version of Flash has powers to tap into hardware for rendering 3-D graphics.

But if you read the announcement closely, Adobe reveals its plans to start charging a revenue share for high-grossing games. It affects developers who call two APIs: one that provides access to domain memory, and one that’s for hardware acceleration.

At face value, it could make sense. If Flash is going to power higher-end, browser-based games that come closer to console quality, Adobe is going to have to find a way to fund the research and development costs behind it. Plus, Adobe is under pressure from shareholders to move away from selling one-off versions of the Creative Suite and Photoshop and towards more of a software-as-a-service model. One could make the argument that a revenue share actually better aligns Adobe’s interests with those of the game developers.

The other way to read it is that Adobe is trying to wring cash out of the last dying gasps of Flash. Adobe has never made all that much from the technology itself and Flash may be on the wane after Apple declined to support it in iOS devices.

The move could make costs unsustainable for some developers, especially considering that they may already pay a 30 percent revenue share to platforms like Facebook or licensing fees to Unity.

“In the cutthroat, thinning-margin social games business, it probably means that no one will be able to afford to use the new features,” said Brian Rue, who recently served as chief technology officer for social game developer 6waves Lolapps, in a blog post. Even now, social game developers are still grappling with the impact of Facebook Credits. Zynga, Kabam, Crowdstar, Funzio — pretty much everyone — is trying to diversify onto mobile. An extra tax puts them in even more of a precarious position.

Rue gave an example. Assume you’re spending $2.50 to acquire a user on Facebook, and your lifetime value (or how much you earn from the player overall) is $3 after the platform’s take, your margin is basically cut by more than half. That leftover revenue has to go to pay for hosting, support and game development.

“That’s huge,” Rue said, adding that Adobe’s move might encourage some Flash developers to migrate faster to HTML5, even though the technology isn’t quite camera-ready yet.

There are some developers that will be able to stomach these extra costs better than others. Kixeye, another Facebook developer, has a smaller audience, but it makes far more revenue per user. That’s because the company targets a hardcore gaming demographic instead of the mass casual audience that Zynga has. (Zynga declined to comment for this story.)

“The 9 percent cut is painful,” Will Harbin, Kixeye’s chief executive, told us. “There’s no other way to put it. However, our mission at Kixeye is to showcase the mind-blowing experiences that browser-based games are capable of delivering.”

Harbin adds, “We can find room in our business model to cover costs like these.” He said Kixeye’s games retain players for five times longer and monetize 20 times better than typical titles on Facebook.

Adobe tells us it researched how to establish a fair pricing structure and says that “not all” developers are expected to use the premium features. The company says it charges 9 percent on gross revenues above $50,000 after payment processing fees, taxes and the platform revenue share. The share covers earnings from app sales, in-app purchases, subscriptions, sponsorships and advertising.

The new pricing plan starts in August and there’s a grace period until then when developers can apply for a license. Adobe AIR apps that access these APIs don’t have licensing fees for now.

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 that I first uncovered last week, as well as the plaintiffs’ opposition statement indicate there is more than sufficient evidence for the dismissal to be denied and the case to proceed towards trial. If the defendants lose to or settle, tens of thousands of full-time employees with the companies between 2006 and 2009 could be compensated.

[Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2011: Judge Lucy Koh says "This case is moving forward...this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss." That means the defendants' motion to dismiss the case will almost surely be denied when the judge files her official ruling soon. Koh said she may dismiss some specific claims but the plaintiffs will be allowed to amend their complaint. She mentioned "It's hard to make the inference that there was no conspiracy". Read on to find out why and what that means for the companies. More details from the hearing at the end.]

Specifically, the senior executives of the defendants, including Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, are accused of entering into a network of identical, interconnected illegal agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Each agreement by itself may be a violation of antitrust laws including the Sherman Act, the Cartwright Act, and other California laws.

