Toufee Launches Fast Flash Movie Making

Toufee is a new WYSIWYG online Flash movie builder that aims to make it easy for non technical users to quickly create impressive multimedia items for embedding in web pages. Some of the key features include drag and drop element placement, good control over presentation timing and a text-to-speech engine with six relatively human voices. I think there is a lot of potential here – there’s no shortage of people who would like to make Flash presentations without complicated or expensive desktop software.

If you read our review of the impressive multimedia tool Scrapblog, Toufee is more lightweight and oriented to short movies. If you read our review of the very heady Flash film creation tool TagLoops, Toufee is much more straightforward, usable and mature. Some sample presentations, which are quite interesting and are said to have taken only minutes to create, can be viewed here on the Toufee site.

The product is fully hosted, rich in point and click selected element and media options and produces very small files. Flickr and YouTube import are supported. It’s fun to use. The company aims to please everyone from MySpacers through sales professionals and eBay users.

The product is being developed full-time by New Delhi based Sanchit Bhatnagar and Navneet Rai. If Toufee can land on its feet in terms of performance and stability it could do very well in the space currently dominated by companies like Slide and RockYou. Toufee isn’t there yet, but it shows a lot of potential.

Tool responsiveness and interaction with the browser could use some work. Toufee could also be easier to learn. The service could probably use a name change as well. If the word Toufee means anything in particular I don’t know what it is. I can’t help but visualize a toupee made of tofu, but perhaps that’s just me.

Overall, I think Toufee is a company and product worth watching. Once it gets its feet on the ground I think it will fill an important need.