The Google I/O keynote is only a little over 3 hours away. I am super excited about Google I/O this year. I wish I was there… But if you’re like me and you couldn’t make it out to San Francisco you can still be a part of it.

Both today’s and tomorrow’s keynote will be streamed live on Google I/O’s YouTube channel. I can’t think of a better way of celebrating my birthday than to sit back with a nice glass of wine and watch the keynote live. I know… I am a bit of a geek :D. You can count on me doing the same thing tomorrow ;-). Trust me… You don’t want to miss this event… We have some very exciting announcements coming up and I’m sure Google also has a thing or two up their sleeves!

The keynote starts at 9:00 am PDT. That’s 12:00pm in New York, 5:00pm in London, 6:00pm in Belgium, 1:00am in Tokyo.

Oh… And just in case you missed it: I’m giving away a Google Nexus One!

Earlier this week (can you believe I really have no idea what day it is today? :)) I joined Adobe’s David Wadhwani and RIM’s Chris Smith on stage at the BlackBerry Developer Day Keynote. Afterwards I asked a couple of BlackBerry community members and application developers about how they feel about the Flash Platform coming to BlackBerry devices. The video is now available on Adobe TV.

Google is selling 60.000 Android devices every day. According to MobileCrunch, that works out to about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21.9 million per year. And the rate is growing rapidly, according to Eric Schmidt who kicked off the Mobile World Live Keynote initiative yesterday.

Android is also not just about handsets anymore. I’ve seen a bunch of tablets running Android as well. The Android OS is free and open source and most of all… you’re in complete control of what you install on it and how you use the web on the device. Very soon you’ll be able to grab Flash Player 10.1 and AIR from the Android Market and install it on your Android device to not only get a full web experience in the device’s browser but also get the power of AIR for standalone applications.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt talked about why this is important in his Mobile World Live Keynote while Eric Tseng (Senior Product Manager for Android) demoed Flash Player 10.1 on a Nexus One. He actually summed it up very nicely by saying: “The line is blurring between mobile phones and desktop computing… One of our main goals when we embarked on smartphones at Google was to really mirror the desktop web browsing experience – but for many of you and you know who you are – there’s been a critical component missing – Flash!“. But you don’t have to take my word for it… You can watch it here yourself!

I was telling a few colleagues earlier that I wish I could take a few weeks off and just build Flash/AIR apps for Android. Because now I can use the skills that I already know to create apps for these devices… Android really is the first mobile OS that can really compete with Apple’s mobile OS and the fact that it is going to have Flash Player and AIR very soon is just the cherry on top! Flash on!

With the day 1 keynote wrapping up, Adobe MAX 2009 has now officially started. While most of the announcements in today’s keynote were already sent out last night, the biggest announcement was probably a very big surprise to many. The first time I heard this news a few weeks ago, I nearly fell off my chair and I’ve been dying to tell you guys about it ever since.

To come back to the title of this post, it really is a great time to be a Flash Platform developer. Without having to learn anything new (with the exception of some new APIs), you can now leverage your skills to create applications that not only run in the browser and on the desktop but also on millions of devices already in the market today. The Flash Platform gives you the broadest possible reach for your applications.

I’m sure you know that we’ve been talking about bringing Flash Player 10 to mobile devices and I think after today you’ll agree that we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve been working very hard with our Open Screen Project partners to optimize Flash Player to run on a variety of smart phones. Flash Player 10.1 (the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project) will be available for a broad range of mobile devices, including smartphones, netbooks and other Internet-connected devices, allowing your content to reach your customers wherever they are. Check out these demonstration videos to see Flash Player in action on a Palm Pre and a Windows Mobile device.

The biggest announcement of the day was without a doubt the work we’ve done for the iPhone. In the not too distant future you will be able to build applications for iPhone with Flash CS5 Professional. Those applications can be distributed through Apple’s App Store. A public beta version of Flash CS5 Professional with this new capability is planned for later this year. This new capability in Flash CS5 Professional allows developers to use their preferred Flash Platform tools and technologies to develop content for a device that was previously closed to them. Because the source code and assets are reusable for applications that run on Flash Platform runtimes, Adobe AIR and Flash Player, it allows them to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments. If you’d like to test the performance on your iPhone, feel free to download any of the Flash based apps that are currently already available in Apple’s App Store. For more information go to http://adobe.com/go/iphone.

For an overview of other news released at MAX, check out Ryan Stewart’s rundown of the MAX news.

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