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On Monday, Adobe made some big announcements including the next version of its professional design software suite and a new cloud service for syncing, sharing, and storing files. Although there is always excitement surrounding news from the leading company in digital experiences, this week’s announcements were especially intriguing since they included 14 new products and 4 new Creative Suite additions.

What do you think of Adobe CS6 and Creative Cloud? Let us know.

Heidi Voltmer, Adobe’s Director of Product Marketing, spoke with WebProNews and told us that Adobe focused its efforts on 4 main areas with these products. As she explained, the company emphasized speed and performance, improving features in its tools, making sure that the content produced in CS6 is ready for devices, and enhancing the user interface.

In CS6, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are all powered by Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine, which will dramatically improve the performance of the tools. Voltmer told us that Adobe wanted to make it “really easy for our customers to use our products and to focus on what they’re doing creatively in the tool… and not so much about where they have to find a particular item in a panel.”

Photoshop CS6 is, of course, one of the big draws to the application bundle, and it is particularly noteworthy since this version is the first completely new release in 2 years. The increased performance it enables lets users receive near instant results in their editing.

“Now, when you’re editing images or making changes, you’ll actually see them appear just really quickly on the screen instead of having to wait for it to redraw,” said Voltmer.

Although the Creative Suite would have single-handedly been big news from Adobe, the company also announced Creative Cloud in which users can access its suite of desktop tools – normally $2,599 for a full license- for $49.99 per month. The cloud offering also adds online services for sharing and publishing content created through CS6. As a result, customers have much more flexibility using the software.

This subscription-based service is also useful for customers that only need the software for a certain period of time. It also gives them access to all the updates Adobe makes to avoid having to buy the newest version every time it rolls out.

“It’s not just like today, where you buy a single box and you don’t see anything new from Adobe for 12-24 months,” said Voltmer. “With the Creative Cloud, you actually get those updates on an ongoing basis.”

Last year, when Adobe announced CS5.5, Scott Fegette, Senior Product Manager on the Creative Suite Web team, talked to us about the company’s first attempt at a new pricing model. The company wanted to give customers both long-term and short-term options.

After listening to the customer feedback from last year’s pilot attempt at changing the pricing model, Voltmer told us that Adobe decided to take the model further this year.

“We evolved the model to lower the price, first of all, and second of all, to add in additional value,” she said.

In terms of video, CS6 includes major improvements to both Premiere and Flash. Incidentally, after a long battle with Apple over Flash’s significance on mobile devices, Adobe announced in November that it was re-positioning Flash for use, primarily, in premium video and hi-end gaming. While CS6 does include updates to Flash, Voltmer told us that Adobe really wanted to help bridge creators from Flash to HTML5.

“We’re really trying to help our Flash customers to transition into animating and creating interactive activity with HTML,” she pointed out.

With this greater emphasis on HTML5, Dreamweaver also received several improvements for incorporating HTML5 animations and more.

With all these developments, Voltmer told us that Adobe ultimately wants to streamline complex workflows for creative professionals. The company recently combined its digital media group with its marketing group in an effort to support this goal.

“By bringing those two pieces together, we offer a much more broad and integrated solution that not only sells to say, our customers in a creative department or an agency, but also people on the business side,” she said.

According to Adobe, the new products will be available 30 days from its announcement on April 23, but the company is accepting pre-orders now.

7 of the world’s most powerful tech companies have been accused of forming an antitrust conspiracy to suppress the compensation of their employees by entering into “no poach” agreements. Today, a San Jose judge will heard a motion to dismiss a class action civil lawsuit in which former employees seek damages from defendants Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm.

The damning evidence against the defendants from a 2010 Department of Justice investigation that I first uncovered last week, as well as the plaintiffs’ opposition statement indicate there is more than sufficient evidence for the dismissal to be denied and the case to proceed towards trial. If the defendants lose to or settle, tens of thousands of full-time employees with the companies between 2006 and 2009 could be compensated.

[Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2011: The judge says "This case is moving forward...this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss." That means the defendants' motion to dismiss the case will almost surely be denied when the judge files her official ruling soon. She mentioned "It's hard to make the inference that there was no conspiracy". Read on to find out why and what that means for the companies. More details from the hearing at the end.]

Specifically, the senior executives of the defendants, including Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, are accused of entering into a network of identical, interconnected illegal agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Each agreement by itself may be a violation of antitrust laws including the Sherman Act, the Cartwright Act, and other California laws.

