Josh James' Omniture can tell you how many people click on your Web site, and how long they stay.  But is his company worth $1.8 billion?

Sweat beaded up behind his Gucci glasses as he thought back a dozen years to his company's early days, when he and his co-founder maxed out on student loans and hawked wedding gifts to buy computers. He remembered the time in 2000 when he agreed to a sale that fell through – and his trip to the Nasdaq Stock Exchange six years later to ring the bell when the company finally went public.

Read the rest of the story here.

Company wants to make its Flash technology available everywhere — and that means penetrating mobile devices.

Flash is coming to most mobile phones - except the one that starts with "i." Image: Adobe

Flash is finally coming to your smartphone—and so is Adobe (ADBE). With today's launch of the newest version its software, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, the San Jose-based company is making an aggressive push to get its product onto any gadget that allows for web browsing–Blackberry devices, netbooks, increasingly even TVs.

Crucially, Adobe has signed on a number of key launch partners for the product including Google (GOOG) and Research in Motion (RIMM). By the first half of next year, consumers can expect Flash on nearly every smartphone operating system including Google’s Android, Nokia’s (NOK) Symbian, Palm’s (PALM) webOS and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile.

This is great for developers, who have long had to use different software to make their applications work on different devices. And it’s even better for consumers, for whom web browsing will get faster and more consistent regardless of the device. More

snowleopard.wikidot.com

One day before the scheduled launch of Mac OS X Snow Leopard — the latest update of Apple's (AAPL) flagship operating system — developers are still scrambling to make sure their applications will work with the new version.

Of the Macintosh apps than have been tested on the gold master of OS X v.10.6 as of Wednesday morning, more than 60 either don't work or have major problems, according to snowleopard.wikidot.com, a collaborative project that is collating independent test results.

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It's Mobile World Congress week in Barcelona, where the city's famous pickpockets have dozens of new gadgets to choose from, and the shadow of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone once again looms large.

Last year, rival cellphone manufacturers used the event to announce their own touchscreen smartphones.

This year, what's getting the love is the iTunes App Store, with its 20,000-plus applications and half a billion downloads.

Among the announcements making headlines this week:

• Nokia's Ovi Store. An online app and media portal that comes "pre-integrated" on Nokia's (NOK) new N97 (right), but will be available for download on a slew of existing Nokia phones come May. (link)
• Windows Marketplace. Along with a new version of Windows Mobile, Microsoft (MSFT) announced Monday that it will open a new Windows Marketplace offering — you guessed it — 20,000 apps, some of which actually run on mobile devices. (link)
• App Store for Symbian. PocketGear, which had previously built its own Palm App Store and an App Store for Windows Mobile, unveiled an App Store for Symbian, the operating system that runs Nokia's smartphones. How it will compete with the Ovi Store remains to be seen. (link)
• Android Market. Google (GOOG) opened an application marketplace for the Android platform last October, but so far it has only accepted free apps. Look for an announcement from Google this week about how that's going to change.
• BlackBerry Applications Center. Research in Motion (RIMM) invited developers to submit programs to its forthcoming Applications Center in October. We may be hearing more this week about when that will open for business.
• Palm Software Store. This one went live in December with 2,000 apps and 1,000 free games available for download to both Palm (PALM) OS devices and Windows Mobile.

Also making news in Barcelona is Adobe (ADBE), which announced Sunday that it expects to ship a full-fledged version of its Flash player in 2010 that will run on Windows Mobile, Google's Android, Nokia's Symbian and the new Palm OS. Steve Jobs had complained that Flash Lite wasn't good enough for his iPhone. Last we heard, Adobe and Apple were working together to get Flash up to speed, but apparently they're not there yet.

"We would love to see it on the iPhone, too," said Adobe's Anup Murarka, according to a report on CNET.com. "But it's Apple's decision on when and how they support any new technology. So we will continue to work on it." (link)

For comprehensive — if somewhat breathless — coverage of Mobile World Congress 2009, check out Engadget here.

UPDATE: We weren't kidding about Barcelona's pickpockets. On Thursday, the London Telegraph reported that Microsoft execs were "in a panic" after a cellphone loaded with a top-secret copy of Windows Media 6.5 was lifted from the pocket of an Australian telecommunications executive. See here.

Adobe has tipped its hand, and it now seems clear that it needs Apple's iPhone more than Apple (AAPL) needs Adobe's Flash. But it's not at all clear that Adobe (ADBE) will get the foothold on the device it seems to want so badly.

