Product

Raveal is up on the front page of KillerStartups.com. Go vote for us, please!

We are currently ranked #2 for the month of May!

There haven’t been many updates here at Over Flowz, lately.  Usually when that happens, it just means we have been sitting on the couch all day eating cheetoes and watching James Bond marathons.  (Curse you, Odd Job!)

But not this time.

We have been working on something big.  A project whose goal is to help people find work in this troubled economy.  I am proud to  present, Raveal:

http://raveal.com

Raveal provides a service that goes beyond established resume building sites. Raveal gives you the power to build a visually stunning portfolio of your work and experience. The resume is sharp. The gallery is simple to use.  The end result is a flexible virtual business card.

For the freelancer, it is a superb way to showcase your work with prospective clients.

For the full-timer, it is a great tool to keep your resume from being lost in a stack of similarity.

For businesses, it is a visual search engine different from any other before it.

Raveal is very young, but we have a great many features planned for it.  We think this service will help a lot of businesses and individuals.  In this economy, we need all the help we can get.

One of the things we wanted to do when creating the pricing for Flowzit was make sure we didn’t leave casual users out.

There are two main lines of thought about free plans.  The first is that a free plan is a trial to give you a taste of what the full application provides.  This is great because usually, it is not time limited like traditional native applications that give  you 30 days to try something out.  However, many times, you don’t get the full functionality, or there are limitations on how much you can consume or how many times you can perform some action.  Usually, when this happens, the limitations prevent real work from being done as the goal is to make this a trial.

The other line of thought is that some people just won’t pay for your service regardless of what you give them.  We must not be too quick to judge these users as cheap.  A great number of them are simply not basing a huge part of their workflow on our system.  Maybe they need a quick “one-off” and can’t justify a monthly fee.  Or, as increasingly likely in this economy, they are doing work in their spare time because they are unemployed or looking for new work or even moolighting to start a new career.

For the latter, we opened up our Free plan limitations to support that type of work.  The idea is, you need a simple service that doesn’t cost anything because you are working on the next big thing in your life. So we’ll be here for you now in the hope that when you are ready for the big time, we’ll be your first choice.

You know, Flowzit isn’t the first time I have built a “send and receive with ease” application.  This is actually the third iteration.  The third completely separate code-base…

That’s how I know we nailed it.

Notice that I didn’t say how we nailed it, “this time.”  This isn’t “the third time’s the charm.”  The previous two apps were very successful in their own right.  They were just private applications built by a private company for their own use with their clients.  We couldn’t resell them.

The first version I wrote using Perl (mod_perl actually) in the span of two months in the waning light of 2001.  It ran virtually unattended thereafter until 2004 when it was superseded by the second version.  One moderately priced machine served terabytes upon terabytes of multimedia files to over 25,000 user accounts!

The second version was part of an enterprise suite that managed all client and agency interaction.  I won’t go into much detail on that now.  That application suite took years to build (and is still being added to actually) and the file sharing portion was really an evolution of the first application.

Flowzit takes everything we learned in the past and now is a finely-honed Gatling-gun of bits dispersion.  But that isn’t actually the point of this little essay.

The real point is, the very first client we moved on to the very first version saved money.  LOTS of money. That client was an automotive manufacturer who spent very, very close to a million dollars every year on overnight shipping.  You see, every version of every TV advertisement (spot) was recorded to tape then shipped overnight across the country so someone could review and approve it.  Believe it or not, that’s how the entire advertising industry operated for decades!  With one little two month project, we cut a cool million out of one client’s costs.  Every.  Single.  Year.  Further, the whole editing process actually improved.  Instead of taking the time to record to tape from the digital copy in the Avid suite, the producer just did a quick transcode to Quicktime or MPEG2 and sent the spot via Flowzit’s grandfather to the client for immediate feed back.  Instead of a 24 hour turn around, we had an hour or two turn around!

That was just one client and just one example workflow.  Across the board, cost savings abounded.

Now, with all that in mind, and given the current state of the economy we are *all* trying to sweat out, you might imagine that Flowzit is a very good way to cut costs.  And you might be right.

After some positive user feedback, we have made some changes to our account plans.  Starting today, the maximum allowed storage has been increased.  Our new storage levels are as follows:

• Free Plan: 500 MB
• Bronze: 3 GB
• Silver: 7 GB
• Gold: 20 GB!

For those of you dealing with heavy MPEG2 and super huge TIFF files, this should give you some breathing room.

Keep that feedback coming!

Just in time for turkey day, a new version of Flowzit was placed in the cuddly, smoky tendrils of our “cloud.”  I don’t know if you heard this or not, but our cloud is named, “Quandrato the Eternal Death Slayer of GOTO Cross Product Joins of N Squared Souls.”  Don’t ask me why.  Quandrato told us so.

At any rate, here are the juicy details:

- Sitcho: You can now completely shutoff email notifications and receive a fancy stitcho alert instead.  When you aren’t logged into stitcho, Flowzit falls back to notifying you via email.  Controls for this are located under My Info > Options:

My Info > Options

- Notifications of new messages and responses now include thumbnails of any files that are attached.  This gives you a clear picture of what was sent before you even log in.

- Support for uploading by users who do not have flash installed.  You can choose in your profile to use either the flash uploader or the basic uploader.  The bottom of the compose window shows you what you are using.

Click to change uploader

- Initial support for those who wish to brave the chilly waters of Internet Explorer 8.

- Thumbnails are now generated for video content.

- Improved Approval UI, check it out:

Approve, disapprove, or just comment.