Adobe $100 Million Fund for Adobe AIR Developers

Adobe is giving away basic versions of both AIR and Flex, charging only the pros who create the content with Flex. And when millions of people upgrade to Adobe Flash Player 10, they’ll have the option to download the new Adobe Media Player. From Forbes:

"Two years ago Adobe launched a $100 million fund devoted to backing startups tapping its technologies. So far a third has gone to 14 firms, including word processing Web site Buzzwords, which Adobe acquired in November. Adobe knows of 300 applications built using its new AIR technology, and most are startups.

One of them is SlideRocket, cofounded a year and a half ago by entrepreneur Mitch J. Grasso. He created a presentation application, a PowerPoint killer, that does Webby things PowerPoint can’t, such as playing high-definition video and having two people on different computers easily working on the same presentation. Yet because AIR lets SlideRocket tap into the storage of a PC, it has a drag-and-drop file system similar to Windows Office." Link.