Four Whip-Smart Digital Publishing Projects
Last night I attended CodeMeetPrint at General Assembly where Findings, Projeqt, Urtak and MagAppZine (now MAZ) presented and sat for a Q&A. The last time I was at General Assembly for a presentation, Steve Jobs died—so happily this time I remember the products and the entrepreneurs. Here’s a wrap-up of what we saw. The pitch lines are mine, and definitely not company endorsed.
Like Instapaper meets highlighting in Kindle
I’ve liked this company for a while. They allow you to highlight and save your favorite quotes in Kindle books and on the Web. You can collect and share key excerpts. It takes the Kindle highlighter feature that next important step. A quietly innovative and valuable service; exactly what you’d expect from a Betaworks company.
Apple Newsstand apps with no coding required
The presentation highlight was founder Paul Canetti revealing he landed beta clients by cold-calling 100 magazine companies – technology is crucial but that commitment makes a businesse successful. MAZ (Canetti announced the rename that night) has an easy to use tool for app publishing through Newsstand that incorporates PDFs into an iOS container. The PDFs can also be enhanced with rich media links.
Two men’s epic battle against Internet commenters, waged through Platonic dialogue
Urtak’s co-founder Marc Lizoain shaped his presentation more as a jeremiad against Internet commenters. You can read his take in this article, but what’s impressive is the solution Urtak’s built for better communication on blogs and the Web—a Yes/No Question & Answer widget that shows high engagement rates that won’t dissolve into flame wars.
The Power Point killer app
An initiative from TBWA, Projeqt has more institutional heft behind it – and they’ve used their resources to craft a beautiful and engaging new way to create and share presentations. It could be a Web-app power point killer, it could be a Web-app HTML 5 book app killer. I didn’t realize til halfway through the presentation that the slides I thought were a gorgeous lead up to the product demo were in fact the product demo in action. It looks like a way anyone could create an excellent Web reading experience right now. I might be missing something, but this one feels pretty revolutionary.
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