I was over at the Tech Museum today. I love that place and it was packed. I shot a product announcement video there that’ll come up on Tuesday morning at 4 a.m.

We don’t think too many people figured out what was going on. But, I love doing product annoucements like this. No makeup. No lights. No special camera crew. Just shoot it YouTube style.

The announcement is one that the major gadget sites will be interested in (if they can forget that I was crapping up their weekend). And it’s something you’ll want to see on video to understand what it looks like. ASCII text isn’t going to do it.

Right now I’m over at Ryanne Hodson’s house. She’s editing videos, I’m writing descriptions. Her cats are playing. Just like they do on her videoblog. So cute.

In all the excitement of MY videos not getting linked to enough, I made the mistake of not more prominently sharing a much better video that PodTech produced with Intel. This one doesn’t have my annoying laugh, my shaky camera work, had a full crew (two camera people, an audio person, a production person, and “real talent.” To you, that’s Jason Lopez, who used to work at NPR and has forgotten a lot more about media production than I’ll ever know). Oh, and it was edited down to “YouTube length” (Less than nine minutes). Has music. Professional titles. And all that, so it’s definitely NOT boring.

If you hate my videos, you’ll love this one.

[podtech content=http://media.podtech.net/media/2007/01/PID_001917/Podtech_Intel45nM_revised.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1971/intel-says-45-nanometer-microprocessors-due-later-this-year&totalTime=520000&breadcrumb=3F34K2L1]

This is news that’s just breaking.

I talked with Adobe officials on Friday and they are opening up the PDF specification. It will release the full PDF 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization, ISO.

If you haven’t looked at PDF for a while, here’s a short list of what’s new in 1.7 vs. 1.6:

1. New Print characteristics; paper selection, page range, copies, and scaling.
2. New portable collections, IE, PDF packages.
3. New Requirement handlers.
4. Added improvements to 3D.
5. Added improvements to annotations.
6. Added improvements to tagging.
7. Added improvements to digital signatures.

So, why would Adobe do this? Tons of governments are forcing standards-based purchase requirements and Adobe wanted to make sure that its customers could continue choosing PDF and Acrobat as a standards-based way to send information around the network, they told me in a press call on Friday. Here’s Adobe’s press release on this topic. Hey, who said press releases weren’t useful? 😉

I’ll try to find other blogs to link to, but for now I’ll just link to an Adobe search on Google News. The press embargo ends at Midnight Eastern Time, so it’ll be interesting to see who gets stories about about this.

Does this change your view of PDF?