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Ed. Note: The Richter Scale is a new series on Rev2. Following important announcements, we’ll be interviewing industry experts and featuring excerpts from their commentary on Rev2. We believe the insight of competitors and peers in the industry is essential in evaluating the significance and meaning of events.

Taking a cue from the vast movement of applications to the web, Adobe took a significant step today by announcing Photoshop Express, a free offering for those who “want to store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects.” The offering focuses a lot on simplicity, but features 2GB of free storage for all users. TechCrunch noted that Picnik, another online photo editor with slightly more advanced features, “is not scared” by Adobe’s announcement. Rev2 spoke to Avi Muchnick, CEO of A.viary, a “rich content creation and distribution” company that’s presently best known for their sophisticated Phoenix image editor. You can her more from Avi in next week’s Rev2 Cabinet, which will be centered around A.viary. In the mean time, he offers an excellent perspective on Adobe’s recent announcement.

Zach Sims, Rev2: What’s your take on Adobe’s announcement?

Avi Muchnick, CEO of A.viary: Let me just preface: I don’t think that Photoshop Express is competition for Aviary, because we cater to completely different markets. They decided to focus on the mass consumer with an offering that is good for red-eye reduction, rotation and some neat finishing effects. That’s great for the consumer level user who is uploading their works to Facebook and wants to do small correcting. Aviary is great for hobbyist level users who want to do advanced special effects. It has layer-based editing more akin to the desktop version of Photoshop, and targeted to more advanced users. This gives our users real access to do anything with their files, no matter how complex the desired outcome. Different markets.

The Sketch Filter in Photoshop Express, One of the App’s Simple Abilities

I also think that this is wonderful market validation for web apps in general. We now have two major publicly traded companies (Adobe and Google) getting fully immersed into the web apps industry. They have a finger on exactly where technology is headed, so it’s a safe bet that web apps is that place.

Rev2: Do you think Adobe stepping into the market will be a tidal wave that propels other players to follow suit?

Muchnick: Well, I hope that will be the case as it will just increase the market validation and force everybody to stay sharp, but I don’t know if this tool will singularly have that much of an impact on web development, any more than other Flash apps that came before it. Platforms are more appealing to me and traditionally cause “tidal waves” when they become opened up for development (Facebook as the case in point). What I’d love to see is for Adobe to focus on extending their platform development and let third parties build out exciting applications in new and innovative ways as a way to promote Flex/Flash. That is what will encourage more developers and companies to look to web apps.

Rev2: Do you think this is Adobe’s first step in assembling a suite of online applications?

Muchnick: I do love that they are offering 2GB of free upload space presumably to be shared between all of their applications. That is a positive sign to me.

Photoshop Express’ My Photos Organizer

Regarding Photoshop Express specifically: I do think this is the first step for Adobe (technically, their second, as they already launched Premiere Express in YouTube’s beta site a year ago). But that being said it’s not a full step in that direction. This is a hedged step intended to promote Flex, add headcount to their marketing efforts, bring in some upsell opportunities to their core products, but at the same time not compete at all with their core desktop products. That last part is unfortunate to the end user.

Adobe, a billion dollar corporation that also owns the Flash platform, ahd the resources to create an actual web-based port of Photoshop with layers, brushes, and selection tools instead of making a consumer light application that most people already have included with the purchase of a digital camera.  I can’t help but feel they deliberately limited themselves as they don’t want to hurt their existing desktop software sales with a coimpeting product.

Rev2: In our Rev2 Cabinet conversation [which will be posted next Wednesday], you mentioned that A.viary was for users who don’t really need Photoshop and do not need to pay for its extensive feature set.  Is this a sign that Adobe has realized the value in that demographic as well?

Muchnick: I think Adobe recognizes the need for a less advanced offering than Photoshop CS3, but I’m not sure they are comfortable hitting that mid-way point where the software really needs to go (and where Aviary currently resides).  Instead they catered to the least advanced type of customer and entered a space that is already well-served by Picnik, FotoFlexer, and other consumer-focused companies.

Conclusion, Zach Sims of Rev2

Adobe’s entrance in the market is symbolic, and Photoshop Express is one of many online apps Adobe is now managing.  Their increasingly large online portfolio, which includes apps like Buzzword, have convinced some, like Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb, to say that Adobe’s building an “online empire.”  Flex is becoming an increasingly important part of the rich internet application movement, and Photoshop Express is an interesting demonstration of its abilities.  We’ll be featuring another application, SlideRocket, tomorrow that also pushes the envelope with Flex, but in the area of presentations.

Avi Muchnick is the CEO of A.viary, a “rich content creation and distribution” company.  He is also the Founder and CEO of Worth1000.com, a Photoshop contest website.  He will be the focus of next week’s Rev2 Cabinet article and podcast.  If you’d like to read more from Avi, please visit the A.viary blog.

