Why Does Adobe’s ‘New’ XFL Format Matter and Why is Flypaper First to Support It?

October 8, 2009 – 1:57 pm

Don Pierson, Founder & Chief Content Officer

Don Pierson, Founder & Chief Content Officer

I just got back from a very successful show at Adobe MAX. Plenty of cool stuff going on but two things really stood out to me. One, of course, was Adobe’s announcement that the forthcoming Flash Pro CS5 will enable Flash Apps (and therefore Flash content) to be delivered to the iPhone. (I’ll blog about that in a different post later.) The second was the demonstration of the ‘new’ XFL format in Flash. I call it new because while it’s been announced for awhile, and some Adobe products like InDesign and After Effects have output XFL, Flash CS5 will mark the first time that Flash has been able to both ingest and output XFL.

Why does this matter? There are a number of benefits, but the key one from my POV is that it removes a critical barrier to collaborative content creation. That barrier is the proprietary FLA format Flash currently uses. It’s a black box. Only Flash can read and write it. But XFL will change that completely. This week at Adobe MAX we demonstrated using Flypaper to create a Flash XFL file which could be opened in Flash. It was a simple example, and we didn’t demonstrate the other half of the round trip – editing the Flash project, outputting the XFL, and reopening it in Flypaper – because that piece is still to be developed.

But what all this means is this: not only will people be able to use Flypaper to create true Flash content – just as they can now – but they’ll be able to pull that content into Flash to add the stuff that ONLY Flash can do. Stuff that hasn’t been packaged into Flypaper components. And then take it BACK into Flypaper to do the stuff that Flypaper excels in.

Take for example a designer and developer working together. We’ll assume a designer who doesn’t have much Flash experience. In the past the designer’s contribution would be pretty much limited to layout and design, handing off to the developer to do all the animation, interactivity and so on in Flash. But Flypaper excels in the hands of the designer, because it enables designers to do so much more than just design and layout. Its page orientation and project map let the designer do the initial construction of the project, including sophisticated navigation. Simple-to-moderate animation is easy. And Flypaper components (created by Flash ActionScript 3 developers using the Flypaper SDK, by the way) give the designer the ‘steering wheel’ to cool Flash widgets created by Flash programmers. Drop on the page, adjust a few settings and go!

Then, to add that sizzle and ultimate power that only Flash provides, the designer outputs the project to Flash via XML. The developer’s now free to work in the Flash IDE without limitation. And because all the mundane work has been taken care of in Flypaper (‘oh no, not yet ANOTHER menu!’ ‘how many times are they going to change this text!’) they’re free to focus on the truly creative work that brought them to Flash in the first place. But best of all, since Flash is no longer a one-way street, the project can go BACK again to the designer for final polishing. And so on until it’s finished, with each person focusing on their strengths and areas of expertise without the FLA format providing a roadblock.

It’s really cool stuff and it shows how Adobe is working hard to remove artificial boundaries to the creative process. That’s been what Flypaper has been about all along. That’s why when Adobe asked if we’d be interested in being the first third-party application to support it we jumped at the chance. It should be really fun to see what happens as everyone discovers the advantages of working together this way.

By DonPierson | Posted in industry news, partner news, product news | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Flypaper’s next release is out, and we’re hitting the road…

April 21, 2009 – 5:24 pm

We’ve developed a lot of new features and upgrades over the last couple months and are ready to announce the next version of our Flash Content Management Platform. Flypaper 2.5 will officially release on April 30th, but we’re announcing it a little early. This week, Flypaper is taking this show on the road at ad:tech San Francisco. We thought it was a good excuse to make our announcement a few days early. If you’re attending this show, please stop by our booth #2265. If you’re nowhere near San Francisco, please check out one of our quick, educational, and highly entertaining weekly demos to learn more.

Plus, kudos to our founder and chief content officer Don Pierson for putting on a great presentation at the IMPACT 2009 eLearning conference last week in St. Petersburg, FL. Don mixed, mingled and showed off the Flypaper goods to some of the leading enterprise learning companies and executives in the country. We’re expecting a video of him in action any day, which we’ll share right here.

