Jonathan Gay

In May 2013, he tried to return into software business, launching successful Kickstarter campaign for Explory, mobile video app.

In May 2010, he was running a small business selling grass-fed beef direct to consumers.

In October 2009, Software as Art (by then renamed Greenbox) was acquired by Silver Spring Networks.

In 2007, a survey found that the Flash Player was installed on 96% of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide and was used by over 2 million professionals.

In August 2006, Gay founded a new software venture, Software as Art, in partnership with three other former veterans of the Flash and Breeze teams, Tatsumi, Grossman, and Santangeli. The company developed energy management solutions for the home.

On April 18, 2005, Adobe Systems, Inc. announced the acquisition of Macromedia. Gay ultimately decided to pursue other opportunities in lieu of joining the combined company. When Gay left Macromedia in December 2005, he held the title of Chief Technology Officer.

He founded a new team alongside the Flash team to fulfill this vision, building a product which he code named "Tin Can," a reference to the tin can telephone made by children using two tin cans and a string. This new team and the Flash team worked together to incorporate two-way, real-time video and audio technology into the Flash Player, the first incarnation of which was released in March 2002 as part of Macromedia Flash Player 6. At the same time, the Tin Can team built a new server product, Flash Communication Server (now Flash Media Server), which communicated with the Flash Player over a new real-time protocol called RTMP. Tin Can could be used for use cases as simple as streaming a video over the Web, or as sophisticated as a videoconferencing system.

By 2001, there were 50 people working on Flash, 500,000 developers were using it and over 325 million people had the Flash Player that worked with their web browsers.

When MSN and Disney decided to use FutureSplash Animator for their websites, Macromedia made an offer to buy FutureWave Software and the acquisition was completed in December, 1996. FutureSplash Animator was renamed Flash 1.0.

Gay and programmer Robert Tatsumi finished the company's first product in 1994, SmartSketch, a vector-drawing program for the PenPoint operating system. Shortly thereafter, PenPoint was discontinued, ending that market for SmartSketch. SmartSketch was ported to the Windows and Macintosh operating systems, but with the advent in 1995 of the World Wide Web, Gay saw an opportunity to create an editor that could produce animations for web pages. The core technology of SmartSketch was repurposed to create a new product, FutureSplash Animator, adding support for timeline animation and a Netscape browser plug-in for playing back content.

In 1993, Gay and Jackson founded FutureWave Software with the intention of creating graphics software for pen computing, in particular the Penpoint operating system that ran on the EO Personal Communicator.

After graduating from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, Gay worked full-time for Silicon Beach Software. During this time he added some significant features to Superpaint 2, including Bézier curves, and began work on IntelliDraw, which was published by Aldus Corporation after the acquisition of Silicon Beach Software in 1990.

While in high school, Gay won a science fair award for programming on an Apple II computer and came to the attention of Silicon Beach Software founder Charlie Jackson. Gay began programming for Silicon Beach in his senior year. His first published product, released in 1985, was Airborne!, a black-and-white game for the Macintosh computer. While in college, he collaborated with game designer Mark Pierce and programmed Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle. All three were award-winning programs that included digital sounds, an unusual innovation for that era.

Jonathan Gay (born 1967) is an American computer programmer and software entrepreneur based in Northern California. Gay co-founded FutureWave Software in 1993. For a decade, he was the main programmer and visionary of Flash, an animation editor for web pages. He founded Software as Art, which was later renamed Greenbox, which made energy management solutions for the home.