Bebo, one of the big players in the social networking arena, will be acquired by America Online for $850 million.  The company has seen tremendous success in non-US markets, like Ireland, where it is presently the top social network.  Its membership of 40 million makes it one of the more prominent sites of the day.  It currently ranks at number three in the United States.

The purchase will finally give the struggling America Online a massive new group of users and a new way to push its Web 2.0 agenda.  AOL CEO Randy Falco noted the importance of Bebo to AOL’s future in a press release, “Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media.”  AOL.  Bebo was a pioneer in what the company calls the “social media networking” market, and has produced original content for their social network.

The company joined OpenSocial in November 2007 and has made a pretty large commitment to their Platform, working with Facebook to adapt their Facebook Platform to ease adoption of applications on Bebo.

The acquisition is part of AOL’s new social media strategy and will serve as a large boost for the company.  More analysis will follow later in the day.

You’ve probably heard it by now if you’re an avid Facebook user, and if you’re not, I can’t see how this would matter. Facebook announced today that they have been working for the past few months on recreating the Profile, and provided previews of the redesigned Profile page which includes, among other things, a multi-tabbed profile interface — with sections like “Wall,” “About,” and “Photos” now in tabs. The change will be gradually rolled out to users over the next few weeks, and a official Page has been setup that users can be a part of and use to get periodical updates about the change. Here is a full screenshot of the new profile.

For full coverage of the news, see great writeups and analysis from TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and Webware. But at Rev2 I want to focus on answering this question: what does this mean for the Facebook user? Judging (purely) from the screenshot, here are what I think are the positives associated with this change:

• Better, more consise apps.
• A generally cleaner interface and less clutter.
• An advancement to the general user experience at Facebook.
• To those who were starting to getting bored of the seemingly unchanging site, a revamped experience.

Of course, as Facebook knows very well from past instances of the News Feed and Beacon, every change, addition, and advancement has great consequences, and some of them might not necessarily be positive ones in the short-term. As a result, there are a few negatives Facebook risks facing:

• A major change — and the task of getting 60 million people using, accepting, and liking it.
• A backlash by the people who prefer the old design.
• A large risk of losing the “Facebook feel” — the very charm of the site that got it to be where it is.

Whatever the consequences are, it’s safe to say Facebook is well prepared. After going through two major backlashes, they’re aware of the risks and most probably have plans as to how to go about and implement it. As for the users, as Facebook claims, this is supposed to be a change for the long-term, so it’s something the users are going to have to get used to more or less –which could help them or harm them in a big way.

French video sharing site DailyMotion announced this morning its support for high definition video sharing. After Apple’s recent movie rental rehaul (and the support for high definition access for a dollar more), and Vimeo being the first video sharing site to announce its support for HD video, this is the third major video player to follow (and I can bet there will be many more coming.)

Technically, the way that this works is that any video that is encoded in high-definition and uploaded to DailyMotion is automatically reincoded by DailyMotion into 720P HD. Users can then view it in HD, or if the bandwidth doesn’t allow smooth playback for them, switch back to regular video — something DailyMotion alerts the viewer if that’s the case.

A personal belief of mine is that the future isn’t with HD-DVD or Bluray, but with HD itself — delivered over the Internet, and accessed in various ways (TV, mobile, web, software, etc.) And it seems that, with the series of announcements we’ve had over the last couple months, this belief may not be far off. If the Apple TV-Movie Rentals isn’t an indicator of consumer adoption in such a future, I think there will be more to come.

An important key factor that shouldn’t be overlooked is obviously, bandwidth. If we are to ditch our cable subscriptions and carry solely an Apple TV for our TV shows and movies, we better be able to watch a piece of content without having to wait 10 hours for it to download. And while this varies by country, I still think we have a few years left to go till we are able to get to that level.

In the end, I think any step we take towards high definition — be it DailyMotion, Vimeo, or iTunes — is a step in the right direction. We might not get there in 5 years or even a decade, but if all we’re allowed to deal with is pixelated YouTube videos, then it’s posible we’ll probably never get there. And like Marshall Kirkpatrick, this leaves me to wonder when YouTube plans to do HD content. I want my HD, darn it!

As reported a couple days ago by a number of sources, CNN today unveiled their user-powered news site iReport.com. In their own words, iReport is a site for “uncensored, user-powered news.” CNN eliminates the censoring and filtering process, and lets share any video that is news-worthy in their minds — along with their own ones displayed with an “On CNN” stamp. The video sharing site, in short, aims to be the grassroots YouTube for news.

