At least two sources have told me that that Adobe paid well north of $100 million. (Added on December 21: A well placed source tells me that the final number is closer to $150 million.)  What may seem like a lot of money is reflection on reality of the modern software business — not only does a company need to offer software via the cloud, it also has to have a community of engaged users to keep enhancing the value of that offering. Behance team makes those points in a post on Behance blog.

Creation should be inherently collaborative – and must evolve more frequently than typical software upgrade cycles. If the tools we use to create are connected with how we showcase and discover creative work, we can help usher in a new era of idea exchange and collaborative creation.

David Wadhwani, who spearheaded this acquisition on behalf of Adobe writes on the company blog:

 As we start to roll out increasingly integrated workflows across the services, you’ll start to see the benefits of combining the creation of content with the ability to seek feedback, showcase your work and distribute it across devices.

Behance was started in 2006 and raised $6.5 million from Union Square Ventures, Jeff Bezos, Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon and several others. It had a million members and was host to three million projects.

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“If you look at content in the world in general, who is creating most of the stuff? Is it a better world if everybody’s creating? I think it’s a better world if everyone has the ability to create but I don’t think it needs to be that everyone is creating and gets equal attention because some stuff is frankly better than others,” he said today in a conversation with Om Malik at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in San Francisco.

Since launching Blogger about a dozen years ago, he said he and his cofounder Biz Stone have been interested in democratizing the distribution of content online. But now, with both Medium and Branch, The Obvious Corporation-backed platform for hosting online conversations, he said, the focus is quality.

With Medium, the new collaborative publishing tool launched by The Obvious Corporation this summer, he said they want to provide a platform that enables anyone to create content but they don’t expect everyone to actually do it. And Branch similarly enables anyone to host an online conversation, but instead of opening it up to the masses, it lets users close it off to a smaller group to raise the bar of commentary.

He also said that while Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms may satisfy users’ obsession with the new and novel with a constant stream of updated information, Medium — which displays content in Pinterest-like “collections” of contents — is designed to give preference to higher-quality, longer-lasting and potentially longer form content.

People will always be attracted to the new and shiny object — and he said much of Twitter’s value comes from its real-time nature — but not all content on the Internet needs to be fast and fleeting.  He acknowledged that they sometimes wonder if they’re being “naive” to think that people might want more than the “junk food” content on the Web. But Medium’s hope is that people will “eat their information vegetables.” And If the site only appeals to a smaller audience in the process, he said, that’s just fine.

“Our goal at Obvious isn’t to reach the entire world, it’s to create as much value as possible,” he said. “HBO isn’t the most popular channel on TV but they do really really great stuff. And I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates “Desperate Housewives.””

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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When you’re working with a small team of less than 20 people on a first-time hardware product, it’s tough to do things perfectly the first time, Fadell said. Tiny Nest Labs didn’t command the same respect among vendors and didn’t have the volume advantage in pricing that Fadell did in his days running Apple’s iPod division. And that impacted design decisions: the first Nest thermostat that went on sale didn’t have a stainless steel bezel, for example, because it was a little too expensive to source.

The new Nest, which started shipping a few weeks ago, is slimmer but also has a single stainless steel bezel. The difference this time around? “This time we can purchase parts in much higher quantities,” Fadell said. “The first time you make a hardware product it doesn’t usually go the way you think it does in terms of cost. You have to redesign it to get your costs in line.”

It wasn’t just visual stuff that they tweaked though. “We looked at everything we did wrong” the first time, Fadell said. That included software. The biggest complaint Nest got from the first-generation thermostat was lack of compatibility: it worked in about 70 to 75 percent of homes in the U.S. and Canada. The new device promises 95 percent compatibility. (Still that didn’t stop customers from all over the world from installing the Nest. Though it’s only sold in two countries, Nest Labs found through IP addresses on its network that shows its thermostat is being used in 63 other countries, Fadell said.)

The folks at Nest also learned a lot from their learning thermostat. The “auto away” feature knows, for example, when people are going to be away (example: when you generally leave in the morning and when you come back in the evening on weekdays). In the previous model, if a house emptied on a weekday morning, Nest’s algorithm would adjust the thermostat to conserve energy after about an hour and a half.

