I don’t know about you, but I probably spend about 50% - 70% of my work day staring at Microsoft Outlook. I probably receive an average of about 500 emails per day - not including the hundreds that get caught by our spam filters. Of these, I need to read and/or take action on about 200 of them.

Communicating mostly through email has become the standard at our company and, as John Porcaro from the XBox marketing team at Microsoft writes, we’re not the only ones. Being in control of your email and effectively managing it has become a secret to success in high tech business (and likely many others).

In order to help us work more effectively, Macromedia recently offered a one-day course to all employees on how to get organized and stay organized in Outlook. The course was presented by McGhee Productivity Solutions and centered around a few basic principles:

1. Never leave an email in your inbox - always take action. This means you either respond to the email right away, archive it for reference only, or you turn it into an Outlook task and assign it to an “Action” category. Typical action categories are “NA - Email”, “NA - Read”, “NA - Computer” (NA stands for “Needs Action”).

2. Plan and prioritize effectively. Realize that you can’t commit to everything and make sure you schedule time during every day to accomplish your tasks. For example, I block two hours out of the day for reading and responding to email. I try my best not to allow others to schedule me for meeting during those time periods (though I’m not always successful in that).

Many of these tips plus a few more are nicely outlined in John Porcaro’s recent post - I suggest that you check it out if you face email overload like we do.

In addition to my usual posts about notable items in the world of Flash, I’ve decided that I’d like to start posting about topics relating to product management, marketing, and general business items.

There are already a high concentration of blogs dedicated to specific technical issues related to Flash so I thought I’d start to share notable items from more of a technical marketer’s perspective.

I’m also going to try to move the more technical topics from my blog to the Flashteam blog, which I also maintain.

Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Korean wireless carrier SK Telecom began shipping the SCH-S260 mobile phone yesterday. The new phone is the first in the Samsung line to feature the Macromedia Flash Lite Player. This follows Macromedia’s recent announcement of a strategic relationship with Samsung that will result in Macromedia Flash-powered Samsung phones throughout the world. The technology is being used to power the user interface for the phone - something that I find fascinating.

I can’t wait until the day that Flash developers can create their own UI skins for their phones using the Flash authoring tool.

For more information on Flash for Mobile, visit: www.macromedia.com/mobile.

We moved into our new headquarters today. It’s an amazing building directly across the street from our old office. The MX product teams (Flash, Flash Player, Dreamweaver, Studio, Flex, and a few others) were the first to make the move.

I’ll try to post some interior photos later. I’m preoccupied with finding all of my stuff, figuring out where to plug things in, getting my new 20-in IBM L200p LCDs to work correctly, finding the new conference rooms, etc. I love moving day!

A brief history of this historic building

“As the ‘pioneer of its kind’ in the area, the building initiated the development of its neighborhood as a manufacturing warehouse district in San Francisco.”
- Landmark Preservation Advisory Board, 1989

A designated City Landmark, The Baker Hamilton Building was constructed in 1905 for Pacific Hardware & Steel Company. When the building escaped the 1906 earthquake and fire unscathed, Pacific Hardware & Steel enjoyed several prosperous years and became one of the largest hardware firms in the western United States.

In 1918, Pacific Hardware & Steel merged with Baker & Hamilton (a firm that had been selling innovative agricultural tools since the Gold Rush) to create a company known as Baker, Hamilton & Pacific. This company, whose name later reverted to Baker & Hamilton, occupied the building into the early 1980’s.

The Baker Hamilton Building has long been associated with growth and innovation. The building helped initiate the earliest economic development in the South of Market area, and it was here – in the 1930s – that Baker & Hamilton invented its famous “model store,” which showed hardware retailers the newest ways of displaying products.

This is nicely done. It’s a great illustration of how Flash gives web professionals full creative control over web video. In this example they’ve also done a nice job of simulating an “Acrobat 7 experience” by walking a user through the application.

Great stuff!
http://www.adobe.com/special/acrobat/tour/main.htm

I’ll be presenting a live, online seminar via Breeze Live during my trip to Australia/New Zealand on Wed, February 16 at 9am Australia East time.

The focus of the seminar will be on building and delivering compelling video experiences using Macromedia Flash. We’ll discuss deployment options, including streaming video with the Flash Communication Server, and we’ll examine how to build great video experiences.

Details and registration here.

On my way to MXDU 2005 I’ll be heading into Auckland, NZ for a seminar on Video, Training and Web Publishing on Monday Feb 14, then heading to Adelaide for the same seminar on the next day.

My esteemed colleague and renowned speaker Brian Chau, Sales Engineer for our ANZ region, will be presenting the seminar with me.

For a full description and to register, go here:
http://www.macromedia.com/ap/events/0305_vtwp_seminar_anz_ap.html

I will be making my way down to Sydney again in just a few weeks to participate in MXDU 2005. I’ve been looking forward to going to MXDU since Mike Chambers first started going on and on about how great it was last year.

This year Mike C and I will be doing the day 2 keynote together, tentatively titled, “Flash the future.” (note - I hope conference organizer Geoff Bowers of Fullasagoog fame doesn’t expect any actual *flashing* in the keynote. I’ve heard of stranger things occuring at these Aussie conferences…)

Mike’s on sabbatical right now (which is why none of you have heard from him for a while) so we haven’t had a chance to discuss exactly what we’ll talk about in the keynote, however, I can guarantee that it will involve Flash video, Flash on mobile devices, and some more sneaks of future Flash technologies.

Learn more about MXDU here: http://www.mxdu.com

I’ll be doing a public demonstration of Maelstrom, the code-name for the next generation Flash Player at a special joint meeting of the LA Flash MMUG and the LA Flash Extension next Wednesday, January 19 at 7pm. Unfortunately this will not be webcast so you will need to be there in person in order to get the sneak.

More info (RSVP required):
http://www.laflash.org/mmug/meetings.html#m200501

Home and Garden Television has a nice site dedicated to providing great information to their viewers. They are also one of our latest Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS) customers.

http://www.hgtvpro.com