1. Yahoo will remain an independent company make a big comeback
2. Sun Microsystems will continue it’s downward spiral and will end up selling off a major component of their business
3. Microsoft will make significantly more traction with their cloud services
4. iPhone will gain significantly more marketshare and will become the dominant platform for mobile computing, rivaled primarily by Google’s Android platform which will also gain significant marketshare as better hardware hits the market
5. Twitter will continue to flourish and will likely be acquired by Google
6. Digg will be acquired by someone, perhaps Yahoo
7. Kevin Rose will achieve his goal and go on a date with Jennifer Aniston
8. Blogging will become popular again – but posts will be more frequent and in shorter bursts
9. Cisco Systems will make a big play in the web 2.0 arena that will get them a lot of attention
10. My most bold prediction: the return of the chat room!

I found this last night on slideshare and thought I’d share it. I haven’t done a great deal of thinking about branding in the past so this short presentation really opened my eyes. It’s kind of fun to think about.

Ok – this will be the year that I do a daily post! I say that every year but I’m not giving up yet. To make it easier on myself I’m going to attempt to do a daily post of something short and sweet (and hopefully interesting) like my friend Brian. I’m going to prefix each post with “DAILY:” so they can be differentiated from my regular, more in-depth posts.

To kick things off, I thought I’d list a few of my favorite things from 2008:

• I got engaged to the love of my life, Liana
• had an amazing vacation in Australia at one of the most beautiful resorts in the world.
• toured through Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway for the first time with my friends Greg, Jason, and Stef.
• iPhone 3G
• helped Barack Obama get elected by volunteering in Nevada with Brian and Liana!
• got my dream car
• went to New York and Europe with Liana. Experienced Oktoberfest for the second time.
• moved to Pacific Heights and discovered how awesome living in San Francisco can really be!
• really enjoyed The Dark Knight, Man on Wire, Iron Man, and Wall-E.
• finally got dragged into reading the Harry Potter series and got hooked
• read one of the best, most effective books on understanding politics ever written: What You Should Know About Politics…But Don’t: A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues
• Got the amazing new Nikon D700
  dSLR. Now I have to start spending more time with it!

Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow has posted a great tutorial on using SWFObject 2.0 for embedding SWFs in your HTML content over at gotoandlearn.com.

Go check it out here >>

PCWorld reports Adobe: Flash Gaining Traction in the Enterprise.

While most people know Flash as primarily a multimedia delivery and development technology for Web sites, it is catching on as a front-end user-interface (UI) technology for business applications, an Adobe manager [AIR Group Product Marketing Manager, Adrian Ludwig] said Wednesday.

The article goes on to discuss Flash’s growing use behind the corporate firewall and the impact that Flex has had in gaining interest from traditional application developers.

Adobe’s Flash has been making progress against legacy desktop applications — such as those built in C++ — although that progress hasn’t been widely publicized…

“One of the problems with Flash is people only think of it as being used to do public Web sites,” he said in an interview in New York Wednesday. “It’s a misconception. A significant percentage of [Flash] applications people are making now are enterprise applications behind the corporate firewall.”

He cited as an example an application that Siemens and development partner Thrasys created for Siemen’s health information system. The companies created a front-end, Web-based interface using Flash and Flex to unite several back-end applications and streamline how employees use information from different systems.

Read the full article here >>

Adobe Platform Evangelist, Lee Brimelow, has posted a good interview of Justin Everett-Church, Sr. Product Manager for Flash Player on theFlashblog.com.

Today I was at Adobe HQ in San Francisco and got a chance to interview Justin Everett-Church, who is the Senior Product Manager for Flash Player, about some of the most frequently asked questions regarding Flash Player 10 and our new search technology.

Check it out here >>

We’ve just announced that we’re leading an initiative to define an open file format for digital cinema files.

Adobe intends to leverage its successful Digital Negative Specification (DNG) file format as a foundation, and Adobe plans to work with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers, including Panavision, Silicon Imaging, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI—along with software vendors, including Iridas and The Foundry, and codec provider CineForm—to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented file format that it plans to call CinemaDNG.

We’ve also announced an initiative to built more meta data into the digital video and audio production workflow.

c|net reports: Separately, Adobe will give a preview at NAB 2008 of technology that automatically transcribes the audio track of a video file.

For editors, this will allow them to more quickly find passages within a clip based on a text read-out of the audio. The output of the video-editing software will also include that transcribed information.

As a result, viewers of a Web video will be able to search on terms to find a specific location within a video.

For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom.

Adobe will demonstrate the feature on a version of its Soundbooth audio-editing product under development and on Premiere Pro.

The company intends to support the feature in the next major release of its video work-flow software. There was a two-year gap between the releases of Creative Suite 3 and 2, so the next major version is likely to come some time in 2009.

The transcription information will be stored in XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), another format developed by Adobe.

Good news for digital video and audio producers out there!

Happy New Year! I feel totally refreshed and ready to start platform evangelizing again. If you’ve sent me any important emails over the last two months you might want to send again because my inbox is very full. :)

We have a lot of exciting events, releases and announcements coming up so keep an eye on adobe.com, MXNA, and the Adobe blogs I’ve listed in the sidebar.

Also, I’m going to be spending a lot of time producing video content over the next few weeks so let me know what you’d like to see more about. Interviews, demos, you name it.

It’s been over three years since I earned my six-week sabbatical from Macromedia and I finally decided to take it (with a little vacation time added on). So if you’re trying to get a hold of me for any Adobe-related stuff you won’t hear back until January 7 at the earliest. In the mean time you can contact Ben Forta (bforta -at- adobe -dot- com) for anything that you need.

Also, I had to disable comments until I figure out why I’m getting insane amounts of comment spam. If you really need to get a hold of me for NON-ADOBE stuff you can email me at my personal address: madowney -at- gmail -dot- com. If you ask me anything about Adobe I will probably not respond. :)

See you in January!

I was just browsing Christian Cantrell’s new site, TipBin, and found this great ad for ebay.com from Google AdWords.

So if any of you are in the market for some dog poop, ebay has a huge selection – right now!