It’s amazing to look back on the last year and see how far this company has come. Having started up a few software companies over the years, it’s always the beginning of the journey that’s the most exciting and difficult part for me. When I joined Flypaper last fall, the company was tentatively called FreshBrew and while we still weren’t totally sure how this would evolve, we knew we had a game changing technology. We took this idea to the Invest Southwest Capital Conference (and won a $250,000 investment) and then DEMO 2008 (and won a DEMOgod™ Award) and before we knew it, were we off and running. The thing that amazed everyone we talked to – investors, press, analysts, customers – was that no one had yet created a platform that allowed users to create, edit, reuse and track Flash content. From our collective backgrounds we knew we had something that could be really big.  We had the solution to a painful problem.  Figuring out the best way to sell and market it has been the challenge. 

We’ve now seen Flypaper be adopted by all kinds of users in all different industries. What we also found was that enterprise-level businesses were creating enormous amounts of Flash content for training, marketing, internal communications, investor relations – you name it. This was costing them millions of dollars and ate up countless hours of programmer time. The biggest frustration for these companies, and the third party developers who create their Flash content, is that just a small change to any project larger or small, could take weeks to implement and eat into the budget.

When we approached these mid sized to large companies, they couldn’t believe they could actually have a central repository of all of their Flash content and projects, and then reuse, edit, and  track all their Flash content whenever  they needed. We saw that we could make some changes and deliver a very powerful Flash Content Management Platform that is truly cost effective. We finally found our sweet spot where the Flypaper solution could be most effective.

Going into the New Year, Flypaper will now be totally focused on the enterprise user and the third-party developers (marketing and design firms, eLearning developers, etc) who create content for enterprise-level clients. We’re empowering companies to create high-impact, Flash content that can be shared across their entire company, re-used again and again, for a fraction of what it was costing them before. We’re also giving Flash programmers and third party-developers a Platform that will save them time and resources and give them a competitive advantage, as they can now deliver projects faster and allow clients to do their own maintenance.

We’re very excited to roll out Flypaper 2.0 in January with a bunch of great new features and a brand new collaboration application, all designed with professional content creators in mind. Just after the New Year, I’ll blog about some of these great new features that make Flypaper easier to use and the output even more cool.

- Pat

Hello and happy holidays! It’s been a while since we checked in with the Flypaper blog. We promise to get better about that – it’s actually one of our New Year’s resolutions. The reason we’ve been MIA is because we’ve been so darn busy. I mean really busy. Aside from working on updates that make Flypaper easier and cooler for you to use, we’ve been enjoying the fruits of our first years’ labors.

The last month saw Flypaper taking home two key industry awards. The first is a Tech & Learning Award of Excellence by Tech & Learning Magazine. Flypaper will be featured in the magazine’s December issue – due out any day now. We also took home an award from the Governor’s Celebration of Innovation – an annual event hosted by the Arizona Technology Council. The award was for “Innovator of the Year – Startup Company.” Last year Flypaper attended this prestigious event as guests just before our launch. It’s very exciting to be recognized the top tech startup in the state just a year later. This makes five industry awards in our very first year!

We have some big changes going on here, which I’ll go into more detail on next week, right here on the Flypaper blog. Without giving too much away, I can say 2009 is going to see Flypaper heading into the enterprise with some really cool, new features and applications for the product.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for ways to save time and money on your corporate communication projects using Flypaper, check out the archive of our recent webinar: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/147601698

Thanks for checking in and come back next Friday for a peak at what’s to come with Flypaper next year!

-Pat Sullivan

Flypaper has been honored with a Brandon Hall award for Best innovation in Learning Technology presented by 2008 marks the 14th year of The Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Awards. Winners were announced at a ceremony last night at the Innovations in Learning Conference in San Jose, CA. You can check out the full announcement here.

Flypaper has also been named a finalist for the Governor’s Celebration of Innovation Award in the start-up company category. Winners will be announced at the awards gala in November, so stay tuned.

