First of all let me just say that I believe that it's required in most cases to use SEO.

Having said that, I have a number of different topics I would like to discuss with the SEO community.

First of all, why are there so many people still preaching that you should never ever use Flash because it isn't indexed by Google? In July 2008 Google announced that they indexed Flash and in June 2009 Google's Flash indexing got even better. Why then can you still read in countless blogs or comments in forums that you shouldn't use Flash for indexing reasons? If you still doubt that Google can index Flash content read this, which answers many of the questions you might have on how Google's Flash indexing works.

One thing I often come across when talking to SEO experts is the opinion that you shouldn't even bother creating a site or a single page without SEO in mind. I refuse to believe that every site and every page would benefit by maximizing the number of visitors. There are many cases when it is more important that your existing visitors or customers get the right content at the right time, and not as important that you get loads of new visitors.

There is little debate over the importance of incoming links to your site for high ranking. It is also rarely disputed that an incoming link from New York Times is worth more than a link from a fake blog created by an SEO expert. The Google ranking value of a link from the Times is in fact so much higher than a fake-blog link that one could argue that it would be much more efficient to spend all your time and money to get organic links on trusted sites. This is achieved by traditional PR, not by SEO.

When everybody has purchased services from SEO experts, who will be ranked highest?
The most SEO friendly site is black text on white background and no graphic elements, but how do you build a brand in a black and white world? An old truth is still a truth, content is still king. If you have an interesting site with great content, people will want to visit your site. To get people to link to your site, you must have interesting content.

Tags: seo, flash, internet marketing

Last week, Adobe released betas of the next versions of Flash and AIR, namely Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0. There are numerous new features and improvements interesting for Yooba and the development of our products, with one of the most noticeble being huge improvements regarding memory handling and performance.

It's good to see that Adobe keeps on pushing out new great updates, getting more and more feature rich and making Flash a platform to really count on in the future.

Read more on the betas at:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/16/adobe-flash-player-10-1-air-2-0/

Tags: flash, air, adobe, yooba studio

Stockholm and London, October 8, 2009 - Yooba's Content Management System, specially tailored to Flash-content, is already generating considerable interest. The number of businesses adopting the platform is growing steadily and now Yooba is taking another major step, this time towards the Enterprise market. The newly-implemented Content Editor is aimed at in-house teams who can take immediate advantage of easy and fast interactive content management.

As a 'Software-as-a-Service' solution, Yooba is available through any browser with an Internet connection. This delivery model also gives users direct and continuous access to new functionality and updates without additional licenses or installations.

Yooba's Content Editor is a simpler version of Yooba Studio - the work place in Yooba - and has been designed to enable editing of content that is already created as templates. Pre-defined objects, such as text fields, graphics, pictures etc., are easily and rapidly updated. Thus editors are able to work on updates with a greater frequency and to optimise the performance of their websites. By integrating Yooba into the content management workflow, businesses and their external content suppliers can work with templates for Flash-content, which is then embedded into conventional HTML-sites. The content editor can be fully integrated into an existing CMS to enable access from the same platform. Integration with EPiServer CMS was completed recently and is now ready for commercial use.

"We think users will be as pleased with this functionality as we are; it's the result of extensive dialogue with, and feedback from, both users and re-sellers", says Sven Miller, Sales Manager at Yooba. Yooba is currently discussing partnership deals with several other CMS providers to enable integration with their platforms. He continues: "Why shouldn't it be as easy to manage Rich Media content in Flash, as it is with standard HTML? It's not about replacing any technology, capability, or content with Yooba Flash CMS; technically we're just streamlining the workflow for both creation and management. As far as content goes, we want Flash to complement the static content, for the benefit of both the visitor and the brand."

Download PDF 

Please contact Sven Miller for more information: sven.miller@yooba.com

Tags: yooba content editor, yooba cms for flash, interactive content in episerver, internet marketing, content management system

We have recently released a new Addon for Yooba Studio called External Data. The purpose of the addon is to load data from external sources into a project. The addon loads RSS2 feeds, which is the most common format for publishing data feeds such as news headlines, blogs, tweets etc. The texts from the RSS feed can be loaded into regular textfields in Yooba Studio, which makes it very flexible when working with external data sources. So if you want to show your corporate blog, make a ticker for your recent tweets, or display any other kind of external data, this addon will make your life easier.

Below is a sample project that shows our latest posts on Twitter. Besides of using already existing feeds from Twitter, Blogger etc, you can of course also create your own custom feed to get external texts into your project.

Please contact us for more information about the add-on.

Tags: add-ons, yooba studio, rss, external data

Just a quick note on the Adobe partnership with Gigaya. As from Monday Adobe announced a new product called Flash platform Services for distribution. Shortly this new partnership and is about making Flash applications more user friendly, easier to share, on social networks. Simplified distribution mechanism, tracking and measurement is also part of this new development from Adobe.

