One question. Can I have your old job? I love scaling out projects. Second Question: Would you be using Hadoop for this project by any chance?

I used to suck at this too... I agree with the others who are saying to practice. Another option is to go "shopping" first with some of your guy friends. Its much easier to pick up a chick if you are with a group of guys. It definitely brings down the creep factor, and helps to beef up your confidence. Confidence is key. Another thing to think about is with people, unlike programming, if your too concerned with the outcome, they tend to feel smothered. Once I took the approach that I really didn't care what the outcome was, I just wanted to get to know as many different types of people as possible, it helped me to figure out what type of person I'm dealing with. Once you can read people, you creep them out a whole lot less.

I know this is old, but did anyone notice that the article was sponsored by Siemens?

Do you want to know how to create the interface in Adobe Air, or do you want to create something similar to the interface you saw, or do you simply want to add flash to a site?

The easiest way would be to convert the binary to hex represented in ascii, then post the ascii text. On the server side you could convert the ascii back to binary. This adds a lot of overhead, and bloats the data, but if your not too concerned about it, its a easy way to go.