In talking with Mitch Grasso, the founder of SlideRocket, the plan was always to do a fremium model. They've got a free version which lets you have up to 250 megs of storage and gives you the basic online editor functionality. Then for more business users there are a couple of tiers - one for individuals and one for a group of people at a company - that includes more advanced features like collaboration and access to the offline presentation viewer which they built in Adobe AIR. It's one of the first examples that I've seen of Adobe AIR being used as a pay-for extra.

Another notable feature is the marketplace. They've got a few partners including a stock photography site that will be populating the marketplace with content. SlideRocket users can purchase credits which can then be used to bring assets from the marketplace into their presentations. SlideRocket takes care of all the usage rights. In theory this could also end up being a way for other SlideRocket users to monetize their content but Mitch said right now they're not opening it up for the general public to upload content.

The interface and the functionality remain mostly the same, but they're still very impressive. SlideRocket supports importing from PowerPoint and lets you create more interactive applications by enabling SWF embedding. It remains one of the best examples of creating real applications inside of the web browser. Congrats to the team on the launch. You can sign up for a free account at SlideRocket.com.

The New York Times is using the new platform which allows for dynamic streaming so that users get the best quality video stream that their bandwidth allows. The portal looks like it has a lot of great content across all of the New York Times' categories. They look like they're using preroll ads. With the impressive brand of the New York Times, advertisers could be more than happy to jump in and advertise on the site, especially with the economic downturn looming. This is a good move for the Times and another indication of rich media becoming more important in every facet of content creation.

Sure the multi-touch stuff is great, and it adds, but the iPhone is a nearly flawless device from the silicon to the software. It's exactly what most people want in a phone and it helped show that the vision of "one device that does almost everything" was actually possible. Some of that is good hardware engineering, but largely it's due to software and how that software links all the pieces. Look at how easy it is to sync the iPhone with your music, photos, or applications. And how easy it is to purchase those things. That's good software design.

When you nail the user experience, you go mainstream and you make a lot of money. Web 2.0 has given us a ton of great building blocks. Social networking, the web as a delivery mechanism, real time collaboration, the cloud - all of those things really started becoming realities during the Web 2.0 boom. So from a technology standpoint, we've established a good baseline. But in order to really make a difference you've got to put a better experience on it. That's essentially the promise of rich Internet applications. And as more and more companies pour money and resources into design, you're going to start seeing real, tangible dividends in terms of user adoption and revenue.

Web 2.0 came along and turned software on its head. The software business is having to rethink how it does things. And as part of that transformation, design and experience are taking center stage. With the plethora of design-centric software development platforms out there, it's never been more fun and interesting to build software. It's one reason why I'm excited about RIAs and also why it's great to see the iPhone do so well. If you put the design time in, you are going to be more successful. Keep that in mind as you're looking to build the new generation of software.

When I was at the EffectiveUI offices in Denver I got to try the glasses on a check it out. It was one of the most fun things I've seen built on top of RIA technology. I'd love to see this become a wider trend. The combination of rich media power and easy interface design makes RIAs a perfect medium for this. As both Flash and Silverlight start to add more functionality around video processing and start to take advantage of the hardware more, we could see more scenarios like this enabled. Now we just need to make it easier to hook up to external devices.

There is a video that TechCrunch posted below.

A couple of the other highlights include new APIs and dynamic streaming. The new APIs are expose in both Flash and JavaScript so that regardless of the technology you're using, you can still get in and manipulate or access various parts of the video. Using the APIs you can pull out metadata, make changes to the playlist, or even alter how the video plays. It's going to mean that developers and site creators can easily customize what and how they want things to appear on their sites. Dynamic streaming lets content creators encode multiple versions of a video at different bitrates so that the user gets the highest quality version available. Brightcove detects the bandwidth and then based on settings that the content creator establishes, the user gets the best possible quality video stream.

All in all Brightcove 3 is a big leap forward in giving the people who create video a ton of control over how that video behaves. It's a good step for the rich media world and a great example of where the industry needs to go.

After listening to the Q&A from the press conference today (recording here), digging into some of the details, and reading some of the commentary on various blogs, there are a few things that I don't quite understand about the announcement today. I think part of this is because there wasn't a whole lot of new news from the announcement and it was more of a direction announcement than anything. Of course, I work for Adobe, so I look at the world differently. The end result is that it's great Silverlight 2 is finally out in the wild. As an RIA enthusiast and an Adobe employee I've witnessed that Adobe does its most innovative work when both our community and our competitors push us. But there are a few things that struck me as odd from the release.

