Can we PLEASE do something about credit cards?

If you live in the U.S., you've probably heard about the theft of as many as 40 million credit and debit card numbers from Target customers between November 27th and December 15th. As with so many of these thefts, the first public disclosure came not from the merchant or card processor that lost the data, but from a third-party source. In Target's case, it was security researcher Brian Krebs who pieced together the story. Krebs buys credit and debit card numbers and other personal information from "darknet" sources on behalf of banks and other clients, and he noticed that a flood of numbers that apparently came from Target were available for sale. Theft of credit and debit card information has become a common occurrence in the U.S., and some researchers claim that as few as 5% of thefts ever get detected and disclosed publicly.

When I heard about the Target theft, I checked my banking records, and sure enough, I used my debit card there a couple of times during the period in question. So, yesterday, I drove over to my local bank branch, cancelled my debit card and got a new one. That was the third time in a little more than a year, and the second time in two months, that I had to cancel my debit card and get a new one. The first time was a scam at Barnes & Noble stores that involved replacement of point-of-sale credit card terminals in dozens of stores with hacked versions that sent complete transaction information, including PIN numbers, to hackers. The second time was due to the hack of Adobe's transaction processing system earlier this year, and now, it's Target for the trifecta.

Barnes & Noble, Adobe and Target are responsible for their security failures, but banks share some responsibility as well. These kinds of data losses are almost unheard of in Europe, where banks issue smart cards to their customers. Smart cards use two-factor authentication to insure that only the proper owner is using it, and encryption to keep anyone except the bank authorizing payment from either intercepting or saving the account information. Smart cards aren't in wide use in the U.S. because they're significantly more expensive than magnetic stripe cards, but, using me as an example, I have to believe that a single smart card has to be less expensive than six magnetic stripe cards (three temporary and three permanent replacements) plus the time of bank tellers, managers and phone customer service personnel spent processing and issuing those replacements. (Update, 12/22/13: According to Brian Krebs, reissuing a magnetic stripe credit or debit card costs from $3 to $5; Gemalto, one of the biggest smart card vendors, says that the average cost for a smart card with a microprocessor is $3.72. Even if that number is on the low side, it means that banks would be ahead of the game, or would at least break even, with smart cards vs. replacing mag stripe cards.)

Whether it's an encryption-based system or a "one-time pad" approach where the customer gives the merchant an account number issued by their financial institution that's good for only one transaction and is useless if anyone tries to use it again, the U.S. needs to move to a more secure and reliable method for credit and debit card transactions. The system we have now is no more secure than the weakest transaction system used by any merchant--which means that we have almost no security at all.

NAB 2013: The Wrap-up

I only had a day to spend at NAB last week, so I couldn't get to every booth, and undoubtedly missed some "gems" hidden around the show floor. However, I did get to see much of the South and Central Halls. Here's a summary of the products that impressed me (I've already written about Blackmagic Design's two new Cinema Cameras,) along with what wasn't there, and some thoughts about the future of the business:

The New

• Canon's XA20 and XA25: Canon's new small, light and low-cost ENG camcorders are the company's first models with 1080/60p capability. Both models have 20x zoom lenses, dual-band WiFi and dual SDHC/SDXC-compatible memory card slots. The XA25 adds dual XLR audio inputs and an HD-SDI output. The list price of the XA20 is $2,499 (US,) while the XA25 is priced at $2,999; street prices are $2,199 for the XA20 and $2,699 for the XA25. Both camcorders are expected to ship in late June.
• JVC's GY-HM650U ENG camcorder (street price $5,695) was launched at last year's NAB, and it's recently scored a number of high-profile, big-quantity sales to customers including the BBC. The 2.0 model introduced at this year's NAB (a firmware upgrade for camcorders already in use) adds a number of new features. The HM650U has three 1/3-inch CMOS sensors and a 23x zoom lens. It can simultaneously record to dual SDHC/SDXC-compatible memory cards, output video through its HD-SDI or HDMI connectors, and stream a webcast-appropriate version of the video over its built-in WiFi interface or a 4G LTE adapter.
• Perhaps the biggest hit of the show was Freefly System's Movi M10 camera stabilizer. Unlike stabilizers built around the Steadicam model, which uses a system of springs and joints (and requires a vest on larger models to handle the combined weight of the stabilizer and camera,) the Movi is an active hand-held design using direct-drive motors and accelerometers to keep the camera stable. The Movi weighs 3.5 pounds and is built using carbon fiber in order to keep its weight down. It can be operated in two modes: In "Monarch" mode, the cinematographer uses his or her movements to control the Movi, while in dual operator mode, one person holds and moves the Movi while another person wirelessly controls the camera's position using a tablet and RC control.
  