Every video posted on the site is termed an “iReport,” and consists of the standard title, description, rating, and tags. Also heavily inspired by YouTube are the sections for the Latest, Highest Rated, Most Viewed, and Most Commented videos of the lot. A section on the homepage outlines the top stories of the day and can act as “assignment” ideas for users looking for one. Here’s a great example of a user-submitted video of last year’s New York City steam explosion (for some reason, either embedding is not allowed or I just couldn’t find the code.)

The site is being promoted widely on CNN’s own (and vice-versa), so you can pretty much automatically expect a grass-roots community to form in a few months. Already, there is a section for “iReporters” that outlines the “superstars” of the site and a few discussions forming in the comment sections of videos.

A little too late maybe, but I think this is a step in the right direction by CNN. As opposed to incorporating some of the new concepts of Web 2.0 into their own site and have to filter through the content submitted by users, they’ve looked in the other direction and created a site of its own for that purpose to complement their mission to report news. It not only adds to their brand, but if successful, can be an additional revenue stream for them. Of course, given that they share it with their users.

Valleywag did an embargo breaker today and announced that Loic Le Meur’s video conversations startup, Seesmic, has raised a $6 million round of funding from a group of A-list investors. Additionally, the startup is reportedly close to fully opening to the public and the current wait-period is down to a day.

Among the high profile investors are Michael Arrington, Steve Case (AOL), Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Niklas Zennström (Skype) and Michael Parekh (Goldman Sachs) — not a typical list of people for a startup that’s only been around publicly for three or so months, having recently come close to hitting a tipping point with its group of early adopters.

The way Seesmic works is that just like Twitter, where people have public conversations, and YouTube to some extent with it’s Responses feature, the idea is to have a public conversation. Users post videos of themselves talking into the webcam about a certain topic, which are noticed by others and replied to (i.e. “I agree with your point about Obama”), and it all flows from there.

While I haven’t covered the product exclusively here on Rev2, I have tried it out and I’m personally a fan in someways, though in someways I’m not. What I mean by this is, in terms of idea, Seesmic is excellent. Video conversations — a great way to communicate and totally parallel to the traditional forms of IM, e-mail, and SMS. I’m a fan of the idea. However, the early group of adopters it has grabbed seem to be are very reminiscent of the early days of Twitter — a tight group of people with the “we’re totally above everyone else” mindset, which I’m not a fan of. As Valleywag very rightly describes it, it’s “suited only for self-important types who overvalue their own thoughts and undervalue the time of those they speak to.”

For Seesmic to move onto to the mainstream, it’s going to need a decentralization of its userbase. I should be able to post my video and get noticed just as easily as someone who has been using it for the last five months, as opposed to getting totally ignored by this centralized community and having the unwelcoming feeling. But of course, one has to be aware that in the early stages of a startup and especially one like Seesmic where community is key, a centralized feeling of beta testers/early adopters will persist until it gets to the point where there isn’t “one” conversation by some but many conversations by many.

I can write for hours about the mainstreamization of a startup, but I’d like to open it up for the comments: Is an early adopter community such as Seesmics’ healthy for a young startup? What are the challenges it will face in hitting that tipping point — and how much time should we allocate to it?

The WSJ just sent out a report saying that Yahoo!’s board has potentially decided to reject the bid from Microsoft. The general feeling in the board meeting, WSJ reports, was that the $31-per-share price “massively undervalued” Yahoo!’s stock, another perception being that Microsoft is trying to take advantage of Yahoo!’s current situation. So, what came out of it? This: “The company is unlikely to consider any offer below $40 per share, the person said.”

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been a lot of talk by the press and the media — more than perhaps within Yahoo! itself — a possible Google co-search-advertising-acquisition, other players like Newscorp and AOL being possible contenders, not to mention a lot of outrageous pairing-up. That said, I’m pretty sure Jerry Yang and board have been vigorously sketching out all the alternatives and are already in talks with every likely contender.

One thing is for sure by this move, though. Yahoo! isn’t desperate — they’ll either go through to the tough times and evolve slowly by learning, or agree to a price that values them well. But of course, the question comes down to Microsoft: would they be willing to go higher? A $40 bid would increase Yahoo!’s total valuation by $12 billion — a 25% of their current bid — which I’m not sure Steve Ballmer is the kind of a guy who’d give-in so easily on.

Obviously, the board is putting in a lot of effort to prevent a hostile take-over. The last thing they’d want would be to, while going through a reinvigorating phase, is be taken over by some technology giant and have things distrupt. The WSJ also reports, in this matter, that they’ve taken “poison pill” provisions to prevent an unwanted takeover and that Microsoft “would likely have to oust the board in order to overturn them.”

So it’s clear from all this that Steve isn’t going to get his way for under $40 a share. Try again, Microsoft.

Google today introduced a new feature as part of Google Docs that will make collecting data for your spreadsheets very easy. Now, every time you want other users/team members/collaborators to contribute data to your spreadsheet, you can do so in a very simple way.