The plaintiffs also claim the agreements constitute an overarching antitrust conspiracy because each was made with knowledge of the other agreements, and relied on the other agreements to achieve a common goal of reducing compensation and mobility for highly sought-after skilled tech employees.

According to the plaintiffs’ statement (PDF), the chronology of some of the  agreements is as follows:

• January 2005 – Pixar senior executives (which include Steve Jobs) draft written terms for a no-poach agreement and send them to Lucasfilm
• May 2005 – Apple and Adobe make agreements
• 2006 – Apple and Google make agreements shortly after Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board of directors
• April 2007 – Apple and Pixar make agreements
• June and September 2007 – Google enters into agreements with Intuit and Intel that are identical to the agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, and Apple and Pixar

Additionally, Steve Jobs personally contacted Palm’s CEO Edward T. Colligan to propose an unlawful agreement, writing “We must do whatever we can” to stop competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.” Colligan declined Jobs’ offer, writing “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.”

The plaintiffs request “The Court should deny the motion, lift the stay of discovery, and permit Plaintiffs ‘to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination’ of this action.”

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The defendants claim that the agreements were isolated and not interconnected. They claim the agreements were pro-competitive parts of legitimate collaborations between the companies, many of which had executives on each other’s boards or started as the same company as with Pixar and Lucasfilm.

The defendants also claim “The alleged bilateral arrangement provide no support for the overall conspiracy that plaintiffs have alleged in order to name the defendants in a class action”. They motion for continuation of the partial stay of discovery and for the case to be dismissed.

However, my research and sources indicate the defendants’ claims are false, the plaintiffs case is plausible, and so there are no grounds for dismissal. Furthermore, the only reason more evidence about the interconnection between the agreements isn’t available is because they were made so secretively.

The case should be allowed to proceed because the plaintiffs have produced “smoking guns” indicating a deep conspiracy. Specifically, “Do Not Cold Call” lists which defendants used to implement the agreements, and the written terms of Pixar’s agreement with Lucasfilm. These signal that today’s joint motion to dismiss the case should be denied because if discovery is permitted to continue, there’s a reasonable expectation that evidence of illegal activity will be revealed.

Finally, the precedent is that motions to dismiss are “viewed with disfavor and are properly granted only in exceptional cases…A complaint satisfies Twombly [is only eligible for dismissal] if the allegations, taken as a whole, are not ‘facially implausible’” according to the plaintiffs’ statement. Therefore, it would take a very strong presentation by the defense for Judge Lucy Koh to dismiss the case.

If the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case is denied, the case will move towards a trial by jury in June 2013. Rather than leave an assessment of damages to the judge and jury, the defendants may try to settle the case, similar to how they settled with the Department of Justice’s federal case in 2010. In the defendants lose or settle, full-time employees of the defendants could be compensated for the 10-15% of lost wages estimated by the plaintiffs’ law firm Lieff Cabraser.

I’m currently sitting in the courtroom waiting for the hearing to begin. Check back soon for the judge’s decision of whether to dismiss the case.

Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2012: The judge has lifted the stay of discovery, saying “This case is moving forward…this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss.” Though her official statement hasn’t been filed, she’s likely to deny the defendants motion to dismiss the case. She also ordered Google to produce draft emails in addition to sent emails, and designate which are drafts and which were sent.

During the hearing, the judge asked if the plaintiffs would consider breaking up the case to focus on each unlawful agreement separately. The plaintiffs claimed the agreements were all interconnected and that they are confortable with pursuing a joint, overarching antitrust complaint.

On June 28th, the court will convene to hear class certification to define what employees are eligible to be represented by the class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs plan to assess evidence surfaced during discovery and determine if only software engineers, software engineers and scientists, or all of the defendants’ employees will be represented by the class action lawsuit.

The head attorney representing the plaintiffs, Joseph R. Saveri of Lieff Cabraser, gave reporters a conservative calculation of the possible damages that employees could be compensated for. He said software engineers make $100,000 a year (they make more), their compensation was “suppressed between 5 and 10%” and “tens of thousands of employees were affected”. That means for each year an entry-level full-time software engineer worked at one of these companies, they might be entitled to damages of $5,000 to $10,000. Higher paid veteran engineers could be entitled to much more. The total damages could therefore be at least $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected.

The ongoing tension between Apple and Adobe seemed to flare up again Thursday with the launch of the new Mac operating system, OS X Lion—although the situation wasn't quite as bad as it initially appeared.

