any connected device, Brookler says. Therein lies the company’s initial business model.
The app is free and people can upload and share 200MB for free. The company is charging $5 a month for up to 1 gigabyte of Flowboards stored in the cloud.
“We’re going to continue to add more premium services” for monthly subscribers, Brookler says.
Flowboards are built to work offline, caching the content in the device’s memory. That’s a capability that travel guru Rick Steves, a Treemo customer, insisted upon.
The company initially designed Steves’ walking tour and audio guide apps to stream content over a wireless connection. But Steves said it has to work offline because travelers to Europe don’t want to pay for data service, Brookler says.
Developers of tablet content creation apps are trying to find the right balance of simplicity for ease of use by amateurs and creative freedom.
Haiku Deck, an iPad app for quickly making clean slide presentations, has an intentionally limited—though growing—set of features meant to force users into “best practices in presentation.”
The initial release of Flowboard may have a little too much flexibility. “One thing that’s challenging about our system, and we’re cognizant of it, is lining things up,” Brookler says. Alignment guides to address this are in the works and should be part of the first update.
Flowboard and Haiku Deck are two of a growing number of apps—several from Seattle-area companies—trying to improve content creation, collection, and presentation in the era of touch-enabled, mobile devices. Others include 9Slides, an interactive slideshow creation tool that launched an iPad app earlier this year; Zapd, for building quick, personal websites on an iPhone; Apple’s own Keynote; the likes of Pinterest, Padlet, Kullect, and Flipboard; and even eBook apps such as iBooks Author, Blurb, and Vook.