The plaintiffs also claim the agreements constitute an overarching antitrust conspiracy because each was made with knowledge of the other agreements, and relied on the other agreements to achieve a common goal of reducing compensation and mobility for highly sought-after skilled tech employees.

According to the plaintiffs’ statement (PDF), the chronology of some of the  agreements is as follows:

• January 2005 – Pixar senior executives (which include Steve Jobs) draft written terms for a no-poach agreement and send them to Lucasfilm
• May 2005 – Apple and Adobe make agreements
• 2006 – Apple and Google make agreements shortly after Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board of directors
• April 2007 – Apple and Pixar make agreements
• June and September 2007 – Google enters into agreements with Intuit and Intel that are identical to the agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, and Apple and Pixar

Additionally, Steve Jobs personally contacted Palm’s CEO Edward T. Colligan to propose an unlawful agreement, writing “We must do whatever we can” to stop competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.” Colligan declined Jobs’ offer, writing “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.”

The plaintiffs request “The Court should deny the motion, lift the stay of discovery, and permit Plaintiffs ‘to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination’ of this action.”

The defendants claim that the agreements were isolated and not interconnected. They claim the agreements were pro-competitive parts of legitimate collaborations between the companies, many of which had executives on each other’s boards or started as the same company as with Pixar and Lucasfilm.

The defendants also claim “The alleged bilateral arrangement provide no support for the overall conspiracy that plaintiffs have alleged in order to name the defendants in a class action”. They motion for continuation of the partial stay of discovery and for the case to be dismissed.

However, my research and sources indicate the defendants’ claims are false, the plaintiffs case is plausible, and so there are no grounds for dismissal. Furthermore, the only reason more evidence about the interconnection between the agreements isn’t available is because they were made so secretively.

The case should be allowed to proceed because the plaintiffs have produced “smoking guns” indicating a deep conspiracy. Specifically, “Do Not Cold Call” lists which defendants used to implement the agreements, and the written terms of Pixar’s agreement with Lucasfilm. These signal that today’s joint motion to dismiss the case should be denied because if discovery is permitted to continue, there’s a reasonable expectation that evidence of illegal activity will be revealed.

Finally, the precedent is that motions to dismiss are “viewed with disfavor and are properly granted only in exceptional cases…A complaint satisfies Twombly [is only eligible for dismissal] if the allegations, taken as a whole, are not ‘facially implausible’” according to the plaintiffs’ statement. Therefore, it would take a very strong presentation by the defense for Judge Lucy Koh to dismiss the case.

If the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case is denied, the case will move towards a trial by jury in June 2013. Rather than leave an assessment of damages to the judge and jury, the defendants may try to settle the case, similar to how they settled with the Department of Justice’s federal case in 2010. In the defendants lose or settle, full-time employees of the defendants could be compensated for the 10-15% of lost wages estimated by the plaintiffs’ law firm Lieff Cabraser.

Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2012: The judge has lifted the stay of discovery, saying “This case is moving forward…this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss.” Though her official statement hasn’t been filed, she’s likely to deny the defendants motion to dismiss the case. She also ordered Google to produce draft emails in addition to sent emails, and designate which are drafts and which were sent.

During the hearing, the defense argued against the conspiracy accusation and joint liability. It stated that plaintiffs don’t deserve compensation from companies they never worked for and that their employers didn’t have agreements with just because they were part of the so-called conspiracy.

The judge seemed somewhat sympathetic to this, and asked if the plaintiffs would consider breaking up the case to focus on each unlawful agreement separately. The plaintiffs maintained that the agreements were all interconnected.

Afterwards, The head attorney representing the plaintiffs, Joseph R. Saveri of Lieff Cabraser, told me the plaintiffs were comfortable moving forward with their single, joint antitrust conspiracy complaint. The plaintiffs will file an amended complaint that removes any claims dismissed by the forthcoming judge’s statement.

