Photoshop your way to Flash On The Beach

Posted by on Aug 18, 2008 in Contest, Events | 2 comments

fotb_logo_small.jpgFlash On The Beach is only 5 weeks and 5 days away and (as always) the community is really buzzing about the impressive speaker list that includes Flash-rockstars like Erik Natzke, Grant Skinner, Joa Ebert and Branden Hall to name a few. Like last year, FOTB is likely going to sell out a few weeks before the event and if you didn’t get your tickets yet, you might want to hurry and get them now. AND/OR you may want to take your chance and enter this competition.

The European platform evangelism team is giving away 6 (in total) conference passes (a £499/€633 value) to Flash On The Beach 08. The only thing you have to do is get creative! Photograph or Photoshop yourself on the beach showing off your love for Flash, Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, … Upload your creation here before September 8, 2008 and each of us will pick our favorite entry. That person wins a full pass to Flash On The Beach 08. We will announce the winners on our blogs on September 12th!

Create a skin to win a ticket to MAX, a MacBook Air and a bundle of software

Posted by on Aug 11, 2008 in Contest, Flex | 1 comment

Earlier today, ScaleNine.com launched the “Skin To Win Challenge” sponsored by EffectiveUI and Adobe.

Juan Sanchez‘ website ScaleNine.com has an impressive collection of CSS skins for Flex applications. With this contest, he’s looking for new additions to this collection and the top three entries win some really cool prizes including a MacBook Air (with SSD!), tickets to MAX, CS3 Master Collection and Flex Builder.

The contest website has everything you need to get started, even if you’re completely new to Flex skinning! Andrew Shorten created a couple of tutorial videos to help you on your way to create your winning Flex skin!

I’m really looking forward to see the skins that come out of this contest. You have until October 10th to submit your entry so you better start now!

World’s biggest Olympics streaming project uses Flash

Posted by on Aug 4, 2008 in Flash Player, Flex, Industry, News | 15 comments

CCTV in China is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) television broadcasters in the world. They also own the online video rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games for mainland China and Macau. That’s over 200 million potential online viewers making this by far the world’s biggest Olympics streaming project. Next to the 3800 hours of pure Olympics coverage, they will make an additional 1200 hours of own Olympics-related content including full event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages. That’s a massive 5000 hours of Olympics content available to more than 200 million users! To deliver all this content in an engaging and hassle-free application, they picked Flash and Flex to get the job done.

The application itself not only features a massive library of online video but it also has live Olympic results, statistics, comprehensive bios, rules and expert analysis from CCTV’s Olympic media team, as well as social networking features that will enable fans to share aspects of their Olympic experience with friends.

Perhaps with this project the myth around Flash and Flash video not being able to handle large-scale projects is finally busted.

Links:
http://www.cctvolympics.com/
Adobe press release

UPDATE: Additionally, the IOC announced that it will launch an online channel to broadcast the Olympics to  77 territories. The video-on-demand channel will be available on YouTube meaning that the official Olympics channel is also using Flash technology.