Well, this is a bummer. Flowgram, a promising startup that launched last July, is a goner.
The service let users create screencasts with live websites, and the early beta users really liked it:
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.
But this evening founder Abhay Parekh sent an email out to users letting them know that the service would be closed by the end of June (in fact it’s dead now):
Dear Flowgram user:
Today is a sad day for us. We have decided to terminate the Flowgram service as of the end of the month (June 30th, 2009). The service received excellent reviews and had an enthusiastic core user base. However, we were not able to demonstrate (especially in these economic times) that Flowgrams would ever be prevalent enough for us to adequately monetize the business, either though ads or subscriptions. This is obviously very disappointing, but building the Flowgram platform was a lot of fun, and it was wonderful to see how many of you used our tool to express yourselves in a deep and meaningful way.
Although you won’t be able to play your Flowgrams after the end of the month, you can export them to video by clicking “share” from the website or “more sharing options” from the Flowgram player and scrolling down to the export to video section. It is very important, if you wish to keep your content, that you export to video and download the video by the end of the month. Please let us know at support@flowgram.com if you have any difficulties doing this.
Again, I would like to thank you for your support, for your Flowgrams and for your good wishes.
Best Regards
Abhay Parekh (Founder) and the rest of the Flowgram Team
Flowgram enters the DeadPool after raising $1.3 million from prominent angel investors Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Bud Colligan, Kevin Lynch, Joi Ito and Rajeev Motwani. Just goes to show that even the smartest and richest people in Silicon Valley can still make a whopper of a bad investment decision.
I’m surprised those angels let this go out so fast
As the company was funded Jan08, it probably burnt out most its money by now and they failed to get another round. Good luck on the next one guys.
Very unfortunately, I did not get the email with the disgraceful piece of news…, but still more unfortunately…, we’ve been deprived of a program which is literally irreplaceable.
As an EFL teacher in Argentina I give ppt presentations, and at times need to record my voice in them… No way I can find another similar tool now
I’m trying out Slideshare, but the difference is big, since we need to use a recording program, upload the mp3, divide it in chunks for each slide and pray that it’s all ok before you have it all done…
Very bad news…
If anybody reading this happened to know about a better substitute I’d be so grateful to get the news!
I forgot to include I even lost the presentation I had uploaded on Flowgram, not knowing about its closure!
(any chances of getting it back, though too late now…?)
Why did this guy need to raise 1.3 MM given the amount of $$ he made?
Unbelievable. I have been waiting and waiting for the official launch of this bad boy after testing out the service….i honestly thought it had a hell of a future ahead of it. What a shame…
There have actually been a LOT more deadpool startups these days that don’t get reported on…
I suspect most of the quieter acquisition announcements that have been made lately (ex AOL purchasing Going.com) are actually fire-sale liquidations.
I have a number of former clients that are undergoing these quiet failures (at least one lost close to $9m in investor capital)
There are a lot of amazing startups that got funded during the boom but never thought about revenue and are silently choking to death now. Be interesting to see a list of these somewhere…
Guess lotsa entrepreneurs fall to the temptation of raising a too big amount of money and thus setting themselves with a burn rate their company can’t cover. A shame indeed.
You get that list share it with me please. We are actively seeking and acquiring failed IP. Failed doesn’t mean bad, just that for whatever reason they didn’t get the round they needed to stay alive.
Any of you out there who are in the position drop me an email and let’s talk. If you have technology that fits the direction we are headed we may have a deal for you.
But hurry, we are moving quickly and eventually we will be in full launch mode. When that happens we will be more focused on making that happen instead of acquiring.
Kurt
They should try and keep the service running in skeleton form, can’t be difficult to maintain if the basic service is already built. I don’t understand why these companies just shut everything down.
It´s a pity! Flowgramm was really innovative letting people be creative.
Nothing wrong with the idea. I always thought that companies would be happy to pay for what flowgram provided.
It is only a bad investment now that is has gone into deadpool. Like they say, hind-sight is 20:20!
I had a chance to interview here, and meet the team a year ago. They flew me out, and gave me my first taste of SOMA startup life. I loved it. (obviously since I moved here a few months later from Southern Illinois). Abhay was a great guy, and they had an awesome team. Its a shame to see them deadpooled, and id love to see it resurrected someday. Best of luck to everyone from this venture.
Hunch is going to join the deadpool too. You heard it here first.
Bitter much? Did Caterina ban your Flickr account or something?
Mike – Unfortunate indeed, but most unfortunate is the demise of Prof. Rajeev Motwani last Friday, the investor you mentioned.
http://timesofi...how/4627659.cms
I never heard of flowgram before, but it seems that the iMacros Firefox addon can used in a similar way (record website activity and share with others).
https://addons....efox/addon/3863
They should make it an elearning creator and sell it to the enterprise.
Why oh why is this targeted at mass consumption??
Can I acquire the code base to pursue corporate training??
Sometimes the inability to think beyond “Web 2.0″ astounds me.
The issue is what investors will invest in. B2B businesses don’t scale as much as consumer ones. Investors thererfore won’t give a B2B business the time of day.
There is a reason companies are deadpooling keyboard cat, because they cant make revenue. No matter the scale, look @ facebook. They have the digital equivalent of a bad coke habit with their photos system. Its a beast, and makes them no money. B2B actually makes money! Like real tangible dollars, b2c, unless carefully planned makes little or no money. Any investor who doesn’t give b2b the time of day is unfortunately, and to their demise, a jackass.
A lot of startups out there are walking dead.
Great idea, but investment should be in $100K range – not in $1M range.
Someone might buy it cheap and do something with it.