Next, another Case Management Conference is set for April 18th, where that amended complaint from the plaintiff will be reviewed. On June 28th, the court will convene to hear class certification to define what employees are eligible to be represented by the class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs plan to assess evidence surfaced during discovery and determine if only software engineers, software engineers and scientists, or all of the defendants’ employees will be represented by the class action lawsuit.

Following the hearing, Saveri gave reporters a conservative calculation of the possible damages that employees could be compensated for. He said software engineers make $100,000 a year (they make more), their compensation was “suppressed between 5 and 10%” and “tens of thousands of employees were affected”. That means for each year an entry-level full-time software engineer worked at one of these companies, they might be entitled to damages of $5,000 to $10,000. Higher paid veteran engineers could be entitled to much more. The total damages could therefore be at least $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected.

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.

Previously, only the DOJ was privy to the evidence, so there was no way for the public to know whether the settlement came out the defendants’ fear they would lose. Now we know the C-level management at these companies did enter into anti-competitive agreements.

Below you can see the redacted Exhibit Joint Case Management Conference Statement attained from Pacer.org. Filed today, it contains evidence from the DOJ investigation pertinent to the upcoming civil case.

The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries.

In one particularly juicy piece of evidence from May 2005, Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen emailed Steve Jobs regarding “Recruitment of Apple Employees”. In the message, Adobe’s SVP for human resources writes “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa.”

Additionally, documents state that there is “strong evidence that the companies knew about the other express agreements, patterned their own agreements off of them, and operated them concurrently with the others to accomplish the same objective.”

For example, Lori McAdams of Pixar wrote an internal email to others at Pixar  in April 2007 stating, “I just got off the phone with Danielle Lambert [of Apple], and we agreed that effective now, we’ll follow a Gentleman’s agreement with Apple that is similar to our Lucasfilm agreement.”

The defendants ask for the case to be dismissed, stating that the DOJ found “no overarching conspiracy” and that these bilateral agreements were separate. The DOJ announced in September 2010 that it had settled with the companies, establishing that they would cease such illegal hiring practices, even though they never had to admit to wrongdoing. The DOJ currently has the right to check on the companies for compliance.

The plaintiffs seek damages for any salaried employee who worked for one of the defendants during a 4-year period in the late 2000s. That means a lot of Silicon Valley tech workers could receive a payout if the defendants lose or settle the case. The civil case will be heard by Judge Koh in San Jose starting January 26th, 2012, and we’ll have continuing updates on its progress.

[Image Credit: Shutterstock - Bioraven]

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. Notably, 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.

These capabilities will be integrated with the Facebook ad buying functionality currently available with Adobe (Omniture) SearchCenter, Adobe says, while Efficient Frontier’s social marketing engagement platform will be combined with Adobe (Omniture) SocialAnalytics.

Looks like Efficient Frontier made the right bet doubling down on the social media marketing space with its (reportedly $50 million) acquisition of Context Optional back in May 2011.

Other solutions that Efficient Frontier brings to Adobe’s table are a search optimization system, a real-time bidding system for display ads and an integrated auction-based buying suite for search, display and social media.

The transaction is expected to complete in the first quarter of Adobe’s 2012 fiscal year. Adobe did not disclose the terms of the deal, but pointed out that the potential financial impact of the transaction is not reflected in financial targets previously provided by Adobe.

More guidance will be provided following the completion of the transaction.

Efficient Frontier was backed by Mitsui Ventures, Cambrian Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. In fact, President and CEO David Karnstedt previously served as Executive-in-Residence for Redpoint Ventures, after leading Yahoo’s North American Sales for over 7 years.

For Adobe, this is the seventh acquisition this year (after Auditude, Typekit, Nitobi Software, IRIDAS, EchoSign and Demdex) according to CrunchBase data.

Related reading: Adobe To Acquire Omniture For Approximately $1.8 Billion

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.

Earlier reports mentioned that Google believed Flash support for Android 4.0 was forthcoming, but an Adobe representative has confirmed to Pocket-lint that Ice Cream Sandwich will indeed get Flash support by the end of 2011.