  Before NAB, a number of observers said that the Movi would be too heavy for long use. The maximum weight of camera, lens and accessories that the Movi can handle is 10 pounds, making the total maximum system weight 13.5 pounds or less. I saw men and women of various sizes handling the rig without problems. The Movi M10 model is priced at $15,000 and is expected to ship in Q3; the company plans to add a M5 model priced at $7,500 that can handle a maximum camera weight of 5 pounds. $15,000 is out of the range of most independent filmmakers, but the Movi will undoubtedly be available for rent.
• The low-cost UAV business got a big boost from the DJI Phantom, a fully-assembled quadricopter that includes a RC control, GPS navigation and camera mount for a GoPro camera, for under $700. The Phantom's maximum flight time is 10 to 15 minutes, and it has a maximum flight control range of 300 meters. DJI showed a prototype of a new Phantom model with a built-in video camera that can be remotely tilted. Neither the price nor the availability of the new model were announced at the show.
  
  The Phantom is about as foolproof as a radio-controlled quadricopter can get:
• It has a built-in autopilot that enables navigation to a specific latitude and longitude.
• The manual controls can be set to allow steering to be correct relative to the operator's position, no matter what position the Phantom is in.
• It can return to the operator automatically.
• If it flies beyond the range of the RC controller, the Phantom goes into hover mode, and if a good GPS signal is available, it will automatically return home.
• Matrox's new $995 Monarch HD live video encoder accepts video input from HDMI and outputs H.264 video at up to 20 Mbps in both RTMP and RTSP protocols, which means that it supports virtually any streaming server or service. It can simultaneously save the video in MP4 format at up to 30 Mbps on a removable SD card, USB hard disk or flash memory, or on network-attached storage. It has a simple web-based user interface, and can control up to three additional slave encoders for feeding to multiple streaming servers, services or CDNs. 

The Missing

• One thing that surprised me was the lack of new products from some of the leading broadcast equipment companies, especially Panasonic. For many years, Panasonic could be counted on to introduce new and exciting cameras, but this year, there was nothing really new. For example:
• The AG-AF100A, which pioneered the big-sensor low-cost cinema camera market, has only been lightly upgraded since it was announced in December 2010. Panasonic hasn't introduced any new cameras into this market (excluding the GH3, the follow-on to the company's "accidentally successful" GH2 digital camera that's gotten a wide following from budget-sensitive cinematographers.)
• Last year's "camera under glass," a professional 4K camcorder with an Android interface, disappeared this year and was replaced with a generic, consumer-looking 4K camcorder mockup that was first shown at CES in January.
• Sony, JVC and Canon didn't announce many new products. JVC's biggest news was a firmware upgrade, and Canon didn't announce anything new on the Cinema Camera front. It's possible that the companies are "catching their breath" after the last 18 months' explosion of new product introductions, but it's still disappointing to come to NAB and not see much new from the market leaders.

The Trends

• Video hardware and software pricing is looking more and more like computer pricing, where prices go down and capabilities go up each year. Here's a few examples:
• Adobe's Creative Cloud offers users everything in Creative Suite 6 for about $50 per month per user, and they can use the software on two PCs. That, combined with improvements in Adobe's software, is enabling Adobe to pick up lots of market share in video editing and post-production. In response, Avid has priced its new Media Composer 7 at $999, with the additional Symphony features priced at $1,499. $999 used to be the price of a competitive upgrade from Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro to Media Composer, and only for limited periods; now, it's the list price of the software.
• Blackmagic Design has driven down prices in every market that it's entered, and competitors have had no choice but to respond. Prices for professional color correction systems have tumbled since Blackmagic acquired Da Vinci Systems, as have prices for video production switchers (except the very top-of-the-line models) since it acquired Echolab. The market for high-end video processing systems has always been small because of their high cost, but Blackmagic's acquisition of Teranex and subsequent rock-bottom pricing will dramatically increase the size of the market. The cinema camera market is already highly competitive, but Blackmagic is increasing options and decreasing prices for buyers.
• Canon, JVC, Panasonic and Sony are using their top-of-the-line consumer camcorders as the basis of their entry-level prosumer/professional camcorder lines, which increases production volumes, decreases costs and allows manufacturers to lower prices. In most cases, if you don't need XLR inputs or HD-SDI outputs, you can save a fair amount of money by buying the consumer models. However, even the prosumer/professional models are less expensive and more capable than comparable models from even a couple of years ago.
• DSLRs have dramatically decreased the cost of cinema cameras, and an entire ecosystem of lenses, rigs and accessories that are fairly priced in relation to DSLRs has emerged.