And in other news, last week we launched our Flypaper Producers program. If you love Flypaper but don’t have time to create your own presentations and Web content, now you have access to certified producers who can do it for you.

Starting on Saturday, Sept. 13, we are changing how we offer our product - there will only be one version of Flypaper. We will no longer have a free version and a Pro version. Flypaper will include a free 30-day trial of all features and we will offer monthly or annual subscriptions.

I describe the change in this video and there is more information here.

Pat

In a couple of weeks we’re going to have our first training Webinar for users and invite you to join us to learn tips and trips to creating great Stories. The Webinar will be on August 27th, 2008 at 10:00 am PDT. This is the first of a series of free “how-to” events designed to give attendees an in-depth look at how interactive Stories are created using Flypaper. You’ll see a hands-on demonstration of the new features that help you educate, persuade, sell and entertain more effectively on the Web. Click here to register.

The Webinar will also feature a guest speaker that will share how they are using Flypaper to sell more effectively than ever. We hope you’ll join us and weigh in. We always appreciate user feedback and learning about how you’re using the application.

Now you can show off your creativity and your Flypaper prowess by joining the Flypaper Stories that Stick Contest. Simply create a cool Story using either the free Flypaper application or new Flypaper Pro and submit your Story by September 15, 2008.

Enter to Win a Sony 40” HDTV, an Apple iPod touch or a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate

Winners in 3 categories (Best Personal Use, Best Business Use and People’s Choice) will be announced the week of September 22, 2008 and will win some great prizes. Winners will also be featured on Flypaper.com, so submit early, and be sure to vote online to help determine the People’s Choice!

You can submit just about anything, from a fun photo album, to a powerful product demo, a cool company showcase, or anything in between.

What are you waiting for? Check out the contest details here.

Flypaper is buzzing today with our recent funding announcement and more articles about the new Flypaper Pro product. Check out this great coverage in TechCrunch, CNET, DEMO.com, and VentureBeat. We’re seeing a lot of comments on these blogs, which tells us Flypaper is catching quite a bit of attention.

Thanks to everyone who’s taking part in the conversation and has something to say about our company, the industry and the application. We like all the feedback, and will take all of it into account as we use this next round of funding to roll out some great products and cool content for you.

Several subscribers have asked: "How come Flypaper only offers support through e-mail?"

As we are a growing company,  e-mail support is the most efficient way for you to get the answers you need quickly. When you send a support e-mail, we automatically get some general information about the version of your operating system, your browser, and your IP address. With an e-mail you don't have to look up all that information and then find a way to get it to us.

Once an e-mail comes to us we respond quickly. If we don't immediately know the answer, we can check to see if the Flypaper application sent information about the error back to our servers. In most cases, it will tell us what went wrong and that really helps us find the solution. Once we have the solution, we send an e-mail back to you and you have a written record.

In most cases during business hours (8 a.m. -5 p.m. AZ) we find the answers and respond to the e-mail in two hours or so (usually faster).  Issues that come in outside business hours we usually respond to in 6-12 hours.  Some issues are more difficult and take a little more time for us to research, but we rarely take a full 24 hours to respond. Our policy is we will respond within 24 hours or the next business day. Flypaper Pro subscribers get priority.

We think the e-mail support is an efficient and effective way to get the information we need from you and give you our best answer without having to guess or use trial and error to find a solution. And e-mail takes the least amount of your time.

That's why we use e-mail to handle your support questions.

We are very excited to announce to all of our users (and the rest of the world) the release of Flypaper Pro! Thousands of people are using Flypaper’s flagship application for everything from sales to social networking to e-learning. One thing we keep hearing again and again is that Flypaper is letting business professionals communicate in ways not possible before.

While that kind of feedback may be great for some, for the Flypeople here there’s always more to be done. So we went back into our cave and thought about what could really help our professional users? And it came to us: tracking, data collection, advanced content creation, and more storage.

When we developed Flypaper, we had persuasive, engaging storytelling in mind. With Flypaper Pro, we’re letting you take all of that great storytelling to the next level. See what your audience is doing with those cool Stories you create. Collect important data that will help prioritize leads. Publish your content anywhere you want and still have the ability to track it.