Now, don’t expect to fire up your Galaxy Nexus (whenever you should happen to get it) and find the ICS-tailored version of Flash waiting for you. Nor will you be able to find and install an older version of Flash from the Android market for the time being. Galaxy Nexus users will join the iOS crowd in being locked out of the web’s Flash content until Adobe pushes out their last major release.

After that update goes out though, mobile Flash will ride off into the sunset. Adobe made it clear in their announcement that the app would only see security updates and critical bugfixes going forward. With all that manpower freed up, Adobe plans to refocus their mobile efforts on AIR and HTML5, the latter of which they have called “the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

As Adobe’s Mike Chambers mentioned in his explanation of mobile Flash’s demise, the future of rich mobile content has very little to do with Flash, and nearly everything to applications and HTML5. That doesn’t mean that the platform is dying off completely though — Adobe licensee RIM has pledged to continue supporting Flash on their PlayBook platform, and all of mobile Flash’s current users can continue to use it if they’ve got it.

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 break 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?

Well, for one thing, Adobe realized that Flash would never reach the same kind of ubiquity in the smartphone space that its enjoys on PCs. Adobe’s own statistics indicate that the company’s Flash Player is installed on a staggering 99% of all Internet-enabled PCs. Meanwhile, their smartphone penetration numbers were considerably less impressive.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the iPhone played a crucial role here. With Steve Jobs and company having fully turned their backs on Flash, further attempts by Adobe to push Flash onto other smartphones would mean that developers would have to craft online experiences for two opposing tribes. That’s where Adobe’s focus on HTML5 comes in.

Mobile browsers have grown to be incredibly savvy in recent years, a far cry from the dumbed-down WAP views we previously had to deal with. Considering that most major mobile browsers pack support for HTML5, trying to shoehorn Flash into the mobile content mix is fighting an uphill battle. According to Chambers, “on mobile devices HTML5 provides a similar level of ubiquity that the Flash Player provides on the desktop. It is the best technology for creating and deploying rich content to the browser across mobile platforms.”

There’s also the issue of how users consume content on their devices. Smartphone users have the concept of “apps” drilled into their heads before they can even take their phones home, so it’s no surprise that they’ll turn to their respective app stores if they want to play a game. I sincerely doubt that average customers knew (or cared) that their devices played well with Flash, save for a few highly specialized circumstances.

Lastly, it was a simple matter of manpower. Adobe has been a fan of HTML5 for quite a while now, and it’s stronger position in the mobile space has become more and more apparent. Rather than devote time and energy to working on a platform that 1) needed to be tweaked for different OSs and hardware configurations and 2) would never be as widely-used as they would like, Adobe decided that those resources would be better spent furthering HTML5 development.

So, there we have it. Mobile Flash died a quiet death, which is perhaps fitting because it never made much of a splash while it was alive. Here’s to Adobe moving on to bigger and better things.

Editor’s note: Guest contributor Ben Savage is the founder of Spaceport.io, a native Javascript and HTML5 platform for mobile game developers.

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? The transition from the PC to the mobile web is arguably one of the most important inflection points in the history of the internet, and the value to Adobe is very obvious. The answer lies in the history of Flash-Player itself.

As Steve Jobs put it: “Flash was designed for PCs using mice”—which is true. When Flash was created back in the 90′s, the target platform that it was designed for, was the PC. Flash was designed for desktop computers, computers with a fast CPU and a power-cable. This is the root cause of all the hardships Adobe has had with mobile.

Mobile devices are not always plugged in. They have to rely on small batteries, which need to last for days at a time. For this reason, mobile phones have slower, less power-hungry CPUs. The original iPhone had a 412 MHz CPU. That’s about how fast desktop CPUs were back in 1998. That was basically a 9 year setback in CPU speeds, which was more than Adobe’s Flash Player could handle.

