All these new terms are giving driving my spellchecker nuts! Neverthless, I got the following email from PressJack and thought it interesting enough to share with you. They hope to overcome some of the legal issues that plague the excellent Zite application. PressJack looks interesting, but I’ll stick to my RSS feeds, through Google Reader, on my computer. This is the type of thing I would like to read at leisure on my iPad.
We have now released ‘PressJack’ in Beta so I wanted to drop you a quick note as it might be something that you want to review or report on.
As you know, Maggregators (news aggregators that display results in magazine formats) are a hot topic at the moment especially with FlipBoard getting $50 million investment and Zite getting a cease and desist letter from a group of major US publishers. All of these are apps and are based on scooping data from content owners’ websites and displaying them within the magazine environment. Our new product, PressJack, is a similar solution but allows publishers to offer readers this same rich experience …… on their terms.
PressJack is a desktop application that allows publishers to convert their web content into digital magazines instantly. All the they have to do is tell PressJack once, where the content is stored and then ‘build’. So any Blog or RSS feed can be plugged in to PressJack and turned into a digital page-flip publication. These social magazines can then be posted online and shared amongst readers and their friends. This application is aimed at helping publishers and content creators to eloquently organize their content in a beautifully laid-out digital magazine. They do not need to have any design or technical skills. Point & click, that’s it. Once online, a ‘customize’ tool allows the end reader to cherry pick articles and create their own tailored publication that they can then share through their social network.
We don’t see FlipBoard and Zite as competitors as we designed this application from a different angle. We have been working in this sector for a number of years. Our flagship product, “3D Issue” is a tool that converts PDFs into page turning digital editions. While working with our customers to develop new features it became apparent many clients did not have design resources in-house so updating a publication was a lengthy process. We also wanted to address the matter that with a traditional publication, the content is fixed to the time the publication went to print. Readers were moving online as they demanded more up-to-date news. So we started about trying to design a technology that would allow publications to update themselves without the need for any design resources and this is where PressJack sprang from. We wanted to ensure a digital edition was always displaying the latest news. Have you ever opened a property supplement from your Sunday paper and noticed that it never contains properties from just your area at that moment?. Well with PressJack a property portal could allow readers to customize the publication so it does. The first time the reader opens the publication they could set the type of properties that they are interested in and every time that they open the publication, it would only show the properties of potential interest.
As the content in these publications is the content of the publisher, the application does not run into any of the legal copyright issues that have been highlighted recently, for example from the launch of Zite.
The full version of PressJack will be released as a web application so that the publications can be dynamically updated but we are making a desktop version of the application available in BETA so people can test out. Please feel free to download a copy from www.pressjack.com and have a play around with it. I would be really interested in your comments.
Ah, new words. I worry that my custom dictionary will eventually outweigh my standard dictionary.