GigaOM » flowgram

Flowgram Could Beat Traditional Screencasts

Aliza Sherman — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:00:30 +0000

I demo about 5-6 new tech products every week, often with a little handholding from the company behind the technology because my brain absorbs information much better when somebody tells me about it rather than when I read something or try to figure it out myself. The other day, I was on the phone with the CEO of a new startup, Flowgram, and he directed me to a link with an explanation of Flowgram created as a Flowgram. My reaction? Absolutely Brilliant!

Every once in a while, I come across a Web 2.0/social media tool that not just speaks to me but sings to me. Right away, I get it and really, really want to use it. Flowgram is like a screencast, only better. A screencast uses software on your desktop to capture your visuals and your audio, and you end up with a self-contained file that is…well, contained and not interactive.

Flowgram, however, provides the functionality of screencast software entirely online so any web site you show in your Flowgram is totally live. That means that as a person views your flowgram, they can click on a link and explore a site. So if you made a Flowgram as a tour of your online store, a person could click on an item you show in your Flowgram and immediately purchase the item from your site.

A person can also pause, rewind and skip through a Flowgram so they view at their own pace and in their own way. You can even build stops into your flowgram with instructions for a person to click the Play button again when they are ready to proceed. Even though you are not really there guiding people through your Flowgram, you can produce it to make it feel like you are.

Sharing a Flowgram is a cinch. You can copy and paste a link to your completed Flowgram or lift the widget code and embed it into your blog or site. You can even save it as a YouTube video!

The Elements of a Flowgram

You aren’t just limited to live web pages for your Flowgram. You can also use:

PowerPoint slides and other documents
Photographs
RSS and Atom Feeds
Custom Pages – pages you create using the Flowgram WYSIWYG program

Flowgram provides you a number of editing tools including

Highlighting pen – handy for highlighting text on the page you are showing.
Flowgram notes – to add a digital “sticky” note to a page with additional information or instructions.
Timeline – to view your Flowgram timeline like a video or audio timeline.
Add Media – to add background music.

Web Worker Uses of Flowgrams

Right away, I can see using a flowgram for

Explaining something about the Internet to my clients;
Showcasing work I’ve done for clients and talking through a case study;
Developing a portfolio of my work and giving some commentary on pieces;
Showing off the Second Life products I’ve produced and link people to my CafePress store;
Offering lessons on my web site or blog explaining Internet and social media concepts.

These ideas barely scratch the surface of ways I can use Flowgrams.

Using Flowgram

So I had all these great ideas and attempted my very first Flowgram. It’s a little rough (to put it mildly) as I get used to the tools. I think I need to watch another Flowgram that gives more detailed instructions about the mechanics behind creating a Flowgram.

The tools weren’t as easy to use or intuitive as I had hoped. In fact, if I didn’t already have a bit of audio and video editing experience, I would have been totally lost. But even with my editing abilities, my Flowgram is still rough, especially the transitions and mixed audio quality. The audio is being pulled from my built in microphone but I find the audio quality on Flowgram to be almost as bad as Viddler’s record function. I don’t seem to have the same problem with a site like Seesmic so not sure what is causing the bad audio.

And I can’t figure out how to get the page scrolling I do when I record the Flowgram to show up in my finished Flowgram unless I highlight text somewhere on the page (maybe that’s the secret). I’m sure as I use it more – and seek out more instructions – I’ll be able to produced much more polished Flowgrams.

Despite the momentary frustrations and the learning curve, I’m excited about this product and how it will help me with my work.

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Psystar Lawyers-up With Some Experience

Jethro Jones — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:17:00 +0000

Psystar has officially decided to not go down without a fight. They requested more time to respond to the suit brought forth by Apple and are represented by lawyers from the firm Carr & Ferrell, ComputerWorld reports. They have until August 18th, if this motion is approved, to respond to the claims, which is a two-week delay.

Carr & Ferrell specialize in intellectual property suits and are located in Silicon Valley, strategically placed to offer their services to the heart of the tech industry. They represented burst.com in patent lawsuits against Microsoft and Apple. Those cases were settled with awards going to burst.com in the amounts of $60 million from Microsoft and $10 million from Apple (I don’t think they used that windfall to improve their website, though).

[Via ComputerWorld]

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Whatever Happened to Red Swoosh?

Janko Roettgers — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:00:15 +0000

Remember Red Swoosh, the P2P company that was bought by Akamai for $18.7 million in April 2007? Red Swoosh used to be a competitor to Akamai, albeit on a much smaller scale, offering P2P-powered content delivery services to corporate customers. Shortly before the Akamai acquisition, the company reinvented itself, rolling out products for amateur videographers and file-swapping consumers.

This new direction opened up a lot of possibilities for Akamai. In particular, it offered a way for Akamai to extend its business model to blogs and other platforms for user-generated content. Call it the CDN solution for the long tail, if you will, complete with options to enter the advertising market. But none of that materialized. Instead, it looks like most Red Swoosh products have been discontinued or taken down.

Take FoxTorrent for example. That’s Red Swoosh’s own Firefox BitTorrent extension. The service made a lot of noise when it first got released back in March of 2007, with one developer even predicting that one year down the road, FoxTorrent would be “…the most popular torrent client on the planet. The fastest. The easiest. Hands down.”

Red Swoosh later stated on its blog that these were the words of a “part-time employee…who got a wee bit too excited,” but the company continued to release updates and hint at big plans for FoxTorrent’s future. Until September, that is. FoxTorrent’s blog hasn’t been updated since, the long-promised client version 2.0 hasn’t been released and the forum — and Wiki — of the project are essentially dead.