Tablets now generate more eCommerce traffic than smartphones

As more evidence that tablets are overtaking smartphones as devices of preference for mobile Internet users, GigaOm reports on a new study of more than 100 million online shopping transactions by Monetate. The company determined that tablets represented 6.52% of traffic to eCommerce sites in Q1 2012, overtaking smartphones (with 5.35%) for the first time. Tablet traffic increased 348% in the last year, while smartphone traffic increased 117%. 95% of the tablet traffic was from iPads. These numbers compare with a forecast from Adobe that overall tablet traffic worldwide won't exceed that from smartphones until early 2013, and will represent 10% of website traffic in early 2014. GigaOm suggests that the reason for the difference between Monetate and Adobe is that Monetate measures eCommerce traffic, while Adobe is counting all traffic, including traffic to content sites.

Tablets are also much more efficient at converting sales than smartphones: In Q1, visits from PCs converted into sales 3.51% of the time, while visits from tablets converted at a 3.23% rate, and visits from smartphones converted at a 1.39% rate. Other measures, such as pages viewed per session and items added to carts, are also much closer between PCs and tablets than between either PCs or tablets and smartphones. The reasons most likely are the bigger displays and keyboards on tablets.

Bibliotheca to export Douglas County, Colorado library eBook model worldwide

No Shelf Required reports that Bibliotheca, a Switzerland-based vendor of self-service print book circulation kiosks and security equipment for libraries, is turning the in-house eBook system developed by the Douglas County, CO public library and its partners into a commercial product. Bibliotheca will provide services for aggregating eBook purchases from participating libraries in order to maximize discounts from publishers, and provide a secure DRM environment for publishers. (It's not clear whether they're simply going to resell Adobe's Content Server, find a comparable DRM platform from another vendor, or develop their own DRM solution.)

Bibliotheca will base its eBook operation near Denver, and it will be run by Monique Sendze, who's currently the Associate Director of Information Technology at Douglas County Libraries. The company plans to introduce its platform in early 2013, and will initially focus on North American libraries before expanding worldwide.

Adobe is onto something with Creative Cloud

Adobe has started accepting pre-orders for CS6 Creative Cloud, its software subscription program. Everything that's been in Adobe's previous Creative Suites, plus a number of new applications that are either being released from or are still in Adobe Labs beta, and all of Adobe's tablet apps, are included in one monthly subscription. Month-to-month subscriptions are $75/month; annual subscriptions are $49.99/month. Prior purchasers of any version of Creative Suite from 3 or above qualify for a discount on the first-year subscription, which brings the price down to $29.99/month.

There were many complaints when Adobe first announced its plan to move to subscription pricing. The fear was that subscriptions would cost more than purchasing software outright--and in some cases, the fears were well-placed: Upgrading from CS5.5 Master Collection, which is the equivalent of Creative Cloud, costs $525, less than the $600 annual price of Creative Cloud before the first-year discount. However, if you skipped version 5.5 and stayed with version 5, the upgrade price is $1,049.00. Upgrades from earlier versions of Creative Suite are even more expensive.

The $29.99/month discounted first-year subscription price is a powerful incentive for Creative Suite users to switch to Creative Cloud. Adobe hopes that it can convince enough people to switch to Creative Cloud that eventually, it will no longer be economic for people to upgrade their packaged software. There's nothing keeping Adobe from raising prices once they get a critical mass of CS users to switch, of course. However, it looks like Adobe is willing to take a chance that lower prices will result in more total users. In addition, the company may be counting on the psychological benefit of a fairly low monthly payment versus a one-time big purchase to get into or upgrade Creative Suite. A completely new Creative Cloud user will get the equivalent of  $2,599 worth of software for a first-month payment of $50 on the annual plan.