By PatSullivan | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Using Flash in the Cloud – Flypaper Releases Web Editor Feature

April 2, 2009 – 8:53 am

Pat Sullivan, CEO

Pat Sullivan, CEO

When we developed the Flypaper 2.0 version, and essentially launched the first complete Flash Content Management Platform, we knew we needed to add more elements for online usage. A few weeks ago we announced a partnership with online collaboration tool Cozimo. Today, I’m excited to announce the release of the Flypaper Web Editor. Venture Beat wrote a review of the new Web Editor today, you can check it out here.

The new Web Editor has some cool features that allow for easy online editing of Flash projects.

· Store projects in our hosted cloud environment and then have the ability to change text, video, audio, and images
· Update email addresses and other form data submissions
· Creators can lock elements that they don’t want to be edited online
· Email, embed or send a link to your edited project

This is an add-on feature for $195. Please check it out and let us know what you think.

By PatSullivan | Posted in product news | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Flypaper Partners with Cozimo

March 16, 2009 – 8:26 pm

Pat Sullivan, CEO

Pat Sullivan, CEO

I’m very excited to announce our partnership with Cozimo to offer Flypaper users online, real time collaboration on their Flash projects. We met Cozimo last year when both of our companies launched a DEMO. Now, both well off the ground and making waves in our industries, we’ve joined forces to give creative agencies, Flash developers, and their clients, the power to collaborate online, no matter where they are.

You can check out our press announcement here. Cozimo CEO Stuart Feldman also wrote a great blog about our partnership that you can check out here.

By PatSullivan | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

You’re Throwing Money Away If…

March 3, 2009 – 9:34 pm

Don Pierson says, "stop wasting money"

Don Pierson says, "stop wasting money"

Who would argue that every bit of your content development budget isn’t especially precious these days? You can’t afford to waste a single nickel. So how do you know if you’re getting maximum return? How do you know you’re not wasting at least part of your investment? Well, you’re throwing money away if:

1.   Your investment doesn’t produce maximum results. OK, it may seem like I’m stating the blatantly obvious. We’ve all bowed to the ROI gods. Clearly any money spent that doesn’t provide a net positive return is a waste. But that’s not what I’m really talking about. I’m talking about maximum results. You need to prove that what you got for the money you spent is more than just “good enough.” It needs to be the best you could have gotten.

2.    You take too long. There’s a hidden cost if you take even an extra day in getting your content in the hands of people who need it. That extra day in equipping the sales force with the best possible interactive sales collateral or sales training means potential lost sales. The extra day that your production team wasn’t up-to-date with the newest information or techniques means increased expenses. The extra day that people didn’t receive compliance certification means added legal exposure. Literally, every day counts.

3.    You waste cycles. This is another huge hidden cost. I’m talking about the unnecessary cycles that stakeholders, subject matter experts, and content development resources take iterating through the development cycle until a satisfactory result is achieved. These days no-one has time to review, edit and change things two, three, four or more times, when once could have been enough. And yet too often we accept this because ‘it’s the way things have always been.

4.    You “settle.” When budgets are so tight it’s seductive to accept content that’s barely OK at best, because we’ve got a ready answer if someone questions it: “I know it’s not that great, but we didn’t have the resources!” But in reality, we’ve wasted money. We didn’t get the maximum value for the precious money we spent.

5.    You’re not building intellectual capital. This is a biggie. When we think of the return-on-investment we get on the content we produce, we think only about the value of the finished product. We willingly accept that as much as 100% of the budget spent on a project has no enduring value. We sometimes say that we’ll be able to re-purpose some of the finished product for use in other products, but we know that that’s very rarely true. The true re-use factor is extremely low. But what if as little as 20% of the content you create is truly reusable? Let’s take an example, keeping the math simple. Let’s assume that we anticipate spending $50,000 on a project and getting $100,000 in returned value, through either increased sales or reduced costs. That’s a 100% ROI. (The $50k net gain, divided by the $50k cost.) Very nice, indeed! But if 20% of the budget also results in truly re-usable assets, our actual project cost is down to $40,000, and our ROI is increased to 150%. That’s a huge return!

