I was able to sneak out of work last Friday and check out the Adobe AIR tour when it came to Boston. The event was well attended and featured some interesting topics, all the Red Bull you could drink (I was told recently by an employee that they only recommend two in a day, good to know but much too late), and access to the likes of industry heavies like Ted Patrick, and Mike Chambers to name a few.
The best part of the event though was to be get some face time with the people you read about but don’t get to see that often. One in particular was former Bostonian Chuck Freedman who was nice enough to give me a personal demo of his Flex and AIR based VOIP app, Ribbit after I missed his session (thanks Chuck!). Ribbit could potentially be an honest to goodness “killer app” for Flex and rich application space in general. Obviously legacy VOIP players like Vonage and Skype have been on the block for a while but with them you were dealing with their app, their hardware, their login requirements, their terms of use, etc…. With Ribbit, think of all the different contextual uses an app like this has for new and existing business solutions on the web. You want to add real-time support or sales assistance to your site, seamlessly designed and integrated? This really raises the bar on the existing IRC chat-based solutions I’ve seen when compared with this. There is obviously some pretty serious back-end support needed for this to work which I’m sure will come out when it goes to beta, but it will be real interesting to see where this product goes, which I’m thinking will be pretty far.
RobToole.com 