Here’s how it works: you design a form with individual fields or information that you’d like people to fill — corresponding to your spreadsheet — and send as many invitation emails (with a link to your form) as you like. Their results, or whatever they input into the form, is then directly inserted into your spreadsheet. The best part is that recipients don’t need to be Gmail users, so anyone with an email address can input data once they’ve been sent an invitation.

Form fields can be of any of the five types available — single-line text, multi-line paragraph text, multiple choice (radio buttons), checkboxes or a choice-list — and you can have as many or as little of them as you like in your form. The interface also allows you to enter, besides the usual title and description of your form, “help text” for each field so you can further the cut down on redundancy in having to individually explain the more tougher questions to every participant. You can even edit your form after you’ve designed it and sent invitations if you feel something needs to be clarified, which is handy when you’re doing a survey and start getting asked the same questions again and again.

User data is automatically timestamped and collected either in a new spreadsheet with columns corresponding to the data fields you created if you designed your form first or on your working spreadsheet if you designed the form around it. A Google Docs form gadget for iGoogle that lists the ten latest replies is also available if you would like to track responses there.

Something I found missing was a numerical field option and a way to validate answers. Although users may indeed enter numbers in the text fields, and sorting them in ascending or descending order is possible, this approach isn’t very elegant when it comes to handling massive amounts of numerical information, especially if some data meant to be numerical have other characters in them (currency symbols, delimiters, symbols are common with numbers). Validation is also important, for example, to ensure information that is absolutely required are present or to ensure values are within a certain acceptable range.

This simple feature would’ve helped a lot when I was doing a market survey for a mobile phone company a year ago. Considering that most people I talked to and gathered information from were capable of following a link from an email and filling in a form, these forms would greatly help save time and effort: I wouldn’t need to manually copy data from Excel spreadsheets attached to emails, wouldn’t need to hand-input data from respondents who just simply typed answers the body of the email and wouldn’t need to spend all that time answering the same questions over the phone.

The form feature might be a simple upgrade — simply one more way to share and collaborate on your spreadsheets — but as anyone who has ever had to collect data from a lot of people over the web will tell you, it can be immensely useful.

London-based family tree social network Kindo today announced a round of funding from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI). The Estonian investment company joins seed investors Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group (TAG), and Stafan Glanzer, the initial investor of Last.fm.

Users can build their own free family tree, invite whoever is a part of it, and stay in touch with their loved ones. Unlike a lot of English-only social networks these days, Kindo has a particular focus on the international landscape. The site currently supports 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The investment round was led by Eileen Broch, who stated in the press release, “In the short time since they’ve been live, Kindo has proven that they know how to build a product that can be embraced by young and old alike. It is already loved by families around the world, which is what appealed to us the most.“

Kindo’s main competitor in the family tree space is Geni, whose previously raised round gave it an astonishing $100 million valuation pre-launch. Having tried both products, I have to say Kindo and Geni square it off in a very tough fight when it comes to user interface, features, and the overall user experience. Being a long-time Geni user, I have no intentions of switching my family-tree of 1,000, but Kindo puts up a very compelling offer.

With the investment in Kindo and Geni’s 6 million user market lead, the family tree networking space is off to only a start and I think will be a rapidly growing space of 2008. It’s one of the ideas that we’ve yet to solve since the first family tree site from back in 1995, and with competition on the rise, the market seems more and more compelling to new users and families who would like to digitize their roots.

A few months ago I migrated all things Rev2 into Google Apps, and  having a startpage, mail, documents, and calendar application at your finger-tips with your custom @rev2.org has been magical to say the least. Now, Google plans to bring this magic and make it easier for schools, teams, and businesses to use the Google applications with the newly launched Google Apps Team Edition.

Notably without Gmail (which is what makes the whole thing a breeze), Google Apps comes with Docs, Calendar, Talk, and Startpage. The way it works is that users’ supply their company, team, or school’s e-mail address and go through the regular process of registering by entering their name, e-mail address, password, captcha, the regular deal. When activated with the original address (so, for example, Google knows I really am a Rev2 employee), users are given access to the features.

Yes, it’s nothing new, nothing world-changing, nothing teams and businesses could try otherwise with the regular Google Apps service. What it does, however, is make getting started, setup, and running a whole lot simpler and easier for mainstream users. Now, users can sign themselves up to their business’ or team’s Google Apps setup themselves and don’t have to pass the administrative hurdle of changing MX records or getting their whole company to switch over and causing the IT department to have a nervous break-down.

What Google is doing in the online office space has to be applauded — being one myself, they are rapidly switching over customers from the standard $400 desktop piece of badware to a new style of collaboration, work ethic, and productivity. If the future and revolution of web office is to be, Google is a front-runner no-doubt. Embedded below is the official demo video.