My bet is that Adobe's pricing is going to bring in many more users, and it's going to put additional pressure on Avid, and especially Apple.

Adobe pins Flash's future on 3D

Adobe Flash's clock is ticking, and not in a good way. Apple wants it dead, Microsoft is about to make life for it much less comfortable with Windows 8, and Google supports it, but only to get under Apple's skin. The better that browsers and authoring tools that support HTML5 get, the smaller the remaining market space for Flash becomes.

For Flash to remain viable, Adobe has to position it for applications that can't be done well, or at all, with HTML5. It appears that Adobe has decided to focus on 3D applications with Version 11 of Adobe's Flash Player and Version 3 of Adobe AIR, both of which are scheduled for release in early October. Flash 11 has a new GPU-accelerated 3D API called Stage 3D, which should dramatically improve 2D and 3D rendering rates on devices with compatible hardware. Adobe claims that, compared with the current Flash Player's capability to render thousands of non z-buffered triangles at 30 Hz, Flash 11 will be able to render hundreds of thousands of z-buffered triangles at 60 Hz.

Flash is currently very popular for browser-based casual games, but Adobe wants Flash 11 to be used for far more graphically-intensive games, and has signed up EA Interactive, Ubisoft and Zygna to support the new capabilities in their games. The problem, as Wired's Webmonkey site points out, is that WebGL can provide at least the same level of 3D performance in browsers without plug-ins, and WebGL is an industry standard. However, Internet Explorer currently doesn't support WebGL at all, and other browsers have widely varying WebGL performance.

So, Adobe may be able to carve out a niche with Flash for 3D applications, but it's hard to see it as anything more than temporary. Browser developers will be improving their WebGL performance in parallel with increasing their HTML5 compliance. The real test will be how many developers successfully market games written with Stage 3D.

Two new HTML5 authoring tools

More than a year ago, I wrote a blog post bemoaning the lack of HTML5 authoring tools. Then as now, you could create sophisticated content using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, but you had to hand-code everything. Now, we have beta versions of two different HTML5 authoring tools that promise to make the process a lot easier.

First, there's Sencha Animator, which focuses on CSS3 effects (transitions, animations, transforms, and anything else you can define in CSS3). It provides an interactive timeline for creating animations with keyframes. Next, Adobe announced the first preview version of Edge, its authoring tool for HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Like Animator, Edge uses a timeline, but it's considerably more sophisticated: The user interface is designed to look and work similar to those of Flash Professional and After Effects, its animation framework is based on jQuery, it natively imports and exports HTML, CSS3 and JavaScript, and it stores all its animations in a separate JavaScript file rather than modifying the CSS3 file(s).

With Adobe jumping into HTML5, the obvious question is whether Edge is a replacement for Flash Professional? Not yet. Both Sencha Animator and Adobe Edge remind me of Swish Max4, an Australian authoring product that outputs Flash but is considerably simpler and easier to use than Flash Professional. Edge is still early in its development; when Adobe releases a new tool like this, it's typically a year away from commercial release. In addition, different browsers implement different portions of HTML5, and it will take time for the most popular browsers to fully implement the specification (which isn't even scheduled for ratification by the W3C until 2014). However, we're getting closer to the point where HTML5 becomes a viable replacement for Flash for a variety of applications.

Given that Adobe is cannibalizing itself with Edge, there's an obvious concern that the company might cripple Edge in order to keep Flash viable. If Adobe was the only company creating HTML5 tools, that would be a legitimate concern, but other companies are competing in the authoring tool space. If Edge creates inferior content, developers and artists will use a competing product. My belief is that Adobe would like nothing more than for Edge to make up for all the revenues that it's losing as Flash is abandoned, and that means that it can't create a second-rate authoring tool.

Adobe and Sencha are working to make HTML5 look and work more like Flash, and additional companies and organizations are inevitably going to release their own authoring tools. We may only be a few years away from witnessing Flash become a legacy application.

