One of the more interesting projects to emerge from Evernote’s 2013 Devcup hackathon is called Postach.io, a new blogging platform which turns your Evernote notebook into a Content Management System. Input Logic, the Vancouver-based company behind the now just four-week old service has already caught the attention of local investors, as well as Evernote, who met with the team to discuss possible monetization ideas.

Input Logic was founded two years ago by UI designer Shawn Adrian and programmer Gavin Vickery, with the intention of becoming a software development firm. The company bootstrapped its first app, proposal writing aid QuoteRobot, and has sustained itself with contract work over the past couple of years. The five-person team (3 full-time) has worked for clients including Nest, Michael Kors, ski resort Mt. Washington, and others, doing everything from coding to design.

This year, the company stopped doing client work to focus on Postach.io instead.

Adrian says that initially, neither he nor Vickery were Evernote users, having “not drank the Kool-Aid,” so to speak. But at the urging of Lance Tracey, Full Stack partner (now investor, who just funded the company with $200K), they decided to take another look.

“We started playing with it, got into it, and said ‘hey, this thing has really come a long way,’” Adrian explains. “And Gavin especially just got fully addicted to it,” he adds.

Later on, when the co-founders were collaborating on documentation for a newly redesigned QuoteRobot using Evernote, a thought occurred to them: “wouldn’t it be great if we could just publish it instead?” Vickery, too, wanted that same functionality for his own blog – he writes all his blog posts in Evernote anyway, why not just publish directly from there?

So they decided to build a service that did just that.

Having worked on CMS’s in the past, the team built Postach.io to include nearly everything you would expect from a lightweight blogging system: customizable themes, RSS (Atom) feeds, built-in Disqus commenting, support for multimedia, and more. In fact, anything you can store in Evernote – images, audio, video/YouTube, etc. – will work on Postach.io, too.

Currently, the half dozen themes available are reminiscent of sites like Svbtle or Medium, favoring clean, minimalistic design and rounded icons. Now the plan is to extend Postach.io’s feature set even further, with special themes designed for Evernote Food and Hello app users, as well as support for social sharing, wikis,  and community features designed to help new bloggers have their content found.

To use Postach.io yourself, after setting up an account and authorizing the service with Evernote, it’s only a matter of tagging posts in a pre-determined notebook with the tag “publish” to make them go live on your blog. You can also use Evernote’s date field to schedule posts for a later time.

Blogs are given their own subdomains like yourname.postach.io, for example, but you can have them work with your own URL instead, if you choose.

In the future, the service might monetize by charging for premium features or converting users to Evernote Premium, while doing a rev share with Evernote. But those ideas are still in the works. Today, the focus is on growing the product and user base, which today includes 1,500 bloggers who signed up since the April debut.

Blogging platforms, of course, are numerous – from the big guys like Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger to newcomers like Medium, Svbtle, and Posterous repository Posthaven. But the team behind Postach.io see the value in building on top of a successful platform instead of a creating a destination site of their own. (And they’re not the only ones with the same idea: see also, Everblog or maybe this IFTTT recipe.)

“One of the big things with Evernote is that you own your content – it’s actually on your own computer,” Adrian explains. “Even if our servers are struck by lighting and everything falls apart, everyone will have their blog posts.”

Interested users can sign up for Postach.io here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.

Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.

Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate.

Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer.

Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list.

Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content.

Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump.

While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere.

Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard.

Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users.

The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company.

While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education.

Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market.

For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system.

Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example.

With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education.

Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.”

And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something…

Google Developer page here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Every marketer uses Twitter to engage with customers. But there’s more to a successful campaign than simply gaining new followers and increasing your number of tweets.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the newest addition to the Inside Network product family: the AllTwitter Marketing Bible.

Whether you’re a first-time user of Twitter for business or an experienced social media marketer, the AllTwitter Marketing Bible is designed to help you build your audience, increase engagement, and improve conversions and customer loyalty.

This comprehensive subscription product is updated weekly with valuable how-tos and best practices, informative case studies, and detailed provider comparisons. This content will help you stay up to date on the latest platform trends and discover great ways to optimize your current Twitter strategy.

Want to learn more? You can sign up for a free trial to get a sneak peak at a few articles, or subscribe to a monthly, quarterly, or annual account for full access.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Flipboard has just updated its iOS app to add a few more features for its 50 million+ readers. Back in March, Flipboard announced a new feature that would include user-created magazines, which seems to have excited Flippers.

