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Adobe scores with Q3 earnings release

Adobe released its Q3 earnings yesterday, amid all the eyeballs set on it it gave investors the earliest possible look as to how healthy the technology industry have been in Q3. The next-earliest major tech company to report earnings, as Utility Belt reports, is Oracle (ORCL), which releases its results on Thursday – but aside from that, no other big players is coming in until Intel (INTC) and Yahoo (YHOO) share their numbers on October 16.

Bruce Chizen, CEO Adobe Bruce says the growth in Q3 was outstanding. Revenue was $851.7 million, up 41 percent from a year ago. CS3 adoption and Acrobat momentum are the main reason, but Chizen cites growth across all businesses.

With Q1 earnings of $649.4 million, Q2 at $745.6 million and Q3 at 851.7; Adobe sure is laughing its success of Creative Suite and Acrobat success. According to Bruce the company is poised to break the $3 billion revenue mark, and they're positioned to achieve double-digit growth well into the future. Looking forward to the fourth quarter, Adobe said it expects revenue of $860 million to $890 million.

And according to him a majority of corporate customers still haven't upgraded, which is surely a good sign for future revenue from CS3. The fact that the suites are doing better than the individual products shouls sound like a song to Adobe's ears. Though the ability of Microsoft to wreck havoc on its revenue sources still troubles Adobe, still its happy as it has not rested on its prior success but is still thriving ahead to deliver better features to its users. No doubt more than 98.5 percent of people with computers have Flash player installed, and more than 90 percent of people with computers upgrade their player within a year of a new release*. Even Microsoft's own MSN site has a lot of Flash on it,Bruce pointed out, demonstrating that Silverlight (Microsoft's new competitor to Flash) is not yet there. Knowing there is a competition, still being miles ahead of it really should result in some nice strategic planning.

Being an ardent performer, Adobe is doing customer research on big customers who have not yet moved. Considering this information the company is gathering, and the fact that CS2 had performed for a long long time after its release, it seems CS3 will also go on to rake in revenues for a long long time. The next quarter will be an interesting one when most of the European and American firms will set aside their budgets for new product buying and upgrades. It would be interesting to watch the division of individual packages to suite buyers.

A list of few happenings at Adobe -
March - launched its Creative Suite 3 product line
May - announced that it has agreed to buy privately held media software company - Scene7
June - unveiled its Visual Communicator 3 software, designed to create video broadcasts
July - introduced its FrameMaker 8 software
Sep - announced the release of its Font Folio 11 software
and announced a tie up with BEA Systems Inc. (BEAS)
Sources:
Adobe website
Utility Belt
RTT News

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posted by Jas @ 2:53 AM, ,






Now go GPS by P2P positioning software

In Adobe we used to feel that almost every hardware job can be done in 'soft' way i.e. a software can replace almost any hardware. And I must point it out that if you start thinking, it'd be very hard to justify 'almost' here.

And today I struck upon this gold, Navizon, while browsing through the internet wormholes. Frustrated by low performance of GPS in congested cities, Houri and his fa wireless positioning system that works on Pocket PC PDAs by triangulating signals from Wi-Fi access points and GSM cellular towers which means in lay man term that it finds out the current position of gadget holder by location information sent by three different WiFi or GSM signals.

All the user needs to do is to load the software on a Pocket PC with built-in GPS and, ideally, both Wi-Fi and cellular phone functionality. wi-fiplanet.com explains the functionality as.

"As you walk around your city, the device receives broadcast signals from Wi-Fi access points – hotspots, home Wi-Fi networks, company WLANs, Navizon adds cell towers to the mix. The Navizon software takes signal strength measurements from the built-in Wi-Fi and/or cellular radios – at three different locations for each AP or tower detected. Since Navizon knows its own location from the Pocket PC’s GPS, the readings of signal strength are enough, using sophisticated algorithms, to triangulate the position of each AP or tower. The software then records those locations. The Navizon software does all of this automatically. Once the software has built a database of local AP and tower locations, it can accurately calculate its position by triangulating from three or more of them – again by measuring signal strength and applying proprietary algorithms. It works even when GPS doesn’t"

Registering as a user at the Navizon site, which one can do for free and without downloading any software, gives access to the Google Maps the Navizon software uses. One can now define a region by clicking at opposite corners of an imaginary rectangle and see a display of all the known APs and towers in that area. Their locations show up as map pins – red for GSM, green for Wi-Fi.



MSNBC has already said that Microsoft is also planning a similar system of positioning, by recording the position of every address on a giant map, it had created a positioning system that would make it possible for anyone with a WiFi-enabled laptop computer to identify their location to within 30.5 meters.

With GPS systems giving low performance, this methodology for positioning may soon be in vogue.

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posted by Jas @ 4:00 AM, ,