“Flash City” follow up

Posted by Serge Jespers on Apr 2, 2009 in devices, Flash Player | Comments Off

I promised to give you an update on the “Flash City” stores. APRIL FOOLS!

While most of you got that immediately, it was funny to see that some people did fall for it. I won’t go in to too much detail because I don’t want to embarrass anyone ;-) but there was “this email” that really cracked me up this morning. Someone actually asked a team in our HQ in San Jose to get a briefing on the “Flash City” stores. So this post really is to just set the record straight. I guess no one really noticed the tag under which this article was filed.

However, when I was writing the story, I did realize that this may not be far off. Not that we are thinking about opening up Adobe branded retail stores but consumer electronics running Flash is already a reality. We already have mobile phones and set-top boxes. And with Broadcom, Intel and Texas Instruments putting Flash and AIR on their chipsets, how long do you think it will take before you see a refrigerator or a microwave with a Flash based UI? These chipsets make it very easy to add this functionality in a small form factor.

The Beagle Board is a great example of that. It uses Texas Instruments’ OMAP chipset which will soon get Flash and AIR capabilities. With this board being just 3″ x 3″ (7.6cm x 7.6cm), it wouldn’t be hard to put this in to a microwave or a fridge. There already are microwaves out there that can read barcodes and tell you the preferred cooking time. Put a Beagleboard in it with a nice display and you get a machine that can even give you tips from other users, play a video while you wait and give you recipes based on the product you are currently microwaving all with a nice and engaging user interface.

The Chumby is another great example. This hackable internet radio/digital picture frame/alarm clock has a touch screen, runs Linux in the back and has Flash Player as a front end. Basically, you can have the Chumby do anything you want and people have already built applications for it ranging from recipe to photo applications. You can even completely take it apart and build it in to oh… just about anything. Now if only Chumby would be available in Europe. I really want a new one. The pre-release model I got a few years back is sadly not up to date… hint hint ;-)

So… While I was kidding yesterday (April 1st), this may not be that far off. I would love to see Flash everywhere and slowly but surely we are getting there. Flash on!