Adobe drops prices for FCP owners by 50%

Adobe made a huge move today to capture disgruntled Final Cut Pro users who have been disheartened by the missing features in FCPX: Any Final Cut Pro or Avid OSX Media Composer owner can "sidegrade" to Premiere Pro or Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium and save 50% off the full or upgrade price. The deal is only good for the Mac OSX versions of the Adobe software. However, any current owner of a Mac version of Premiere Pro or Creative Suite can also take advantage of the deal.

I give the company a lot of credit for making this offer, and I suspect that a lot of FCP and Avid users will take advantage of it. Of course, those people who purchased a slightly discounted upgrade to CS5.5 from resellers over the last few weeks may not be happy that they didn't wait for Adobe, and they may want to go back to their resellers to request a refund of the difference.

The sidegrade deal is available direct from Adobe through September 30, 2011. Even non-owners of Creative Suite (or people like me, who run CS on a Windows system, plus FCP on OSX) can get CS5.5 Production Premium for OSX for well under $1,000; those who qualify for upgrade packages will pay much less. It's an offer well worth considering, in that Production Premium also includes After Effects, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator and Audition.

FCPX Part 3: The backfire

I didn't want to write another post about Apple's Final Cut Pro X debacle (I really, truly didn't), but I've reached my irritation limit. Let's be frank: Apple blew it, but not necessarily for how FCPX turned out. Rather, it blew it by:

1. Not fully communicating just how much of a departure FCPX is from FCP 7, and not educating users to see it as version 1.0 of an entirely new platform,
2. Not anticipating how vehement user reaction would be to key missing features, such as the inability to import FCP 7 projects, no multicam capabilities, and the lack of any facilities for getting audio and EDLs from FCPX to and from other applications, and
3. Not keeping Final Cut Studio 3 available for sale while Apple and third-parties worked to bring FCPX up to functional parity with FCP 7.

As I said, Apple blew it, but the reaction by users and resellers is completely out of proportion to the problem. There is absolutely nothing keeping existing FCP users from continuing to use their current copies of FCP. If it worked for you last Monday, it will still work for you today. Multiple sources indicate that FCP 7 will work fine on Lion, the new version of OSX that will be released next month. Moving to any other editing platform is going to entail a learning curve.

The enormous reaction, for a product that represents a minute fraction of Apple's revenues, suggests to me that there's something more at work here than simple customer dissatisfaction. For example, Adobe started looking for "Premiere Pro ambassadors" just prior to the launch of FCPX. Call me paranoid, but I have to suspect that Apple's competitors are encouraging the firestorm, even to the point of offering talking points to bloggers and tweeters. I have no evidence that this is happening, but the number of posts and tweets, and their similarity, sound very much like what would be driven by a competitive response team. (I used to run those teams in the past, and I know how they work.) Throw in free "evaluation" copies of software that have valid serial numbers, and you end up with a corps of people who have motivation to keep the pressure on.

The resellers who have been tweeting constantly since last Tuesday, trying to get FCP users to switch to Avid or Apple, have a transparent reason for doing so: They can no longer make any money selling FCP. FCPX will only be sold through the Apple App Store, so resellers and integrators can't make any money selling it. They can continue to sell peripherals that work with FCPX, but they can't make any money on FCPX itself.

The FCPX release has stirred more negative reaction than Microsoft's decision not to support direct Windows XP upgrades to Windows 7. Remember that one? It affected, and still continues to affect, millions of PC users--many times more than the FCP user base--but it didn't get this level of vitriol.

So, I've stopped following the resellers that continue to tweet negative coverage of FCPX and exhort me to buy Avid or Adobe. When Apple gets this resolved, as I'm convinced they will, there's going to be a lot of people with egg on their faces. And, for the record, I've been compensated by no one for this (or any other) post, and I'm not writing from anybody's talking points other than my own. I just wish that a whole bunch of people would grow up.

Episode 5 of the Feldman File videoblog is live!

This week's episode of the Feldman File videoblog is live on YouTube! If you can't see it here, click here to view it in your browser. Here are the stories in this week's show:

• Google's $6 billion offer for Groupon is rejected, but it acquires DRM specialist Widevine
• Verizon Wireless fires up its LTE broadband network and launches its first devices
• Comcast extends its agreement to acquire NBC Universal and contends with complaints from Level 3 and Zoom Telephonics
• Adobe releases the first beta of Flash Player 10.2
• The U.S. Justice Department is forced to drop charges against an accused Xbox 360 modder
• Flipboard adds HTML5 support and advertising

The first Feldman File videoblog is live!