You see, in Flash Player, everything is done in the CPU, including the graphics. That means that if you slow down the CPU, you slow down the graphics performance.

Back in 1997 when the Flash Player engine was created, the CPU was all that was available. It wasn’t until 2000 that normal PC computers started to get GPUs with hardware-accelerated transform and lighting.

The advent of the GPU changed everything. It’s several orders of magnitude faster to do graphics calculations in hardware over software. In addition to that, GPUs are able to perform multiple calculations in parallel. The original iPhone could do up to 16 simultaneous calculations, and the new A5 chip (iPad2 and iPhone 4S) can do up to 128. Most importantly, GPUs use less power to do the same number of calculations.

Over the last 10 years, AAA Console game developers have worked closely with companies like Nvidia to optimize the performance of video game graphics. Together, they have created standards like OpenGL for interacting with the GPU, and maximizing the graphical rendering capabilities of a system. It is because of this innovation that iPhones can run beautiful 3D games like “Infinity Blade”, and run them fast. The GPU in modern mobile devices is really powerful if you can just tap into it.

So why has Adobe failed to take advantage of the power of the modern GPU? The answer is backwards computability. Adobe is burdened down by history. There are millions of SWF files all over the web from all versions of Flash Players’ history. To play all of these, Flash Player needs to be capable of playing SWF files back all the way to version 1 (we are currently at version 11). It’s the same issue that plagues Windows. The only way to avoid the issue of backwards compatibility is to make a break with the past, stop supporting old versions, and go forward with a new format.

Adobe has added new APIs that can leverage the GPU (like stage 3D), but in order to ensure backwards compatibility for old code, their entire pre-existing API does not leverage the GPU. That means that Flash developers still need to re-write their existing games in order to get hardware accelerated graphics.

Now startups are thriving by solving the problems that Adobe could not. Solutions like a rendering engine designed for the mobile web that does take advantage of the power of the GPU, for high performance, hardware accelerated graphics. There is an opportunity for startups to come in and provide the same API as Adobe’s ActionScript 3 libraries, so Flash developers left out in the cold by Adobe now have a place to call home. Developers can bring their knowledge and skills with Flash to mobile by partnering with these new crop of companies.

Where Adobe can still succeed

Adobe may have failed with the Flash Player Plugin, but their art-creation tools are still the best in the industry. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash Professional are the hands-down best options for creating 2D artwork (both vector and raster) and animation. The millions of artists and designers around the world who have learned the skills to use these tools need not learn any new tools to create content for the mobile web. Startups will fill the gaps left by Adobe and allow developers the ability to use these tools to create the user-interfaces, characters, animations, and other assets.

The end of the Flash-Player plugin is an inevitable consequence of history. Flash’s CPU-based architecture was on a head-on collision course with mobile devices. Now that Adobe has exited stage left, let’s see who swoops in.

Photo credit: Flickr/Adam Tuttle,

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.

The native iOS application, as you see, worked smoothly and seamlessly. The Android/Flash implementation, on the other hand, exhibited lag, touch insensitivity, and a general “wrong-ness” that disturbs the purists out there. This is obviously evidence of Android’s “familiar lag” but it also part of Flash’s problem: all of the things people wanted to do in Flash, barring viewing web video (an activity that is better in dedicated apps anyway) – play Flash games, view flash animations (why?), and, I assume, see Flash advertisements – are poorly served by these laggy implementations. Flash made Flash look bad.

Adobe never got mobile Flash right but even as they claimed injury at Steve Jobs’ mean comments, they were probably already moving past the issue internally. The depth of that move is now public. In their statement, it’s clear that they’d rather have Flash and Air exist as standalone apps rather than an add-on. They want center stage on your device, not playing second fiddle to someone else’s browser:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video. Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection. Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.