In the past, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been openly antagonistic towards Flash, which is Adobe's format for online media, including videos and games. Apple refused to support Flash on the iPhone or the iPad, and it left Flash off the MacBook Air (though in the latter case, users could still install Flash on their own). Jobs even published a letter titled "Thoughts on Flash" where he suggested that the technology is "no longer necessary".

Sniping between executives at both companies seemed to die down recently, but the Lion launch provided a new opportunity for friction. Adobe published a list of "known issues" between Lion and Adobe products, and tech news site VentureBeat, which spotted the list, described the incompatibility as a declaration of war. Perhaps most noteworthy was the suggestion that Flash videos on YouTube were taxing computers' CPUs, which Adobe said could "possibly" mean that Apple had disabled hardware acceleration for Flash.

Except, well, that turned out to be wrong. An Adobe spokesman later told Adweek via email that Lion offers "the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration" as the last Mac operating system, Snow Leopard. So why the confusion? Adobe acknowledged that its earlier suggestion was "incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration."

"We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers," the spokesman added.

Now, Adobe might claim that it's working closely with Apple, but today's about-face suggests that's  not entirely true. 

And there are other compatibility issues. For example, older versions of Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst (two of Adobe's tools for creating Flash content) don't work with Lion. Adobe says it "does not intend to update" those versions to make them work.  On the other hand, the latest versions of Builder and Catalyst do work in Lion, but Adobe says there are "issues": "We do not recommend that these customers upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7." That's a big deal for Adobe, since (as Jobs suggested in his letter) the company's Creative Suite products have an unusually strong following among Mac users.

Why do the two companies seem to have so much trouble working together? Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond suggested via email that it's about control.

"I think the struggle comes from the fact that each is trying to establish 'strategic control points' in the developer ecosystem," he said. Specifically, Adobe products like Flash Builder make it possible for developers to build apps that run across multiple smartphone platforms, not just the iPhone. "This turns them from collaborators into competitors."

Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

The ink on the acquisition agreement documents signed – perhaps electronically – by Adobe and e-signature technology company EchoSign hasn’t even dried yet, and already dark clouds appear on the horizon.

An EchoSign rival called RPost, a self-proclaimed pioneer of electronic signature services, is suing Adobe and EchoSign over patent infringement.

RPost, founded in 2000, says it brought suit for the infringement of five of its U.S. patents – numbers 6,182,219; 6,571,334; 7,707,624; 7,865,557 and 7,966,372.

The patents cover technologies of verifiable proof for email delivery, recording recipient consent associated with received messages and documents, and value-added outbound email processing.

According to the lawsuit documents, embedded below, RPost is asking the US Federal Court to issue an injunction against Adobe to prevent further damages. If the court follows their reasoning, such an injunction would render the Adobe’s purchase of EchoSign potentially worthless.

RPost’s services provide senders legally valid evidence of email content, timestamp and delivery, with options to record the recipient’s consent to attached contracts with legal e-signatures.

This isn’t the first time RPost embarks on a legal crusade against its competitors, and even national postal services haven’t been spared.

RPost currently has actions pending against EchoSign challenger Docusign – which yesterday announced that it has processed more than a half billion signed pages to date – as well the United States Postal Service, the Swiss Post Office and the Canadian Post Office.

RPost says it owns 35 patents worldwide, some of which have priority over technology dating back to 1995.

The timing of the lawsuit raises questions, but I asked RPost CEO Zafar Khan why the documents were filed on the very same day Adobe announced the acquisition of EchoSign, and this is how he responded:

Electronically signing a document is not difficult. Just typing your name at the bottom of a document or email can have all the legal force of a handwritten signature if all parties have proof that you are the author of the specific content. At first, we had viewed EchoSign’s electronic signature service more of a novelty — a cosmetic way of placing your typewritten name in a fancy font and calling it an EchoSign electronic signature.

But, in light of recent marketplace demand for a higher level of forensically verifiable proof surrounding electronically signed documents — proof with an audit trail and method of verifying authenticity — we found that Echosign upgraded its services based on the teachings published in RPost patents.

RPost patented technology focuses on producing electronic signatures on documents in a manner that has high evidential weight, including an audit trail, associating this to the e-mail and e-signed document record, and providing methods of authentication. Without this, you don’t have proof.

When we discovered that EchoSign’s service included key elements of RPost patented technology, we recently re-evaluated EchoSign and realized that they added technology to make their e-signature service more legally meaningful – and we identified that technology as key elements of RPost patented technology. We reviewed in the context of our patents, and this has taken several months to complete, as the RPost patent portfolio includes 35 patents.