In fact, the company announced that users have already created 500,000 curated magazines. Like ours.

That said, today’s update to version 2.0.2 brings with it a new Friends category in the Content Guide, allowing users to easily find their friends’ magazines. But it goes beyond that. Flipboard has even added new profile pages that have a better insight into readership and curation activities.

Past that, version 2.0.2 also offers better sharing. You can select a social network and use various sharing options in the revamped sharing menu, and you can also shoot off stories via SMS.

You can even save images from Flipboard direct to your device now, as the update allows users to save to camera roll as an option within the share menu.

Last, but certainly not least, Flipboard is hooking up Google Reader users with one last hurrah. The Flipboard 2.0.2 app for iOS has just received improved navigation for Reader RSS folders as well. Unfortunately, Google Reader will die a quiet, sad death on July 1.

Still, Flipboard continues to grow as the social news consumption space gets even hotter. Along with the newly launched magazines feature, the company has also been working to implement new features via a partnership with Samsung. Flipboard comes pre-installed on the new Galaxy S4, and even has Samsung’s AirView feature integrated, letting you peek into all the headlines of a certain category without ever clicking through. Or even touching the display.

If you’re interested in Flipboard 2.0.2, head on over to the App Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While it would take you a million lifetimes to watch all the video on YouTube, the company relies on contributions from its amateur and professional partners to keep its content fresh. At the same time, its core business model revolves around providing advertisers with the ability to reach its billion-plus viewers. In turn, video creators rely (or want to rely) on a piece of that ad revenue to continue producing their content. The problem is, of course, that those ads are intrusive, annoying and, at the end of the day, its partners are finding that the revenue from those banners and clips isn’t growing nearly as fast as, say, the number of cat videos on YouTube.

In an effort to provide its partners with an alternative revenue stream, YouTube announced today that it is officially launching a pilot program that enables its video stars to charge subscription fees for access to their channels. Subscriptions will start at $0.99/month, and every channel will be able to offer a 14-day free trial, along with discounted yearly rates.

In its announcement, YouTube cites Sesame Street, which will offer full episodes through its paid channel, and UFC offering fans the ability to watch classic fights as examples. For more, here’s the list of its 53-odd pilot channels.

As of today, users can subscribe to paid channels from their desktops and laptops and watch across devices, but going forward YouTube will look to add the ability to subscribe from any medium/device. On top of that, YouTube will begin a broader roll out of subscriptions in the next few weeks for “qualifying partners,” and from the looks of it, it will be adding a paid channel recommendation feed — just as it does now for free channels.

If you don’t have a YouTube channel, why should you care? Well, YouTube has been telegraphing this for awhile, but it’s really the first (official) sign that YouTube is beginning to tiptoe into the paid video market. Granted, the subscription model isn’t a new idea for YouTube, considering the company just announced in March that it will be launching a music subscription service later this year.

The goal is much the same: Give musicians/artists/creators an opportunity to make some money, while improving the user experience for listeners by potentially removing some of those obnoxious ads that start every video. Of course, in the case of both video and music, it’s much more likely that YouTube is going to stick with both.

Amateur content creators are going to be hesitant about erecting paywalls around their content. Most viewers are going to balk at the idea of buying a subscription to a YouTube channel, and there’s a question of whether or not they’d really be able to convert enough of their viewers to paid subscriptions to make it worth it. In the end, it’s the same issue newspapers and publishers have struggled with for years.

There’s also the fact that every video producer is already offering their content for free, although behind ads. Now you’re going to tell viewers that they have to pay for the same content they’ve been getting for free? Sure, that will work for your superfans, but as is the way with the “freemium” model, if you’re going to charge, the content behind the paywall better be, well, premium. I want to see “Extras,” exclusive content/footage, and so on.

Of course, as Peter Kafka pointed out this week, amateur video producers likely don’t have the resources to produce that exclusive or premium content.

Nonetheless, the company is going to use paid subscriptions in an attempt to attract new partners, new content creator and, we assume, more dollars — although YouTube doesn’t specify whether it will be taking a cut of subscriptions or not. YouTube is clearly aware of the success Hulu, Netflix, Vimeo and other video sites have been having with subscription and on-demand models, and it wants to become more attractive to film and TV networks, studios and producers.

