Goowy has rebuilt a number of commonly used applicatons (like email) in Flash. It includes traditional web services such as email, contacts, calendar, games and widgets. Goowy is highly interactive and, as you’d expect with a flash application – fast. Visually it is a very beautiful site as well, and I wasted a good amount of time today playing around with the applications (including some very addictive games).
Goowy is one of the first full featured internet applications that uses Flash 8. For more detail, see Mike Schleifstein‘s post on Goowy, although I disagree with some of the conclusions in this post – Ajax, xforms and other technologies are gunning for some of these same applications right now.
Flash-heavy sites are, however, currently quite trendy, and Goowy seems to be one of the best implementations. While flash can be heavy work for some simple stuff, Macromedia’s current efforts with Flex (as Mark Birbeck tells me) will make Flash a lot easier by using a high-level language on the server.
Once you’ve registered for the service, a virtual desktop appears that allows you to access the various applications. The email application is excellent. You are assigned a goowy address (ours is techcrunch@goowy.com), and it also allows users to POP into Goowy from other accounts. Alex Bard, Goowy’s CEO, tells me that they are expanding email capabilities in the near future.
Alex also tells me that Macromedia has been very supportive of Goowy, which explains how they have grown to 30,000 users with virtually no marketing:
Macromedia has been a great partner to us. They have supported us in both marketing and development. We have been mentioned in several Macromedia press releases including the most recent Studio 8 release. In addition we have been their site of the day several times (most recently on Aug 9th). In addition we are working with them on more awareness / marketing initiatives in the near future which are very exciting.
Alex also wrote to me about upcoming features:
We have some very exciting functionality in our development lab right now. In the next 30 days we are releasing an advanced calendar and some other “fun” features. In addition we have virtual desktop storage, wireless integration, video streaming, widgets, open APIs, and more in development. It is going to be an exciting time for goowy over the next 6 months.
Goowy’s business model includes advertising and, later, premium subscription pricing and licensing of the platform. They have 8 employees.
Alex Bard – CEO
Gary Benitt – COO
Jeremy Suriel – CTO / Chief Architect
Sashi Bommakanty – VP Product Development
Javed Mandary (interview with Alex Bard), Oman3D, Psychopalaestra
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