When you use Flypaper as your content development platform you don’t have to live with lengthy development times and wasted cycles. Flypaper gets you to the end result much faster, and many of the wasteful steps that used to be necessary can be eliminated altogether. For example, why create storyboards, when you can create a working prototype in less time? And rather than iterating through endless review cycles edging closer to an acceptable result, you can use Flypaper’s robust collaboration features to gather input and approval on every element of your project, up to and including the project itself. You don’t have to settle for inferior content any more either, because Flypaper content can equal custom Flash content in quality, and yet takes no more time to create than using low-end development tools.

But the really big win? Three clicks are all it takes to save any page as a completely-reusable template. Then upload it to your enterprise repository and it’s available instantly to anyone. Flypaper includes hundreds of re-usable templates right out of the box, so you never have to start from scratch. These can be your starting point for creating your own new templates. Soon you’re building an ever-increasing treasure trove of your own proprietary templates. Which means each project becomes less and less costly to develop, and can be delivered quicker and quicker. Because you’re no longer throwing money away. You’re investing in your company’s future.

By DonPierson | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

The Seven Sins of Content Creation

February 23, 2009 – 7:53 pm

In my nearly two decades (whoa, THAT’S scary!) of leading content development groups and companies,

Don Pierson, Founder & Chief Content Officer

Don Pierson, Founder & Chief Content Officer

I’ve lived both sides of the relationship and felt the frustrations of trying to create truly impactful content within the constraints imposed by budgets and time. It’s certainly never easy, and over time we’ve boiled down the pitfalls to what we like to call the seven sins of content creation.

It really comes down to a matter of quality… and being able to deliver that quality within the client’s parameters. If as content creators we can’t solve the challenge of creating meaningful digital content that meets today’s standards, then we’re essentially wasting time and money – that’s clear to everyone involved. Let’s take a look at what can go wrong.

1) Poor quality. The content you create must be high-quality and contextually relevant. Remember, today’s visual standard is broadcast television and film. Effective solutions must provide high-quality and visual impact.

2) Unavailable. Just like broadcast media, there can never be a down time. Dead air (or a dead screen as it were) is like throwing money out the window for your customer. If they don’t have engaging, interactive content on their screen, they are losing eyeballs and money.

3) Choppy/broken. Broken content is just as bad as dead air. If your content does not display correctly then no one is going to pay attention. Reliable play out is a must. Flypaper relies on Flash as a proven delivery medium.

4) Content Fatigue. What is content fatigue exactly? Content fatigue is what sets in quickly if the content is boring and repetitive. You need to constantly refresh the content your viewers see, and make it interactive whenever possible. Or vary your approach to creating your content. That way viewers don’t feel like they’re watching the same thing over and over and over and….

5) Too expensive or over budget. Quite frankly, content creation just can’t be an expensive proposition anymore. Not in this era of massive budget cuts. Often customers only have a limited budget for content production. You need a solution that fits within your customer’s budget. In the same regard, not delivering the project on budget erodes customer confidence (as well as their pocket book) and jeopardizes winning future projects with that client. Meeting this need has always been in conflict with number 1, providing quality content. Inexpensive always meant settling for inferior quality. With Flypaper you don’t have to settle any more.

6) Missing deadlines. Most digital content projects are tied to a specific event or campaign. But even when they aren’t, late delivers affect yours and your company’s reputation. In today’s economic climate you need to deliver projects on time and on budget, because if you don’t, that gives your competition the opening to steal your business. Here’s another need that’s always been in conflict with providing quality content. “Fast” also meant settling for inferior quality. With Flypaper that’s no longer true.

7) No measurable ROI. Content done for visual aesthetics without a business purpose is good for the fine art world, but does not work in business. If the results cannot be measured to provide a justifiable return on investment, then you are setting yourself up to fail your clients. Analytics and measurement are the keys to business communications.