The 1 in 4 Number
Scott Guthrie said that "already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed" but I'm not quite sure what that number means. Ben Romano from the Seattle Times noticed it too and it seems like an odd metric to use. The numbers game is a little bit bogus everywhere because there are so many ways to measure things: downloads, penetration, etc. The other numbers show that Silverlight is gaining traction, but it's hard for developers to do a direct penetration comparison with Flash right now.

Linux
In the Q&A, Tim Anderson asked about Linux support. Right now Silverlight has partial support for 1.0 (though it doesn't include video or MP3 playback, two of the main features of Silverlight 1.0) and there is no support for 2 on Linux right now. As Tim notes, it's misleading to tout the cross platform aspect of Silverlight without an actual release. It's also surprising that there was absolutely nothing in terms of a roadmap for Linux. My hunch is that they wanted something to announce for PDC and this may be it. As Brian Goldfarb mentioned in the Q&A session, Miguel de Icaza, who runs the Moonlight effort, has a session at PDC although his session doesn't say anything about Silverlight/Moonlight so I'm not sure what to make of that.

Eclipse Support
This is the one I was most bummed about. The announcement about Eclipse support for Silverlight is a big deal. As a Mac developer I've been waiting for a way to build Silverlight apps on my Mac (what better way to scope out the competition than to start building apps on their platform). But the release of Eclipse4sl is currently Windows only with support coming from others "soon". I agree that it makes sense for Microsoft to woo developers outside the Microsoft ecosystem, but why use Eclipse on Windows when you have Visual Studio? Ask any developer and they will tell you Visual Studio is basically a gold standard for IDEs. Even more, as part of the press release they announced that Silverlight support extends to Visual Studio 2008 Express, the free version of Visual Studio. So if I can use the free version of arguably the best IDE out there to create Silverlight 2 apps, why do I want to use Eclipse? Hopefully "soon" really does mean soon for Eclipse Silverlight support on the Mac.

The other parts of the announcement are significant. Opening up the components is great, especially considering the gigantic ecosystem of Microsoft developers out there. Nick Hoover asked about Silverlight inside Microsoft and the response was that over 100 campaigns had been run with Silverlight. Most of these seem to be very video centric, but I can only assume more actual applications will be coming from the world's largest software maker.

Now that Silverlight 2 is out, the RIA battle heats up more. As I mentioned above, that's a good thing for me or anyone who wants to watch Adobe and Microsoft add features and functionality. I'm looking forward to being able to start talking about Silverlight 3 and Flash Player 11 soon.

Silverlight adoption continues to grow rapidly, with penetration in some countries approaching 50 percent and a growing ecosystem that includes more than 150 partners and tens of thousands of applications. During the 17 days of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, NBCOlympics.com, powered by Silverlight, had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the average time on the site (from 3 minutes to 27 minutes) and Silverlight market penetration in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. Broadcasters in France (France Televisions SA), the Netherlands (NOS), Russia (Sportbox.ru) and Italy (RAI) also chose Silverlight to deliver Olympics coverage online.

The 50 percent penetration in some countries is what jumps out at me right away. I'm not sure if that's for Silverlight 1 or the Silverlight 2 beta. I'd assume the latter. But there are a few other very interesting announcements in the press release.

One is that Microsoft is going to be working with Soyatec to bring Silverlight development capabilities to Eclipse, which in theory means that we could finally have Mac and possibly even Linux development tools for Silverlight. According to the press release this will also be free. A technology preview of the tool is available now (I'm downloading as we speak - but the current tool is only available for Windows).

There was supposed to be an event with Scott Guthrie this morning but the dial in doesn't work for me. I'll be watching the recording later and should have more info later today.

As I've mentioned before, the hardest part of the online/offline problem is synchronization. I'm not exactly sure how Zoho is implementing that part of offline Zoho Mail but I have to wonder if one of the reasons that Google hasn't added support for Gears yet is that they're spending a lot of time on the synchronization problem. Both Adobe and Microsoft have products that help handle online/offline synchronization. Adobe has LiveCycle Data Services and Microsoft has the Microsoft Sync Framework. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Google was working on something similar and looking at how to bake it into Gears.

