Adobe Flash Platform Success Story

Wacom Inspiring creative users

Leading tablet maker taps consumer market with new Adobe® Flash® Platform applications that encourage productivity, creativity, and social networking

Wacom Wacom pioneered the development of pen tablets, interactive pen displays, and Saitama, Japan intuitive interface devices—driven by a fundamental vision to create harmony www.wacom.eu between the user and the technical environment. Wacom pressure-sensitive tablets http://bamboodock.wacom.com have been an industry standard for graphic arts professionals and enthusiasts for Gugga decades. Literally, a generation of artists, designers, and publishers has grown up www.gugga.com using Wacom tablets to maximize creative expression. Fantasy Interactive www.f-i.com Broadening reach and impact Today’s new ideal for Wacom is to expand the use of multi-touch and pressure sensitivity beyond creative professionals to the mass market, making it fun and easy for consumers to use Wacom devices regardless of their skills or background. To accomplish that goal, Wacom has turned to the Platform to inspire users, drive hardware sales, and bring creative users together through a growing lineup of applications. Aiming to engage children, students, and hobbyists with creative expression through pen and multi-touch activities, Wacom introduced a wide array of highly engaging applications—created using the Adobe Flash Platform—to use with its line of Bamboo tablets.

Challenge Developed by Wacom—with support from digital agencies Gugga and Fantasy Interactive—Bamboo • Broaden user base from professionals Dock (bamboodock.wacom.com) is a small, downloadable Adobe AIR® desktop application that to creative consumers using apps and holds, manages, and launches Bamboo applications from the convenience of the desktop. With the social networks stroke of a pen, users can open and minimize the Bamboo Dock as well as open and add apps— Solution providing a quick way to access fun, easy, and useful tools for everything from note taking to doodling • Adobe AIR and Flash Platform to gaming and sharing work with friends. applications The availability of Bamboo Dock has proven to be a boon to Wacom. Through the breadth of Wacom is driving sales of multi-touch applications supported and its ability to integrate into user communities, the solution has attracted and pressure-sensitive tablets by using the Adobe Flash Platform to develop millions of users. In its first year of launch, Bamboo Dock helped Wacom sell 30% more Bamboo applications that inspire creativity and tablets than the previous year. Key customers are children, students, and creative hobbyists. stimulate use. In year one, there have been approximately 600,000 downloads of Bamboo Dock and more than Benefits 3 million downloads of associated applications—with developers working with Flash worldwide • Increased tablet sales by 30% contributing to the rapidly growing app collection. Measurable returns on investment, building • Achieved 3 million application and community as a core marketing strategy, and providing new opportunities for developers working 600,000 dock downloads in one year with Adobe Flash to monetize their work are just a few reasons why the innovative Bamboo Dock • Developed in 1/3 the time anticipated solution was the winner of the 2010 Adobe MAX Award in the Social Computing category. • Opened opportunities for developers Wacom is finding that the social aspect of Bamboo Dock is where the future lies. “Sharing with friends working with Flash worldwide and with the greater Bamboo community is a huge part of the enjoyment we want to stimulate,” says • Created app store business model to drive hardware sales Peter Kurstjens, director of the applications and platform group at Wacom. Bamboo Dock makes it • Extended community connection fun and easy to connect with coworkers, friends, and family by sharing images, animation, and other by leveraging social media creative content via e-mail, on Facebook, or in users’ online Bamboo Spaces. collaboration “The Adobe Flash Platform is indisputably the best way to rapidly deliver outstanding, branded user experiences to people using a wide variety of applications across platforms and devices.” Peter Kurstjens Director, applications and platform group, Wacom

Spot-on brand extension Kurstjens notes that the Adobe Flash Platform was the only available technology that enabled Wacom to successfully extend its brand from the physical world to the virtual one. While the team briefly looked at using native applications such as Java, they favored the Adobe Flash Platform for its ease of development and its ubiquitous reach. “The Adobe Flash Platform is indisputably the best way to rapidly deliver outstanding, branded user experiences to people using a wide variety of applications across platforms and devices,” he says. The main goals of the project are to deliver cross-platform desktop applications that provide offline as well as online functionality and that map to Wacom’s landmark design and standards. For developers, ™ entirely separates visual elements from components and business logic. “The new component and skinning architecture in Flex™ 4 and the associated tooling support in Flash Builder 4, plus the seamless integration with Adobe Flash Catalyst®, enabled us to accelerate design and reduce overall development cycles. Additionally, the improved integration between Adobe Flash Professional and Adobe Flash Builder significantly reduced costs on this complex project and enabled us to rapidly iterate and deliver results in a third of the time we anticipated,” says Kurstjens. Tapping into the worldwide community of developers working with Flash was another key factor in choosing the Adobe Flash Platform for this project. “The number of people out there who can create Bamboo applications for us is bigger in the Flash world than in any other world,” notes Kurstjens. From the developer’s standpoint, Bamboo Dock provides an opportunity to showcase their capabilities to millions of users, as well as potentially monetize their work via an expanding store model that features different applications available on the Bamboo Dock platform. Powered by Adobe Flash Platform applications, .Net 3.5, and MS SQL server, the Bamboo Dock platform monitors application download rates, as well as how long a user is engaged with an activity. One developer noted in the Bamboo developer forum that Bamboo Dock is the fastest path from code to customer. Iterating toward universal mobility Wacom’s initial marketing strategy for Bamboo Dock focused on hardware, relying on users to discover both the dock and apps after purchasing a tablet. But, with the success that apps are bringing to the entire Wacom experience, that process will reverse. “We are highlighting the Adobe AIR Bamboo Dock and the ever-increasing array of Flash and Adobe AIR apps. That effort will circle back to help us sell tablets,” says Kurstjens. Bamboo Dock, a downloadable Adobe AIR desktop application, holds, manages, and launches Bamboo applications—providing a quick way to access fun, easy, and useful tools for everything from note taking to doodling to gaming and sharing work with friends. In its first year, Bamboo Dock helped Wacom sell 30% more Bamboo tablets than the previous year.

“The improved integration between Adobe Flash Professional and Adobe Flash Builder significantly reduced costs on this complex project and enabled us to rapidly iterate and deliver results in a third of the time we anticipated.” Peter Kurstjens Director, applications and platform group, Wacom

Toolkit Moving forward, Wacom is looking at opening up the Bamboo development platform to end users— Adobe Flash Platform. Components particularly creative professionals—who will be able to build apps, for example, that are useful in used include: design workflows. That strategy would serve a dual purpose of broadening the developer base as • Flash Builder well as introducing a new breed of applications that increase productivity for professionals and • Flash Catalyst creative consumers alike. • Adobe AIR Also on the horizon for Wacom are plans to migrate apps across devices and platforms. With Adobe • Adobe Flash Professional CS5 AIR support for Android™, iOS, and BlackBerry™ Tablet OS mobile operating systems and TVs, developers can reuse code to rapidly deliver great experiences beyond the tablet. “As the Adobe Flash Platform continues to evolve, we intend to deploy a growing collection of cross-platform applications that leverage multi-touch and pressure-sensitive functionality on many devices. Mobility is definitely the next important step in the evolution of our business, and we continue to explore the possibilities on the Adobe Flash Platform to help us reach our goals,” says Kurstjens.

For more information www.adobe.com/products/ flashplatform

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