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.