An open source synchronization platform would be a big deal and would go a long way towards blending the browser and the desktop. In a lot of ways I think that's one of the major problems that has to be solved before we move on to the next generation of RIAs. I've been doing some thinking about the cloud and RIAs recently but you can't fully jump into that unless you make it easy for developers to use the same piece of data wherever they are.

David Tucker over at InsideRIA is also doing a podcast titled the Weekly RIA RoundUp. It's basically a rundown of the biggest RIA-related news so it's a great way to catch up on what you may have missed during the week.

Using AdSense inside of RIAs has been all but impossible until now. Scribd had a hack that allowed them to show AdSense inside of their Flash-based iPaper but beyond that there haven’t been a lot of good examples of using AdSense inside of RIAs. In fact advertising inside of rich Internet applications is something that continues to be difficult to do based on the current web model. Matthew Johnson from blist has some good thoughts on this.

My hope is that AdSense for Games can be a driver for helping bring together Google’s advertising platform into the new real-time RIA experiences on the web. It continues to amaze me that a platform like Flash which is so much a part of advertising on the web has yet to really find away to incorporate that advertising in its applications.

We keep getting closer. As ScottGu says, it's not that far off, and I've heard rumors to that effect. Microsoft recently had a bunch of independent developers in Redmond to go over the Sivlerlight roadmap, so I expect big things once Microsoft ships Silverlight 2. I think in general most developers are happy with the level of innovation that Adobe and Microsoft have been throwing into their respective projects. Eventually, however, I wouldn't be surprised to see Flash Player and Silverlight diverge a bit. I think they'll always compete at a basic and feature level, but I think it's pretty obvious that the larger strategy of the two companies is different and I think Flash and Silverlight play a core role in those respective strategies. As each runtime becomes more driven by a larger strategy, innovation may start to happen in different areas. I just hope that everyone keeps swapping ideas.

Microsoft has also been busy on the Ajax front. They announced today that they're incorporating support for jQuery into Visual Studio. I'm a big fan of what Microsoft has done with Ajax going back to the way they supported it in Silverlght 1. What's really interesting is seeing the support for ADO.NET Data Services, which is a very, very big deal. Now more JavaScript developers have an easy, native entry point for writing apps that include Microsoft's Data Services stack. That's going to be significant.

We're seeing a huge explosion in the use of rich media during the election. We saw an example with Silverlight being used to stream the Democratic National Convention live and now we're seeing what I hope is a big trend - incorporating other data into the live streams. The power of using rich media in RIAs goes hand in hand with how much extra data we can bring in. That's what makes it so much better than TV: we've got the web at our fingers! Why shouldn't that be more interactive? This is a good first step, and I hope we see more down the road.

To participate all you have to do is tag your Tweets with #current and it will show up during the debate. Now if only we could get a backchannel that the candidates actually looked at and responded to.

The beta 2 includes a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements including some new features:

• Enhanced application performance through improved compiler register allocation
• New default look and feel for controls
• Ability for Curl applets to control page views when using the embedded browser API
• Support for encryption in SQLite APIs
• Ability to leverage the newly released Curl Development tools for Eclipse (CDE)

The encrypted SQLite databases are nice and the improved controls are a great touch. Curl continues to support Mac, Windows, and Linux with the Nitro release as well.

They had a great presence at Web 2.0 Expo NYC. I'll be posting my slides from my talk later, but I got some great feedback and there were a lot of people interested in the RIA aspect of Web 2.0. I think the market is still alive and well. You can see past info on Curl here.

There were some snippets of Silverlight news, or perhaps clarifications. Guthrie said the plug-in is getting 1.5 million installations a day, and that these will upgrade automatically to version 2.0, the .NET version, when it is released later this year. Unlike the beta, Silverlight 2.0 will have proper accessibility support, but H.264 capability will not appear until a future version. Guthrie also hinted that a 3D API is under development. Further controls, such as a Rich Text Editor, will be delivered as add-ons within the lifetime of version 2.0.

The 1.5 million download number is interesting, and I'd assume that most folks are downloading the beta which will auto upgrade. I also like the strategy of rolling out components as add-ons. That would even allow them to ship third party components if required, like Telerik's Silverlight set. I'll be curious to see how that process works but it could be a great community builder if they have some way of approving and adding components instead of just a standard dot release.