You’ll also note that they want Flash to run high-end 3D games and other rich content, a possibility that is truncated by Flash in the browser. By going in this direction, they create two interconnected tracks – the direct to PC track and the direct to mobile track. Each track would presumably start at the same point and the differences in coding and development would be trivial, allowing an Adobe user to make a rich app on the desktop and the mobile device at the same time.

Apple didn’t win this battle – if it even was a battle. Instead, Adobe ceded ground to the future in hopes of surviving another decade as the go-to tool maker for creative professionals. It’s fun to think that Steve Jobs had a hand in this, humiliating big bad Adobe with his Zen trickster techniques. However, it’s clear that Adobe is a business in crisis and that posturing doesn’t pay the bills.

[Image: Brett Mulcahy/Shutterstock]

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.

So you’ll forgive me when I snicker a bit at the news tonight that Adobe plans to cease development of their Flash player for mobile devices. Jason Perlow has the scoop for ZDNet, and it’s a doozy. Here’s the apparent forthcoming announcement from Adobe on the matter:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

This announcement, along with talk of a focus on HTML5, should be out in the next day or so, according to Perlow. Yes, Adobe is ending their efforts to get Flash onto mobile devices.

But again, that’s odd, since all we’ve heard out of the company for the past 3+ years was either how mobile Flash was coming, or how it was just about to be perfected. While it did finally come — in June 2010 for Android — it was far from perfect. That’s putting it nicely. Put less nicely, it sucked.

The technology on mobile devices was never ready for primetime. As Harry McCracken put it this past February: Mobile Flash: Always Exciting, Always Not Quite Here Yet. In that post, McCracken noted that Motorola was touting full Flash support as a big selling point of their then-new Xoom tablet. But there was an asterisk. Flash would not ship with the device itself. It would come later. It would always come later.

Things got really heated in April 2010, when Steve Jobs took to Apple’s website to write a missive against Flash. Simply titled, Thoughts on Flash, Jobs destroyed the technology in 1,700 or so words. Perhaps most damning were his thoughts on mobile Flash in particular. The key parts:

• “In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.”
• “Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath.”

This letter prompted an ill-advised advertising campaign (which they ran all over the web, even on TechCrunch) by Adobe in which they proclaimed: “We Love Apple”. It was transparent and lame. Worse, it was just about the weakest response possible. Adobe didn’t address any of the issues Jobs brought up. They tried to be cute. They brought an advertisement to a gun fight, as I noted at the time.

When pressed, Adobe would only call Jobs’ dismissing of Flash “a smokescreen“. And they would continue to promise that the technology would soon be perfected. Better, Adobe’s platform evangelist summed up his feelings with: “Go Screw Yourself Apple“.

It’s sad that Jobs is no longer with us to see this day. But the truth is that he probably didn’t need to see it — he knew he was right. In his post, he outlined the need for a move towards technologies like HTML5, and now that’s exactly where Adobe is heading.

Steve gets the last laugh.

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.

The idea behind the IAB’s Guidelines, which had not been updated since 2008, is to balance the needs of advertisers and publishers with the need for “positive consumer experiences,” explains the organization explains. Since its last update, advertisers have been increasingly interested in the usage of interactive ads and rich media formats. Of course, these sorts of ads are more complex and require additional testing.

With Adobe’s Adthenticate, publishers and agencies will be able to do that testing right in the browser. After signing into the service, they can select a local file, enter an ad’s URL or an AdTag and then chose the IAB specification they want to test it against.

After running, the test displays the results in a simple chart, displaying allowed and actual value for things like SWF width, height and filesize, framerate, animation time, sound and more. A performance monitor below maps out the CPU usage during the ad’s run.

According to Adobe, the key features found in of the (beta) service include:

• Dynamic Validation: Online ads are run in a hosted, browser-based environment
• Standardized CPU usage: Without Project Adthenticate, the ad ecosystem must compare CPU usage across machines that vary greatly in different agency and publishers’ QA departments
• Advanced Instrumentation: Adthenticate can detect any requests for tracking pixels, animation beyond specified durations and clickTAG issues
• Rich Media Rules: This lets the publishers set complex rules regarding the “polite, user-initiated, and automatic loading and playback of additional media, such as animations, video, and audio”
• Web Service API: Adthenticate is also available as an API

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.

