Facebook Backs Same-Sex Marriage in Supreme Court Filings (AllFacebook)
Facebook joined the growing list of companies expressing their support for same-sex marriage, announcing in a post on its LGBTQ@Facebook page that it will submit briefs on the topic to the U.S. Supreme Court. The social network said it would post links to its filings on the LGBTQ@Facebook page when they become available.
Find out how to use Google Tools to manage social media content and campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an interactive online event starting June 6. Monica Morse (left), head of social & SMB solutions at Google, will familiarize you with a wide range of Google tools such as trends, Google+ and Hangouts. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
Adobe Systems Incorporated has acquired Behance, a social network for designers. The software giant today announced its plans to add Behance’s community features to its own Creative Cloud, which serves professionals who use Photoshop and other tools.
Get your pins and tweets ready, marketers, because holiday shopping season is about to begin. To ease stress for retailers, Adobe has created a predictive tool that forecasts sales growth figures and online shopping spikes for the upcoming season, also factoring in referral traffic from social media sites. Referrals to retail sites from social networks are expected double, the company reports, and Pinterest takes the lead as the fastest-growing site for driving traffic.
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Facebook Faces Shareholder Lawsuits (AP)
Facebook’s fourth day of trading as a public company saw an increase in the company’s stock price and shareholder lawsuits related to the social network’s botched initial public offering. Several shareholders who bought stock in the IPO have filed lawsuits against Facebook, its executives and Morgan Stanley, the IPO’s lead underwriter. Reuters Meanwhile, Facebook is considering a stock-listing proposal put forward by the New York Stock Exchange, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters, in the wake of a disappointing initial public offering last week on the rival NASDAQ bourse. Facebook has exchanged phone calls and emails with NYSE Euronext and are considering their pitch, the source said without elaborating on specifics. CNET Facebook plans to open its first Middle East office in Dubai next week, according to the Associated Press. This United Arab Emirates city is considered the Silicon Valley of the region, so it makes sense that the social network would put its Persian Gulf hub here. The Hill Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday began to look into the debacle of what was supposed to be the social networking company’s crowning achievement. Lawmakers want to know whether institutional investors got a sneak peek at an updated analysis, written just before the initial public offering, that gave a more pessimistic assessment of Facebook’s future revenues. AllFacebook Some Facebook page administrators are seeing messages in the top-right-hand corners of their timeline pages urging them to create Facebook ads and containing a “promote your page” button. Have you seen similar messages on Facebook pages you manage? Mashable A Facebook page and a six-minute video tell the story of a 12-year-old girl whose mother died when she was 3 years old, grew up being abused by her father and bullied on her Facebook page. Eventually, the girl commits suicide. There’s just one problem: this is all fake. Read more
Adobe hit a home run with its free drawing utility launched along with the original iPad in April 2010. However, it did not see to do much beyond release utility type apps for the iPad since then. It looks like this is about to change. Adobe announced, but has not yet released, a set of sophisticated apps for Android tablets and the iPad in the near future.
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There’s a saying that the more things change the more things stay the same. Case in point? Adobe Flash for Android. Last may I wrote about Flash 10.1 beta for Android OS 2.2 phones.
Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta for Android OS 2.2 an Underwhelming Experience
This week, InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister wrote:
Flash on Android: Look but don’t touch
Neil’s finding with Flash 10.2 on Android OS 3.0 (Honeycomb) mirrors my experience last year with 10.1-beta on OS 2.2.
- Hulu still doesn’t work on a mobile device with Flash
- Flash for Android doesn’t scale bitmap images well (such as bitmap text)
- Flash for Android doesn’t work well in a touch display environment
- Flash for Android doesn’t work with Adobe’s Acrobat.com site
He concludes that Flash support offers no reason for buying a Xoom instead of an iPad. If you were hoping the Flash player would enable a whole new world of content, you will be disappointed. Flash sites on Android devices are utterly hit or miss. And if you’re deploying Flex applications for your business to be accessed on mobile devices, my advice is to switch to HTML immediately.
The international publishing group at Bonnier will use the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to develop its News Plus tablet newspaper publishing platform, with the aim of creating tablet editions for newsmagazines with a total daily print circulation of more than 800,000.
Sweden-based daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which released its iPad app in the iTunes store Monday, will be the first Bonnier publication to use News Plus for daily production, and the publisher said the next four will be Sydsvenskan, Expressen, Dagens Industri, and Børsen.
Bonnier is using Adobe Content Viewer’s Web View functionality to display and push HTML5 content live in real-time, as well as implementing a publisher direct model for subscription payments and content distribution.
Cross-platform mobile web browser SkyFire has earned nearly $1 million over a single weekend after it’s appearance on Apple’s iOS app store.
SkyFire launched for iOS devices last Wednesday at $2.99 a pop. However demand for the program was so great that the company SkyFire Labs temporarily pulled the app down after just five hours to keep their servers from being overloaded. The company then allowed users to download the app in more controlled batches.
SkyFire’s claim to fame is its ability to run Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Quicktime web content without additional plugins. Flash video is pre-processed on the SkyFire servers so it can be played in the mobile browser; a feature that iOS devices such as the iPhone and the iPad lack.
Over the first weekend on the iOS store, SkyFire was downloaded more than 300,000 times, according to MobileCrunch. After Apple’s 30% cut, the SkyFire team will still get between $600,000 and $700,000. Had the company been prepared for the barrage of initial downloads, they might have made even more during that time period.
While SkyFire charges money for the iOS version, the browser is available for free on other mobile platforms such as Google’s Android OS.
Publishing giant Condé Nast will debut digital replica editions across its portfolio of magazine brands using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite following its successful rollout of digital editions of Wired and The New Yorker using Adobe tools.
The apps for GQ, Vanity Fair, and Glamour will be re-created using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.
Condé Nast president by Robert A. Sauerberg Jr. said:
This decision comes as the result of an ongoing research-and-development period that included the introduction of five digital replica apps using two different approaches and tools in order to gain maximum learning in this emerging area. The company will continue to seek the best technologies to bring its award-winning content to market as platforms and devices emerge.
The innovative work our in-house team at Condé Nast Digital did made us first to market with replicas on iPhone and iPad and has allowed significant learnings. Our team considered many factors to ensure that we had a platform that could be continually enhanced to meet the needs of our consumers and distributors.
Chief technology officer Joe Simon added:
We have always intended to deliver our content on a variety of platforms and devices, and the Adobe Design Suite will help us efficiently achieve the “author once, publish anywhere” goal.
Adobe has recently selected PlaySpan to power the payments platform for their Shibuya service, which allows Adobe AIR developers to easily upload, sell and monetize their applications. The developers will simply add a few lines of code to their applications, set the price and the free trial period and publish the application to the Adobe AIR Marketplace. This then puts their applications in the Marketplace directory, where users can do free trials and then pay to get the full version with a credit card, PayPal, an Ultimate Game Card(R) or over 85 other global payment methods provided by PlaySpan.
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