Adobe MAX 2008 Ends and MAX 2009 Begins

DIGG IT!     2 Comments Published Friday, January 30, 2009 at 11:49 AM .

I just arrived in San Francisco this morning returning from MAX Japan 2008. The event was great and it was a great way to end the MAX 2008 conference season. Japan had record attendance at 1900 attendees and the community was there in full effect. Overall 2008 was a year of great change for MAX, we added a new track "ENVISION", we added 4 Unconferences, and we built the content (sessions & speakers) different than past years. Overall it was an amazing success, even with the economic downturn we had record attendance at all 3 events.

MAX 2009 will be my 3rd year coordinating content (keynotes and sessions) for the event. Over the past 2 years we have built a foundation delivering a better quality event (process and team) while at the same time growing attendance(2X in 2 years). So what should you expect in 2009?

MAX 2009 keys for success:
- Openness
- More Community
- Better Speakers & Content

We are going to build the content for Adobe MAX 2009 openly under the Camp process we established last year. The goal is to make the content at MAX the best ever, content is king. To start, we are making changes to our speaker benefits to eliminate any barrier to having the best speakers at MAX. We are also going to get the community much more deeply involved in MAX content creation, planning, and speaker selection within the Camp process. Additionally we are going to expand the Unconference program and better integrate it into MAX overall.

To drive all this planning, the team has created the MAX Open Working Group on Adobe Groups to get anyone involved in MAX planning at a very early stage(9 months away!). We will leverage the MAX Open Working Group site to build all the content from session proposals to Camp Management to Session ratings and comments. Ideally anyone who wants to contribute to the conference can join us online. It will take a lot of work but this level or transparency and openness is essential to making MAX a leading industry event and the best event possible for attendees.

Camps and Camp Managers
In 2008 internally our team built all MAX content using Camps and Camp Managers. If you look at MAX as an whole there are about 36 biased interests that make up the content, examples include: RIA Design, Web Standards, Photoshop, ActionScript, Mobile Development, Web Design, ColdFusion, etc. Our first task was to define each biased interest group into a Camp and find a person passionate about the camp's interest to lead/manage/own the camp. Each camp was then allocated a number of sessions to balance into 3 tracks: 50% in DEVELOP, 35% DESIGN, and 15% ENVISION. Each camp manager then picked the best sessions from the entire pool of proposed sessions that best met their camps interests. The camp managers were given complete independent control over sessions and speakers but were limited to the submitted session pool even internally. Last year especially, we saw a lot of new faces speaking at MAX and overall session averaged 20% better than prior years in quality in the surveys, these were largely due to the Camp and Camp Manager process. The process placed content control in the hands of the Camp Manager allowing them to do what was best for their biased interest group or Camp. It also made one person accountable for the quality of one set of sessions and this drove better session quality.

In 2008 a large majority of Camp Managers were Adobe internal, but this year we want a better balance of external Camp Managers. Given the success with externally managed Unconferences, MAX will be a much better event if community leaders manage more Camps at MAX. I really believe that this type of change will result in a much better content and event for everyone attending. Better still it lets attendees get involved in building the event they attend and that is great all around.

If you are interested in helping build MAX please join the MAX Open Working Group as we begin the process of making MAX 2009 the best yet. I am looking forward to working with you.

Cheers,

Ted :)

---

Flash Player 10 at 55% in 2 months and 100M AIR Installs

DIGG IT!     5 Comments Published Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 10:00 PM .

Today in the MAX Japan keynote Kevin Lynch announced that AIR passed 100 million installs and Flash Player 10 passed 55% penetration 2 months after release.

This is easily the fastest Flash Player has achieved this level of adoption. Better still Flash Player 10 should hit 80% installed by Q2 2009. It add to it AIR achieved 100M installs in early January. The penetration study should be online within hours.


Kevin announcing 55% in 2 months at MAX Japan Keynote.

Awesome!

Ted :)

---

Tsukiji Fish Market at 5am

DIGG IT!     5 Comments Published Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 12:52 PM .

Typically on the first night I arrive in Japan I wake up super early due to jet lag. This morning I decided to got to the fish auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market where they auction Tuna and fish all morning starting at 4am.



Unfortunately today they were closed but I really want to see the auction so I am going to go again tomorrow morning as I will probably wake up early anyway, I love jetlag. If anyone wants to join I will be leaving at 4:45am from the Grand Pacific La Daiba and plan to stay til 6:15am.

Loving Tokyo!

Ted :)

---

Headed to Adobe MAX Japan

DIGG IT!     2 Comments Published Sunday, January 25, 2009 at 11:41 AM .

Tommorrow I am flying to Tokyo, Japan for MAX Japan. As the last MAX of the 2008-2009 conference series, it is really great to close MAX with such a great event. The market for rich media has been growing rapidly in Japan. Just to give you an idea of the growth, the Tokyo Flex User Group has over 1500 members and there are 1800+ attendees registered for MAX Japan making this the largest event for Adobe in the Japanese market.

