Cannes Lions widget powered by Adobe and Influxis

Posted by on May 31, 2010 in Events, Flash Platform | 1 comment

The Cannes Lions Festival is only a few weeks away now. The Cannes Lions Festival is a global festival for those working in advertising and related fields. Thousands of delegates from around the world attend the festival to view shortlisted work and attend seminars, workshops and master classes (via Wikipedia).

Adobe is planning lots of seminars and workshops this year and we’re also helping out with the Young Lions competition. Our CEO Shantanu Narayen is also speaking at the event.

A few weeks ago I built a little widget for the festival. The idea is similar to the MAX widget. It displays the latest Cannes Lions news, users can record their own testimonials and it’s incredibly easy to add the widget to your own social network page, blog or site.

I used Adobe’s Distribution/Promotion Service to enable the share functionality in the widget. This service is incredibly easy to use. With just a couple of lines of code you can add the share menu to your application. There’s no need to write any code that talks to all the specific social network APIs. The Distribution/Promotion Service does all that for you.

The video recording is handled by Influxis. I had never used the Influxis service before but I kept hearing good things about them. I’m glad to say that they are all true! The Influxis admin panel is just amazingly easy to use. Literally within seconds you can have your FMS app up and running on their servers. Influxis is also one of the few providers that give you full access to the Flash Media Interactive Server which was needed to enable this in-app recording experience. I know this almost sounds like an Influxis commercial but trust me… If your app uses Flash Media Server you have to check out Influxis. They even provide a bunch of ready-to-go apps so you can get started in a few minutes.

If you’re going to Cannes for the Cannes Lions Festival, leave a message here or come and say “hi”. See you in Cannes!

SlideRocket out in the open

Posted by on Oct 28, 2008 in Cool stuff, RIA | Comments Off

SlideRocket is definitely one of my favorite Flash-based RIAs out there. It’s been in private beta for quite some time but today it has opened up to the public. The online tool allows you to create stunning presentations, manage them intelligently, share them securely and then measure the results — and the AIR client allows you to use your presentations offline.

“SlideRocket also includes an online marketplace where you can find all the content and services you might need to make your presentations great. SlideRocket goes beyond traditional presentation tools by harnessing the power of the Internet and making everything available to you in an integrated and intuitive online interface. SlideRocket is provided in a software-as-a-service model in a variety of price points starting at free.”