Adobe switches users to Creative Cloud
Adobe’s switch from boxed products to a software-as-a-service offering seems almost complete, with its Creative Cloud announcement at its annual Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles today.
Henceforth, development has been halted on the traditional Creative Suite product and users are being urged to switch to Cloud if they want any updates. Adobe sees its future here in a monthly subscription model, similar to Microsoft’s strategy with its Office 365 online productivity suite. Read more
Tech news from around the web:
British billionaire Sir Richard Branson has made a ‘multimillion-dollar’ investment in mobile payment start-up company Square, a spokesperson for the company has told Reuters. The move follows a $100m investment led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an injection by credit card company Visa.
Adobe Systems is said to be scrapping its move to bring its Flash Player software to smartphones and tablets, CNET reports. The Flash browser plug-in is widely used on personal computers but has so far only reached a fraction of the mobile phone market. Read more
Adobe launches high-performance Flash 11
Adobe has announced a new high-performance version of its Flash software, which it says will differentiate it further from the capabilities of HTML5 – the name for web technologies that are increasingly being used in its stead by developers.
Apple has notably rejected Flash for its iPhone and iPad, citing performance issues, but Adobe said the new Flash Player 11 would render games a thousand times faster than the current 10.3 release. Read more
Tech news from around the web:
Adobe has acquired electronic signature company EchoSign for an undisclosed price, VentureBeat reports. EchoSign’s web-based electronic signature technology will be integrated into Adobe’s document exchange services platform. If this kind of technology takes off, VentureBeat says, it could mean the end of the fax machine and the paper contract. Read more
Major tax phishing attack shows resilience of Zeus
A phishing attack aimed at small businesses accounted for as much as a third of all global junk email–or more than a quarter of all e-mail–for a 15-minute period Friday, showing that the Zeus family of keystroke-logging software remains a force to be reckoned with despite a recent spate of arrests.
The attack took the form of e-mails that had subject headings beginning “Your Federal Tax Payment” and said an electronic transfer had been rejected because of an invalid corporate identification number. Following a recent trend in such scams, the e-mails contain links to a genuine web page, in this case a US site that collects tax payment information including bank account numbers. Read more
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Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
