Company description
FluidHtml is a new markup language that was created to address many shortcomings of today's rich media authoring solutions. FluidHtml combines the rich media display attributes of Flash with the search benefits, SEM support, server support and ease of development of HTML.
The use of rich media, interactive web applications, and web animations are growing dramatically, and consumer expectations of their web experience with your company are rising as a result. In general this is called RIA rich Internet applications, and it's here to stay. It's also been proven that richer web sites are more compelling and increase consumer engagement and retention.
Historically, committing to rich website development meant using Flash but this has significant problems for CIOs that FluidHtml solves. The main ones are these:
a. Flash developers are expensive. FluidHtml puts the power of Flash into the hands of your existing web developers because it follows HTML paradigms can easily be learned in a few weeks.
b. No one today would code a large website in Flash because it was never built for this purpose. Flash is compiled, so each page of your site is essentially a compiled application. This isn't true of HTML which can be dynamically generated on the server. Since FluidHtml is just markup on the page, it works like HTML With FluidHtml you can generate Flash pages dynamically just as you do HTML.
c.Flash does not lend itself to team-based development. Since Flash is not a structured language, no two developers do things the same way, and code is not easily sharable or re-usable. FluidHtml on the other hand is structured. This means code can be shared within teams, code libraries in FluidHtml can be developed for your enterprise or brands, and you can develop and maintain syle and animation libraries that are separate from FluidHtml code. This not only reduces development time and ensures consistency, but means that styles can be changed once and propagated throughout your site wherever they are referenced.
d. Flash has a difficult time with SEO. Because Flash is compiled, the search engines can't index these binary objects. Adobe is working on making this better, but there is a natural limit to what can be done. However, FluidHtml is just markup, so it can be indexed by the search engines just like HTML. This means you can develop in FluidHtml and get all the benefits of Flash without sacrificing search engine indexability.
Team
Michael Collette
In August of 2009, Michael Collette joined FHTML as CEO. A seasoned startup CEO and media technology expert, Michael previously was CEO of Ucentric Systems, which pioneered the multiroom DVR market and was sold to Motorola in 2005. He then ran PhyFlex networks, a broadband infrastructure company, which was sold to Ciena. Previously, Mr. Collette served as SVP Marketing and Business Development for OpenTV, a publicly traded company that is the market leading provider of middleware and Interactive Television authoring platforms for cable and satellite. Prior to joining FHTML, Mr. Collette was Managing Director of MediaTech Strategies where he provided strategic consulting services to Google (IPTV strategy), Extend Media (CMS services for Over The Top media), and Gotuit Media (video metadata), among others.
Jim Kremens
Jim is a leading Flash developer who, after many years building very advanced Flash applications, finally grew frustrated with the various limitations of Flash and set to work to create FluidHtml.
Matt Shaw
Matt Shaw, VP Development, was previously Lead Flash Developer at Viacom/MTV Networks for products such as MTV Overdrive, Comedy Central Motherload, and their core video player platform. Prior to that, Matt spent 5 years with web startup Abstract Edge and has more than 10 years of web development experience.
Business model
Enterprise customers pay a low annual licensing fee for the use of the language. The language is free for your developers, so they can download the language, learn it, and build and test without any charge. To actually deploy public sites and applications in FluidHtml does require the language license.There are no other hidden costs to FluidHtml. There are no server licensing fees, no seat licenses or any other accessory fees.
Competitive advantage
Flash and other rich media authoring solutions produce rich Internet applications (RIAs) that are not searchable. With FluidHtml, you get the performance of Flash, but your site is now discoverable by search engines and that provides the first business benefit free, organic search traffic.
Similarly, before FluidHtml, RIAs were not deeplinkable. This means your marketing teams cannot drive truck enthusiast traffic to the trucks and sedan buyers to the sedans. They are forced instead to send all traffic to the home page. Thus, the second benefit: by adding support for deeplinking, you'll get higher return on investments in marketing.