While some of these tips are more important during tough economic times, they should always apply to how you do business, even during the best of times. Additionally, every creative agency and Flash developer should be focused on creating content that meets today’s standards – always engaging, always interactive, always impactful.

By DonPierson | Posted in e-Learning & training | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Flypaper and DNA

February 6, 2009 – 9:17 am
By Pat Sullivan, CEO of Flypaper Studio

 

I have been involved in several startups in my career. It is always fascinating to see how a product and a company both grow from the original germ of an idea. Early in the history of ACT!, a mentor of mine asked an interesting question. “Is ACT! a product, or is it a company?” He was asking about ACT!’s DNA. Our DNA controls much of what we grow into as humans. The same is true with products and companies.patsullivan1

I heard a Salesforce.com exec (John Dillon) during the early days of SF.com give a similar answer. He was asked why SF.com was rapidly overtaking the first truly SaaS CRM application. An application called Upshot that had a two year head start on SF.com. His quick and astute answer was simply, “better DNA.” How true.

The DNA of a startup includes all sorts of things. What is the problem the product is trying to solve? How it is designed and coded? How is the product envisioned by the founders? How fanatical are the creators about the details of the product? What marketplace itwill compete in? How much money does the startup have? How will the company monetize? What about the founders’ talents, personalities and experience? How will it be sold and distributed? What is the influence of outside investors and advisors, if they exist? What is the price point? What is the economy doing at the time? Just like DNA, these factors and many others are extremely complex. What eventually emerges is a product of the interplay of the many elements that make up that startups’ DNA. The major challenge for the entrepreneur is to recognize just what this product is!! And the earlier the better! At ACT!, we struggled many times with this.

We had already created the Contact Management category in the first few years of the release of the first version of ACT! We gained a 90 percent market share at one point. But as time went on new competitors were introducing Sales Automation products and then CRM products. We were tempted to try to make ACT! fit into those categories as well. But I always found myself saying, “if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, IT’S a DUCK.” We could not change the DNA of what ACT! truly was. It was and still is today, a contact manager. That was its DNA.

With Flypaper the same is very true. It has been four long years in the making. And during its history many influences affected its DNA. But at its core its DNA was really very clear. If only we could see it. As I said, that is the entrepreneurs’ biggest challenge.

At first we tried to make it fit into the cool consumer market where you give a version of the software away to millions and hope that enough people will buy the “pro” version. Well that did not work. And it did not work because it was simply not the products’ DNA. Then we tried to alter the marketing by giving a 30-day free trial to consumers, and that did not work. Again, not in the DNA.

So what is Flypapers DNA? About five months ago, it became crystal clear to me and the other execs here. The problem Flypaper was designed and built to solve has nothing to do with consumers wanting to do cool stuff with Flash for their Myspace or Facebook page. Flypaper was built to solve the problems of companies building mid to large scale Flash projects for eLearning and Marketing.

Don Pierson, the founder of Flypaper has 20 years experience of building large scale Flash projects for large and midsize companies. He saw the problem. Flash was very cool but could only be used by talented and expensive programmers. It could not be edited or maintained by the customer. It took enormous amounts of time and money to build these projects. It involved much collaboration and many approval cycles. Arguments would arise about who approved what and when. This created many billing and payment issues. While building a project in Flash was the best way to do it in terms of a quality result, it was truly a nightmare getting it done. He reasoned, “There has to be a better way!”

That was the beginning of the DNA that ultimately produced Flypaper. Trying to make it something else, as it was being birthed, was a big mistake. But mistakes are common in startups. The good news is that we recognized it soon enough to allow it to become what it today is. Flypaper – The Leading Flash Content Management Platform.

If you look at our brand new, built from the ground up website at www.flypaper.com you will finally see what Flypaper really is. It ain’t for consumers playing around with Adobe’s Flash. It is only for serious producers and consumers of Flash projects. It solves the problems that Don saw years ago. You can now really build Flash projects in a third to half the time. You can collaborate online with all the people involved in the project in really productive ways. You can actually solve virtually all the problems with approvals and billing that inevitably arise. And, on yeah, you can also save a ton of money. Many of the companies we are working with estimate Flypaper will allow them to save millions of dollars a year.