These are just a few of the great features of Flypaper Pro. You can see a complete tutorial on the product here. Please check it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Thanks to all of our users who have been creating cool stories in the standard version of Flypaper since our Beta launch. We’re now officially moving out of Beta and into in our first release! Enjoy Flypaper 1.0 and check out Flypaper Pro.

Thanks,
Pat Sullivan, CEO

www.flypaper.com/product/flypaperpro.aspx

A good friend, Francine Hardaway, forwarded some comments and question about Flypaper that were on a social networking site called FriendFeed that I am not a member of. So I sent her the following to answer the questions: “why is Flypaper a Windows application that you have to download?” and “why don't you have a Mac version now?”

It is a Windows app because the app was targeted for business pro’s who either create or buy Flash programs especially for sales and marketing. Windows is by far the platform of choice for these people. We do have demand for a Mac version especially from graphic artists. The breakthrough with the Flash stuff we create is that mere mortals can now create, edit and customize real Flash programs. Flash programmers, graphic artists, web developers, etc. can also deliver really cool Flash stuff but now deliver in a way their customers can edit themselves instead of having to go back to the programmer to maintain it. Both the customer and developer wins because usually the programmer hates maintenance. They love to create.

It is a “download” because it has to process heavy graphics using lots of processing power. The king of web apps, Google, has big downloads for programs like Sketchup, Google Earth, Picassa etc. iTunes is also a big download. Keynote and ppt would be large downloads if they were not already on the machine when you bought it. Imagine millions of users trying to simultaneously create, edit and share large graphical presentations, or what we call “interactive stories”, using cloud computing power.

I have tried all the web based apps doing anything in the Flash arena. While I can get to the app very quickly, if I upload a song from my iTunes it takes several minutes to do. Videos, pictures etc. are even more painful. And all these apps are just now in either private beta, with a few in public beta. All are struggling with performance with only a few hundred users. iTunes, Picassa, Earth, Sketchup, Keynote etc. are all extremely fast and have millions of users. So the bother of an upfront download is made up 100x every time you use it. There are very simple graphics products like Slide where all you’re doing is adding some glitz and glitter to a pix and then posting it somewhere. That works. But anything significant combining text, video, pictures, recorded narration, animations, existing swf’s, Flash components in one story is very painful. Especially as thousands/millions of users are trying to do it at the same time. Every Flypaper story created though runs anywhere on the web requiring nothing but Flash on the computer which everyone has.

Also, it is key to understand Flypaper is best used to create “Interactive Stories that Sell” – on the web. The best use for ANY presentation building app is to create slides that support what I am going to say in a presentation. Flypaper is best to create and share stories that tell themselves 24/7 on the web. You can use it for presentations, but interactive stories are what it is all about. And with the Pro version (coming next week) you can now track everything about what a viewer of your story is doing with it. And the viewer can communicate with you in a variety of ways using our Flash components.

It does take a little bit of work and time to “get” what you can do with Flypaper as it is NOT a simple application. With power, there is always a tradeoff with simplicity. I had to play around a lot with some of the google apps mentioned above to figure those out as well. And iTunes can get really hairy especially when you are trying to get around the DRM elements so I can get stuff off one iPod to another iTunes. (I know you are not supposed to do that but most of the time I am doing it with stuff I own but are on different iPods or computers.) Plus you have to create an account to do anything in their store etc. You have to create an account with almost ANY of the online apps as well.

We are always trying to make Flypaper easier to learn. In the beta we did a really good job of “hiding” the great tutorials we have. Next week's launch of the general release and the pro version you can now readily find those tutorials under Help. So that should help.

So far, though, we have been amazed at the stuff people are already doing with our beta version and are very pleased with number of downloads.

Hope this helps with the questions and comments here. Perhaps this shows there is some method to our madness. Since I have been doing software for a long time I have learned there are always tradeoffs no matter what you do. All you can do is try to do a great job for your ultimate target market.