I was very happy that Ramesh reached out to have this discussion, here is some of my take away …

From the beginning of the meeting it was clear that the way Ramesh looked at community and the way I thought of it was different, in Ramesh’s opinion Adobe’s community is professionals who use Adobe’s technology, people who may be interested in Adobe technology but don’t use it, developers in companies who may become users of Adobe technologies, managers whose teams use Adobe technologies, students in universities, teachers, everybody …. while in my opinion Adobe’s community is comprised of professionals who already use Adobe technology and are passionate about it …for the sake of convenience of discussion, I’ll borrow a term used by Seth Godin and call my understanding of community a Tribe

Ramesh talked about the principal of Participation Inequality (90-9-1) which states …

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

He pointed out that Adobe’s strategy in India so far has been to grow the over all numbers of people involved with their technologies and hence hopefully in turn grow the number of key contributors, the 9 and the 1. He mentioned various challenges like the corporate structure of Indian service oriented companies, the online savvy of Indian developers etc. because of which they think that marketing to the masses at least here in India takes priority over focusing on the Tribe.

I was reminded of this TED talk by Seth Godin …

Ramesh pointed out that the reason the content at various events is “Introductory” is because their goal with most of the events that they organize is to focus on the new people and help them adopt Adobe technologies. He agreed that there is a need to engage more with the tribe but at the same time he pointed out that their primary strategy is still to focus on the masses. We also discussed various ways in which Adobe could engage better with the tribe and hopefully we will start seeing some of that take shape soon.

What do you feel, should Adobe in India continue to focus on marketing to the masses or should they pay more attention to our Tribe?

Here is how Adobe evangelist Harish Sivaramakrish chose to react to my thoughts on twitter, I feel that its unfortunate that this is Adobe’s reaction to genuine critique …

I believe that Adobe’s various community programs like the User Group Program, Community Champions program etc are meant to obtain genuine feedback and its sad to receive such a personally attacking reaction when you speak your mind.

I have not asked other members of the list for their permission to post their parts of the thread in public .. so I am only posting my thoughts and not the whole thread but there were at least 4 other champions who agreed with me on many of my points but not everything ..

Here’s the email I sent on Thursday …

I am disappointed by the consistent failure of Adobe India to support community, user groups, community mailing lists, community events, community leaders etc.

I just got an email about Adobe devsummit … yes the same event that gives flex builder to everyone who attends and draws the maximum audience of all Flex related events throughout the year.

Last year in August when I first heard of the same event … I had written to the Adobe evangelism team .. congratulating them on organizing a large scale event that would draw audiences from outside our regular community … I also suggested that they should include community speakers in the event to add to their existing content … I personally offered to present a talk on Advanced concepts in AIR (AIR was completely not present in that agenda). My intention at the time was to help improve the quality of the content that would be presented at the event .. because well I was and still am tired of the “Intro” like talks we hear at all Adobe events in India … you cannot blame Adobe for this because these talks are presented by evangelists and not by developers who use Flex to build real stuff … hence I suggested Adobe should include community experts who have more experience in the trenches than Adobe evangelists.

The reply I got to that email last year stated that it was too late for what I was proposing and they would include community in future events .. yet, here we are a year down the line with an email about the same event in my Inbox and no prior communication to the community that I know off.

I’ve attended Adobe events outside of India and community takes center stage at those events …. I was at the AIR Bus tour in Washington DC in 2007 and at the venue the local DC Flex user group had been given a special pod (the only pod there) to promote their group … adobe presenters advertised the group after their presentations and encouraged people to join …. I have attended several Adobe events in India … none of them mentioned the local user group.
I attended MAX in Chicago and there as well I saw special focus on community and user groups … if devsummit is the main event in India .. why doesn’t that include community in any form?

While Adobe India events continue to be boring marketing gimmicks (there I said it) .. primarily I feel because they don’t include community … its not just about the events …

1. Adobe India members are not active on flex-india or any user group mailing list … they just use flex-india as an advertisement medium. Local Indian Flex team members do not contribute to any local mailing lists, while I constantly see them active on flexcoders, flex sdk list and other international forums

2. Indian Flex team members are not active on the local user groups (the evangelists are) .. but why don’t I see the Flex engineers at out BangaloreFx meetings which happens in their own building?

3. Adobe evangelist go out and give presentations to several companies every day … I don’t think any of them mention the local Flex User Group or Flex India .. where all these new adopters could get help and gain knowledge.