And with Flypaper you get a lot more than you got with the Flash projects you built the old way. Each project you build inherently is tracked in a Dashboard. You know what the viewer has looked at. How long they spent on what pages. If they emailed it to anyone else, you know it and you know what those people did with it. You can edit and maintain your own projects without being dependent on Flash programmers who don’t really like to do the mundane maintenance anyway. Marketing can produce Flash projects that salespeople can easily personalize specifically to the prospect they are trying to sell. And marketing gets to control what elements sales can personalize. Salespeople use the Dashboard to see exactly what a prospect is doing with the marketing materials they sent. The stories (projects) also provide a way for the prospect (or learners in an eLearning application) to communicate with the sales person either by email or even live chat (coming soon).

Flypaper unlocks the power of Flash for everyone in the corporation. It releases Flash from the domain of experts and niches, and unleashes its power for the whole company to sell more and train more effectively. Content creators both inside and outside the company can now work together in ways they could not do before. To our knowledge, there is nothing like Flypaper. I could not be more excited about the potential of Flypaper. I like its DNA!!

By AlySaxe | Posted in Uncategorized, product news | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Change in the air – and on the Web

February 3, 2009 – 10:19 am

We’ve been teasing users with the upcoming changes at Flypaper, including the launch of our 2.0 version, which is just weeks away. As part of the overhaul of the product, we’ve done a complete overhaul of the Web site too. Please check it out and as always, let us know what you think.

We think the new website will really help users learn how Flypaper benefits them in their specific roles within their companies, including eLearning, Marketing and Sales. In addition, everything about the site (and the product – but more to come on that next week) is more focused on meeting the specific needs of users who are increasingly under pressure to do more with less. Check it out and enjoy!

- Pat

By flypaper | Posted in corporate news | Tagged , | Comments (0)

How “Rapid eLearning” came to the forefront in the last recession and why it’s going to be even more important in 2009

January 29, 2009 – 1:19 pm

During the recession that followed the burst of the dot com bubble, the corporate training world saw an overwhelming cut to their budgets (along with most other departments).  We all know the story — organizations that had been spending on expensive custom web-based training projects began looking for ways to meet their training objectives at a greatly reduced cost. Really, it’s the same story with every recession, and this the one we’re in the midst of one is shaping up to be no different. Training, as well as marketing, are two departments that get slashed immediately when really, it’s these two functions that companies should consistently invest in. But I digress.

Don PiersonBecause of this economic bust in 2001, a new class of tools arose that saved companies money by enabling non-specialists to create serviceable but very bare bones eLearning courses. Often the idea was to enable the subject matter expert to create eLearning without needing assistance from instructional designers, writers, graphic artists and other professionals.

The result of course, were online training courses that were of low quality – frequently little more than PowerPoint-type static pages delivered over the Web — but learners accepted them because most had little to compare them with, expectations were low, and they kept training departments on budget. As the economy grew back, so did the training budgets, and therefore the emphasis has returned to the quality of eLearning. The problem now is that companies and third party eLearning developers have gotten used to the bevy of new, higher-end eLearning. How are companies to adjust back to static training when we’ve gotten used to a certain standard of eLearning.

The current recession promises to be much deeper, with training budgets being cut even more severely. Some analysts are estimating up to 25 percent. But with the benefits of eLearning now established – especially with regard to cost-of-delivery eLearning will often be the preferred method for any training that can’t simply be postponed. So long, of course, as it can be produced economically and quickly.

So the challenge in this recession will be how to deliver high-quality, effective eLearning, while dramatically reducing costs and resources. Aside from Flypaper, what other solutions will emerge that promise to deliver the same quality we’ve grown accustomed to, while helping companies stay within dramatically reduced training budgets?

- Don

By flypaper | Posted in e-Learning & training | Comments (1)

Flypaper is buzzing into the enterprise – what’s to come in 2009

January 29, 2009 – 1:17 pm

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.

Flypaper v2.0

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

By flypaper | Posted in corporate news | Comments (0)

Flypaper Blog

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