Digital document software giants Adobe have announced that it will be buying up rivals Macromedia for about US$3.4 billion (£1.7bn/€2.6) in stock.
Adobe, best known for its market-leading document distribution Acrobat PDF software and Photoshop graphics suite, said the deal would help the company meet customer demands for wider-ranging applications, including audio and video capabilities.
The deal, announced early today, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2005, subject to shareholder approval.
Bruce Chizen will continue as Adobe’s chief executive and Shantanu Narayen will remain president and chief operating officer. Macromedia chief executive Stephen Elop will join Adobe as president of worldwide field operations.
Here’s the PR spin on the deal:
“The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better. Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools – and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash – we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems.
By combining the passion and creativity of two leading-edge companies, we will continue driving innovations that are changing the ways people everywhere are experiencing and interacting with information.”
The combined company would have annual sales of just over US$2bn (£1.05bn/€1.5bn), based on the most recent fiscal and calendar year figures from both.
The two companies have been battling it out for the hearts of creatives for several years – Adobe’s killer app Photoshop has long ruled the roost for designers, although Macromedia’s innovative rival product Fireworks was constantly nipping at its ankles.
Macromedia is best known for its hugely-popular HTML authoring package, Dreamweaver, and its animation software ‘Flash’, which enables Web designers to deliver fast downloading, interactive multimedia content.
Adobe’s late-to-the-party Flash riposte, ‘Live Motion’ never really got anyone excited, and its capable HTML authoring package, GoLive, failed to seriously trouble Dreamweaver’s dominance.
There has been no announcement about the future of individual products, and bulletin boards on the Web are already speculating as to the future of competing products, such the high-end illustration packages, ‘Freehand’ and ‘Illustrator’ (Macromedia and Adobe, respectively).
Both products have large, loyal user bases and there may be some concern that – in the words of Sparks – “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us”.
There are also fears that with Adobe now free of any real competition in this lucrative sector, a damaging monopoly could emerge.
Last week, 250 executives from advertising agencies, game developers and publishers swarmed into the first annual Advertising in Games Forum on 14 April 2005 in New York City.
For the benefit of buzzword-deficient execs, Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman explained that this hideous word describes what you get when advertisers create a game around a product rather than place their brands within a well-known title.
Fact-bloated attendees also learned that the top selling 2004 game titles (according to the NPD Group) were:
Napster may have a new headache on its hands, with a DRM hack recently surfacing.
The tool is reported to be unable to circumvent Napster To Go songs using Janus DRM (WMA DRM v10) which is different from the DRM applied to Light and Premium songs.
The open source Web browser FireFox, has experienced a humongous surge in popularity over the last year according to a report by Nielsen//NetRatings.
“FireFox gives Web surfers a simple tool that blocks unsolicited windows, is less susceptible to virus attacks and offers a unique means of navigating multiple sites within a single browser”, Cassar added.
Although Microsoft is expected to adopt many of FireFox’s features in its new Internet Explorer version 7.0 (expected this summer), the browser’s exponential growth may force lazy coders to ensure that their sites are also compatible with the upstart browser.
Apple Computer has announced that the latest major update of its Mac OS X operating system, code-named Tiger, will be available on 29 April.
This powerful core application lets users search just about everything on their system – files, emails, contacts, images, movies, calendars and applications – with the results appearing “instantly”.
Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger” will be available on 29 April from 6:00 pm at Apple’s retail stores and through Apple Authorised Resellers for a suggested retail price of £89 (US$129, €129)
New figures by media researchers, Screen Digest, has shown that the mobile games market has scooped up £327m worth of funding since September 1999, 56% of which was raised during 2004.
The growth of multimedia/web-enabled phones has supercharged consumer spending on downloadable mobile games, with sales growing from £380m (US$719m/€554m)in 2003 to £778m (US$1.4bnm/€1,134m) in 2004.
A study by Nielsen Entertainment has revealed that men spend more money on video games than they do on music, adding weight to a growing belief that video games are displacing other forms of media for the notoriously fickle attentions of young men.
Naturally, advertisers are keen to cash in on the rising popularity of games, and are looking at ever more persuasive ways to bombard bedroom-bound, bunglesome boys with beguiling adverts (branded billboards in race games are already commonplace, as we’ve 
Overall, Nielsen reported that active gamers tend to spend just over 5 hours a week playing alone and 3 hours a week playing with people or online.
Canary Wireless have released their Digital Hotspotter device, which, as the name suggests, is a WiFi detection and analysis tool.
To scan for more networks, bash the button again.
And while we can’t disagree with Ben’s summary, we wonder how long it will be before laptop makers start fitting WiFi sniffers into machine cases to let users seek out accessible networks without going through all the palaver of booting up.
Skype is a Voice over IP (VoIP) service that allows you to make phone calls via a broadband connection to other users for free. And we like it.
Despite all the benefits of VoIP telephony, the perceived ‘fiddlyness’ of the technology makes it look like an uber-geeky toy for weird, gadget-loving, parameter tweaking folks (cough!).
Once installed, picking up the Cyberphone causes the Skype interface to immediately pop up on your PC’s desktop (sadly, this amused us for some time) and you can then scroll through your contacts via the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ buttons on the phone’s keypad.
Naturally, fellow Skype users can ring you for free too, and you can elect to use your PC’s ring tones or use the one built into the phone.
VERDICT
Everyone’s heard of Space Invaders haven’t they? Those who haven’t, will surely have been sitting in a very dark room with their fingers in their ears, singing “La, la, la, la” very loudly to themselves since 1978.
Not wanting to let a good thing go by, Nintendo has announced the latest version of Invaders – Space Invaders Revolution for the Nintendo DS.
The new version sounds like it has some of those interesting features, such as rules that change as you pass between levels.
In normal play, the DS version doesn’t make a great use of the dual screens. You can use the lower, touch screen as a controller, tapping the on-screen buttons, in some of the games and sometimes graphics do pass between the two.