Flowgram | Blog

New Feature: Share Your Powerpoint Presentations Online Using Flowgram

We have had a number of requests from from our private beta Flowgrammers asking for Powerpoint importing. We’re happy to announce that it’s now available thanks to the efforts of David and Greg.

Want to check it out? Visit the Flowgram Maker and then select “Powerpoint” from the tabs on the left hand side of the page. Then you upload your Powerpoint doc and we’ll turn each slide of the Powerpoint doc into a Flowpage. You can then add your narration and notes to your Flowgram as you normally would.

It’s a powerful and easy way to share your presentations with people that can’t be there in the room with you. Check it out and as always, let us know what you think.

Outage

We have been affected by today’s S3 outage. Since we store the metadata related to your Flowgrams there you can’t play or record until this outage gets resolved.

Things appear to be slowly coming back to life there….

Sorry for the inconvenience!

UPDATE:  S3 is back up after SEVEN hours

Usability Participants Wanted (San Francisco)

We’re conducting usability testing on the next version of the Flowgram Maker on Thursday and Friday of this week (July 10th & 11th) from 9am to 5pm each day. Please contact us if you’re interested in participating and can come to our office in San Francisco. Just mention “Usability” in the subject line.

The sessions will be about 90 minutes and you’ll be paid $75 for your time. It’s a fun and painless way to give us feedback, meet the team and see some of our upcoming features before anyone else.

Contact us to participate.

Flowgram Forums- A Great Place To Get Help

We just launched the Flowgram Forums so that you can get help, make suggestions and talk about all things Flowgram. We seeded it with a few topics but we’re hoping that you can help us get it going.

We’ll do a better job of integrating login and the like in the coming days, but it’s usable in its current state.

Check it out.

TechCrunch Talks About Flowgram

TechCrunch, the web’s leading technology blog, has a great article about Flowgram today entitled, “Flowgram Reinvents The Screencast”. It’s a great summary of Flowgram and I really like how they contrast us to existing technologies like screencasts. You can read the article here…

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/03/flowgram-reinvents-the-screencast-1000-beta-invites/

Abhay talking about Flowgram with Loic Lemeur

Fun Flowgrams

As we roll out the service, we are seeing all kinds of terrific flowgrams. Joi Ito has been posting them on his blog as have several others. He did a great job of explaining how to use Seesmic video comments on movable type blogs. And here is a terrific account of his recent experience at the Tokyo Restaurant, Aronia De Takazawa.

And on a totally different note, here’s a journey through Fergie’s career! Great use of video.

Post Slashdot

On Wednesday morning around 8AM Tony noticed that our site was down. We all rallied to see what was going on and realized that we had hundreds of concurrent connections all trying to access the same flowgram. After 2 somewhat harrowing hours, David and Mike stabilized the site and things held up wonderfully after that. This was a wonderful experience for the team! We ended up handling about 500K flow page views! We now know that we can scale!!

We also got an incredible amount of feedback, which was largely negative while we were scrambling to stabilize and largely positive thereafter. Many, many people signed up for beta codes, more than we can handle right now.

Here’s the flowgram that was slashdotted:

Working on latency issues (we’ve been Slash Dotted)

There was a Flowgram posted today on Slash Dot that is driving an incredible amount of traffic our way. You might experience some responsiveness issues as a result. The team is working to fix this issue as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience.

A Boatload of Improvements- New Player

Today’s release includes a number of behind the scenes improvements including a brand new player. It’s optimized for your viewing enjoyment and addresses a few bugs which you’ve reported. 

We also have a new rev of our home page complete with a demo movie that we’ll hope you’ll check out. Thanks for your patience today and keep the feedback coming. Thanks.