online videos

Adobe Systems is poised to launch several key enhancements to its Adobe Flash platform in San Francisco this week at its MAX 2008 conference.

Any major upgrade to Flash is significant because 81 percent of worldwide online videos are viewed with Flash technology, making it the number-one format for video on the Web, according to comScore. Adobe's Flash Player is also installed on 98 percent of Internet-connected desktops and a growing number of mobile devices.

Sometimes, in the decades after he came home from World War II, it seemed as if the movie camera was surgically attached to Christoffel Teeuwissen's hand.

He carried it everywhere, trained it on everything. When they widened the street in front of his house in Florida, there he was. When a septic tank was installed in West Virginia, there he was. High school football games, construction sites, the building of a swimming pool -- there he was, camera in hand.

Adobe Systems chief executive Shantanu Narayen wants to make it easier for people to watch online videos, play games and use other sophisticated Internet applications on a variety of cell phones and other mobile devices.

And he'd be extremely happy if they were doing that with the help of Adobe's software. Narayen stressed the need for industry collaboration to create a better mobile Web experience in a keynote speech Thursday at the Wireless IT and Entertainment trade show in San Francisco, sponsored by the wireless industry association known as CTIA.

“Social Networks will be like air“
-Charlene Li of Forrester Research

If you haven't already seen it, watch the video:Then read the article by Charles McGrath in the New York Times:

If you haven't already seen it, watch the video:Then read the article by Charles McGrath in the New York Times:

After Hurricane Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast, small businesses such as the Silk Road Collection antique store in New Orleans had little hope of surviving. Tourists and local customers had vanished, and it would take years for the city to rebuild.

Donald St. Pierre, the owner of Silk Road, and his business and life partner, Robert Turner, feared that they might have to close the shop. They couldn't land government or bank loans, and their personal savings were keeping the business afloat.

Shane Felux is an independent filmmaker whose Star Wars Revelations was seen by over 4 million people in its first three months. His next project, Pitching George Lucas, reached even more.

But unless you've downloaded his online movies -- or are part of his fan legion at the comic book convention, Comic-Con -- it is likely you've never heard of him.

Felux is hoping that could change with Trenches, his 10-episode, short-form, sci-fi thriller coming to ABC.com and YouTube. It is among 20 online programs in development at Disney-ABC Television's new digital content studio, Stage 9.