Adobe Wants to Come in from the Cold

Om Malik reports on gigaom:

At its developers’ conference in Las Vegas last week, Adobe announced it would spend $100 million in venture funding on startups that use Adobe platforms, especially Apollo, the company’s new system for running applications written in Flash, HTML, and JavaScript from the desktop. The core idea is to marry the online and offline worlds, but the system is only out in preview now, so there aren’t exactly startups queued up for the cash.

Adobe is working hard to put itself in the middle of something. It must have thought it was already there with Flash, the ubiquitous (really ubiquitous) player it acquired along with Macromedia last year. Since then, Flash has come become a part of the biggest recent trend on the web, online video. Every new video-sharing site on the web, from YouTube on down, uses Flash, but Adobe doesn’t get to charge many of them for the service. Rather than streaming, which would require Flash servers, most of these sites opt for downloading and caching videos locally. Content owners like ABC pay to use Flash, but that’s not where all the viewers go.