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.

If you haven't found it yet, we have added a bunch of cool things you can do with text.  My personal favorite is "The Big Text Mask." To Flash people, it means you can mask any image with a line of text. What it means to regular people is you can "fill your text" with any picture.  It's easier to understand when you see it, than it is for me to describe it. But masking is the kind of effect you see all the time on TV and in Flash animations on the Web.  We have made Big Text Mask really easy to do in Beta II. 

We have also added scrolling text, text art, the ability to set text on fire and more text effects. Check out some examples in the short Story below:

In Beta II we completely reworked the User Interface (UI). We adopted Window's standard controls and changed the background gradients to match your Window's theme. We also worked hard to make it easier to control the content on your page, share your Story with the world, and access your account on flypaper.net.

For a lightening fast pass at the changes, start the short Story below:

It's been one of the most frequently requested features, and finally we have the ability to convert a PowerPoint file into a Flypaper Story. Someday over coffee, I can tell you about the wrong turns we took in trying to convert PowerPoint to a swf and then bring into Flypaper, but that's old news.

Now you can convert text, audio and video from PowerPoint straight to Flypaper. Everything else comes in as a graphic.  Play this fast demo to see how it's done and what it does and what it does not do...

Flypaper Beta II has an all new way to share any content you have created. We've made it much easier to put your Stories on the Flypaper Community, and quickly embed it on any other Web page. You can share from the Flypaper application with the Share button, or share any Story through the new FlyPlayer.

Check out this quick demo to see how it's done...