Two weeks ago Adobe turned the other cheek when Steve Jobs' publicly slighted Flash and Flash Lite, describing the first as "too slow to be useful" on the iPhone and the second as "not capable of being used with the Web." See here.

Nonetheless on Tuesday, during Adobe's quarterly conference call, CEO Shantanu Narayen announced that his company has begun development of a version of Flash specifically for the iPhone — surprising even his PR staff.

"We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone," he said. "We have evaluated (the software developer tools) and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves." (link)

Presumably Adobe intends this version to fit what Jobs described as "missing product in the middle" between Flash and Flash Lite.

But there are other ways to deliver rich-media applications to the iPhone. Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has announced that it is developing a version of Java for the iPhone, for example, and Apple has some home-grown solutions of its own. (See Kontra's Runtime Wars (1) and (2) for a summary of Apple's options.)

And it's not clear that even this new version of Adobe Flash will thrive in the iPhone ecosystem unless Apple decides to allow it.

Daniel Eran Dilger at Roughly Drafted Magazine has already expressed his skepticism, arguing that it's no more in Apple's interest to become dependent on Adobe than it would be to become dependent on, say, Microsoft (see here).

Daring Fireball's John Gruber is even more dismissive. "Adobe Smoking Same Dope as Sun," was the headline of his post on the subject. He points out that the iPhone SDK explicitly states that no "interpreted code" can be downloaded and used in an application except those that are run by Apple's published program interfaces (APIs).

"Without approval from Apple (including APIs beyond those in the current third-party SDK)," Gruber writes, "they can distribute it in the same alternate universe as Sun’s supposedly-in-the-works Java port." (link)

UPDATE: Gruber is right about that, as Adobe acknowledged in the clarifying statement it issued on Wednesday:

Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it. (link)

What does Microsoft see in Adobe Flash that Apple doesn't?

Two weeks after Steve Jobs signaled that Apple (AAPL) would not be building Flash support into the iPhone, Microsoft (MSFT) on Monday took the opposite stance — signing a licensing agreement with Adobe (ADBE) for both Flash Lite and Reader LE in its competing Windows Mobile platform. (link)

This despite the fact that Microsoft is working on a product — Silverlight for Mobile — that is expected to compete directly with Flash Lite.

What's going on here?

First a bit of background. Flash (short for FutureSplash, one of its early incarnations) is a set of multimedia technologies widely used by advertisers, game companies and Web developers to integrate video and other rich media into Web pages. Flash Lite is a subset of Flash used to deliver multimedia content on many Internet-ready cellphones, but not the iPhone.

Asked at the March 4 shareholders meeting when Apple planned to bring Flash to its mobile Web browsers, Jobs said that the PC version of Flash "performs too slow to be useful," and that Flash Lite "is not capable of being used with the Web." (see here and here and here)

That's not quite right. Adobe points out that there are more than 500 million Flash-equipped mobile handsets shipped worldwide, a number that it expects to grow to 1 billion by 2010. (link)

But not if Jobs can help it.

What does he really have against Flash? According to Daniel Eran Dilger at Roughly Drafted Magazine, it has less to do with performance and everything to do with proprietary standards.

Flash video is encoded using a proprietary codec licensed from On2 and served on the web via a Flash-based controller. … By pushing alternatives to Flash, Apple gets a shot at knocking out the headlights of Verizon and all of the hardware rivals lined up behind Adobe’s Flash Lite, including LG, NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson, all of whom hope to use Flash Lite to provide their Symbian phones with a consistent graphical interface.

Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices.

Adobe likes the idea of establishing Flash Lite as a banal yet good enough layer of uninspired user interface technology to act as a glue to bond together the fractured Symbian platform. Cutting a deal to stir Flash Lite into the toxic BREW of Verizon also made for a good press release suggesting wide adoption of Flash Lite.

Add in Adobe’s AIR/Apollo system for developing “rich Internet applications” that depend upon Flash, and you have the makings of a Windows-wannabe strategy, giddy to send the increasingly open, cross platform web back into a proprietary prison with Adobe, not Microsoft, holding the key. (link)

Microsoft, of course, would much prefer that it and not Adobe hold that key. But if it comes down to a question of open technologies versus proprietary, guess where Redmond will take its stand?

Apple, of course, is no stranger to proprietary platforms. It just prefers them to be its own.