A new adventure
November 1st will be my 4th anniversary as a Platform Evangelist… And March 2012 will be my 5th anniversary at Adobe… And what a crazy 5 years it has been! No no… This post is not to announce that I am leaving Adobe. On the contrary, I’m actually moving in to a new role… in our San Francisco HQ.
I’ve never made it a secret that I would one day love to live and work in the US and I feel truly blessed that Adobe is giving me this opportunity. In my new role as “Solutions Architect/Evangelist” I will still be doing a lot of what I’ve been doing in the last 5 years but I will also start building relationships with big name brands and work on strategic partnerships. It’s that part that’s got me really excited about this new adventure and I’m really looking forward to it!
It’s funny… While I was writing this post I saw this article in my Twitter feed. “Disrupt Yourself” is the title and that is exactly what I’m going to do. ;-) The article also says that “if it feels scary and lonely, you’re probably on the right track” and I must say that it definitely is a little bit scary… And lonely… Well… I never thought I would do this all by myself. I always thought that my girlfriend would join me but she sadly decided to end our relationship (also the reason why it’s been so quiet around here the last couple of months). But… I guess there are worst places than San Francisco to be as a single guy…
I’ll start packing right after MAX and then move some time early November. The California sun still shines in November, right? ;-)
No crisis on the web? How are you doing?
According to the Union of Belgian Advertisers and researchers Profact [as published on Digimedia (dutch)], there is no crisis on the Internet. According to this report, 90% of all advertisers said the crisis does impact the way they work and over 80% reduced their budgets by 10 to 20%.
Where it gets interesting, is where they are spending their money. 55% of all advertisers said they will spend less money on tv, newspaper, magazine, movie theater, radio and street ads. However, 37% of them said they are investing more in Internet advertising.
On top of that, I also see a lot of interactive agencies looking to hire extra Flash designers and developers. This week alone, I saw at least 6 job openings across Europe on Twitter. I also received a couple of emails from agencies looking for people.
While talking to agencies at both FITC and FlashCamp UK last week, I found that this seems to be a common trend. Most of the people I talked to still had plenty of work but are expecting a cutback in marketing projects. Most of the people I talked to are planing on filling any gaps with research (looking into mobile development came up frequently) and diversifying their skill set.
Now, I may be completely wrong, but to me it sounds as if “the Internet” is doing ok at the moment. I’m sure there have been some cutbacks here and there already but the bigger agencies seem to be doing alright.
I’d love to hear your stories! How have you been doing? Has your company been hit by the crisis? If so, in what way?
Recently laid off? Learn a new skill, upgrade your profile.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the economy is not in a good place right now. Since October 2008, more than 300.000 people have lost their jobs in the tech industry.
I’m not saying that being laid off is fun but you could see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to learn a new skill and while doing that, upgrade your profile. There’s still a pretty strong demand for Flash/Flex/AS3.0 skills. So, if you haven’t looked in to those technologies, why not do it now?
If you’re interested in learning Flex, send me an email ([email protected]) and I may be able to hook you up with some stuff ;-)
Feel free to follow me on: 