But for now, YouTube can’t make the jump exclusively to subscriptions, because it needs those ad dollars that are keeping the whole thing afloat. It’s a tricky line to walk, no doubt, but YouTube certainly isn’t helping its user experience by setting up the potential to have both a paywall and ads in and around videos for the foreseeable future.

Just speaking for myself personally, I probably most frequently use YouTube for search (and a little discovery), particularly around music. In other words, I’ll have a song or an artist in mind, will do a YouTube search, which inevitably serves a couple or dozens of choices for the same song, artist or even subject. There’s a high likelihood that I have no idea which video I want or is best, which requires some perusing, so having a 10 second ad at the beginning of each video is really disruptive.

Maybe that’s a niche use case, but I suspect not. YouTube ads, while tolerable because we consciously or subconsciously recognize their role in keeping millions of cat videos afloat and online, are frustrating. Sure, Hulu has ads, too, and they aren’t much better. But at least in Hulu’s case, the viewer knows they’re watching a 30-minute or hour-long episode of television online, and regular old offline TV has already conditioned us to expect ads every 5 seconds. Unfortunately. But for a 2-minute clip of questionable quality? Come on.

So keeping ads, while slowly throwing up paywalls is just a bad idea. So the roll out of paid video will end up being incremental and almost just a show of good faith — to keep from ruffling feathers — while the ads just keep proliferating.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Matt Sanchez, co-founder and CEO of Say Media (which owns sites like xoJane, ReadWrite, and Dogster), just told me that the company has laid off about 10 percent of its 400-person staff.

Sanchez described this as part of Say’s transformation from an ad network to “a digital media company.” The company isn’t getting out of the ad network business completely, but that part of Say is relatively mature and that the company’s focus should be on the content side. The layoffs, Sanchez said, were really about looking “at all parts of the business except for sales and our content organization” and bringing them in line with that vision.

As for why the layoffs are happening now, he said there’s more pressure on digital media companies to become profitable. For example, he pointed to TechCrunch-owner Aol’s recent earnings report (the company is still facing a lot of questions about whether its content business can ever be a moneymaker, and CEO Tim Armstrong tried to allay those concerns by saying that Patch will be profitable in the fourth quarter).

Sanchez told me that with the layoffs, Say should be profitable in the second half of 2013. Looking ahead, he said he plans to stay focused on the content verticals that Say has already established (style, tech, and living), but that doesn’t preclude launching or acquiring new sites in the future — he just wants to do that using the company’s profits, rather than raising more venture capital.

“Regardless of whether it’s an IPO, an acquisition, whatever you think about our long-term prospects from an exit perspective, nothing’s changed,” Sanchez said. “We want to build an enduring media company. … We just think the best way to get there is to get profitable and grow from strength.”

Here’s the memo that Sanchez sent to Say staff:

Sayers,

This morning we had to say goodbye to some really talented Say Media employees and it was tough. It’s been a difficult day for all of us, and I know that many of you are feeling the absence of our colleagues and friends. We did not make these decisions lightly; each person that left today has contributed to our mission and will be missed.

Two and a half years ago, we set out on a course to build the media company of the future. We knew it wouldn’t be easy, and along the way the media landscape has continued to shift. We’ve navigated from ad network to media company while the transactional display market has commoditized on exchanges as predicted. We’ve invested heavily in this transformation, and are coming out the other side with a solid foundation for the future.

We have built out a world-class publishing platform, transformed our sales team, evolved our offering to content-led marketing programs and filled out our brand portfolio with talent and brands we are all very proud of. Our focus on Point-of-View content is working. Our brands are deeply engaging, growing communities of readers. The publishing platform on which these brands sit boasts a pipeline of new products that are poised to change the media landscape. And our advertising solutions are impressive and working hard for our marketing partners.

That said, the time is right for us to transition aggressively to continued growth with profitability. To that end, we’ve made a set of hard decisions aimed at right-sizing our business with a greater focus on supporting our strong content brands, growing sales and building innovative publishing and advertising products — while at the same time achieving profitability in the second half of this year.

Each and every one of you is incredibly important to what we are building at Say. Your passion, intelligence, energy and loyalty are what make this company and our culture so special. Today’s actions were painful but necessary for us to move forward, and I am confident we are on the right path to creating the media company of the future.