PDC is shaping up to be a big deal of an event for RIA developers. Along with what I'm assuming will be a Silverlight 2 release, we should get more info about the next gen of WPF as well as some additional info (and hopefully SDKs) around Live Mesh. Microsoft has so many pieces and I like the new focus on design as well as creating a pretty wide-ranging platform on which to deploy. You get the desktop story, the browser story, the cloud story, and everything else. One thing I heard came out of reMIX UK was that they're doing a ton of API changes to Silverlight to make it more like WPF. Keep an eye on that. Silverlight can act as an up sell to WPF and by blending the two technologies it's easier to get developers to hop back and forth.

He ignores the Firefox community. The life of a Firefox user does improve as the user base grows. A more vibrant community means better add-ons, bug fixes, security patches, phishing reports, translations/dictionaries, etc. -- all members benefit. Mozilla is already providing the sort of incentive he describes. Sure, there may be ways to improve, but I don't think they're missing the point.

More users mean a better Firefox expereince. Just like a fax machine. But does any of that stuff matter? As one comment so eloquently put it:

Community! Addons! Coolness! Long live the Firefox!

Addons! Addons! Addons! Long Live the Extensions!

There, fixed that for you.

Addons are the one thing that really drive the Firefox community and drove adoption. And Google's going to implement that. Talk of patches, translations and whatever else the "community" builds are overblown. Users just want addons and that's what drives adoption.

Google Chrome has gigantic implications for the web. The next 6-9 months, especially when Google releases a Mac version, are going to be drastically different. We're undoubtedly going to see some of the HTML5 stuff implemented in Chrome/Gears and I don't think Firefox will be able to keep up. Throw in Google's ability to drive distribution and browser war 2.0 could be a quick one.

So what makes Jibidee different from all of the other webtops out there? One, I don't think they're trying to bite off too much. They're not trying to replicate everything Windows does. They're focused on the very specfic niche of the more consumer market. It isn't trying to compete with things like Google docs or replace an operating system. It's goal is to essentially make people's lives a bit simpler by allowing them to store and collaborate with organizers and lists. The other thing that stands out is the user interface, which is an important element for going after the consumer space. They built the application in Flex and really focused on the user interface. It's fun, colorful, intuitive and best of all, can be customized to look however you want.

I also like the fact that they have a business model coming right out of the gate. They're using the "freemium" model which gives you a certain number of "sheets" for free and then there are tiers above that. I'm a big fan of the freemium model but it does take some scale to achieve. Jibidee was a semifinalist in the TechCrunch 50.

This is a pretty big deal as it makes Silverlight a possibility for companies that don't want to use Windows Media for whatever reason. And when you combine this with last month's news that Microsoft invested in Move Networks, and it's clear Microsoft is very interested in online video. There's no word on when this version of Silverlight would be available. I suppose there's a chance that it could be released when Silverlight 2 goes out (which should be sometime soon) but more likely this is a Silverlight 3 feature. Update: Josh Catone got confirmation of this.

Content - Aside from a couple of niche shows, Joost just didn't have the content draw that a site like Hulu has. Content is king and new content seems to be in demand. Joost couldn't keep up.

Use of the Desktop - I'm not really sure why Joost used the desktop. It didn't provide any desktop-like features. You couldn't save things to your hard drive to watch them offline. Essentially Joost was just a desktop application that let you go full screen. When Joost was released, the web didn't have that, but Silverlight and Flash Player advanced enough where it became trivial to do in the browser.

Lack of Link to the Web - Joost had a "Share" button, but it only used IM and Email. People want to share and embed things on their MySpace/Facebook pages. This is something I think a lot of rich media desktop apps (including Adobe Media Player) don't get. If you want to do a desktop client you have to provide the benefits of the desktop in the context of the web. Let people take content from the desktop player and embed/share it. Ideally, even provide a way to access a bulk of the content from a web portal.

In the end I think a hybrid approach is the way of the world going forward. Despite the buzz from Chrome, the desktop still has a lot of benefits as an application platform. But the web browser has to be central to every strategy. The companies that can easily blend those to worlds - and then incorporate the mobile world as well - will have a leg up on everyone else.

The NFL is a really, really tough nut to crack. As the biggest sports league in America in terms of revenue and viewership, they can basically do anything they want. And their incentive to take risks is very low.

