President Obama honors Adobe’s founding fathers
President Obama today named nine eminent researchers as recipients of the National Medal of Science, and four inventors and one company as recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honors bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers, and inventors. Among them John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Adobe’s founding fathers.
They will be receiving the award at a White House ceremony on October 7th. John and Chuck are receiving the award for “their pioneering contributions that spurred the desktop publishing revolution and for changing the way people create and engage with information and entertainment across multiple mediums including print, Web and video.”
More info:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/President-Honors-Nations-Top-Scientists-and-Innovators/
http://www.uspto.gov/main/homepagenews/2009sep17.htm
Obama uses Adobe Connect Pro to cut travel costs
Just a few weeks ago, I already reported on the White House using Flash for their live streaming. Today, the news broke that the White House is also using Adobe Connect Pro to cut travel costs. President Obama himself made his first appearance in the Connect room last week.
With Adobe Connect Pro, they can greatly reduce travel costs because they don’t have to fly everyone to one location. Anyone with an internet connected PC and Flash Player installed can join the meeting from wherever they are. With Connect Pro, you can even completely customize the look and feel of your online meeting room. With the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service, you can even build your own Connect experience and/or add it to your own application.
Great choice, Mr. President! Flash on!
Presidential Inaugural Committee picks Silverlight. Rest of the world uses Flash.
Last Friday, Microsoft sent out a press release announcing that “…the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) has selected the company’s Silverlight technology to enable live and on-demand video streaming of the official inauguration swearing-in ceremony on the PIC Web site…“.
I’m not entirely sure if it’s worth bragging about one site using Silverlight. Even if it is the “official” site… Especially since all the big networks are using Flash technology to stream the event. It’s also funny to note that “… the list of donors to the inaugural committee does not include any contributors who list Silverlight-rival Adobe Systems as an employer. As we have reported here before, it does include several high-profile Microsoft executives, including CEO Steve Ballmer…“, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A Microsoft spokeswoman was quick to note that “… these donations are personal contributions from the named Microsoft executives, and not representative of Microsoft the corporation …“. I’m sure a $200.000+ contribution wouldn’t have hurt though. ;-)
When I read the press release, I remembered that video interview that Robert Scoble did with Eric Schmidt a while ago. Eric is the director of media and advertising evangelism at Microsoft. In that interview, Eric Schmidt confirms (although not in those exact words) that it was Microsoft who built the NBC Olympics site and that NBC only delivered the content for it. He says that his evangelism group was responsible for project management. The developer side of things was done by Scott Guthrie’s group. A team at MSNBC was responsible for the content and his group worked with external developers. Now, I am not completely unbiased of course, but to me that sounds as if Microsoft paid for the whole site.
I’m not suggesting anything here but it makes you wonder how technology is chosen these days.
Anyway… There will be plenty of live sources to watch tomorrow’s inauguration. I kinda wish I was in Washington to witness it live but instead I’ll be watching it online on Current.tv, MSNBC.com, FOXnews.com, CNN.com, UStream.tv or any of the other big networks who are all streaming live video with Flash on a day-to-day basis. Go Flash!
President Barack Obama and how the world watched the elections
First of all, let me say: “Thank you America”! The whole world thought it was time for a change and I am really glad that you agreed!
I’m sure you’ll agree that this election has been historical in many ways. It’s also been an election that really used multimedia and the internet to the max with Obama being clearly in the lead. The internet gave the candidates a whole new “channel” to work with. Posting live updates on Facebook and Twitter and posting commercials on YouTube. Never before could a presidential candidate reach so many people.
On election day, the whole world was watching. Not just on traditional TV but even more so on the web. CNN already said that they had 27 million unique visitors on their site on election day. That’s 27 million people using a Flash application to get the latest results and/or watch the live coverage with the newly launched CNN Flash video player. Even though I know very well what the Flash Player is capable off, I also know that high traffic events like this one are not easy to stream but the new Flash video player didn’t even flinch once. Same thing for the MSNBC Flash video player and the Fox News AIR based video player. Just about all the big networks and newspapers picked Flash as their preferred technology to publish the results and they all did a really nice job.
To use some of the words of Obama’s victory speech: “If there’s anyone out there that still doubts that Flash is the best way to deliver data on the web in an engaging way, who still questions if Flash can deliver video to large worldwide audiences, today is your answer.” ;-)
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