I've posted the first episode of the Feldman File videoblog to YouTube! Let's put it this way: It can only get better from here. I should have taken that scholarship to the Columbia School of Broadcasting when it was offered to me.

This week's episode covers the following news:

• Barnes & Noble's NOOKcolor eBook reader (and Android tablet wannabe)
• Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon have all set prices and availability dates for their versions of Samsung's Galaxy Tab Android tablet
• News from Adobe's MAX Developers' Conference
• Sencha Animator, a timeline tool for animation using HTML and CSS3, goes into beta
• Roku licenses the hardware and software behind its Internet set-top boxes to consumer electronics companies
• IDC reports that Apple has become the world's fourth-largest mobile phone manufacturer, passing Research in Motion

The problem with PDFs

In my last post, I took KFNB Reading Technology to task for developing its own proprietary format for eBooks, and stated that PDFs can provide the same "page fidelity" experience as KFNB's Blio eBook reader. There's a good reason to create a new format, however, and it lies at the heart of PDF itself.

There are lots of ways to create a PDF file that looks good when viewed in a PDF reader, but the internal structure of a PDF file can vary widely, depending on the tool used to create it and even the order in which it was created. For publishers, Adobe's InDesign and Quark's QuarkXPress are the two most popular tools for laying out books. These tools can then generate PDF and ePUB files, and it's those files that are used to create eBooks. However, there are many other tools that can create PDFs, and Adobe's own print drivers can create PDFs from almost any document. Some publishers have written their own page layout and conversion software, and there are dozens of format conversion services around the world that can accept files in a variety of formats and output PDFs.

The internal structure of a PDF is very important if you want to create notes or highlights, select text or perform text-to-speech. Adobe has what's generally considered to be the best PDF rendering technology in the industry, and they handle the variety of ways that a PDF can be constructed very well. However, if you need to write your own converter or renderer, you have to handle all the myriad PDF variations.

That's one reason why a company like KFNB would decide to create its own format and require publishers to convert their titles into its format rather than PDFs. By enforcing a more consistent internal structure, KFNB could bypass many of the problems faced by PDF renderers. However, it still results in compatibility issues--eBooks in KFNB's format can only be read with KFNB's readers. If KFNB goes out of business, no new readers will be available, and if there's DRM on the KFNB eBooks, it may be impossible to use them in the future.

That's why I would have preferred to see KFNB "bite the bullet" and do the hard work of parsing PDF files in its reader, instead of creating its own format and insisting that publishers use that rather than PDF.
 

Blio finally coming to market; Ray K babbles about distribution deals

According to The New York Times, the Blio software eBook reader is finally going to start shipping. Blio, from KFNB Reading Technology, maintains page fidelity (eBooks look like, and are paginated like, their print equivalents.) Ray Kurzweil, the founder of KFNB, said that a variety of distribution deals are coming soon, including one with Wal-Mart, which Wal-Mart refused to comment on and was probably unhappy about.

Kurzweil points out that Blio's ability to maintain page fidelity is great for "cookbooks, how-to guides, schoolbooks, travel guides and children’s books" He also is quoted saying “The publishers will not give things with complex formats to these e-reader makers. They destroy the format.” What he doesn't say is that Adobe's PDF also maintains page fidelity, there are PDF readers from Adobe and many other vendors, and by and large, they're also free. He also doesn't mention that Blio uses a proprietary format that only his reader supports. So if you buy eBooks in the Blio format, you can only use them with Blio readers. Using a proprietary format may not be a big problem if your name is Amazon.com, but it's a bigger problem when you effectively have no distribution and are completely dependent on other companies to adopt and sell your product.

He also misspeaks about the reason that publishers haven't made graphically rich titles available in eBook formats. It's not that they don't like the available readers, it's that in many cases, they're simply not yet marketing their children's or specialty titles as eBooks.

I've played with the Blio reader, and it has a lot to recommend it. Its text-to-speech and translation capabilities are particularly good--what you'd expect given Kurzweil's experience with readers for the visually disabled. However, introducing a new, proprietary format is a retrograde move. KFNB could have done everything it wanted to do with PDF, but decided to invent its own format. That's bad for customers, bad for publishers and bad for the eBook industry in general. The eBook industry needs fewer formats, not more.