I could go on …

In short I feel while Adobe on the whole does a great job of including community … Adobe India has been completely ignoring it.

I’m disappointed.

Himanshu Modi from Tekno Point agreed with some of my points but suggested that we as community champions should step up organize things on our own … here’s my reaction his thoughts …

Hi Himanshu,

Thank you for replying.
I see your point, .. but the events we organize as community champions is a whole other discussion .. yes we should do that and many of us have been … RIA Connect, initRIA, User Group Tours/Meetings etc.

My point here is different … I’m disappointed because none of Adobe India’s existing efforts seem to include community … its as if they organize/plan everything forgetting that there is an active community out there that can help … I’m not requesting any new events here … I’m questioning why community is not included in exiting efforts … we see Adobe world wide do this beautifully everyday .. community is included at a very early stage .. take MAX for example or the launch of Adobe Groups.

I receive info about an event in San Fransisco 2 months in advance … in contrast .. I receive info about an event in Bangalore 18 days before the event along with public announcement with obviously no room for suggestion and no inclusion of community whatsoever even though I had suggested that last year
All Adobe India events have tech talks only from Adobe speakers .. why don’t they take advantage of expertise in the community?

Also, why don’t I see adobe india .. support/promote/contribute to existing efforts of the community … user groups, mailing lists etc … did anyone from Adobe India help you promote RIA Connect?

John Koch from Adobe who has been very helpful to the Indian Community and has all my respect, acknowledged that he saw my frustration and would communicate my thoughts to all concerned .. here’s my reply to him …

Hi John,

Thank you for replying ….. I know you understand my point of view … anyone who has spent some time thinking about community, its effects and its benefits should see what I’m saying.

What’s surprising to me is that there is team at Adobe India whose job is to focus on community and yet they repeated fail to see the obvious.

I’m picking on one particular team here … I know everyone in that team … they are all great guys and gals .. but I feel I’m obligated to point out their mistakes in the interest of a common goal

I’m sorry to have put you in this position of having to communicate my strongly worded comments … I was about to put this in a blog post and let them know directly how I feel, but then I thought that saying something like that in public would put a lot of people on the defensive … and that is not what we need here. I would love to have this discussion be direct so if you just want to forward this thread to all concerned and have an all hands discussion I’m open to that.

Thank you as always for helping.
Mrinal

Anantharaman Mani who runs the Chennai Flex User Group also agreed with me on some counts but made a point that there are cultural differences between India and abroad and it is somewhat unfair to single out one team at adobe when there is less community focus in all of India Software industry … here is my reply to his thoughts …

Hi Ananth,

Thank you for replying … you’ve raised a very good point about culture … but here’s as I see it …

Adobe India is impacted by two cultures …. 1. The culture of corporate India and 2. The culture of Adobe …. you’re right most corporates in India don’t get community … but what surprises me is how Adobe India is not able to gain from its own world wide culture of nurturing communities … Adobe worldwide oozes with understanding of community … I mean big decisions a are made by including community … see the Flex SDK, see the Adobe Groups initiative, see the activity of Flex team members on mailing lists, twitter et al. … so how come Adobe India misses this and their evangelism efforts continue be one sided marketing messages … I mean that team might as well be called Adobe Marketing.

While they’re almost the same, there is a cultural difference between those two words — Marketing and Evangelism.

(In a separate email, I said …)

Why I’m singling out just team is because I want this one team to change their approach … that change will greatly help improve our ecosystem … blaming the society won’t get us anywhere.

There were other valuable reactions on the thread from Abdul Qabiz and others, but I will leave it to the other contributors of the discussion if they want to make their thoughts public.

Adobe community in India is small knit and I guess I’ve stepped on a few toes here .. but I feel that the reason Adobe runs various community programs is to solicit genuine critique and feedback, so being part of the community champions program, I feel obligated to share my thoughts and that is what I am doing here, unfortunate that people are reacting the way they are.

The talk will be an in depth walk through of the life cycle of a component in Flex 4. The Flex 4 component model (Spark) is built on top of Flex 3 component model (Halo), so we will also take a detailed look at the Flex 3 lifecycle.

I am not planning to do a feature by feature overview of new features in Flex 4, so it would help if you already know a little bit about that. These articles are a good place to start ..

Matt Chotin on What’s new in Flex 4 Beta
Joan Lafferty on Differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4 beta

Check out the event page for registration and other details.

Look forward to seeing you all there.