The video quality is pretty good and I love the fact that you can switch between cameras. They've got 5 live streams going at the same time and it's going to be a great way to check out replays. And because it's live, they're still able to include advertising. The killer is a lack of full screen. The Olympics Silverlight app did this as well and I can't figure it out. That should be such a key, easy feature. Hopefully this isn't the start of a trend.

I think this is going to be a great example of Flash, a great showcase for RIAs, and hopefully a good point of comparison between the Olympic Silverlight player.

Over the past couple of years we've gone from rich Internet applications being a loosely defined buzzword to a de facto standard of web development. It's almost easier to describe things that aren't RIAs than it is to describe things that are RIAs. Technologies like Flash and Silverlight get most association with rich Internet applications, but any technology that is pushing the boundaries of user experience - including Ajax - should be counted among the rich Internet application population. And Tim Anderson makes a good point that what we're really seeing is the next generation of the client.

I'm not saying that we've arrived in terms of "success", but I think across the web there is broad acceptance that a good client side experience is important. In a lot of ways this makes the RIA space even more exciting because there are a lot of new battles to be fought. How will HTML5 evolve and compete with technologies like Flash and Silverlight for animation, video, and richness? How can developer and designer tooling come together to make it easy for designers to craft a great experience for the client side? How do traditional server-side web developers come to the client? Or do they? One of the great enablers of RIAs has been a pretty clear separation between server and client. People are creating web services on the server side and freeing them up to be consumed by basically any client technology.

As we continue to move forward, from both a Google Chrome/Adobe AIR delivery perspective, as well as a HTML/Ajax/Flash/Silverlight runtime/technology perspective, developers end up winning. I don't know that client side programming has ever been more interesting or more powerful.

So it has everything you'd expect from a browser-based operating system and gets right to the heart of the problems. By making the browser more stable and more usable for long periods of time, they've created something very, very interesting, and something that should be a huge win for RIA developers everywhere - even Flash or Silverlight developers. So the easy answer is "Windows Killer". But I didn't see anything in the comic about device drivers. I didn't see anything about hardware acceleration. In an extra bit of irony the beta is only available on Windows. So who's in trouble? Firefox, even if they don't acknowledge it.

Firefox has become synonymous with memory leaks and an antiquated code base. Despite a very good, lucrative arrangement for both sides, Google started from scratch and used WebKit as the HTML renderer. Firefox's market share is still somewhere in the 25% range, while IE controls the bulk of the rest. So while it's making inroads, it still appeals most to the hard-core geek crowd. And add-is are a major selling point over Safari right now. With Google Chrome you get the WebKit engine, you get add-ins, and you get a ton of more useful features in your browser. That same crowd that flocked to Firefox is going to embrace Google Chrome with open arms. The crowd of folks who just use whatever comes with their operating system? Not so much. Google will make more inroads than Firefox can, but it's still going to take a ton of market-share from everyone's feel-good open source browser.

I'm very, very excited about Google Chrome. This is a big day for RIA developers because Google started from scratch. They're building a train that will actually be able to run on the high speed tracks of the internet. We've been pushing and pushing and pushing for a long time, but the browsers just haven't been able to keep up with demands. Google Chrome should be a big leap forward.

I watched the Mozilla Ubiquity video last night and it struck a chord. The crew over at Mozilla Labs is doing some very cool, forward thinking stuff. In the process, I think they're evolving what the browser is into something more of an RIA platform. Rafe over at WebWare makes a couple of good points about Ubiquity and IE8. What's happening to web pages? It seems like they're going away and I think that's a good thing.

The web's page-based model has been slowly dying for a long time. We just don't interact with the web as pages any more. Sure there's a lot of infrastructure built up around that model but we're seeing more and more applications reside in the browser and fewer and fewer actual pages. What pages we do see are mostly related to SEO or content. So why should those static, boring pages continue to exist? Legacy? All that matters is the content on those pages. That's what's so compelling about Ubiquity. It takes those static pages, grabs the content, and allows you to do something useful with it. I'm a huge fan of Microformats and Ubiquity is kind of like Microformats and Greasemonkey on steroids. You get content when and how you want it and you can interact with it in a meaningful way.

