More Content Faster: Flypaper Adds "Stickiness"

Real flypaper The last generation remembers "flypaper" as a paper coated with an extremely sticky substance that traps flying insects when they land upon it.

Today, especially in this industry, a newer Flypaper will more likely be remembered for digital content with an extremely catchy substance (creativity) that holds readers when they land on a web page or watch digital signage.

CONTENT is the whole crux to the AV business, the foundation that holds up the sale of displays, the projection business, the digital signage industry… the mortar that holds together the bricks of our AV vertical markets (education, hospitality, church, stage, museum and more).

We all recognize Content is King and yet no matter how easy it is to say "content," it always proves difficult to achieve good content, the type that makes users want to stick with a web site, a TV show, a display…or even stay tuned to signage in a retail store.

Don Pierson, Founder and President of Flypaper Studio found that out as he started creating digital media to be used for online training in 1985.

The problem he faced was that good content needed highly skilled and highly paid executioners, as well as expensive software.

Rather than live with the problem, he decided to do something about it: and Flypaper was born.

Flypaper offers a drag-and-drop Flash content creation platform that empowers programmers and non-programmers alike to create, edit, share, track and reuse high-impact Flash and video content.

Flypaper proposalThe Flypaper platform allows anyone to edit and manipulate components without touching programming code. Through an SDK that converts Flash elements into Flypaper Components, Flash programmers can create components, which can be edited and reused.

Hence, the creation of the "Flybrary" (stands for "Flypaper Library"): it provides a convenient place to store and access media assets you use to create your content [templates, images, video and sound files, Flash animation or interaction files (.swf)], Flypaper components, and even entire Flypaper projects. To use assets from the Flybrary, the user simply drags them on to the page or into project.

Flypaper's ease of use and quality output (platform agnostic) won an early champion: Cisco.

Cisco was using Flypaper to create eLearning.. The digital signage group approached Flypaper and asked if the app could be extended to another business, suggesting that if it could it had the potential to solve a major problem in the industry.

Cisco had recently entered digital signage and always, always the problem with selling digital signage hardware is "What content do we put in the system?" Followed by, "How often do we need to change the content and how do we do that?"

The growing popularity of digital signage took the industry in a direction where high priced content-makers could not produce cheap enough, fast enough for the more modern IP-driven digital signage.

Flypaper spent the next 9 months adding frame accurate video rendering for their newest Flypaper version.

Announced at Digital Signage Expo in February of this year, Flypaper created a stir…almost as many exhibitors as attendees wanted to learn more about how to make better content faster and cheaper.

Output from Flypaper rivals the interactivity and quality of custom Flash development and HD motion graphics, but at only a fraction of time and cost.

Both of those factors (time & cost) contribute to digital signage becoming Flypaper's fastest growing market, taking over from e-learning.

Flypaper and Digital Signage

"The sheer amount of signage content our clients create and manage is enormous, and until now it has been a tremendous cost and effort for them to produce," says Loren Bucklin, President of ConnectedSign, a reseller. "Flypaper is the first solution we've found that empowers customers to create impactful content, very quickly and at an attractive price point.

This product is a serious efficiency booster for our industry and it's going to change the game."

By rendering the creation (and editing) of custom interactive and motion graphics content simple and quick, Flypaper lets companies do more internally and save budget once outsourced for content development. Companies that need to create large libraries of high-quality content (and change content on the fly) for digital signage networks now have affordable software.

The next step for Flypaper is an upcoming version 3.4 that automatically renders any Flypaper creation to be touch-screen and gesture enabled.

Earlier this year, Flypaper won a 2010 CHAMP Award by our sister publication in America: rAVe DS [Digital Signage]. Flypaper has also been very popular in the e-Learning space, having won several major industry awards including the Brandon Hall Award for Best Innovation in Learning Technology and the Award of Excellence from Tech & Learning Magazine.

Did we mention the free trial software?

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