One of the new services that we announced at MAX this year was Adobe Wave, an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to deliver desktop notifications to users.
Adobe Wave lets consumers opt-in to receive messages from their favourite online brands and aims to overcome the spam and phishing concerns associated with using email to receive alerts and notifications.
Whilst this will primarily be of interest to publishers (wishing to distribute messages/offers/news) and consumers (wishing to receive such information), it also demonstrates how Adobe is leveraging its own platform to deliver new services, which will in turn further distribute the AIR runtime and make it easier for us all to deploy desktop applications.
One of the launch partners for Adobe Wave in Europe is lastminute.com; as the name of the company suggests, a big part of their business is providing last minute deals and offers on travel and leisure activities, such as holidays, hotels, theatre breaks, etc.
Adobe Wave could allow you to sign up to receive specific notifications when particular activities or destinations are on offer (using a badge like the example above), with notifications appearing as toast-style alerts, allowing you to make a quick decision on whether to investigate the soon-to-expire offer.
Of course, you could also use Adobe Wave to get notifications from sites like MySpace when one of your friends sends you a message or from Digg when particular news stories are published.
Given that news readers and notification applications have been an easy starting point for a publisher exploring AIR, Adobe Wave also solves the issue of having to run multiple applications to receive notifications/messages from different companies – now you can get everything in one place and you stay in control of what is/isn’t delivered to your desktop.
There will be more on Adobe Wave in 2009 when we officially launch the service, in the meantime we’re running a pre-release programme for publishers interested in trying out Adobe Wave – more information on Adobe Labs.
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