Read more at Econsultancy and Ryan Stewart's blog.

Tags: adobe flash, social networks, facebook, widgets, ryan stewart

Revolutionary Swedish online content creation and management system for Flash reaches semi-finals of ‘Best of InsideRIA 2009’ sponsored by O’Reilly Media and Adobe.

LONDON and STOCKHOLM, August 31 2009 – Swedish developer Yooba is proud to announce it has reached the semi finals of InsideRIA’s poll for best Rich Internet Application 2009. The three finalists will be presented at Adobe’s MAX Session in Los Angeles, 4-7 October. Requirements for getting into the competition are that the application is created using any of Adobe’s tools, and that that they were either created or released in 2009.

Yooba’s web-based Content Management System, which is specifically designed for Flash content, was created using Adobe’s Flex and Flash technologies. Key benefits for Yooba’s users are that all programming for Flash creation and management is eliminated, while lead times for Flash production are substantially reduced. Yooba therefore provides entirely new ways to control and execute interactive marketing content for the Internet.

As a ‘Software-as-a-Service’ solution, Yooba is available through any browser with an Internet connection. This delivery model also gives users direct and continuous access to new functionality and updates without additional licenses or installations. The SaaS structure also enables all kinds of user - from individual freelancers to enterprise businesses - to package the most cost-effective solution for their needs.

“Getting recognition from the developer community is very encouraging, as it comes from our peers.” said David Nordin, MD at Yooba. He continued: “Obviously it’s valuable publicity for our company as we’re a relative newcomer to the international market. Getting to L.A. and Adobe’s MAX Session conference would be a small but important step for the future development of Yooba, although we realise the competition is going to be tough.”

The poll at InsideRIA starts from today, August 31^st and ends Sunday 6^th of September.

Tags: insideria, max session, adobe, yooba studio, yooba flash cms,

Who benefits from implementing a Flash CMS? The obvious answer is that everybody wins, but is that the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Of course not, when a new technology that is meant to automate something emerges, the person who did the manual labour before the new technology will sometimes find it hard to embrace this new technology. In the case of Flash CMS, people making their living by creating simple Flash projects that mostly look and work the same way and just replaces images and texts for different customers, will not benefit from customers being aware of Flash CMS. One could argue that people with limited knowledge of Flash that still makes money by doing simple Flash projects, probably doesn't have the customer base that will find out or cares if there is a more efficient way of doing things. With that argument in mind, it is likely that they will not be affected at all by Flash CMS.

How about the web agencies, that have very skilled Flash developers and built their own site as a showcase on what they can do in Flash? This also leads to another question, will Flash CMS "steal" work from skilled Flash developers? Let's look back in time some 10-15 years and try to compare the amount of work available for web developers, before and after the CMS systems. Is there any indication that the introduction of CMS systems has done anything but increased the amount of development time is required for each web project. Most likely, customer requirements for features on their websites have increased in such a rate that any time saved on using a CMS system in development is hard to measure, since your still doing so much development. To transfer the historic wisdom to Flash CMS, it will probably help increase the amount of Flash used in websites to such extent that even more developers will have to learn action script.

How will your average Flash CMS customer benefit from using a Flash CMS? Most likely they will communicate a lot more with Flash than they do today.

Tags: yooba flash cms, flash usage, flash cms implementation, flash cms market impact

With Add-ons, extra functionality can be added to Yooba Studio. Under the Add-ons menu on the toolbar you can find the extensions that are currently activated for your account. An Add-on can add functionality in many ways, and we have already created a bunch of generic add-ons that anyone can use.

For instance, we have recently worked with a customer that wanted to run Yooba projects on touch-screen monitors. We helped them by creating the Touch Screen Add-on, which adds the functionality they needed, including a fully customizable on-screen keyboard to enable user input without a regular keyboard. As a result of this add-on, Yooba projects are at the moment running on hundreds of touch-screens all around Europe and Latin America.

Other add-ons that we’ve been working on with clients includes sending text messages to cell phones, uploading images, counting impressions etc. So if you need extra functionality that is currently not available in Yooba Studio, please let us know! Chances are that it’s already available as an add-on. And if not – we’ll build it!

Add-ons are features for our Enterprise customers and can be ordered by contacting your sales representative or calling Sales at +44 (0)20  8123 2570.

Tags: add-ons, yooba studio, touchscreen

David our graphic maestro, and certainly the World Champ in Yooba Studio has created a tutorial on how to make bouncing effects on assets. This is too good to keep it limited just for certain forums, therefore we like to share with you.

Update: This is what it looks like: Clicky!

Tags: flash tutorial, yooba studio, web design

Great news form from Google Webmaster Central Blog. "We just added external resource loading to our Flash indexing capabilities. This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it's text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it."

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Tags: google, flash, yooba