Photoshop, Flash and PDF readers are household names in India. These were created for a different age though, and California-based Adobe Systems, the developer of these products, is now transforming them to work on mobile devices, the devices that consumers are moving towards. Apple tried to keep Flash off the iPad and iPhone, saying it's irrelevant for those devices, but today Flash-based apps are available on its App Store. The person leading the Adobe initiative is Shantanu Narayen, the company's president & CEO, who grew up in Hyderabad and later moved to the US. Narayen is currently on a visit to India to meet with employees and customers.Since 1995, Fortune has ranked Adobe as an outstanding place to work. Adobe was rated the fifth-best U.S. company to work for in 2003, sixth in 2004, 31st in 2007, 40th in 2008, and eleventh in 2009.
In May 2008, Adobe Systems India was ranked 19th of great places to work in India. In October 2008, Adobe Systems Canada Inc. was named one of "Canada's Top 100 Employers" by Mediacorp Canada Inc., and was featured in Maclean's newsmagazine.
Adobe Labs is a source for news and pre-release versions of emerging products and technologies from Adobe. Most innovations, such as Flash 10, Flex 3, and ActionScript 3.0 have all been discussed and/or trialled on the site.One area Adobe is focusing on (as of February 2009) is the deployment of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). To this end, they released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a cross-platform runtime environment which can be used to build, using Adobe Flash, rich Internet applications that can be deployed as desktop applications. It surpassed 100 million installations worldwide in February 2009.Flash is installed silently when Acrobat Reader is installed.
Two additional components designed for large-scale implementation have been proposed by Adobe for future releases of Flash: first, the option to require an ad to be played in full before the main video piece is played; and second, the integration of digital rights management (DRM) capabilities. This way Adobe can give companies the option to link an advertisement with content and make sure that both are played and remain unchanged.
Flash Player for smart phones is available to handset manufacturers at the end of 2009.