We are looking to make some great changes to MAX as a conference in 2009 and take the conference to the next level.

See you at MAX!

cheers,

Ted :)

---

Ip to Geolocation

DIGG IT!     34 Comments Published Saturday, January 24, 2009 at 9:18 PM .

I have been looking for a good geo-location API that I can host on my own server. I set this one up and want to see how close the results are in accuracy (please leave comments). The returned geolocation should match your ISP given proxies, overall it should be accurate down to city level.



Here are the JSON and XML versions.

It is pretty cool that you can derive a location from a single http request.

And to properly credit the database used:
"This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com/."

Cheers,

ted :)

---

Flex, Flash, Facebook - Building ACE Solitaire on Facebook ( Wed Jan 21 San Jose )

DIGG IT!     7 Comments Published Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 9:16 AM .

I am giving a presentation next week at the SILVAFUG SOUTH User Group Meeting on Jan. 21 in San Jose. The presentation covers my recent work building applications on the Facebook Platform with Flash and Flex. While building ACE Solitaire, I learned a ton about the Facebook APIs and how best to integrate Flash and Flex into building apps and plan to share all the details. The presentation will give an overview of the application architecture, how best to call the Facebook API's from Flash/Flex, and how best to provide a seamless user experience.



See you in San Jose Wed Jan 21!

cheers,

Ted :)

---

Adobe Stratus - Peer-2-Peer connection service for FP10 & AIR 1.5

DIGG IT!     9 Comments Published Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 12:19 PM .

Today Adobe launched a new Peer connection service called Adobe Stratus into beta. The service allows 2+ Flash Player 10 clients (or AIR 1.5 clients or mixed) connect directly to one another using a new protocol in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5 called RTMFP (UDP based). With a Stratus developer key you can now write peer-peer audio/video apps leveraging this new Adobe service.



It will be interesting to see how this changes things.

Cheers,

Ted :)

---

MAX 2008 Keynotes on AdobeTV

DIGG IT!     1 Comments Published Monday, January 12, 2009 at 3:05 PM .

We just posted the MAX keynotes on AdobeTV:

MAX 2008 DAY 1: Vectors of Innovation

MAX 2008 DAY 2: The Agency

Enjoy!

Ted :)

---

50 NEW MAX 2008 Sessions Posted on AdobeTV

DIGG IT!     2 Comments Published at 11:46 AM .

Today we completed posting an addition set of MAX 2009 sessions on AdobeTV.

MAX on AdobeTV

Cheers,

Ted :)

---

Brightcove Expands

DIGG IT!     2 Comments Published at 10:03 AM .

Looks like 2 ex-Adobe execs, Jeff Whatcott ( VP Sales ) and David Mendels ( Board ), have joined Brightcove. Brightcove has done an amazing job and as a customer they are clearly ahead of other players in the market. From the innovation in the Brightcove 3 platform to customer support, my team has been nothing but pleased with their service.

PRESS RELEASE

It will be interesting to see what Brightcove does in 2009.

Congrats to Jeff and David! Lead with Grenades!

Cheers,

Ted :)

---

ACE Solitaire, 2009 Resolution, Happy New Year

DIGG IT!     5 Comments Published Saturday, January 03, 2009 at 9:22 AM .

Ahhhhh the first post of a new year, Happy New Year! During the long holiday I decided to do something very different with my idle time and focused on finishing a Flash game I have worked on quietly for about 3 months called ACE Solitaire.



Become a FAN of ACE Solitaire

ACE Solitaire was build using ActionScript 3 and leverages some earlier code written by Darron Schall during the early IFBIN and ActionScript 3 days. The codebase has been almost entirely rewritten to support the features needed in ACE Solitaire and will soon leverage the full social aspects of Facebook. Currently the social aspects are limited but there is a lot more code to release in the next 2 days before I return to work.

The game is written in pure Old School AS3 using ActionScript Project in Flex Builder. The output SWF is 19K and that includes the card graphics made in Flash CS4, tiny tiny! The game is specifically designed to allow for long gameplay (4hrs in same session) and I tested the game running for 48hrs without any memory leaks or abnormal behavior. I also had some fun building forms with just Sprite, TextField, and Drawing API which is way fun if you haven't tried it, I just love TextEvent.LINK (later post)! One unique element is that I added in imaging support into the game so the app can upload screen shots to Facebook ( bug reports, high scores, shared games ). The game is also unique in that it supports FullScreen to allow you to play ACE Solitaire taking advantage of the full desktop real estate.

My recent work at Adobe (MAX+Groups+Video+Community) has really limited my ability to write software and this project scratched a huge itch for me personally. It really made me realize that in 2009 I need to write and blog about the code I write much more often. It is my top resolution for 2009 and I get so much enjoyment out of writing code that it really isn't work for me, it is fun. I guess once an evangelist, always an evangelist. With this project in particular it really helped to be a Solitaire addict. Over the holiday I think I played over 500+ games of ACE Solitaire.

Back to code, 2 more full day sprints!

Ted :)

---