UPDATE: I’ve posted the slides and code from the talk here

The idea is simple, you build some cool RIAs using Adobe technologies and if Adobe likes your work they give you some very cool prizes and a platform to showcase your work and your skills.
  

  

I was quite excited about the contest at first .. I had even thought of an idea for an app I would build, but after very little exploration I decided not to participate. Now that the contest is well underway and this blog post cannot negatively affect Adobe’s efforts in anyway since the Grand Finale of the contest is tomorrow… I think its appropriate for me to express why I made my decision …
  

  

Quoting the RIAthon terms and conditions ….

“Each Contestant agrees that if his or her entry is selected as a Finalist entry, as a condition of receiving a prize, Contestant shall sign a license agreement granting to Adobe a royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, modify for purposes of publicly performing and publicly displaying, and prepare derivative works based upon winner’s entry, for the purposes of advertising and promoting Adobe products, and for inclusion in and distribution with Adobe products.”

My interpretation of this legal gibberish was that if my entry gets selected as a Finalist I will have to give away all rights to my code to Adobe … I don’t see why I should have to do that … I know, Adobe is spending money on the prizes and the event but they are getting back developer excitement, adoption of their technology, cool examples to show and a whole lot of marketing .. I don’t see why they need to own my code. The obvious question in my head was …. if I spend a week or two building this thing will I still own the rights to monetize it? … and I asked the same on this Flex India thread … but with no response. I’m pretty sure I asked at one more place, but I cant remember where … well eventually my excitement died out and I decided I wont participate.

I wonder if there were others who went through the same thought process as me … I also wonder if the people who’ve participated have actually read the terms. Anyway, I look forward to seeing some of the cool stuff people have built tomorrow at Flash Ahead.

• Flex 4 (Gumbo)
• BlazeDS .NET
• Flex plugin for Visual Studio
• Flash Catalyst (Thermo)
• Flash Player 10 (Astro)
• Alchemy etc.

More details about the event here.

If you’re planning to attend, please RSVP here … also if you’re there do catch up with me and say hi

I’ve been very vocal in the past about the problems Adobe needs to address to help the Flex community grow in India and one of my biggest concerns has been the problems relating to buying Flex Builder in India. Although, those problems still stand, I appreciate Adobe’s efforts to tackle them in whatever way they can. I hope they’ll enable an online store in India soon, but until then I appreciate Adobe for trying to provide new developers all the means that they need to get started with Flex development.

A special thanks to the Adobe Evangelism team in India, who I know have worked really hard towards making all this possible.

See you all at the event.

Let me start with a quote from an email I just received from iPhone@vodafone.in

Thank you for registering for your Apple iPhone 3GTM with us.
We are delighted to announce that the iPhone 3G will be available in India from August 22, 2008
It will be available in 8GB & 16GB models, priced at Rs 31,000 and Rs 36,100 respectively.

According to today’s rupee-dollar exchange rate that’s $715 for 8GB and $832 for the 16GB model. The email is not very clear if there is a contract involved or not .. contracts are not very common in India so I’m guessing not.

This is not entirely new news since the guys at tech2 had leaked the pricing a few days ago and they were bang on … but it is very disappointing. The iPhone is priced at $199 with an AT&T contract in US …
 

 
I’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone ever since it was first introduced, it is a brilliant piece of technology and I might actually still buy it even at that price, but not many will.

What’s disappointing is that Apple, Vodafone (and maybe Airtel) have missed to notice this extremely exciting opportunity that had the potential of totally changing the Internet usage landscape in India. Just yesterday Tim ‘O Reilly tweeted a link to this excellent writeup on the state of the Indian mobile space .. the article states ..
 

India had only 3.4 million PC broadband subscribers in early 2008, and less than 60 million people are using the stationary internet – that’s 5% of the population. But 300 million people in India have a cell phone. Since April 2008, there are more cell phone users in India than in the United States.

The whole country is making mobile a natural priority. Wherever I went, it was obvious, all the way to overcrowded and old Indian trains. My 14 hour overnight train did not have a restaurant car or a bathroom as we know it. But it did have power plugs built in at each air-conditioned seat, with a metal plate next to it. It didn’t say computer power plug or shaving power plug (which would have been appropriate for these slow-moving overnight trains), but simply and only: mobile charging points.

How can Apple, Vodafone not see the potential here? At the right price and given the ease of using the web on the iPhone, it had the potential of becoming the de facto Internet device for the masses in India.

