GigaOm has a short but highly edifying interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch up on the blog today. One of the most interesting bits is when Om gets Kevin talking about what’s coming next in for Flash. One of the things they’re cooking up is interactivity in Flash video, which could lead to a whole slew of new advertising formats.
“Interactivity in videos — that is, highlighting certain items in video and making them clickable — is something we are enabling,” says Lynch.
That could enable a new type of “see it, buy it” style advertising that would be non-intrusive in comparison to todays pre-, mid-, or post-roll ads or the hover ads that sit on top of video content. They’d also likely be more effective that static text or banner ads that sit next to playing video.
Lynch also talked about Adobe’s shift from software computing to web applications. Because of Flash, Flex, and AIR, Adobe has been one of the leading technology providers of the web application revolution, but at the same time their cash cow software products (such as Photoshop and Illustrator) are desktop products.
“Adobe is a 25-year-old company and that’s a great achievement because we have had the ability to change. We have changed with technological shifts,” says Lynch. “And now we are in that situation again. How software is made and sold is changing, so we are changing.”
“We are not deploying at the level of raw storage and raw hosting. Instead we are looking at application hosting from our customers’ perspective. We want to be very specific about hosted online services, which are essentially about the collaboration of creative services,” according to Lynch, who says that it’s not all about the cloud. Adobe is taking a “hybrid approach” by offering both web based services such as Buzzword, Photoshop Express and Acrobat.com, and bridging them to the desktop with its AIR runtime.
Check out GigaOm for the full interview.
Josh CatoneBefore joining Jilt, Josh Catone was the Executive Director of Editorial Projects at Mashable, the Lead Writer at ReadWriteWeb, Lead Blogger at SitePoint, and the Community Evangelist at DandyID. On the side, Josh enjoys managing his blog The Fluffington Post.
