Adobe, the San Jose company that develops graphics and print applications, is creating a $100 million venture capital fund to invest in companies using Adobe technology.
Adobe has ended its formal relationship with San Francisco firm, Granite Ventures, which Adobe had originally backed as a way to nurture technology companies — though this has been known for some time.
Ryan Stewart of ZDNet has the news, citing comments from Adobe’s Kevin Lynch about the plans:
According to Kevin, the fund will focus specifically on Apollo-based applications. Apollo is Adobe’s still-in-alpha runtime for bringing cross-platform Rich Internet Applications to the desktop.
On top of the news of the fund, Kevin showed off Apollo applications by MySpace (a version of their IM client) and eBay (a bid management tool running on the desktop). There was also a fantastic word processor running on Flex built by the team at Virtual Ubiquity.
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