Three scorpions in a bottle, and a great opportunity for startups

As several writers have pointed out, yesterday's keynote session at Google's I/O Conference was an Apple bashfest. It's increasingly looking like Apple, Google and Microsoft are three scorpions in a bottle, focusing all their attention on each other, with Adobe and Yahoo acting like smaller bugs in the bottle, desperately looking for a ride on one of the scorpions' backs to avoid getting stung.

This represents a great opportunity for startups. The big guys are focusing on each other, rather than customers. They're reacting to each other's moves, and that means that they're even less sensitive than usual to the activities of companies outside the bottle. As Bill Gates said years ago, his biggest fear was two guys in a garage doing something that Microsoft hadn't anticipated. He was right; the two guys were Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and although they were at Stanford, not in a garage, they thoroughly blindsided Microsoft. Now, Brin and Page, along with Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer, need to watch out for the next "two guys in a garage", who are likely already working on the next big thing.

Adobe: Saying and doing are two different things

Recently, Adobe executives were quoted saying that the company will not put any additional effort into its Flash-to-iPhone cross-compiler, and that its focus will be on providing the best possible experience on Android and other mobile platforms. I'd suggested that approach in a blog post several weeks ago. Today, however, Adobe has launched an advertising campaign and published a full-page ad in the Washington Post with an open letter from the company's founders chastising Apple for its actions.

It seems clear that Adobe doesn't really know what it wants to do. If the company is truly focusing all its efforts on Android and other platforms, why is it launching an anti-Apple advertising campaign? The ad in the Washington Post certainly wasn't intended to influence Apple--the last time I checked, Apple's headquarters were still in Cupertino. Adobe's ad is intended to influence the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department in their preliminary investigations of Apple.

If Adobe can't get Flash working on other platforms and is therefore desperate to get onto the iPhone and iPad, that's a problem with Adobe's own engineering team, not an issue for the U.S. Government. Adobe has missed a series of self-announced release dates for Flash 10 on a variety of mobile platforms. Apple's actions haven't helped things for them, of course, but Adobe has painted itself into this particular corner. Also, we don't know the details of the discussions between Apple and Adobe; the companies have been talking about porting Flash to the iPhone OS since the release of the original iPhone, and we don't know how much of the current situation is the result of bad blood that arose in those negotiations.

Adobe has lobbyists who can try to convince the FTC and Justice Department to take action against Apple (if there are any legal grounds for them to do so.) However, according to NPD Group, Android is now beating the iPhone in new U.S. consumer sales, and Verizon has confirmed that an Android tablet is right around the corner. That's where Adobe should be focusing its attention, and it should be sending consistent messages, both externally and internally.

Adobe's rumored to be planning to sue Apple, but over what?

According to ITworld Daily, Adobe is gearing up to sue Apple over the new restrictions on cross-compilers in the latest version of the iPhone Developer Agreement. (Standard disclaimer here: I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and your mileage may vary.) What I'm not sure about are the grounds under which Adobe will sue.

Apple isn't a monopoly; the iPhone isn't the most popular smartphone (RIM's BlackBerrys still hold that distinction.) The iPad just started shipping, and companies have built tablets for years. A company can't be a monopoly in its own products, and Apple has the right to put whatever restrictions it wants into its own agreements, so long as those restrictions aren't illegal. It doesn't appear that Apple induced Adobe to implement its Flash-to-iPhone cross-compiler; Adobe made that decision by itself, to get around Apple's previous restrictions on Flash. Apple had no legal obligation to inform Adobe of its decision to ban cross-compilers before it made the announcement. No developer is forced to sign Apple's new agreement unless they want early access to the iPhone 4.0 SDK.

So, I'm not sure what grounds Adobe is going to use to sue Apple, if it files suit at all. After all, for several years, Adobe either refused to release applications for OS X or released them later on the Mac platform than on Windows. Premiere Pro was unavailable for the Mac for several years. Adobe's actions definitely hurt Apple, but Apple never filed suit against Adobe to force the company to port its applications to OS X in a timely manner.

This may all be a PR scheme on Adobe's part to try to get Apple to change its policies. It doesn't seem as though Adobe has very strong grounds for a lawsuit.

