Macromedia launched a new company site introducing the Flash Platform. The new term Flash Platform is meant as a genus for the different tools and technologies evolving around the core Flash technology. MM also provides a very interesting PDF that explains the present and the future of the Flash Platform.

When reading through this document, you'll find some great information about upcoming software:

• Upcoming Flash Player capabilities (Maelstrom) include a new image API for dynamic custom effects, runtime support of PNG, GIF and progressive JPG files, improved performance (graphics rendering, text scrolling, component rendering, ActionScript execution, and memory management) and finally file up- and download.
• Next version of Flash Lite, code-named Deuce: based on Flash Player 7 with ActionScript 2 support.
• Next major release of Flex, code-named Mistral, will introduce new data services to support transparent data persistence across tiers, occasionally connected clients, data synchronization, a robust data push infrastructure, and paging large datasets. The new data services will also support offline data access.
• Upcoming Flash Communication Server release, code-named Edison, will support new hi-fidelity video capability in Maelstrom, and provide integration with the Flex programming model.

Can't wait to get my hands on these things!

Update: Official press release by Macromedia

Dirk.