We’ll get together tomorrow for an All Hands, and I’ll share more detail about this action and our plans for the year. As always, please reach out to me if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Matt

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A startup called Webflakes aims to bring some of the best international content on fashion, food, travel, and more to English-speaking readers with the help of volunteer translators. The site is officially launching today, and the company is also announcing that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding.

CEO Nathan Shuchami told me that people searching the web can sometimes struggle to find “genuine, authentic content” on a given topic due to language issues. For example, for wine connoisseurs, there are certainly plenty of sites about wine, but the commentary of many French experts is inaccessible unless you speak French.

To address that issue, Webflakes has selected 60 established bloggers in Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Switzerland and Peru and has licensed the rights to their content in every language except the original. Then a team of volunteers translates their work into English and posts it on the Webflakes site.

For now, neither the blogger nor the translator is paid. Shuchami said the blogger gets exposure to a new audience. Meanwhile, many of the translators also do professional translation work, so this is an opportunity to do something more fun and build their portfolio. Plus, Webflakes will donate $1 for every 500 words translated to the charity of the translator’s choice. And in the future, Shuchami suggested that Webflakes might be able to offer revenue-sharing deals to both groups.

But is the global nature of the content enough to attract readers? One advantage, Shuchami said, is that Webflakes is currently focusing on lifestyle topics where the blogger’s nationality should be a particular draw — not just French writing about wine, but also Italian writing about Italian food, Japanese writing about Japanese architecture, and so on.

I poked around the site this morning — I don’t read a lot of lifestyle content, but I thought the range of topics was pretty interesting. The top trending article right now is a French writer on “How To Wear A Bow Tie.” Also on the front page is a Peruvian writer telling readers to “Invite Your Mother To Peru For Mothers Day!” And the translations are usually quite readable, if not always graceful. (To be fair, that may have as much to do with the original post as the translation. And yes, the writing on English-language blogs can be pretty rough, too.)

Eventually, Shuchami said he hopes to add more writers and translators and to expand to other kinds of content.

As for the funding, it was led by Oren Zeev’s Orens Capital, with participation from Genesis Capital, Audible CEO Donald R. Katz, eBay CTO Mark Carges, Chegg co-founder Aayush Phumbhra, former GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman, former Apax partner Stephen Grabiner, and others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BitTorrent is taking a new step today in its efforts to help creators make money (and make money itself) — it’s releasing a new content packaging format called the BitTorrent Bundle in alpha mode.

The company has already been working with different creators to launch promotional bundles. For example, author Tim Ferriss packaged chapters of his book with other supplementary media material as a way to promote sales of his newest work, while musicians like DJ Shadow have used BitTorrent to promote new tracks and albums. However, spokesperson Christian Averill told me that today’s announcement signals the company’s intention to move beyond one-off experiments and actually “productize” these efforts.

Averill also said that today is the first time BitTorrent has actually “gated” one of these bundles. Specifically, it’s partnering with music label Ultra to promote the behind-the-scenes documentary of Kaskade’s 2012 Freaks of Nature tour. Users can access half the content (a remix and a tour trailer) for free, but to get the rest (a digital tour booklet and unreleased footage of Kaskade’s Staples Center show), they need to enter their email address. In his blog post announcing the bundle, BitTorrent’s vice president of marketing Matt Mason described the package as a “functional record store.”

“This is a completely new way to look at monetizing content,” Mason said. “Instead of putting the content in the store, what if you put the store in the content? What if the interaction happened in the unit of content in itself?”

Mason said that the first bundle focuses on collecting email addresses, because for most musicians, email is “the most important way to connect with fans.” At the same time, he said BitTorrent will be experimenting with other ways to structure the bundle, including ones where users actually pay money to. (When he spoke to us last fall, Mason said that the music business has become more relationship-based, meaning that musicians usually have to build a relationship with their fans before they can start asking them to pay.)

The ultimate goal is to release a publishing tool that will allow any artist to create their own bundles, and to structure those bundles however they like — that’s probably coming in the fourth quarter of this year.

“BitTorrent users are clearly fans,” Mason added. “It’s now up to us to build the right sort of publishing tools so that that relationship between artists and fans can just be completely optimized.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Flash may be dead, but Adobe’s Flash Professional has already gone beyond just being a Flash tool and it’s getting a major update today. The new version, Adobe says, has been “rebuilt from the ground up to be faster, modular, extensible, reliable, more focused and more efficient than before.” That’s quite a promise, but new version does indeed sport quite a few new features and improvements.