Then there is Red Swoosh’s Edge Delivery Network (EDN), also dubbed Red Swoosh 2.0. The idea was to supplement the company’s existing corporate customer base with folks who can’t pay for professional CDN services, like bloggers and video podcasters. Users could deliver any content hosted on their web sites through Red Swoosh’s P2P technology. It was free and dead-simple: All you had to do was add a string to your links, and content would automatically be delivered via P2P, provided your users would install the Red Swoosh client.

Red Swoosh in return got a chance to grow its client install base as well as a chance to place ads on download splash pages. The service was launched in the summer of 2006, and while it’s still up and running, is almost impossible to find. Red Swoosh’s EDN home page now redirects to an Akamai.com page that makes no mention of the service. Red Swoosh’s forum as well as its developer site are also down.

And finally, there was Red Swoosh’s brief foray into the area of one-click hosting. The company quietly launched an anonymous, P2P-powered file hosting service at Upload.redswoosh.net some time last year that promised “unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads, no waiting, no ads, no spyware ” and even came with streaming video support.

One-click hosting is a highly popular, but also very controversial market. Market leader Rapidshare.com is listed as the 12th most popular web site by Alexa.com, and by its own account offers a total of 4.5 petabyte of storage to its millions of users, but has also been also the target of entertainment industry lawsuits — a risk that Akamai apparently wasn’t willing to take.

NewTeeVee discovered the Red Swoosh hosting service earlier this week and asked Akamai for a statement, only to watch the site get taken down just minutes later. Red Swoosh founder Travis Kalanick explained to us that the service was “an experimental site that the Red Swoosh team created prior to the acquisition,” and that the company decided to shut it down “to avoid any confusion on the matter.”

All of this obviously doesn’t mean that Akamai is ignoring P2P. For all we know, the company could be offering a P2P-powered CDN solution any day now. A company spokesperson told us he couldn’t get into specifics at this time, but that Akamai regards “client-side distribution as a natural evolution of our strategy and edge architecture.” He continued: “Our focus is always on enabling our customers to do more.”

The problem is that P2P isn’t just about corporate customers, but about end users. The key to gain traction in the P2P CDN market is to have a huge client install base, and for that you need consumer-related offerings, especially since it’s getting harder and harder to get consumers to install a plug-in just to access a certain site in the age of Flash-based platforms like YouTube and Hulu.

BitTorrent Inc. knows this and plans to leverage the huge and still growing popularity of uTorrent to power its BitTorrent DNA CDN. Pando became the most popular personal file-sharing service before it started to enter the CDN world. Akamai, on the other hand, has completely ignored the consumer side of P2P ever since it acquired Red Swoosh. As a result, they might just have missed the boat on P2P content delivery.

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Nokia N95 firmware improves GPS acquisition time

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:52:42 +0000

Although the overall reviews I’ve read of the Nokia N-series devices are fairly positive, one of the recurring themes I’ve seen is slow GPS system acquisition. GPS is one of those services I consider ‘on-demand’, meaning, when you need it, you pretty much need it quickly and don’t want to wait several minutes just to get started.

Symbian-Guru makes note of a new firmware upgrade for the Nokia N95 that addresses this issue with Assisted-GPS or A-GPS. By looking up cell tower IDs on an assisted server and using your cell location, the phone begins to ‘learn’ where you are much quicker. Case in point: without A-GPS, it took 74 seconds to get a GPS lock. With the A-GPS enabled, it only took 57 seconds. Granted, nearly a minute is still a bit too long in my opinion, but the A-GPS approach is definitely a step in the right direction.

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Verizon KOs Qwest’s MCI plans, for now

Om Malik — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 16:30:00 +0000

Verizon’s played its ace in the battle for MCI, when it decided to buy Carlos Slim’s 13.7% stake in MCI for $1.1 billion in cash. That works out to about $25.72 a share, and will pay Slim’s companies a bonus in one year should Verizon’s share price exceed $35.25. What I find amazing is the Slim decided to settle for that amount – given that he had publicly said he wanted more for MCI, much more. Now what this tells me – Verizon is ready to boost its price to $25.72, versus $23.10 a share it currently is offering. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it seems that a substantial number of MCI shareholders, perhaps more than 50% were in favor of Qwest deal, and proxy would have shown that. By taking out Slim out of the equation, well now they can start chipping away at Qwest base. As someone, I respect a lot, points out this whole sage is about “shareholder opportunitism vs. MCI Board neglect. I want to see the hedgies crying in the WSJ monday about how Slim sold them up the river.”

“Verizon pulled a fast one, but did it cleanly. This was a smart move, and one aimed at getting other major MCI shareholders to get on board with Verizon,” says Ben Silverman, telecom analyst for independent investment newsletter FindProfit.com. “Slim could be the lead domino when it comes to other large MCI shareholders. Though Qwest says other major MCI shareholders support their takeover proposal, if major MCI shareholders feel like they can negotiate directly with Verizon now and receive some additional upside down the road, we may see sentiment turn against Qwest.

What VZ & Q had to say:

“While this was an opportunity for us to purchase a block of shares under unique circumstances and is an important step forward in our acquisition of MCI, we will continue to assess the situation as we move toward a vote by the MCI shareholders,” Seidenberg said in a statement.

“By entering into its deal with Mr. Slim, Verizon has both created two classes of shareholders and called into question the MCI board’s previous determination that Verizon’s lower offer to the other MCI shareholders was superior and fair,” Qwest said in a statement Saturday. “We believe Qwest has a superior proposal for all shareholders.”

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