R Blank is CTO of Almer/Blank, an Adobe Solution Partner based in Venice, California that specializes in video and application development for the Flash Platform, for clients including E! Entertainment Television, Microsoft, Apple, and IKEA. For over 12 years he has been an interactive designer, developer, consultant, teacher, and author, specializing in the planning, development and release of rich interfaces; R has specialized in Flash since 1999. R holds four Flash Certifications, was one of the first 50 Macromedia Certified Flash Developers in the world, and is a contributing author for the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Designer Certification Exam. R also founded and manages LAFlash.org, a… community of over 1,300 Flash industry professionals, and home to three Macromedia Users Groups for Flash. R also serves on the Information Technology Faculty at the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering. Previously, R co-founded and served as Director of Product & Design at Wildform, where he co-created Flix, the first video encoder for Flash (now owned by On2). R has an MBA in Entrepreneurship from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a BA in History from Columbia University.
Chris is a software architect at Almer/Blank and an Adobe Flex champion. He is a CSSand ActionScript expert who successfully cannonballed into web development in the late 90s and has been programming since childhood. Always caught up with the latest in Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and XML, Chris authored premium articles for the largest Dreamweaver/ Flash community, DMXzone (www.dmxzone.com), and produced WebDevDesign, a popular web design and development podcast featured on iTunes. Somehow, Chris finds time to run an authorized Adobe user group, LA AIR, focused around open source and Adobe technologies. As a community leader, Chris remains a resident faculty member of the Rich Media… Institute and lends himself to speak at large industry events, like JobStock, NAB, and FITC Hollywood. Brain cycles from Chris are always web standards, the Flash Platform, and accessibility.