Based on looking at the data they’d collected over a year and a half, Nest changed auto away so it turns on after an hour and a half hour. Fadell says that can save 1.5 to 2 hours of energy, in someone’s home.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follow below:

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Last year we talked about how connectedness changes everything. We thought it would be a good idea for us to rewind and share some of the conversations from the 2011 event as we work on the 2012 edition.

Jack Dorsey, Square & Twitter

Tony Fadell, Nest

Drew Houston, Dropbox

Brian Chesky, AirBnB

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic/Wordpress

The complete archives from GigaOM RoadMap 2011.

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• Rio de Janeiro gets ready for the 2016 Olympics. And not everyone in Brazil is thrilled about it.
• Frank Sinatra has a cold: Gay Talese’s April 1966 piece is a classic and worth reading. It is how a celebrity profile should read. Great read for fans of Frankie Blue Eyes.
• Inside the deep web: A journey through the dark underbelly of the Internet is a fascinating read and one’s man’s journey through its horrors and occasional surprises. Listen to the accompanying podcast as well.
• Inside the Mansion – and mind – of Kim Dotcom: THe man behind MegaUpload gives Wired writer Charles Graeber unprecedented access and the result is a great read about one of the most controversial people on the Internet.
• The Alliance from hell: How the US and Pakistan became the dysfunctional nuclear family of international relations. (Bonus links: The hunt for Geronimo and The scariest little corner of the world.)

John Maeda, the President of Rhode Island School of Design and  one of the most influential people in the world of design and technology, spoke at TED earlier this year about the importance of art, technology and design inform creative readers. I stumbled on to his talk, thanks to Tina Roth Eisenberg, and found it fun and educational. Of course, you can hear John speak in person at our RoadMap conference on November 5 that I am co-hosting with Katie Fehrenbacher. Our theme for the event is design in the age of connectedness. Join us!

These days Behar, who spent his childhood in Switzerland, is obsessed with wearable devices, including watches and wrist computing devices such as Up created by Jawbone. Behar, who is chief creative officer at San Francisco-based Jawbone, the company behind Up, says, that wearable devices are particularly hard to design.

During a recent visit to the offices of fuseproject, a design company he started, we ended up talking about two things we both love the most: bags and watches. It was a conversation that started right after my onstage conversation with him at Loic Le Meur’s Le Web 2011. Behar who is a recipient of  the National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum is looking to create a new line of bags and is working on a brand new watch, though he wouldn’t go into great detail on his new projects. He has previously collaborated with Japanese designer Issey Miyake on a watch.

Behar in a conversation said that, “Watches are a great way to think about how products should be designed to last.” He pointed out that things we wear on a daily basis have to meet a very high threshold of design because they “have to withstand constraints of life – water, dust, scratches.” Behar points out that with wearable computing has to over come that challenge.

Behar is one of the key speakers at our 2nd annual GigaOM RoadMap conference on November 5 in San Francisco. Our focus for this year’s conference is on how design, and user interfaces will help us navigate this age of constant connectedness and a world of increasing complexity. Other speakers at our RoadMap event include Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, Instagram CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom, Tony Fadell, CEO and co-founder of Nest, Scott Wilson, designer and founder of Minimal, and Ben Silbermann, CEO of Pinterest.

Behar told me that he is excited that design has finally become core to a whole generation of Silicon Valley companies. He pointed out that in the 1990s, design was seen as a vanity project and the notion of experience was very limited or non-existent. The success of Apple and its many products has changed things radically. “Apple has proved that design makes a difference,” he said. “I am looking around and seeing that guys like AirBnB are doing what Apple is doing and that is what makes a fundamental difference.” His points to companies like Nest and AirBnB as startup leaders embracing design.

But he is not satisfied with the state of the web and web design. From the T-shirts we wear to the sneakers we buy, in the physical world we have infinite choices to create unique experiences. It confounds him how little choice we have in the digital space. “The experiences need to fit to us,” he said during a lunch conversation a few months ago and added “We are pretty far from there. The data is all based on algorithms and it is not emotionally associated to us.”

Behar believes that the constant state of connectedness means that there are opportunities to create unique experiences. The increasing popularity of touch-based interfaces offers an opportunity to humanize the computing experience, especially on tablets and smartphones. He feels that the web has to become more visual as humans understand visual communication better than written words. Just look at the movie posters, he added.

I am looking forward to chatting with him at our RoadMap event where we will explore how design will influence our digital experiences in the future.

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