As a developer, I think what makes Ubiquity a platform is that people are going to want to create content for it. I don't see they how they could abstract or generalize something like the Yelp example. Just like a lot of startups today are looking to create AIR applications for the desktop, I see the same phenomenon with Ubiquity. You're going to want to expose your content like that to the user. And Ubiquity seems like the closest thing we've got.

So props to the Mozilla Labs team. You're definitely pushing the envelope and I think you're doing a lot to help move the web in a good direction. The more we can abstract the data, the better, richer experiences we can build around that. For some that may be the command line, but it's not hard to see other applications popping up that would put a GUI face on the Ubiquity infrastructure.

In fact, the majority of online video for the Olympics was delivered in Flash. There's a great blog post up by John O'Donovan, the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC about their Olympic numbers. For Beijing they streamed nearly 40 million videos with up to 5.5 million Olympic videos watched each day at an average of around 3 million. In total there were 6.5 million hours of video delivered using Flash by the BBC. What those numbers don't include are streams from the BBC iPlayer or the mobile platforms. It's all Flash in the browser. Compare that to 72 million videos in the states, and it shows that in a country much smaller than the US, online the Olympics was a hit.

More importantly, the numbers out of China are fantastic. In the first 10 days CCTV's website streamed Olympic coverage to 100 million people according to the New York Times (registration required). CCTV used an innovative system which combined Flash Media Server with their own P2P technology which made it easy for anyone in China to watch the Olympics regardless of bandwidth. So in China we'll have 2,900 hours of Olympic content backed up and ready to watch with Flash Video.

What's also interesting to see is how the BBC got more comfortable over the course of the Olympics with their video content. By the end of the Olympics they were actually putting the live video stream on the front page of the BBC News homepage as the lead story. That's pretty impressive and I think it's a very good sign that rich media is creeping even more deeply into a role as a primary way to consume content.

Update: Got a note from Eric Schmidt, Director Media and Advertising Evangelis about the Move plugin:

The DNCC chose to use Move as a means to tackle their live high definition streaming needs. The Move install is part of any Move experience (Silverlight or Flash).

We are leveraging Move's CMS system to manage content and Level 3's CDN infrastructure to deliver the video to the Silverlight player. The Move "plugin" hands video frames to Silverlight for compositing, etc.

Last year Microsoft and Move announced a partnership which would allow Silverlight content to be used on top of Move's dynamic streaming technology. At the time I didn't think the Move plugin would be required, but if they're using that for the DNC site then it looks like it will be required. Or this could be a helper to Move to get more plugin distribution.

Anyone have more info on the reason or purpose of the Move plugin?

Photosynth

Boats by Chihuly Chihuly has always been famous for his glasswork. In this Photosynth you get to see it like never before. You can zoom around the boat, and drill into detail. It’s a perfect example of how art and technology can blend to provide a really great user experience.

Climbing Aegialis
Not only is the scenery good, but making a person the focal point of a synth makes for a very interesting visualization. As you click through different views you can watch the climber move along the rock. As the background changes you almost get the sense that you’re the one doing all the hard work.

Halo 3 Zanzibar
Played Halo 3? Then this level will be familiar. Using screenshots of the game we’re able to jump into the middle of the Halo world like it was any other place on Earth. It’s got a bunch of photos and it’s really cool to zoom out and watch the 3D shapes form.

Stonehenge
National Geographic did a bunch of Photosynths and I thought Stonehenge was one of the best. They took more than 400 photos of the ancient monument which gives the user complete control over what and how they want to see it. It’s one of the more complete synths on the site and you can spend hours crawling over the rocks and stones.

Scoble Family Room
Yup, Scoble synthed his family room. But in doing show he proved that Photosynth is also great for small spaces and family memories. With only 50 photos, Robert was basically able to recreate his room which makes for a great way to share with friends and family (and the entire Internet). But the small space means it’s easy to move around and is a great demo for showing how well Photosynth can stitch together basically anything.

There was a time when IT departments could get away with forcing employees to use complicated and hard-to-use software. The average worker didn’t know that better alternatives were out there. But as workers gain experience with consumer-focused software – either in their personal lives or at the office – they’re starting to realize that software can be easy to use and quick to get started on. It started with productivity boosters like instant messaging and collaboration software, but it’s crept into the realm of software that’s traditionally the realm of IT departments, such as sales automation.

