Flash is great for social gaming. We all know that. But Flare3D is showing off the “next generation of social gaming” using the upcoming Molehill APIs. Molehill is going to bring Flash (and the web) to a whole new level!

Flash on!

(Hat tip @JosephLabrecque)

More exciting news for Flash developers coming out of CES this morning. Samsung and Adobe bring AIR to Smart TVs.

Samsung’s Smart TV platform (demonstrated at MAX 2010) will be the first to integrate support for AIR 2.5 for TV, making it easy for developers to build, distribute and monetize standalone applications through Samsung’s Smart TV applications store, Samsung Apps.

All of Samsung’s 2011 Smart TVs and Smart Blu-ray players will include support for Adobe AIR for TV and Samsung also announced plans to bring Flash Player 10.1 to its Smart TV browser.

Adobe is a key partner for Samsung and we are thrilled to be the first TV manufacturer to support Adobe AIR across the Samsung Smart TV platform,” said Boo-Keun Yoon, President of Samsung’s Visual Display Business. “Together, Samsung and Adobe are transforming the ways in which consumers interact with devices and content, providing rich, interactive applications built with industry-leading, cross platform tools.

Companies such as CNET, Epix and YouTube are already developing apps for Samsung’s TV app store. In the video below Don Woodward demonstrates what those apps look like on an AIR enabled TV.

You can already start building apps for the new Samsung TVs! Watch Don Woodward’s MAX 2010 session,“How to Develop AIR for TV Applications” and then check out the resource page on Adobe’s Devnet. Flash on!

If you’ve toyed around with netbooks, you know that they are not the fastest machines you can get these days. Playing HD video is out of the question… or… WAS out of the question. Today German site Notebook Journal posted a video showing a demo of a netbook running a new NVIDIA (partner in the Open Screen Project) graphics chip. The NVIDIA ION chip does hardware acceleration for Flash Video and – as you can see in the video below – does an amazing job at it.

The video starts by showing an HD clip on a device not using hardware acceleration. Around the 1:20 minute mark, you can see how big the difference is when using NVIDIA’s new chipset.

[Via CrunchGear & Engadget]

At Intel’s Developer Forum Engadget recorded a demo of an Intel (an Open Screen Project partner) based set-top box running a Flash based user interface and Flash based applications. The heart of this set-top box is Intel’s CE 3100 Media Processor which according to Engadget “combines an 800MHz Pentium M core with a proprietary video processing core all on one chip. That’s about as much power as a 1.2GHz Atom…“.

The video demonstrates the Flash UI on top of a Linux operating system. It shows how you can add Flash based applications on top of a video signal coming from the tuner and run full screen Flash based applications. The future is bright for the Flash Platform! Flash on!

If you’re not in Milan for MAX Europe, you actually missed the coolest Cocomo demo ever ;-) Andrew and I created the “Paparazzi Central” Cocomo application where paparazzi can share tips with colleagues and upload photos to share with publishers all over the world. During our demo, paparazzi in Milan were already uploading images to the application… and I thought it was a good idea to share them with you here ;-)

Ben Forta in “Ben In Black”

Enrique Duvos as Austin Powers

Kevin Lynch in the new Harry Potter movie

Andrew Shorten as 007

Richard Galvan and his new girlfriend

Ted Patrick in the future