The app provides additional features like the ability to search for text in the document itself, plus support for bookmarks, navigation using thumbnails, zooming, sharing via email, copy and paste, single page or continuous scroll modes and even wireless printing via iOS AirPrint.

In addition to standalone PDFs, the app can be used to open ePortfolios (PDF Portfolios), PDF Packages, annotations and drawing markups. Password-protect files, those secured by Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management and files encrypted using AES256, are also supported.

Along with the new iOS app, Adobe released Android Reader for Android 10.1 which includes many of the same features and works on both Android phones and tablets running Android 2.2 or higher.

Update: The responses to news of the Adobe Reader iOS app I’m seeing on Twitter are quite varied. So far, they’ve ranged from “finally!” to “oh god no!” Apparently, there’s no middle ground on this one.

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.

Here’s a quick run-down of each of the new apps:

• Adobe Photoshop Touch: This is the beast of the new apps, since just about everyone can have fun in Photoshop. The app allows users to layer images, edit in most of the same ways they do in Photoshop, and add effects to their imagery. Adobe also added a new feature only available on the tablet-based apps called Scribble Selection Tool. It lets users pull objects from an image by “scribbling” over what to keep first, and then over what should be removed. Facebook and Google Search have also been integrated with the app, letting users search for images and share their creations quickly.
• Adobe Collage: This app seems pretty cool. It lets users collect images, drawings, and text to build what Adobe is calling a “mood board.” It features a customizable pen which allows for four different types of drawing, along with the ability to import photos, add text, and apply color themes. Thanks to Adobe’s new cloud-syncing tool, users open up these files in Photoshop and do what they will with them.
• Adobe Debut: This one’s for the creative professional. Adobe Debut offers a way to present clients with tablet-friendly versions of Creative Suite files, including Photoshop layers and Illustrator art boards. From there, clients can give feedback using the markup pen tool, which adds notes and drawings right on top of the work.
• Adobe Ideas: Adobe Ideas is a vector-based drawing app on steroids. With either a stylus or finger, users can doodle to their hearts’ desire, but with the added ability of choosing color themes and importing tablet-friendly images which can function as separate layers.
• Adobe Kuler: This app pulls from Adobe’s Kuler web-app which lets people create and share different color themes. Within the app, users can create themes based on a single photo, or by simply pulling their favorite shades together. The Adobe Kuler app already has hundreds of thousands of themes ready to roll courtesy of the Kuler community, and users can rate and comment on themes straight from the app. After themes are created they can be exported as color swatches for use in different Adobe projects.
• Adobe Proto: This is the developers’ app. It allows users to develop interactive wireframes and prototypes for mobile apps or web sites. The finished product can be exported in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Just like the Creative Cloud, these new apps won’t roll out until November. Worse, iOS availability seems to be a bit behind, with Adobe expecting to announce iPad availability in early 2012. Each app will cost $9.99 from both the Android Market and the Apple App Store.

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.

With PhoneGap, Adobe says it will offer will offer developers the choice of building native mobile apps using HTML5 and JavaScript with PhoneGap or using Adobe Air and Flash. As Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager, Platform, Adobe says of PhoneGap, “It’s a perfect complement to Adobe’s broad family of developer solutions, including Adobe AIR, and will allow us to continue to provide content publishers and developers with the best, cutting-edge solutions for creating innovative applications across platforms and devices.”

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of October 2011 and all of Nitobi’s employees, which are based in Canada, will join Adobe.

Considering the general trend of away from Flash-based mobile sites towards HTML5, it’s interesting to see Adobe push its HTML5 strategy. The company has been open recently about making more meaningful tools for HTML5 development, so I’m sure we can expect more of the same from Adobe in the future.