The US price of $199 (I know it comes with a contract) or Rs. 8634 is an extremely good price for a phone in India .. I mean I’ve seen vegetable vendors and auto-rickshaw drives with more expensive phones than that. If Apple, Vodafone had priced the phone at that price (or a little over it) .. iPhone could totally have become the uber device of the masses in India .. we have a lot of masses you see, so imagine the volume of business for Apple, Vodafone, Airtel, application developers, e-commerce based service providers and many others.

Maybe I’m taking this too hard, maybe they plan to fix this by December when 3G networks arrive, what do you think?

It is a meme tracker site, which indexes Indian blogs and gives a sneak peak of the hottest stories from the Indian blogosphere.

The site is a work in progress and is in no way as mature as Techmeme but it has a lot of potential .. the link and time based ranking algorithm seems fairly basic (I think that’s all its doing for now) and I hope this will get better over time and would include many more factors. I would surely like to know more about this algorithm.

The RSS feed could use some improvement too, it currently does not tell me who the author of the post is, this is extremely important as I scan though things in my feed reader.

All in all, this is an excellent start .. great job Ram!! .. I look forward to seeing Indimeme grow into the true pulse of the Indian blogosphere

You should check out the Keynote by Naresh Gupta, CEO, Adobe India and the RIA Strategy talk that David Wadhwani gave that I recorded earlier.

I will be presenting as well at around 4:30 about the RIA User Community and how it can help you

Check out my stream.

The meeting started off with Supreet, who is a very experienced designer, talking about Microsoft’s User Experience Platform and the history of how Silverlight came into being. Pandurang soon took over form Supreet as the room was full of developers and we were more interested in the geek talk.

Pandurang started off by showing some cool demos built in Silverlight followed by an explanation of the designer developer workflow while building for Silverlight or WPF. Then he showed us how to build a simple Silverlight app with Expression Blend and Visual Studio. He has a nice write up the things he showed on his blog, check it out.

I would like to extend a special thanks to Pandurang and Supreet for sharing with us and Esberi Technologies for sponsoring the excellent venue .

My main intended take-out from the session was a list of scenarios when I would want to use Silverlight to build an RIA, given that I am well versed with Flex/Flash/AS3/AIR and I am reasonably comfortable in programming in C# as well. I couldn’t come to any concrete conclusions but here are a few things I’ve been thinking about …

DeepZoom

DeepZoom is the single most important reason why I would build a Silverlight app. This kind of technology is just not available on the flash player and the kind of experiences this can offer is simply amazing. The Hard Rock Memorabilia site is awesome !!.

Performance

This was a hot topic of discussion both during and after the meeting. To me the performance of an RIA runtime has three important elements:

1. How fast can the player calculate, i.e hard core number crunching .. some argue that because of the CLR, the Silverlight player may be faster at numbers than the flash player, I will have to see some benchmark tests before I concur.

2. How fast can the player render, there is some evidence that Silverlight 1.1 was performing better than the flash player, we still have to see tests for the latest Flash and Silverlight players.

3. How well can the player render, i.e how good does the final output looks. Lets face it, one of the biggest reasons for anyone to invest in an RIA is the richness, the wow, the look and feel .. all of which adds to the overall experience of the user. In my opinion Silverlight player’s rendering quality is not up to par with Flash player’s rendering quality. This is the main reason I shelved Silverlight 1.0 when it was released and this continues to be the reason I still prefer the Flash Platform over Silverlight 2 for building RIAs. I had mentioned this point during the meeting, here is a video recording of Microsoft.com’s Silverlight page, where I’ve zoomed in a little bit to explain what I mean. Microsoft has been open about agreeing that their font rendering is not up to the mark and they are working on it, but I feel that they need to work on Silverlight’s overall visual rendering. The rendering is not crisp, edges are jagged especially when things are moved, gradients are not smooth etc. etc. I am pointing to just one example but I have noticed such inferior quality is several Silverlight apps and I plan on writing a detailed post pointing to many more examples.

The above are a few of the things I’ve been thinking about but the decision of which technology to use always depends on several factors, the above are just a few observations.

All in all it was a excellent evening I learned a lot and met some very interesting people. I tried recording the whole evening on video on my phone but this was my first time recording like this I messed up, There are two long clips, one has no audio and the other is too jerky .. sorry guys I’ll try and do a better job next time, meanwhile check out the pictures that Prakash took.

If you have any feedback for the meeting please take a minute to fill this survey.

