What you see above is not a video or a slide show, it is a Flowgram. If you click on it, you will be taken to a full-screen player with what appears to be a screencast with a voiceover. Except that you can control the pages by scrolling up and down, watching any videos that might be on the page, or clicking on the live links (which takes you out of the Flowgram to that Website, but if you hit the back button it picks up where it left off). You can also add comments and share the Flowgram via a widget like the one above, which is muted and requires you to click through for the full experience.
If you want to make your own, we have invites for the first 1,000 readers who register here with the code “TECHCRUNCH”.
It’s an interactive screencast, a way to synthesize the Web by pulling different pieces together The voiceover acts as the glue. It can be used for slide shows, travel guides, tutorials, sales pitches, or just to explain something to a friend.
The best way to understand a Flowgram is simply to watch a few. Here is founder Abhay Parekh explaining what a Flowgram is (above) and another one he made specifically for TechCrunch (below). Flowgram’s are also great for narrated photos slide shows. Investor Joi Ito did one about Google Zeitgesit Europe and another one about an amazing restaurant in Tokyo (also below).
Parekh was previously the co-founder and CEO of FastForward Networks, which sold to Inktomi for a cool $1.3 billion in 2000. (Those were different days). He then did a stint as a VC at Accel. He founded Flowgram in June, 2007 with $10,000 and raised $1.3 million in September from a high-profile group of angel investors, including Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Bud Colligan, Kevin Lynch, Joi Ito and Rajeev Motwani.
To make it easier to create a Flowgram, Parekh’s team is building a set of importing tools for Flickr, Facebook, RSS feeds, and Powerpoint slides. And as more people create Flowgrams, the service will be able to recommend similar ones. Parekh plans to make money with either ads or a premium subscription version for sales people and marketers.
i will signup using TECHCRUNCH do they show ads in beta version too.
I want to register using the code “TECHCRUNCH”. Do they display ads in beta release too?
Hey, wont you post about the announce of the release dates of Opensocial for Brazilian Orkut Users? Brazil has 53% of the users of Orkut. I think opensocial will change a lot the way brazilians deal with internet!
See the links:
http://widgy.net/widgy/2008/07.....-de-julho/
http://orkutdeveloper.blogspot.....-push.html
That is *very* cool.
Definitely signing up for that.
Cheers
Nick
That is nice. However, instead of only showing friends how to do something e. g. on salesforce.com via a series of screenshots or a screencast I found more effectively to send an “Internet macro” that actually the task directly in their Firefox browser.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863
Feels kinda Geeky. Too much trouble for too little gain. Flowgram should FLOW with my browsing / whatever i’m doing right now experience. In other words, the moment I have to sign into a website to add stuff, it becomes a lil bita pain. It’s got potential though..Godspeed!
Wow, its kind of complicated to create such a flowgramm. At least, I did not manage right now. Will stick with sending embedded iMacros or use my Snagit/Camtasia tools
Flowgrams as screencasts ? Am not sure about it.
Cool idea, i can see the fun side of this getting a lot more popular than for business use.
Flowgrams are more like simple powerpoint slides from what I can tell. To me, a screencast would be a live recording of the author’s screen, seeing his mouse move, type, etc.
http://adminblog.sitespaces.ne.....&12127
I have a patent on a fake camera device that captures frames from your PC desktop and streams them to the camera device to flash, so you can choose a camera in Flash setup on UStream or Seesmic, reduce your window and do screencasting.
The driver isn’t fully developed yet, but I do have the project going with the new DDK from my MSDN pro, and I should have it done in the coming months.
Imagine a youtube full of live screencasts. At any rate, if you are interested in developing this please contact me. I could probably get it done a lot faster if I didn’t have to work to generate immediate revenue.
I of course meant to say patent pending. I am still working on the drawings and other parts of the $425 e-file.
The service described in the article looks ok.
Reinvent the screencast, really does.
Looks really good. I thought the Techcrunch Flowgram that the creator sent to you was a great idea as well. I signed up for the beta (thanks) and am looking forward to using this. Nice work Abhay. Seeing innovative creations this early on the morning made my day.
Didn’t seem that cool to me until I got to the wikipedia page. Then I was able to scroll freely in the page, and it was pretty cool. Then it autoscrolled to a specific location in sync with the narration. That was very cool.
Just hangs on generating thumbnails for webpages.
This looks like a great solution for creating tutorials and demos for web applications, especially that it’s free (for now at least). But the most important part is that a user could go and do what he wants right from within the flowgram, as the links are active all the time and (if the service is done right) remember that he is logged in.
Sweet Sweet, I just signed up with flowgram, now I can’t wait to add a flowgram to my website.
This could quite possibly be my startup of the year here. Absolutely awesome - completely reinvented the wheel imo…superb.
Hi, I’m a member of the Flowgram team. Thanks for the comments and sign ups.
Some of you who are trying to make Flowgrams may be experiencing some delays with adding pages right now (there’s a reason why we’re still in private beta ;-)). We’re working on the issue and it should be back to normal shortly.
Please email me at techcrunchfeedback@flowgram.com if you have any problems, suggestions or feedback. Thanks.
Tony Lopez
Flowgram
I’m a little surprised at all the naysayers here…I think this is a very useful and original idea. I wish we saw more stuff like this profiled on TC.
The explanation was way too slow, I couldn’t even stand it. Tried to scroll forward and it just started over…
“Registration code has already been used.”
I’ll stick to Camtasia
Is all the invites already gone?
I get the error message “Registration code has already been used” when I try to sign up…
I dont get whats so outstanding about it. Have i missed something?
I can imagine using Flowgram in a Yelp kind of way, to share my favorite restaurants, museums, galleries, bars, services, etc. with friends or to share suggestions for an upcoming vacation or even ideas for a wedding/event.
Seems really like a fun and easy to use product. Awesome!
cool but if you want to add video narration to PPT and images, check out the vidipresenter at http://www.viditalk.com
This might be cool for someone who has a lot of time of their hands to create a flowgram, personally I found myself hard pressed for time to even share a link, let alone create a flowgram, it’s more work than writing a blog post.
cool so far, but still very buggy. major issue with “private” flowgrams. you can send them directly to people, so they are not listed, but then those people can re-share or embed them. defeats the purpose of private I think.
Very impressive.
There hasn’t been many innovations in interface design. This goes beyond regular screencasting.
It will be cool if they support YouTube style embeds.
Hello, I’m another member of the Flowgram Team.
We’ve reached our maximum of 1000 invites, but please do continue to register.
http://beta.flowgram.com/register/
We will be inviting more guests soon and you will be first in line.
In looking at the comments so far, one of the big features within Flowgram is the ability to bring LIVE web pages into a timeline. These are not just screen captures or screenshots. The Flowgram can be paused and the page can be browsed and interacted with. The author has the ability to control the playback of highlighting and scrolling to areas of the page as well.
The experience can also be full-screen, which most screen captured video is not (due to bandwidth).
Lastly, it should be noted how easy Flowgram is to use. Just add some URLS, highlight the important parts while talking about the pages, and you are done. Click a button and it’s shared. (No uploading and we host your Flowgrams for free).
Thanks for all your interest!
Not interesting for me.
Why did Abhay Parekh have to raise the $1.3 million to fund Flowgram when he was co-founder and CEO of a company that sold for “$1.3 billion in 2000″?? doesn’t make sense? why just not fund it yourself? Surely he had shares in “FastForward Networks” when it sold?
I have 10 invites ,, just received my beta invite
thanks Abhay
DM
@fotographic