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elements of the product. Despite the possibly revolutionary nature of the communication capabilities of the Flash Media Server, it did not meet initially with great business success. Macromedia saw Breeze as a means of getting Flash Media Server "over the hump." By building a solution on top of Breeze, the Breeze team had many goals: it sought to demonstrate what kind of applications could be built on the Flash Media Server platform, explore a new business model for a company traditionally focused on shrink-wrap tools software, and understand the attendant difficulties in building applications on the Flash Media Server platform.
226:, overlapped with FutureSplash's functionality in many ways. Both were essentially animation/multimedia solutions consisting of an authoring tool and a browser plug-in runtime. As a Web technology, Flash had the advantage of a smaller runtime (on the order of 100 kilobytes, whereas Director's Shockwave runtime weighed over a megabyte), as well as a learning curve that was significantly less steep owing to the lower complexity of the product. Director was weighed down by six releases of accumulated legacy, and in particular because its original target was the CD-ROM market, not the Web.
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Flash came to dominate the market for Web-based interactive media. Macromedia wrestled with the cross-product positioning of Flash and
Director for several years, trying repeatedly and with limited success to position Director as the "big brother" to Flash, to be used for situations where Flash hit its limitations. Director continues to be one of the most popular tools for authoring multimedia CD-ROMs, although Flash is also used for this purpose.
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an additional browser plug-in or helper application. Other advantages of Flash video were the lack of "chrome" around the video player window which competing players typically displayed, and the customizability of the interface which enabled Web developers to create their own stylized video-playing widgets in Flash. Flash video is now an essential technology used by prominent Web sites such as
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and Flash MX. When Jon returned, he was armed with a vision for a new class of Web applications that enabled communication, collaboration and what he called "online storytelling." He saw the Flash Player's success and ubiquity as an opportunity for bringing the real-time communication technology that these applications would require to every computer running the Flash Player.
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The new video-enabled Flash Player quickly became one of the most popular means of deploying video on the World Wide Web. The Flash Player's ubiquity enabled Flash video to bypass a principal drawback of competing video technologies, which was the requirement for the end-user to download and install
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He founded a new team alongside the Flash team to fulfill this vision, building a product which he code named "Tin Can," a reference to the tin can telephone made by children using two tin cans and a string. This new team and the Flash team worked together to incorporate two-way, real-time video and
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During the development of Flash 5, Gay took a several month hiatus from day-to-day operations of the Flash team to think about new projects of strategic importance to the company. At that time, engineering VP Peter
Santangeli took over leadership of the Flash team and would lead the team for Flash 5
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As the engineering team grew in size, other engineers began to step in and take over pieces of the Flash codebase, freeing Gay up to focus on higher-level product strategy. After Flash 4, he took on more of a pure leadership role, continuing to guide the evolution of Flash from an animation engine
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files which could be viewed on the Web, with an accompanying audio track recorded by the presenter. Breeze could be used for a variety of uses, including corporate presentations, quarterly earnings calls, and distance learning. Breeze also featured "Breeze Live," a conferencing system built as a
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Gay took on the role of Vice
President of Engineering at Macromedia and led the newly minted Flash engineering team at Macromedia's headquarters in San Francisco, beginning a decade of leading the Flash agenda at Macromedia. In an unusual move for a vice president, Gay continued to be responsible
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Initially, the nascent Flash team within
Macromedia was quite small, with few engineers beyond Gay and Tatsumi, and corporate R&D investment in Director remained high. Over the years that followed, the Director team would shrink to a handful of people and the Flash team would grow rapidly as
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Ben Dillon and Peter
Santangeli went on to found the Breeze team at Macromedia, building an enterprise-class Web conferencing, E-Learning and collaboration system on top of the Flash Media Server. Gay served as the engineering lead and product visionary for the "Breeze Live" web conferencing
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On April 18, 2005, Adobe
Systems, Inc. announced the acquisition of Macromedia. Gay ultimately decided to pursue other opportunities in lieu of joining the combined company. When Gay left Macromedia in December 2005, he held the title of Chief Technology Officer.
111:. Gay began programming for Silicon Beach in his senior year. His first published product, released in 1985, was Airborne!, a black-and-white game for the Macintosh computer. While in college, he collaborated with game designer Mark Pierce and programmed
173:, a vector-drawing program for the PenPoint operating system. Shortly thereafter, PenPoint was discontinued, ending that market for SmartSketch. SmartSketch was ported to the Windows and Macintosh operating systems, but with the advent in 1995 of the
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In August 2006, Gay founded a new software venture, Software as Art, in partnership with three other former veterans of the Flash and Breeze teams, Tatsumi, Grossman, and
Santangeli. The company developed energy management solutions for the home.
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Netscape browser plug-in. Tatsumi wrote the bulk of the user interface code for the Flash authoring tool. During these early releases, only a handful of other engineers joined the Flash team. An important addition to the team was programmer
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Flash application which utilized the Flash Media Server to enable two-way video/audio chat, shared whiteboarding, screen sharing and shared presentation viewing. Following the Adobe
Systems acquisition of Macromedia, Breeze became
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audio technology into the Flash Player, the first incarnation of which was released in March 2002 as part of
Macromedia Flash Player 6. At the same time, the Tin Can team built a new server product, Flash Communication Server (now
248:, who implemented a subset of JavaScript (called ActionScript) into Flash 4. This expanded programming capability allowed Flash to be used for many different purposes.
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for a great deal of the actual coding on the product. He was responsible for the low-level vector graphics rasterization, pen-computing inspired drawing tools, and the
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By 2001, there were 50 people working on Flash, 500,000 developers were using it and over 325 million people had the Flash Player that worked with their web browsers.
177:, Gay saw an opportunity to create an editor that could produce animations for web pages. The core technology of SmartSketch was repurposed to create a new product,
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In 2007, a survey found that the Flash Player was installed on 96% of
Internet-enabled desktops worldwide and was used by over 2 million professionals.
91:, an animation editor for web pages. He founded Software as Art, which was later renamed Greenbox, which made energy management solutions for the home.
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made an offer to buy FutureWave Software and the acquisition was completed in December, 1996. FutureSplash Animator was renamed Flash 1.0.
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In 1993, Gay and Jackson founded FutureWave Software with the intention of creating graphics software for
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In October 2009, Software as Art (by then renamed Greenbox) was acquired by Silver Spring Networks.
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79:(born 1967) is an American computer programmer and software entrepreneur based in
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Gay and programmer Robert Tatsumi finished the company's first product in 1994,
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decided to use FutureSplash Animator for their websites,
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655:"Flash Co-Creator Jonathan Gay Responds To Steve Jobs"
508:"Preface to Macromedia Flash Communications Server MX"
669:"Flash Co-Founder Jonathan Gay's New Video Software"
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480:Dowdell, John (2006-07-26).
454:Coale, Kristi (1997-01-06).
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16:American computer programmer
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510:. O'Reilly. Archived from
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630:"About Software as Art"
582:. Adobe. Archived from
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484:. Adobe. Archived from
458:. Wired. Archived from
432:. Adobe. Archived from
406:. Adobe. Archived from
380:. Adobe. Archived from
53:, software entrepreneur
559:"Technology Breakdown"
534:"The History of Flash"
430:"The History of Flash"
404:"The History of Flash"
378:"The History of Flash"
335:Silver Spring Networks
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126:After graduating from
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363:References
343:Leaving IT
212:Macromedia
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95:Early days
70:Programmer
234:Flash 1–4
146:in 1990.
160:Penpoint
107:founder
101:Apple II
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561:. Adobe
351:Explory
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65:(1993)
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