QlipBoard, a handy tool for blending voice and video mail

QlipBoard is a nifty application, just released, that is a cross between voicemail and a video email.

It’s a quirky sounding thing, because it doesn’t fit the mold of other products on the market — but it’s simple and useful enough that it could well catch on.

First, you download a small application. Then, when you’re surfing the Web or scrolling through documents, QlipBoard lets you take snapshots of pages, or of images — putting them on a clipboard. Next, you can record a message to layer on top of the images, by hitting a little red record button on QlipBoard’s dashboard — the technology is designed so that you speak into your laptop. With one click, you can then share the voice/video clip with friends.

You can also draw or paint on the content you’ve collected.

It’s handy for recording a message over slideshows, such as family pictures.

Qlip Media’s co-founder Swamy Viswanathan demoed the service for us earlier this week, and recorded this Qlip for me, based on photos he took on a vacation in Hawaii. We tested it in a crowded cafe, with plenty of background noise, but QlipBoard picked up his voice — free of microphone — with very good audio quality.

Here’s a step-by-step demo of how it works.

QlipBoard reminds mostly of the elegantly voice-over-photo album product, Voicethread, which we reviewed here. However, Qlip Board’s technology allows it to be a more routine communication product in daily work — with a production feel like Techsmith’s Camtasia or SnagIt products or Microsoft’s Photo Story.

The technology isn’t trivial. The company has worked for more than a year on the problem of maintaining voice and picture quality while turning it real-time into a small compressed wmv file. You can save the file to your desktop. Or, if you decide to share it, QlipBoard turns it into a flv file, where it can play from any browser. You can also submit Qlips easily to YouTube or Photobucket.

QlipBoard is part of QlipMedia, a company headquartered in Mountain View, Calif, with development in India. It has a first round of venture capital from Norwest Venture Partners.

The company hopes to eventually run ads on the right side of the Qlips when they are shared — at least within the free consumer version. The registration process forces you to divulge age, gender, country, zip-code — for advertising purposes. Thats an unfortunate load of info, and is the one thing that may turn people off.

It offers an enterprise version for companies (managers can record video/voice Qlips for employees, and vice versa, recording over group documents, etc) for $89.55/yr/person, and it plans to offer a “pro” version soon for small businesses, at $9.95/mo/person.