A preview of some things to look for at NAB

I don't expect anything revolutionary at NAB this year, except for a lot of 3D, but the cost of HD capture and post-production keeps going down, so there will be lots to see. Here are a few things to look out for, in no particular order:

• Adobe will be launching Creative Suite 5 on the opening day of NAB. It's already previewing some interesting new Photoshop and Premiere Pro features, including the ability to natively edit AVCHD footage without first converting it into another format.
• Sony will be showing its new NXCAM camcorders, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it show prototypes of its new AVCHD-compatible DSLRs.
• Panasonic will be showing its new $20,000 3D camcorder, which should be getting close to shipment.
• Canon will be showing a camcorder with its new MPEG-2 Full HD codec, most likely along with its line of videos DSLRs.
• ARRI will be showing its new Alexa (A-EV/A-OV) digital cinematography cameras, starting at 50,000 Euros.
• RED will be hosting an offsite event (registration required) at the Tropicana Hotel on April 14th where it'll be showing the current state of Scarlet and EPIC.
• Lowel and Videssence will be showing their first LED lights. The advantages of LEDs over other forms of lighting (no flicker, almost infinite color control, virtually no heat and much lower power consumption) are obvious. Just about everyone in the video lighting business is now offering LED products.
• DSLRs will be another big theme of the show. Many companies will be showing add-ons for making them more usable for video applications (think Redrock Micro, Zacuto, Chrosziel and many others).
• No hints yet on any big new announcements from Avid (which will be exhibiting at NAB) or Apple (which won't be.)

If you're going, be sure to pre-plan your booth visits and organize your time, because the Las Vegas Convention Center is huge and it takes time to get around the city. (The RED event, for example, is at the Tropicana, which is across from McCarran International Airport at the far south end of the Strip. Allow plenty of time to get there from the Convention Center.) Use the monorail as much as you can to avoid cab lines. If you're focused, you can see the show in a full day, but if you plan to attend sessions or off-site exhibits, allow yourself more time.

Nvidia accelerates Adobe CS4 applications

There's been a lot of talk about using the GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) on graphics cards to accelerate applications, not just display, and Nvidia has finally done it. According to InformationWeek, the new Quadro CX not only supports dual displays up to 2560 x 1600 resolution, it can dramatically accelerate Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects CS4 rendering. It can also cut H.264 video encoding time in Premiere Pro by half. Nvidia supplies plug-ins for the applications that execute the processor-intensive code on the GPU rather than the host CPU.

The Quadro CX lists for $1,999, so it's not something that casual users are likely to be interested in, but for serious CS4 users, the productivity gains could pay for the card in a fairly short amount of time. Given that AMD/ATI is now back in the thick of the graphics performance battle, Nvidia's rendering and encoding acceleration could tip the balance in its favor.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 is on its way

I watched today's announcement of Adobe's Creative Suite 4 online, and frankly, Apple can announce nothing better than Adobe (or most companies) can make a "big" announcement. From the very beginning, Adobe was on the defensive, with managers saying that "this is much more than a point upgrade." From what I saw, the need to upgrade depends almost entirely on whether or not you have to have the new features in the products that you use most. For some people, an upgrade is almost mandatory: Premiere Pro, for example, now supports both Red and AVCHD formats. If you need to edit video in either of those formats, it clearly makes sense to upgrade. On the other hand, if you're perfectly comfortable with what you can do with Illustrator or Photoshop right now, you might want to spend your money on other things.

This may be the point at which Adobe users decide to upgrade individual applications, rather than an entire suite. I've loyally gone from individual apps to Creative Suite to CS2 to CS3 over the years, but the apps that I use the most are Acrobat and Dreamweaver, with Illustrator following behind and Photoshop even further back. All of them work fine for me. I've been testing Dreamweaver CS4 for some time, but I can jump back to CS3 if I have to.

If you haven't bought into the Adobe platform at all, a suite may very well make sense, if you're going to use two or more applications. I believe, however, that there's not all that many creative professionals that haven't already bought into Adobe. Students can buy in at greatly reduced prices. And no, this announcement isn't going to cause a mad dash to Microsoft's creative applications, although some people might take the money that they'd spend to upgrade their Adobe apps and buy Expression Studio ($699 list for five applications).

Rather than purchase an upgrade as a knee-jerk reaction, check out the new features in the Adobe applications carefully. In this tight economy, you might do better to save your money and wait for CS5.