VIEWPOINT: Following our post on Adobe’s announcements from yesterday’s MAX 2009 developers conference, we’ve made a video highlighting some of the things we saw during the keynote and around the showfloor and developer sessions over the past two days.

Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch showing musician John Mayer's augmented reality music video single by putting a key-card against a Webcam.

We even interviewed some attendees on what they thought about MAX 2009 and their wishlists for MAX 2010.

Earlier today in the General Session, Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer of Adobe, showed several augmented reality applications, such as one by the US Postal Service.

He then showed an augmented reality music video for the single “Heartbreak Warfare” by Grammy Award-winning musician John Mayer for his upcoming album “Battle Studies”.

Another impressive demo we saw included a real-time delivery tracking and management app for Federal Express’ Custom Critical service based on Adobe’s LiveCycle enterprise-based solutions. Here’s the video:

This video comes with English captions. To change caption language, click on Translate in the bottom corner option of the video.
For keynote videos on Adobe’s Flash 10.1 support for smartphones and portable devices, and compiling Flash for the iPhone, check out our previous post here.

Jennifer Taylor, Director of Flash Content Creation and Distribution (left) on stage with David Yu, SVP of Product Development for MLB.com, a real-time streaming website for Major League Baseball.

Not only that, we also did a group interview with Jennifer Taylor, Director for Flash Content Creation and Distribution at Adobe. Taylor’s primary role is to work with customers from hardware manufacturers, service providers and content creators to create, protect and distribute content based on Flash technology to the Web, the desktop and mobile device based on their needs and customers’ needs.

Here are some choice quotes from her responses to some of the questions raised:

How the Flash team is assisting content creators like movie/TV studios take their content multi-screen:
One of the challenges for movie studios today is basically figuring out the technology like how do I want to build it, deploy it and scale it. One of the many reasons why companies are participating in the Open Screen Project is the idea of having a consistent platform, which seems to remove a lot of the headache associated with this challenge.

Another challenge is the business model, where all of them are looking for eyeballs and viewers as people are moving from broadcast to different channels and mechanisms, so the traditional ad-supported content and subscriber-supported content on cable networks are changing so as a broadcaster, you need to best position yourself differently, which is where our partnership to experiment will be helpful.

In Taylor's OpenSource Media Framework Web video workflow demo at MAX 2009, the architecture has a layer for monetization, supports dynamic streaming, and a plug-in for Omniture Metrics.

Is Flash being too ahead for more conservative-based enterprises to adopt more Flash-oriented consumer experiences:
Different segments of the market have different risk profiles. With consumer applications, organizations are willing to take the risk to experiment, and customers expect companies to differentiate based on those experiences. Enterprises are a little different, once given, the IT department will remind you to support it for a long time so they tend to wait for things to be proven out a bit. In that regard, the consumer segment is an interesting way to dabble in these emerging technologies that could eventually crossover into the enterprise.

On developers now using built-in cams to personalize Flash content and the potential of touch-screen Flash apps and the possibility of augmented reality and 3D:
It goes to the problem you’re trying to solve but it’s not necessarily a trend. For advertising, they’re trying to experiment and personalize the online experience. This will make technology more intimate and more relevant to the user. While I’m not as familiar with augmented reality, you can see from the augmented reality John Mayer music video unveiled earlier today, that there’s a lot of buzz on 3D from the studios and theaters.

With AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1, you can utilize HTTP streaming as well as protect your Web video content.

What will the Flash team be focusing or prioritizing for the next one year until MAX 2010:
Obviously we will be focusing on multi-screen and enabling our partners to create and deliver experiences across these platforms. We’ll also be focusing on building higher quality content for Web video, using HTTP delivery architecture.

On HTML5:
We’re thrilled. We’re actively involved in the working group and obviously, we have a Flash platform and we also have a robust business around HTML via our DreamWeaver authoring tool. We hope HTML5 can really help differentiate and move online experiences forward and that’s the right thing for the industry. Its biggest challenges are how far can we get in terms of consistency of implementation and the speed of doing so across the browsers considering the fragmentation.

On Flash on Internet-connected TVs and living room devices like consoles and media centers:
Part of our Open Screen Project is to partner with our chipset manufacturers, set-top box and game console manufacturers to help them optimize their hardware efficiently. The living room is definitely a more pressing issue for content creators compared to devices as it is the heart of the family and the traditional place of media creation and consumption.