Now its time to meet again, this time I thought it would be cool to get some insight in Flex’s competition Silverlight. Even though we are a Flex User Group, I believe it’s important for everyone working in the RIA space to understand all the technology options available and make informed decisions when selecting the RIA technology for our next project. With this in mind I managed to convince Microsoft’s Silverlight Evangelist Pandurang Nayak to come and present an Introduction to Silverlight at out our next meeting on the 28th.

It will be a very interesting discussion, so try and be there.

Click here to Register

While on the subject, I have also set up a quick survey on surveymonkey to help improve the Bangalore Flex User Group meetings, so please take a minute to provide some feedback.
 
Take the Survey

The discussion in the comments of Vivek’s post has been quite interesting … Abdul expressed that it might not be very practical from an organizers perspective, given that the Adobe community in India is still quite nascent and I kinda agree with him having had the experience of organizing initRIA and several local FUG meets. That said I also feel that its quite a tough judgement call and I hope that Adobe would have given Bangalore due diligence before rejecting it.

Peter Elst also joined the discussion and expressed a very important point that I totally agree with …

Adobe has an opportunity and needs to step up to the plate, failing that it takes little for Microsoft to start actively pushing out their technology to developers and tip the balance of the current ‘outsourcing ecosystem’.

Its just a matter of time for Microsoft to push more money into it and start promoting Silverlight. I firmly believe Adobe needs to be ahead of the curve here.

Yes, Adobe needs to step up and stay ahead of the curve here in India, before it becomes economically more practical for organizations to build RIAs using Microsoft’s technologies, even though the Flash Platform is a better option technologically.

Now is organizing MAX in India the way to stay ahead of this curve? I don’t think so …. events in general is definitely one area but there are several other things that Adobe needs to spend time and money on, as far events are concerned, we have gone from no events in 2007 to some events in 2008 .. thats not too bad.

So here are the things that Adobe needs to do to stay ahead of the curve and MAX is not what we really need at this point ..

Thus in my opinion Adobe’s time and resources are better spent in the above areas rather than in a big event like MAX . I’m not saying that events are not important, I would totally love it if we had a MAX in India .. but right now that is not my biggest demand from Adobe.

Things are very different this year, from the very beginning of the year I started to feel that RIAs were getting a lot of traction in the local circles and we have a lot of fun in store for India this year. In February all the Flex user groups in the county celebrated the launch of Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 and we now have some excellent events lined up already … here’s a list of events that have already been announced …

• Adobe RIA Architects Summit 2008 – April 3rd

  Notable Attendees:

  • Naresh Gupta, MD, Adobe India
  • David Wadhwani, VP of the Platform BU, Adobe
  • James Ward, RIA Cowboy
  • Ben Forta, the Coldfusion Guru

 

• Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0: From The Ground Up Tour – April 29th

  Colin Moock is the author of the best ActionScript 3 book there is, Essential ActionScript 3 and a very well renowned expert in the AS3 world.

 

• Great Indian Developer Summit – May 19th to 23rd

  Although this is a broader event and is not free like the above two events, there are two speakers on its speaker list that i would love to listen to:

  • Jesse James Garrett, he coined the term AJAX
  • Yakov Fain, a renowned name in the Flex and Java worlds and I love reading his blog

 
These are the events that have already been announced, I know there are many others that are being planned … there’s word that we might even have an Adobe MAX in Bangalore this year..
 
So lets get ready to party !! 

I know that Abdul had complained about this first in March 2006 and then again in Jan 2007 … yet another year has passed since and still nothing has changed.

Adobe, we have a huge community of Flex developers in India, please do something about this soon, its hurting your business and its painful for us your customers. I was all set to buy CS3 Web Premium last month, but I didn’t because I realized I would need to go to the reseller for it (ya I’m lazy) .. I don’t really need CS3, it was spur of the moment that i wanted to buy it .. but the fact that there was no online store and I couldn’t get it immediately at 2 in the night put me off …. I now use Aviary Phoenix and Picnik .. they serve most of the needs I have. Unfortunately I don’t have such an alternative for FlexBuilder, its an excellent tool and I can’t live without it … so adobe please fix this.

As far as I know, the group was started somewhere in mid July of 2006 by Manish Jethani, it stayed quite dormant during its early months, about a year ago it had 43 members and the number of discussions was starting to increase, today as we speak the group has 1003 members and 1079 messages were posted last month. A few months ago, Raghu had done an analysis of how well the group was doing..

The rate of growth of Flex India has been amazing and its indicative of the growth Flex adoption is seeing in India .. so as Flex India hits this landmark of 1000 members I want to congratulate everyone who has helped make this community a success. Cheers !!