Hasta La Gadget!

Adobe has reported its quarterly earnings for Q1 2013 that ended on March 1. The company has made $1.008 billion during the past three months, exceeding its own expectations of $750 million to $1 billion for the quarter. The company also announced that it has passed 500,000 Creative Cloud paid subscribers, while free users are past the two-million mark.

Compared to last year, the company’s revenue dropped slightly this quarter compared to Q1 2012, which showed a $1.045 billion revenue during the three months. However, the company’s paid subscriptions to Creative Cloud could boost the company’s financial results in the long term, but it may take a few quarters for that boost to occur.

The company’s user base for Creative Cloud is quickly gaining steam, since the service passed the 1 million user mark back in December, and already that number is over double. It was quite the year for Adobe, with the launch of Creative Cloud and a new version of Creative Suite, dubbed CS6, which includes a ton of software for designers and developers.

As for Adobe’s income for the quarter, operating income chimed in at $98.2 million, and net income was $65.1 million on a GAAP basis. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $240.7 million while net income was $177.9 million. Not a bad quarter for the company, even considering its revenue is down just slightly from last year.

Adobe rakes in $1.008b of revenue in Q1 2013 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The proportion of web traffic coming from tablets has pushed past smartphones for the first time, according to Adobe’s latest Digital Index which has tracked more than 100 bil­lion vis­its to 1,000+ web­sites worldwide, between June 2007 to date, to compare which device types are driving the most page views. The monitored markets are the  U.K, U.S., China, Canada, Australia, Japan, France and Germany. While the difference between smartphone and tablet traffic is marginal — with tablets accounting for eight per cent of the measured page views and smartphones seven per cent — the growth in tablet page views is impressive, especially considering how new the category is (the first iPad launched in April 2010).

Of course both mobile device types still account for a fraction of the total share of page views when compared to desktops/laptops — which accounted for 84 per cent of the page views, according to Adobe’s data – but both are taking a growing share, and tablet growth is on an especially steep trajectory:

Adobe attributes the rise of tablet page views to how well-suited the form factor is for web browsing, with the most obvious attribute being tablets’ larger screen size vs smartphones (albeit, that gap is closing as some tablets shrink and some smartphones swell). On average, Adobe found that Inter­net users view 70 per cent more pages per visit when brows­ing with a tablet com­pared to a smartphone — so tablet users are doing more leisurely (and presumably leisure time) browsing.

While there is a good spread of different activities across both tablets and smartphones, Adobe’s index indicates that online shopping is a particularly popular activity for tablet users. Retail web­sites receive the high­est share of tablet traf­fic across all indus­tries, according to its data, while auto­mo­tive and travel shop­ping websites also get a “sig­nif­i­cant share” of tablet traffic:

Writing on its digital index blog, Adobe adds:

We’ve been keep­ing a close eye on how quickly tablets have taken off. Just ayear ago in Jan­u­ary we uncov­ered that vis­i­tors using tablets spend 54% more per online order than their coun­ter­parts on smart­phones, and 19% more than desktop/laptop users. Dur­ing the past hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son we saw that 13.5% of all online sales were trans­acted via tablets. And last month before the Super Bowlwe learned that online view­er­ship via tablets dou­bles dur­ing big sport­ing events. Now we know that not only is tablet traf­fic more valu­able in terms of ecom­merce and engage­ment, tablets have also become the pri­mary device for mobile browsing.

The U.K. leads Adobe’s Index for tablet page views, with the U.S. second:

All coun­tries tracked saw their share of traf­fic from tablets dou­ble over the course of 2012 — a trend Adobe expects to con­tinue through 2013. It added that some slight dips in tablet share in certain countries in November were down to PC traffic surging, rather than tablet page views dropping:

It’s no secret that Flash can be a security liability, with Adobe having again rolled out critical updates in recent weeks to patch vulnerabilities that left users at risk. Not every user updates when the patches are released, however, instead continuing to use an older, potential vulnerable version. In light of this, Apple has taken another step towards keeping its users safe.

Just as it did previously with Java, which is widely known for its security vulnerabilities, Apple has now blocked out-of-date Adobe Flash plugins on Safari. The change has already been implemented, and so when users attempt to access Flash content using an older version of the plugin, they will instead be present with the notification box in the screenshot above.

The user will be notified that he or she is using an outdated version of Flash, and will be provided with a link to download the latest version. Once downloaded, the Flash content will be loaded and all will be well. While some might consider this to be an inconvenience, it has been implemented in light of critical security issues with Flash Player.

On Tuesday, we reported that Adobe has rolled out an emergency update for Flash Player to patch security issues that allowed hackers to attack users running Firefox. On February 14, Adobe had also rolled out updates to its Acrobat and Reader to correct vulnerabilities that were actively being exploited in the wild.

[via ars technica]

Apple blocks out-of-date Flash Player in Safari, tells users to update is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Twitter has just launched its new advertising API. The new ads API is designed to help marketers get their ad campaigns out to the right type of audience. This way, Twitter can help create more relevant advertisements for both marketers and users alike. Twitter states that “our focus has been on delivering better ads for users, not more ads”, because more ads would mean a lot of angry Tweeters.

There are 5 initial partners who have implemented Twitter’s Ads API into their marketing program. This list includes Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT, and TBG Digital. By advertising using the marketing campaigns from these companies, marketers will not only be able to get their ads out through the company’s existing marketing program, but also to Twitter’s 200 million users as well.

The new API system will also be more targeted, providing Twitter users with ads that are most relevant to them. This new system was tested with the five partners back in January, and over several weeks, the companies were seeing very positive results. Adobe’s media optimizer was able to increase Adobe’s number of followers from 2 dozen new followers a day to about 400 new followers a day. By the end of the test, there was a steady rate of 115 new followers per day for Adobe.

Twitter is looking for new partners to add onto the list, and have placed an application on their blog. In the near future, you should see more promoted tweets, and more promoted accounts, but they should appear based on your interests. Twitter is also looking to launch a “promoted products” feature in its advertisement API soon.

[via Twitter]

Twitter launches Advertisement API is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Digital photo editing is one of the most valuable – and fun! – skills to have these days. But not all of us can easily learn the right mix of tools, filters, tweaks and whatnot to get the result we want. If even the thought of using MS Paint causes your eyes to glaze over, you might be intrigued by PixelTone. It’s like Siri for Photoshop.

PixelTone is a prototype iPad app developed by folks from Adobe Research and the University of Michigan. Unlike Photoshop Touch – or any photo editing app for that matter – PixelTone was made to be operated using natural language commands and simple gesture controls. The user will still need to know certain terms like contrast, crop and saturation, but as you’ll see in the demo below even newbies like me can pull off a lot of tweaks on PixelTone that we may not be able to do on a normal photo editing program. You can even attach words to parts of the picture, such as identifying people or clothes.

There’s no word if the researchers will release a commercial version of PixelTone, but one thing’s for certain: they can make a mind-controlled Photoshop, but you can’t automate taste. Or tact. For more information on the projection, you can download a copy of the PixelTone research paper on Eytan Adar’s website.

[Eytan Adar via Gizmodo]