David Wadhwani

Adobe Systems will make its AIR platform and new Flash player available to mobile devices. The company previewed the new AIR version at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Tablets are front and center at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, and Nvidia wants to be the power behind the trendy devices. Nvidia launched its next-generation Tegra processor on Thursday, marketing it as the first processor for the mobile web and specifically designed for the high-resolution needs of tablets.

Adobe Systems' Flash technology is ubiquitous on desktop and laptop computers, but its availability on smartphones and other mobile devices is spotty. Adobe is now looking to change that, with its announcement Monday of a public developer beta of Flash Player 10.1 for "smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, PCs and other Internet-connected devices." One device left off the list: Apple's iPhone.

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.

Just weeks after releasing the beta version of its Flash Player 10, code-named Astro, Adobe Systems this week released the final version for Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers. Flash Player 10 comes with a slew of new features and goes head-to-head with Microsoft's Silverlight 2, which was also released this week.

The multimedia products are competing head-to-head. Adobe has the lion's share of the market, but adoption of Microsoft's Silverlight has ramped up since it launched a year ago with 150 partners, including NBCOlympics.com, Blockbuster, Yahoo Japan and AOL.

Adobe Systems on Tuesday announced a new initiative with Google and Yahoo to improve search results for dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to enhance indexing of the Flash file format and uncover information currently undiscoverable by search engines.