Adobe also announced today that it acquired TypeKit, which offers web designers a way to use a wide array of fonts on their websites.

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.

Alas, while you can’t start working through your backlog of artsy Flash games, Flash Media Server 4.5 allows content producers to easily to get their Flash content onto iOS devices without any additional headache.

While older versions of the media server served up video streams in the F4F format, the update has added support for the HTTP Live Streaming format, which iPads and the like can handle just fine.

The media server system, according to ZDNet, detects the device’s level of Flash-capability and will switch over to using the HLS format when it sees an iOS device. It’s actually pretty ironic: in order to make Flash video streaming work, the new version of Media Server actually has to un-Flash the content and wrap it in another, more iOS-friendly container.

While it isn’t the Holy Grail of iOS Flash support, it’s a solution that works, and will make life easier for those in the unenviable position of managing live video streams. Hopefully Adobe has a team sequestered in a bunker working getting actual Flash support working now that they’ve managed to cross “streaming video” off the list.

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.

RPost, founded in 2000, says it brought suit for the infringement of five of its U.S. patents – numbers 6,182,219; 6,571,334; 7,707,624; 7,865,557 and 7,966,372.

The patents cover technologies of verifiable proof for email delivery, recording recipient consent associated with received messages and documents, and value-added outbound email processing.

According to the lawsuit documents, embedded below, RPost is asking the US Federal Court to issue an injunction against Adobe to prevent further damages. If the court follows their reasoning, such an injunction would render the Adobe’s purchase of EchoSign potentially worthless.

RPost’s services provide senders legally valid evidence of email content, timestamp and delivery, with options to record the recipient’s consent to attached contracts with legal e-signatures.

This isn’t the first time RPost embarks on a legal crusade against its competitors, and even national postal services haven’t been spared.

RPost currently has actions pending against EchoSign challenger Docusign – which yesterday announced that it has processed more than a half billion signed pages to date – as well the United States Postal Service, the Swiss Post Office and the Canadian Post Office.

RPost says it owns 35 patents worldwide, some of which have priority over technology dating back to 1995.

The timing of the lawsuit raises questions, but I asked RPost CEO Zafar Khan why the documents were filed on the very same day Adobe announced the acquisition of EchoSign, and this is how he responded:

Electronically signing a document is not difficult. Just typing your name at the bottom of a document or email can have all the legal force of a handwritten signature if all parties have proof that you are the author of the specific content. At first, we had viewed EchoSign’s electronic signature service more of a novelty — a cosmetic way of placing your typewritten name in a fancy font and calling it an EchoSign electronic signature.

But, in light of recent marketplace demand for a higher level of forensically verifiable proof surrounding electronically signed documents — proof with an audit trail and method of verifying authenticity — we found that Echosign upgraded its services based on the teachings published in RPost patents.

RPost patented technology focuses on producing electronic signatures on documents in a manner that has high evidential weight, including an audit trail, associating this to the e-mail and e-signed document record, and providing methods of authentication. Without this, you don’t have proof.

When we discovered that EchoSign’s service included key elements of RPost patented technology, we recently re-evaluated EchoSign and realized that they added technology to make their e-signature service more legally meaningful – and we identified that technology as key elements of RPost patented technology. We reviewed in the context of our patents, and this has taken several months to complete, as the RPost patent portfolio includes 35 patents.

We were in the final stages of filing last week, and just finalized the details today.

Fighting words indeed.

We’ve reached out to Adobe and EchoSign and will update when we hear back.

Update: Adobe says it won’t comment on pending litigation.

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.

EchoSign’s solution, which is said to currently support more than three million users worldwide, will be offered as part of Adobe’s online document exchange services platform and be integrated with Adobe’s SendNow for managed file transfer, FormsCentral for form creation and CreatePDF for online PDF creation.

As you may have heard, Adobe’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.

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