We were in the final stages of filing last week, and just finalized the details today.

Fighting words indeed.

We’ve reached out to Adobe and EchoSign and will update when we hear back.

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Adobe has acquired EchoSign, a provider of electronic signatures. All EchoSign full-time employees, as well as its founders, will join Adobe. Adobe says EchoSign’s solution will be a key part of its document exchange services platform. It will be integrated …

Adobe this morning announced that it has acquired EchoSign, a provider of electronic signature solutions and signature automation.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the founders as well as all full-time employees of EchoSign, which has offices in Palo Alto, California, the UK and Germany, will join Adobe.

EchoSign’s solution, which is said to currently support more than three million users worldwide, will be offered as part of Adobe’s online document exchange services platform and be integrated with Adobe’s SendNow for managed file transfer, FormsCentral for form creation and CreatePDF for online PDF creation.

As you may have heard, Apple’s new version of its video editing software, Adobe Final Cut Pro X, has received considerable backlash from users. And as Jim Dalrymple reports, video editing rival Adobe has been welcoming these disheartened Final Cut Pro users with open arms. Now Adobe is taking it one step further, announcing a formal ‘switching program’ for any Final Cut Pro or Avid Media users.

Adobe says that anyone who has purchased any version of Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer and want to switch to Adobe’s video tools (Production Premium or Premiere Pro) will be eligible for a 50 percent savings on Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5 Production Premium or Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5.

Adobe has been pretty active in its marketing efforts towards disgruntled Final Cut Pro users. For example, the company has posted a number of ‘success stories’ of Premier Pro users who have made the switch.

Of course, not everyone hates the new version of Final Cut Pro, so it’s unclear how many ‘switchers’ Adobe will gain from the backlash. Also, check out Conan O’Brian weighing in on the Final Cut Pro X debacle.

Google just launched a new Google Labs project called “Swiffy“. It converts Flash SWF files to HTML5. It lets you reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (ie: iPhones and iPads). You may recall a similar tool from …

Adobe reported strong second quarter earnings at market close today, posting revenue of $1.023 billion, up 9 percent year over year. The Company says revenue came in at the higher range of its targeted revenue range of $970 million to $1.020 billion.

GAAP diluted earnings per share grew 61 percent year-over-year to $0.45. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share grew 25 percent year-over-year to $0.55, beating analyst expectations of $0.51 per share.

Non-GAAP net income grew 20 percent to $279.9 million in the quarter and cash flow from operations was $389.3 million.

Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe, said in a statement: Our strong Q2 performance demonstrates our strategy of enabling users to make, manage and measure great digital experiences is resonating with our customers.

In terms of specific groups within Adobe, digital marketing arm Omniture achieved record revenue, with client bookings up over 20 percent. Adobe’s Enterprise segment revenue grew 34 percent year-over-year and Acrobat achieved 17 percent year-over-year growth.

For the third quarter of fiscal 2011, Adobe is targeting revenue of $1 billion to $1.050 billion and is projecting 10 percent revenue growth in fiscal year 2011.

Adobe is today pushing updates to its application development software product Flash Builder and the open source Flex framework to enable developers to build apps for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry PlayBook, following support for the Android platform last April.

Developers can now opt to use Adobe’s platform to build apps that work across the Web, desktop and a range of tablets smartphones, with the ability to reuse most or all of their existing code and use common logic across all platforms.

The new version of Flash Builder (4.5) and Flex (also 4.5) are offered as stand-alone products or as part of Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium and Master Collection. Also, Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP today supports mobile application development for Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS.

The release of the software updates accompanies the company’s announcement of the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, which it bills as an “open, standards-based platform for delivering engaging digital solutions across social, Web, mobile, and print channels”.

Using the new Flash Builder, developers can create Flex and ActionScript applications and deploy them using Adobe AIR software, which Adobe reckons will be supported by over 200 million mobile devices by the end of this year. Needless to say, this is a way for developers to work around Apple’s no-Flash restrictions when it comes to building apps for iOS devices.

Last week, the company released the Adobe AIR 2.7 SDK and runtimes. Notably, Adobe at the time of the release said it would be dropped support for Linux to focus on mobile platforms.

Flash Builder 4.5 Standard will set you back $249, while the premium version of the product costs $699, and upgrade pricing for Flash Builder 4.5 is $49.

Flex 4.5 is available as a free open source framework.

You can find some example applications built with the new software in Adobe’s blog post.