This presentation from David Heinemeier Hansson is a great presentation for people who want to make money from their rich Internet application.

Via CNET.

Convos is a recent Flex application that provides an easy way for people to manage groups and subscriptions. Like Google Groups, Convos allows users to create online groups with their own email address. Once logged in, users can easily see messages, to do items, calendar events, photos and more from each of the groups that they subscribe to.

I like the central spot for all group notifications - when you login you can easily see all the messages for all the groups that you belong to, same with the to do items, notes, photos etc... I also love the clear pricing scheme for users and groups - not to mention that the prices are more than reasonable. (I've blogged often about how I like using subscription based pricing rather than advertising supported sites.)

There are some things I don't like about it though. I don't like the getting started process once you've signed up - there's some improvements that could be made for new people getting used to the site. (For instance, the welcome email doesn't instruct you how to start your own group.) The UI for certain elements could be improved - for instance using a calendar to display events, or using a custom component (like Fisheye?) to display images and files.

Having said that, there are new updates being released every few weeks, so this is definitely a work in progress. For those of you looking for technical information, JP from the site emailed me and let me know that they're using Java on the backend, and running things on Amazon's EC 2 (they're also using S3 to store data.).

Convos is a good application today. If they can fix a few of the problems and improve the UI a bit, I think Convos could be great. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Emmy Huang, product manager for Flash Player, has posted a blog entry that details the number of daily downloads and installs of Flash Player. As expected, the numbers are really, really big. "In July 2008, successful downloads averaged about 33 million per day, and successful installs averaged around 18 million per day."

The latest number from Microsoft (that they give publicly) for Silverlight downloads is from April of this year, when they were averaging 1.5 million per day.

Its probably worthwhile to look at the numbers for the Olympics recently and compare those to the number of installs for Silverlight. According to ZDNet, on day 3 of the opening weekend 3.42 million streams were watched online at NBC Olympics. Assuming that person viewed just two streams, that's about 1.7 million users - or about the number of installs that Microsoft could expect in 2 days (if they're completion rate is the same as Adobe's - about 54%, and assuming that every person watching didn't have the runtime installed.) And the same number that Adobe receives in 2 or 3 hours.

When it was first announced that NBC would be using Silverlight for the Olympics, many people thought this would be a great catalyst for distribution of the runtime. I had different thoughts at the time, and I think they've proven to be true.

USA Today has a cool RIA built with Flash that follows the polls in the US presidential race, state by state and for the entire country. The application provides historical results for each poll, and also graphs them over time to see how the race is changing.

This is a nice, simple application that displays a lot of information in a format that is meaningful and intuitive. Not an easy thing to do.

Dave at PXL Designs has a blog post about a new Flex project they just launched called Peek-a-boo Paperie. The Flex application allows new parents, like me, to build custom baby announcements.

The application allows new parents to upload photos of their new baby boy or girl, and then customize the baby announcement with details of the newborn.

The invitations are then printed and sent to the new parents. Pricing is reasonable, ranging from $1.85 per card to $1.20 per card, depending on how many you order.

If you're a new parent or parent to be, check out the application and build your own baby announcement.

FotoViewer is a Flex based application that allows you to easily create 3D photo galleries of your photos stores on Flickr or SmugMug.
Its super easy to set one up - you simply pick the style for your photo gallery, then enter in your username for Flickr or Smugmug. The system connects to those photo sites and pulls down your albums or collections. Pick the one you want and you're done.
Here's one that I made of some photos I took in Ottawa a few weeks ago:

FotoViewr - Create your 3D photo gallery

There are a number of different templates that you can use to create the gallery. The one above is the "Wall" layout - they've got 6 in total - Flow, Horizon, Carousel, Floor and Pile are the others.
Once you've created the gallery, there's embed code for you to take an embed in your blog or social networking page, or a link that you can use to email them to your friends. Check it out - its a nicely done Flex app.

Ribbit, the Flex based Internet telephony company based in Silicon Valley, has been acquired by British Telecom for $105 M.

After the news earlier today that Babbel received significant funding, maybe there is money in Flex development after all? :)

Om Malik has more.

Babbel, a Flex application that allows users to easily learn new languages, received a significant investment from Kizoo and VC Fonds Berlin. In an email to me, they say say that users can look forward to improvements with the site and service - the company will use the money to add developers to the project.

Ryan Stewart has more information.

If you haven't checked out the site yet, you should. Its a great way to learn new languages quickly.

Today I decided I better get into the Twitter scene, so I decided to find some AIR applications for it. To my surprise, I found 8 AIR applications for Twitter. Do you have recommendations on which one is the best?

Flash Player is an extremely popular plugin for web browsers, that's obvious. What I find amazing about it isn't that its on nearly every computer that connects to the Internet, but that it gets updated so quickly. Recent stats show that about 80% of users update to the latest version of the Flash Player within 6 months of release. Its that reason that Flash is such a compelling platform to develop on, and why Flex is really taking off.

How does that compare to other technologies? Well, a recent survey has found that 40% of people aren't using the latest version of their web browser. More at Google, and the official study paper. That's a lot of people - more than 600 million of them. Some are running the latest main version, but without the security updates, and others are running older versions of the browser. (For eg. 92.2% of Firefox users were using Firefox 2, though Firefox 3 is available.) Updated by Mike: I misread the Google blog post referenced above.

How does this affect you? Well, with Flash Player, you can be pretty sure that 80% of people will be using the latest version within 6 months of release. As a developer, that means you can use all the newest features right away, without having to wait for users to update. That's very different than if you're developing apps in the browser.