She's got a good point. As users spend more time with complex RIAs on the consumer side, they're making the obvious leap that some of this technology could make their jobs easier and themselves more productive. Hopefully that means that more companies will spend the bit extra on creating an RIA solution that works for their users as opposed to stuffing bad user experiences down on people.

The mobile version appears only to work on Windows Mobile devices but the API uses a combination of GPS, cell towers, and WiFi/IP information to get a fix on where you are. It works anywhere that you've got Ajax as Dion's example shows.

The release comes as part of Gears 0.4 which in addition to the Geolocation API, also provides onprogress events for HTTP downloads and uploads and some localized dialogues. the onprogressevent will be a big deal for anyone doing large uploads in the browser.

Just as with the Olympics, this could be an interesting experiment to see how a blend of traditional media and new media can affect ratings. As we saw with the Olympics, traditional media still rules the advertising roost. It draws the most viewers, it pulls in the most money, and it isn't going away any time soon. But increasingly content seems to be moving to a "consume it how you want it" model where big content creators (if you can attach that term to the NBA) offer a variety of ways to consume content. I've called these "touch points" in the past but always talked about them in terms of the web. Now big media companies are getting into the touch point game.

In the end, this kind of thing is great for the web. It's the first step in blending the TV and web experiences. A lot of people focus on interactive TV as a next step, but it seems to be moving more in the web direction. People like their TV the way it is, but with the technologies on the web, you can create that interactive content and increase the granularity of your analytics. I think the web-based TV experience will end up being superior than the general TV experience because of RIAs and better data. Keeping it on the big screen is still important but ultimately the web provides better platforms with which to make the most out of video content. I hope other sports leagues follow suit.

I won't add much commentary to Tim's excellent post up on the Register because I work for Adobe and I don't want to get into a bunch of nonsensical arguments about Flash versus Silverlight. But I will say that Tim Anderson is one of the very few tech journalists who really, really gets the RIA space. He knows all of the technologies from the major companies and how they're meant to be used.

The last one in Tim's hate list is the one that kills me: You have to develop on Windows. This is particularly a problem for the Expression design tools, since designers have a disproportionately high number of Macs. I know Microsoft sells Windows and that's how they make money, but I've been doing some C# development lately and it really sucks to have to go into VMWare to load up my development environment. If anyone has any good tips on doing C# development on a Mac, let me know. Mono seems halfway there but I haven't found a great tooling option yet.

This comes at a good time. With the improvements in Flash search this would expose all of that video data as text to search engines. It would make searching video easier as well as drilling down into specific parts of the video based on content.

I still hate that everything boils down to text and that video and audio haven't become first class data on the web but text is still the name of the game. The easier we make it to shoehorn rich media into the text world, the easier it will be to insert them into more core parts of the web. It still feels hacky to me, but hopefully it's a good first step.

Even if you're staunchly in the Ajax/HTML camp, data visualizations are a great way to incorporate some plugin-based functionality into your applications. As far as HTML and JavaScript have come, they still can't come close to this kind of valuable data visualization. It looks like there was even some interest by Dojo in creating a JS interface to Flare.

When a company like Google, which has a ton of redundancy built in, or Amazon S3, has issues, we've got to have applications and systems that let us continue to work. And Google has a built-in solution for people with Gears. So why haven't they rolled it out yet? Because synchronization is a really, really hard problem. And I think that problem is what prevents a lot of services like Gmail like incorporating offline functionality. The web needs to focus on solving synchronization so that outages like these don't have to affect productivity like they do currently.

But one number I thought was interesting was that according to the Wall Street Journal, 90% of people watched the TV exclusively while only 0.2% watched the online version exclusively. But a decent number, 10%, watched both TV and the online version. This is the number I'm most interested in tracking through the games because I think that's the best example of how people are changing their viewing habits towards rich media online. Giving up TV entirely would be a little ridiculous, but if the big media companies can augment TV coverage with more detailed (or more obscure) coverage on the web, that's a winning formula.

In general, I've been pretty happy with the NBC and the Silverlight Olympics experience. Though some of the criticisms are well founded, that's more to do with failure in the actual application than it is technology.

More info at Beet.tv.

For those not familiar with In-Stream, it's the advertising framework from DoubleClick that adds both distribution and analytics to video advertising. Being able to actually make money off of rich media content is priority number one and I've been impressed with how targeted Microsoft has been in that goal with Silverlight. The fact that they're using it with the Olympics is good and it would be interesting to see how much revenue this actually brings in for NBC.

There's more discussion on Techmeme.

There's only minor value in standalone video content. Sure, YouTube is popular (and even YouTube has started enabling related videos right inside of the player) but "video in a square" is going to get less and less useful as the web involves. What's going to be important is how people incorporate video into the overall experience. Video adds that extra real time/real life element. But being able to bring in related content and add that to the video experience is what really makes using video great. We can have that very human interaction and feel with video but then drill down into data as our video is intermingled with text, charts, and numbers.

Watching video of the Olympics is great, but that's not any different from television. Watching video of the Olympics, being able to instantly get information about medal standings and athletes right inside of the same application without having to open up a new tab and search is the kind of interactive experience that the web should be all about. The video tag just treats video as another box on the page like a div tag or an image. That's going to be good up to a point, but as we move around video standards and the web becomes more distributed people are going to consume the exact same video clip in different ways (desktop apps, the browser, mobile devices, offline) so the content and the format become a commodity. To really stand out and draw people into your video application you'll have to start providing that interactive content.

That's a core part of the RIA experience and it should be a core part of the web video experience. If this summer is any indication we're moving in that direction and I don't think the video tag will be able to keep up.

One of the most compelling features of JavaFX is the ability to seamlessly move between the browser and the desktop. Being able to drag JavaFX content from the browser and turn it into a desktop application is pretty compelling for users who want that desktop persistence. It's also going to be partially open-sourced under the GPL which provides the open source community with a more open RIA technology than they have today.

I really liked Tim Anderson's analysis on the topic. The install experience worries me from a user perspective, but being able to plug into the entire Java ecosystem is a plus. I'm looking forward to kicking the tires of the preview SDK but in general the impression I get is that this is a good step for Sun. The more RIAs we have the better and getting Sun into the RIA game brings a lot more developer eyeballs.

Now, with the acquisition, they're going to become a major player. They have BT's infrastructure and money behind them so they can scale, reach new customers, and offer more services. And they can start getting deals in areas that would have previously been off limits.

The beauty of Ribbit is two-fold. One, that it's very easy to create voice-centric applications or integrate voice into your RIAs. The APIs that they've created span the range from making a phone call, to getting contact information or sending an SMS. The platform allows you to pick and choose what features you want to use, so you can bite off a little bit or create a full-fledged phone dashboard as part of your application. That means any application can start to add voice in a way that makes sense. The second part of Ribbit that's so nice is that they're building an ecosystem to let developers make money. Through the Ribbit Store, developers can build widgets and then price them and distribute them. By providing a way to make money and a way to distribute, they're working inside the iTunes model but for Flash. I think it's the first instance of a "SWF" store where Flash developers can deploy widgets.

It's a little bit funny to think about "Silicon Valley's First Phone Company" being owned by a British company, but this is a good day for data-enabled voice and voice as a core data type for your applications.

I've long felt that rich Internet applications and the online advertising market are deeply intertwined. Not necessarily on the pure display ads side of things, but as a way to build brand and deliver more pure forms of advertising online. AdAge brings up the quintissential example: Nike Plus.

More marketers are creating their own media and their own consumer experiences. Nike Plus, of course, is the perennial example of marketing taking an advertising budget and creating a real-world utility that essentially becomes proprietary media.

I'm excited to see more companies jump in and create experiences like Nike Plus that cater very heavily to a brand and bring with it all of the various aspects of the "lifestyle" you'd want. In Nike Plus' case, those are things like exercise, fitness, and achieving goals. The added community aspect makes it easy to share (and in theory, keeps you on track).

The Roles of Agencies
One impact of this new advertising medium is going to be increased importance of agencies and development shops. R/GA did the Nike Plus site and were able to use their skills in the interactive world to create a high quality branded experience. By all accounts, the Nike Plus site has been a big success. As other companies look into creating something similar, it will be the agencies with strong interactive ties that benefit and perhaps lessen the importance of the pure advertising agencies. RIA skills will be in even more demand and being able to completely customize and design an RIA will be an important skill set.

I've still got a lot of faith that advertising on the internet is the holy grail. It's easier to track, easier to change campaigns, and it's more global. We just don't have the right hooks or techniques yet to make the jump. But the more experimentation we get the better. I think the hype is well-deserved.