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SAN JOSE, Calif — Dec 17, `07 — Adobe Systems today reported financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended Nov 30, `07.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, Adobe achieved record revenue of $911.2 million, compared to $682.2 million reported for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006 and $851.7 million reported in the third quarter of fiscal 2007. This represents 34 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Adobe’s fourth quarter revenue target range was $860 to $890 million.

Adobe benefited from global demand for Creative Suite 3, which includes software for editing photos, designing Web sites and creating video. Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen, who took over from Bruce Chizen this month, predicted first- quarter earnings that topped estimates, and reaffirmed a forecast for 13 percent sales growth in 2008.

Adobe Reports Record Annual Revenue in Fiscal Year 2007
In fiscal year 2007, Adobe achieved record revenue of $3.158 billion, compared to $2.575 billion in fiscal 2006. On a year-over-year basis, annual revenue grew 23 percent. More at Adobe.

HD Quality Web Video and Audio Now Available With Adobe Flash Player Update.

SAN JOSE, Calif –BUSINESS WIRE– Dec 03, ‘07 — Adobe Systems today announced the immediate availability of Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3 software, previously code named Moviestar.

Adobe Flash Player 9 now includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities. The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers.

The combination of Adobe Flash Player 9 and Adobe Flash Media Server 3 (also announced today) enables the delivery of HD quality video to the broadest online audience.

H.264 support is an encoding option in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects software and is now integrated across the Adobe Flash family of products. Support extends to applications developed for Adobe AIR software, a cross-operating system application runtime that enables developers to use their existing skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Expected to be available in early 2008, Adobe Media Player, the first application from Adobe built on Adobe AIR, will leverage both H.264 video and HE-AAC audio support. Adobe Media Player takes Flash streaming video experiences outside the Web browser delivering more viewing options, such as watching videos anytime, anywhere.

Adobe Flash Player content reaches over 99 percent of Internet-enabled desktops, as well as hundreds of millions of mobile and set-top devices, enabling organizations and individuals to build and deliver rich Web video experiences that work consistently across multiple platforms. Leveraging Adobe’s Emmy Award winning Flash architecture, Adobe Flash Player can be used to view both live and on-demand media or entertainment on sites such as CBS, NBC, FoxNews Digital, PBS, MTV Networks, BBC and Hulu.

The technology also powers the video capabilities of popular social networking sites including YouTube and MySpace. With H.264 and HE-AAC support in Adobe Flash Player 9 and Adobe Flash Media Server 3, content providers can now deliver HDTV-quality streaming video on the Web.

Since H.264 and HE-AAC are open industry standards and already integrated into existing authoring and publishing workflows, content producers can leverage their existing H.264 material and seamlessly play back the native content in Adobe Flash Player. This enables publishers to encode content once and then distribute it to multiple mediums, resulting in the potential for reduced costs and time savings.

Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3 is immediately available as a free download for Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms from adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.

SAN JOSE and SUNNYVALE, CA — Nov 29, 2007— Adobe and Yahoo! today launched Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo!, an opt-in service that enables online commercial publishers to drive new revenue by including timely, contextual ads next to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)-based content. The service has the potential to offer readers access to more free content, enhanced with ads that match their interests. Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! is available initially as a beta program.

The new service allows publishers to generate revenue by including contextual, text-based ads next to Adobe PDF content, with Yahoo! providing access to its extensive network of advertisers to match a broad range of subject matter. For advertisers, Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! extends reach by delivering advertising across a new channel of content, while also providing the ability to track advertising performance, just as they can today with ads placed on Web sites.

How it Works

To join the program, publishers must register online, and then simply upload their Adobe PDF content so that it can be ad-enabled before distributing PDFs as they do today. Ads can only be displayed within Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, in a panel adjacent to the content so that they do not disrupt the viewing experience. Every time the PDF content is viewed, contextual ads are dynamically matched to the content of the document. The publisher can then monitor performance through detailed reports. Publishers already committed to participating in the Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! beta program include: IDG InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation, Reed Elsevier and many more.

Pricing, Availability

Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! is a free service and does not require the purchase or installation of software. The program, currently in beta, is open to US-based publishers who produce English content. Publishers can apply to participate in the program at advision.webevents.yahoo.com/adobe/ . Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! supports PDF content created in Adobe Acrobat 8 and earlier versions.

More at Adobe.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Oct. 15, 2007 — The BBC and Adobe Systems Incorporated, today announced a strategic relationship around the delivery of Web video. By adopting Adobe Flash Player software, the BBC will make its free catch-up TV service — BBC iPlayer —available as a streaming service across Macintosh and Linux, as well as Windows, by the end of the year. The strategic relationship will also allow the BBC to provide a single consistent user experience for the majority of streamed video and audio content on bbc.co.uk.

The BBC iPlayer on-demand streaming service will complement the download service currently available. This non-exclusive relationship is part of the BBC’s strategy to reinvent bbc.co.uk, to ensure all its rich-media content is accessible to the widest audience possible.

Erik Huggers, BBC future media and technology group controller said, “I’m delighted to announce this strategic relationship with Adobe. It is important to ensure that BBC iPlayer is available on as many platforms as possible.”

Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe added, “Adobe is driving the next generation of video delivery by accelerating the fusion of TV and the Internet. With more control over playback, interactivity and branding, the move to Flash Player compatible video will help the BBC to engage audiences by delivering a seamless, instant-on Web video experience.”

More at Adobe Press Room

CNET is reporting on Adobe’s new 3D camera technology.

In their words “Today, if you want to trim all the distracting background out of a picture–say, the crowd behind your daughter playing soccer–you have to do a lot of artful selection with high-powered software such as Photoshop. But what if your computer understood the depth of the image, just as you did when you took the picture, and could be told to just erase everything that’s a certain distance behind your kid?

That’s one possible way to use technology that Adobe Systems has begun showing off–and that can be seen in video of a news conference posted by the Audioblog.fr site last week.

Dave Story, vice president of digital imaging product development at Adobe, showed off aspects of how the technology worked. First comes a lens which, like an insect’s compound eye, transmits several smaller images to the camera. The result is a photograph with multiple sub-views, each taken from a slightly different vantage point at exactly the same time.

From this information, the computer reconstructs a model of the scene in three dimensions.

Story then showed a video with significant transformations of an image based on this 3D understanding. The image had three major elements–a statue in the foreground, a statue in the middle distance, and a wall in the background. The video showed a simulation of a person shifting vantage point left and right–natural enough given that the multiple views captured that information.

More at CNET…

According to Reuters, Adobe has released new software, Flash Lite 3, for its popular Flash Player on Sunday that promises to bring the quality of live video on cellular phones closer to that of video on computers.

Adobe, whose software made possible the rapid rise of pioneering online video site YouTube, said Nokia and NTT DoCoMo would use its new Flash Lite 3 in their new cell phones.

More at Reuters…