Flash presentation maker Flypaper gets a simple web editor

Flypaper Studio, which offers an easy-to-use editor to create presentations in the Flash format, is adding to its options for salespeople with the release of a simple web editor.

At first, I thought this would be an online equivalent of Flypaper’s desktop application, but it turns out the web editor is much more limited, because it was built for a very specific purpose. Customers of the Phoenix, Ariz. startup will still use the standard Flypaper editor to create presentations, but when those presentations get sent along for a big sales team to use, those salespeople can then customize the presentation for their needs using the web editor — for example, swapping out some image or text, or changing some of the numbers in a presentation at a customer’s request. The initial presentation creator can decide what parts can be altered in the web editor, and which parts are locked down.

This makes a Flypaper presentation a much more customizable document, rather than something static that one person creates and everyone else consumes or shares. Since the web editor costs extra, it’s also another way for Flypaper to make money. Lastly, the web editor is another step in the company’s efforts to hone its focus on sales and marketing teams. Since launching as a general purpose Flash editor at the DEMO conference last year, Flypaper has moved away from consumers and towards making presentations for a professional audience. (Competitors include Sprout, which focuses on marketing widgets.)

It also recently released version 2.0 of its desktop editor, adding a collaboration feature, an online repository for projects and media, and a software development kit that allows developers to create and convert Flash files into the Flypaper format.

Flypaper has raised a total of $6.5 million in venture backing. And here’s a demonstration showing how to create presentations in Flypaper — it is, naturally, a Flypaper presentation itself.

http://content.flypaper.net/a934acc0-f965-4852-958c-ea491a072349/Main.swf

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