When we last wrote about FlipTrack in March 2007, it had created a niche for itself by making slideshows that were synced to background music. Since then, the company has reinvented itself: It is now Moblyng, a site dedicated to bringing the embedded flash widgets on social networks to mobile devices. Today, the company has launched a beta of its product, and has announced the closure of a $5.7 million funding round.
Moblyng’s main function is to take the Flash slideshow widgets seen on MySpace and other social networks, and convert them into a format that is viewable on most mobile phones. The system scrapes profiles for autoplaying flash movies and strips away layers in the .swf (Flash) file to expose the individual photos. These photos are formatted for display on any compatible mobile device, or, for phones that support video, they can be reassembled into mobile-friendly movies, along with the music and effects that were in the original flash widget. The newly-formatted files can be sent between users using SMS or through Moblyng’s built-in send function.
The new technology seems to work well, and at this point it seems like it has a large number of potential users – many phones don’t support Flash yet. That said, the phones that are capable of video playback are also more likely to feature Flash support in the near future (like the iPhone, for example), so Moblyng could see this userbase shrink quickly.
Moblyng’s $5.7 million funding round was led by Mohr Davidow Ventures and Deep Fork Capital. The company launched as FlipTrack in 2006, and is based in Menlo Park.
“the company has reinvented itself: It is now Moblyng, a site dedicated to bringing the embedded flash widgets on social networks to mobile devices.”
It seems that there is a wrong link in this part of the article, the link refers to mobylng.com, but it should be moblyng.com.
There is typo in the site url, instead of “http://www.moblyng.com” it is typed as “http://www.mobylng.com”
I’m not sure how this company got funded — this (stripping out photos from flash slideshows) is a simple app that can easily be replicated. Also I’m not sure if targeting old phones is a blockbuster market. Plus Adobe could come out with a version of their software that does something similar.
how the fuck did they get so much funding????
without formal api’s to extract data from the source website, it’ll be almost impossible for them to keep up with the plethora of changes that will happen over time, as their regular expressions and screen scrapes become obsolete.
even if they do have 8m in funding, their solution is limited by the fact that there is are no standards that are being used, and because not all flash content is capable of being decompiled, especially since content being loaded from within the flash file may not be embedded, but may be streamed from other servers, which is usually the case.
essentially they are extracting the source xml path of the slideshow or youtube video or mp3 slideshow that is being dynamically generated by the server they are leeching from, and then rebuilding something on the fly.
there’s still one problem with this: the iphone only supports video and audio audio playback in independent full screen mode from inside safari, so even if they managed to scrape together a table of contents of hyperlinks of mp3s from some mp3 playlist or video playlist, they are still essentially doing what everyone has done to date, for free – point a simple hyperlink at an mp3 file.
can you imagine how many rules and parsing scenarios they’ll have to keep up with to integrate with the top 10 or 20 sites on the internet? too many.
i guess they’ll spend 8m on paying over glorified developers to do something any perl or php programmer can do with a simple http proxy like charles, and how do you make money, injecting video or image ads into other peoples content when you recompile it?
sounds like a bunch of pissed off users.
I’m confused. So what they’re actually trying to develope is a webcrawler for flash sites ?