The company has re-engineered Flash Professional as a 64-bit application, which should make it more stable and allow users to easily manage multiple large files.

The app, which Adobe says is now far more responsive, now also allows Flash developers to export their content in high definition video and audio, “all without dropping frames.”

The tool now also sports a streamlined user interface to make dialog boxes and panels more intuitive. Users can now also choose between a dark or light interface.

With this new version, Adobe is introducing enhanced HTML5 support – something most of us probably don’t think about when we hear the word “flash.” The enhanced HTML publishing support now uses the updated Toolkit for CreateJS, meaning the service now features new functionality for buttons, hit areas and motion curves.

Also new in this version is support for real-time mobile testing. Developers can now test and debug their content by connecting multiple iOS and Android devices to their computers via USB and quickly see how their designs work on a real device.

Other new features include a more powerful code editor, which uses the Scintilla library. This new editor, the company says, will allow users to search across multiple files and features a new “find and replace” panel. Also new are code profiling in Adobe Scout, a real-time drawing tool, and an unlimited size for Flash Professional’s pasteboard.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Inventure-backed Froont has launched in public beta today with a web-based tool that aims to make it easy for designers to create, prototype and share responsive website designs, without the need to code. Using a visual, largely drag ‘n’ drop interface that creates responsive CSS/HTML on the fly, it aims to replace the somewhat arcane process where a designer hands off a Photoshop mockup for a developer to interpret. In fact, Froont offers the potential to leave developers out of the design (and even prototyping) process altogether, which in some cases may be a very good thing.

Responsive web design — where a single version of a site is designed to adapt in size and layout depending on the device that it’s being viewed on — is particularly in vogue right now. And with the proliferation of various types of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets etc.), alongside the traditional desktop, it’s easy to see why. A responsive approach to web design offers an attractive solution to reaching as wide an audience as possible without necessarily degrading their experience, even if it does make some compromises.

But the old way of designing websites, and the traditional division of labour, doesn’t necessarily scale well if you’re jumping on the responsive bandwagon. Trying to represent a responsive design in a series of static Photoshop mockups to show how a site will adapt when viewed on various screen sizes involves quite a lot of compromise. One solution is to have the non-coding designer work hand in hand with a front-end developer to prototype their Photoshop designs in HTML/CSS, thus making them viewable as is and to get a feel for how the responsive design will work in practice. This approach, however, can involve a lot of unnecessary back and forth as the design gets lost in translation.

Instead, Froont wants to hand control back to designers by letting them visually create working responsive designs that, because they are built using HTML/CSS and hosted in the cloud, can be viewed and shared instantly in a web browser, on any device being targeted. And when it’s time to hand off the design to a developer, instead of a static PNG file or something similar, in theory they’re given “nice, clean HTML/CSS or the ‘face’ of the website already made,” says the company.

The tool itself, though only in Beta, appears to be quite easy to get to grips with without being overly restrictive. It’s primarily WYSIWYG, employing a palette of tools and lots of drag ‘n’ drop, making it easy to add text, import graphics and tinker with typography and layout. Obviously, the aim here is to create a responsive design and in this respect Froont has some nice touches, such as a sliding ruler at the top of the page that adjusts the targeted screen size on the fly, instantly updating how your design changes as it responds. You’re also able to set “break points” to denote when the layout of your content shouldn’t simply reflow as the target device’s screen size differs but should change all together.

Although there are lots of visual web design tools that target different stages of the process or a finished site entirely, in terms of tackling responsive design at the initial HTML/CSS stage, Adobe’s Reflow probably comes closest. The main difference, says Froont, is that its tool runs in the browser, which means that its output can be shared instantly with team members, clients or developers for feedback and testing. Also, however subtle a difference, Froont isn’t so much aiming at simplifying coding but providing better tools for design.

Froont’s team of six is spread across San Francisco, Finland and Latvia. The company is founded by Sandijs Ruluks (designer/CEO), Andris Silis (CTO), Anna Andersone (operations and marketing) and Eli Altman (PR), and originally graduated from the Finnish accelerator Startup Sauna, giving it an avenue to raise €100,000 from Finnish VC fund Inventure. Froont also appears to at least be a partial pivot. The same team is behind the content management system Berta, which although described as a side-project, is still operational and I’m told is profitable.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch