Adobe jumps into the venture capital world

I just got out of the Adobe MAX keynote where Kevin Lynch announced some big news for the company. The biggest announcement by far was the news that Adobe will be creating a $100,000,000 venture fund that will be available to innovative companies using Adobe technology. According to Kevin, the fund will focus specifically on Apollo-based applications. Apollo is Adobe's still-in-alpha runtime for bringing cross-platform Rich Internet Applications to the desktop.

On top of the news of the fund, Kevin showed off Apollo applications by MySpace (a version of their IM client) and eBay (a bid management tool running on the desktop). There was also a fantastic word processor running on Flex built by the team at Virtual Ubiquity.

Clearly Adobe wants Apollo to succeed, and they have built what seems to be a very strong partnership structure. The $100,000,000 in capital that they are putting up in seed money to show off what Apollo can do is an indication of exactly how serious they are. There will be a ton more Apollo news in the next few days and I'm excited to see what comes out of it.