Adobe Air & The Future Of The Network

According to the New York Times, Adobe "will release the official version of AIR, a software development system that will power potentially tens of thousands of applications that merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones."

It was only a couple years ago when i was talking to VCs about funding the oponia ucaster that many of them told me the personal computer was dead. Everything was moving to the cloud. However, it always seemed to me that the growth of the edge and edge services had to do with DECENTRALIZATION and not CENTRALIZATION. The notion that I will be fine with having Facebook as my central hub giving my control over to their whims and changing business strategy did not seem in-line to me with where the power of the network was (and is) going.

With ucaster, we wanted to make everyone a node in their own right -first class citizens and full participants in the network (And that was both technically and spiritually speaking).

I found it interesting that still no one is mentioning Blake Ross' venture Parakey that was scooped up by Facebook, Parakey, whose product positioning looks like it was borrowed heavily by the folks at Adobe.

"Parakey is a platform for building applications that merge the best of the desktop and the Web"

We are still only at the beginning of this phenom. I still think ucaster and what the role it could play could be the next generation. Having a node to call your own - having applications that sit on your desktop - utilizing the cloud when it creates the most value - and how these things intersect with each other, and how we ascribe meaning to it in a way that creates value to each of us as individuals...that to me is the thing to watch in the coming 12 months.