New on Zinerepublic – 28 May 09

At Zinerepublic, we believe in democratizing the magazine publishing industry and making it easier for all of us to create magazines. So we’ve introduced crowdsourcing as a way to gather articles for magazines.

On Zinerepublic, you can create a magazine using your own and other writers’ articles on the site, contribute articles for other users’ magazines, or collaborate on magazines together with your friends.

We’ve just added up a bunch of new features on Zinerepublic that will make creating and distributing your crowdsourced magazine that much easier.

Submit an article to this zine

If you’ve started a zine on Zinerepublic, other users can now submit articles for your zine by clicking the “Submit an article to this zine” link on any of your issues. You’ll get an email notifying you that someone has submitted an article for your consideration. There’s no obligation and you get to choose whether you’d like to include the article in your latest issue or not. This means it’ll be easier for you to source for articles for your zine, and easier for your friends to submit articles to you.

If you haven’t started your own zine, you can submit articles to other users’ zines using the same “Submit an article to this zine” link on any issue page. If the editor likes your article, they can include it in the latest issue of their zine. Easy eh?

Email zine to friends

You’ll also find an “Email zine to friends” button on every issue page. Use this to spread the word about zines you like on Zinerepublic. You can even import email addresses from your Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook address books. Share the love!

Invite friends to subscribe to your zine

If you’ve started a zine on Zinerepublic, you’ll find an “Invite friends to subscribe to your zine” button on every issue that you created. Use this button to publicise your zine and invite your friends to subscribe. They’ll receive a link to check out your zine and a link to sign up and automatically subscribe to your zine if they like what they see.

Add hyperlinks and embedded objects to your articles

Finally, we’ve added support for URL hyperlinks and embedded objects like Youtube, Vimeo and Tudou videos, imeem music players and many others. So any URL links you include in your articles will be clickable, and you can add videos and music to your articles by copying and pasting the “embed code” into the article text.

Which means you can now use Zinerepublic to create your own crowdsourced music review magazine with embedded music tracks, or collaborate with friends to create a crowdsourced movie review magazine with embedded trailers. Just use your imagination and the possibilities are endless!

Please check out our new features at:

http://www.zinerepublic.com

and we hope to see you on Zinerepublic soon!

Viva La Revolucion!

Introducing… Common Totes: Uncommon Totes for the Common People!

It’s been a crazy-crunch couple of months and we’ve just popped up for air again after launching our latest site, Common Totes, over the Easter long weekend.

Common Totes is a design community producing fresh tote bags every month, with designs submitted by the community, for the community, and where the community decides which designs go to print.

Basically, you can submit designs for tote bags, the community votes on the designs, and the best designs get made into actual tote bags for sale at the end of each month. Each winning design will be awarded a prize of US$300.

Please check out the site here:

http://www.commontotes.com

We’ve just launched the site and would really appreciate your participation by joining as a member, voting for designs and submitting some designs on our design template provided on the site. You might win and see your design made into a tote bag!

Common Totes is the fruit of our partnership with SKND Pte Ltd. Thanks go out to design studio fFurious for the visual design of the site.

So in our first year, we’ve launched three different properties (Common Totes, Zinerepublic and Shoplette) based on three of our in-house community app engines. Phew! What a busy, rocking year!

UPDATE: Since launching, we’ve had some nice coverage on Bagaholicboy, with a great 5-step guide to winning US$300 in 30 days.

New on Zinerepublic – 28 March 09

We released a few changes to Zinerepublic today. Do check them out, and we hope you like them!

Published issues on the zine rack

Firstly, if you’ve started a zine on Zinerepublic, you might notice that your latest unpublished issue has disappeared from the Zinerepublic home page. Don’t panic! We’ve just changed the way issues are published, so that only published issues appear in the magazine rack of the Zinerepublic home page.

This way you can add articles to your issue and work on it in secret till you’re ready for it to be released to the world. Then just click “Publish” on your issue page (or your MyMag page) and your issue will appear on the Zinerepublic home page and will be sent to your subscribers via email.

To view your current unpublished issue, click on “MyMag” at the top of the page when you’re logged in.

New article layouts

Secondly, we’ve introduced a range of article layouts for your articles, so you can select how you’d like your article to be laid out on the page, as a single column or two columns, with a large or small picture (if your article has a picture).

That’s a step towards making your articles and issues feel more “magazine-like” and hopefully make them a lot more fun to put together.

Please enjoy the new changes to Zinerepublic at:

http://www.zinerepublic.com

and feel free to drop us a comment to tell us what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

Viva La Revolucion!

Shoplette is now your crowdsourced shopping guide

If you visit Shoplette today, you’ll notice a few changes to the site.

Your crowdsourced shopping guide

We’ve converted Shoplette into a crowdsourced shopping guide featuring products the community think are hot, that they’re craving for, or that they’ve bought. To participate, you’re no longer limited to posting something you bought. You can now suggest cool products that you like or that you’ve spotted by clicking “Suggest a product”, adding a title and photo, and telling us where you found it. So now you can create your own crowdsourced shopping guide by suggesting cool products and places to shop, and following other users’ shopping suggestions.

New new look!

We’ve made everything cleaner with a bigger product gallery, so that you can focus on what you really want to see – more great products and where to find them. We’ve done the same thing for Shoplette Shops, so that the product catalogues are more focused on the Shops’ products. We hope that will make your browsing experience more enjoyable on Shoplette.

You can check out the new Shoplette here:

http://www.shoplette.com

Please enjoy the new changes to Shoplette! And feel free to drop us a comment or email to tell us what you think.

Welcome to Zinerepublic! Viva La Revolucion!

So what’ve we been doing all this while, coding away in a little corner and reading irreverent manga for entertainment? Here we go!…

We’re happy to announce the launch of our new online zine publishing platform, Zinerepublic, and would love to count on your support and participation.

Zinerepublic is our attempt at a revolution aimed at democratizing magazine publishing. We believe that magazine publishing – from article sourcing and content generation, to editing, assembling and publishing issues, to subscription and distribution – should be open to everyone, so we’ve created tools to make it easier.

Zinerepublic is an easy way to create and distribute your own crowdsourced zine. On Zinerepublic, anyone can be a reader, writer and editor, create your own zine out of your own and other users’ articles, and submit articles that other editors might like to use in their zines.

We’ve just released a public version (is this an alpha or a beta? It’s our first incarnation – call it whatever you want) and would like to invite you to try it out by checking out the zines, creating your own zine, contributing articles, and giving us feedback on what you think about the site.

Please check out our new site here:

http://www.zinerepublic.com

and sign up for a new account by clicking “Join”. Then give it a spin – start posting some articles and creating your own zine.

For inspiration, here are some zines that users have already started creating on the site:

	The Little Arts Academy’s Magazine – A lovely cooking zine with the yummiest dessert recipes you’ll be dying to try (and eat).
	Half Flat – A stunning art zine featuring the works of four groundbreaking illustrators based in Singapore.
	Graff spotting – A globe-trotting graffiti zine about graffiti and street art sightings all over the world.

Enjoy the zines, have fun creating your own, and Viva La Revolucion!

It’s oh so quiet…

We’ve been rather quiet over the past month and haven’t updated our blog for a while, but all for good reason, so we hope you’ll forgive us. Over the past month, we’ve been deep in development of a new web property based on our Mobrick engine, which we’ll be unleashing really soon!

It’s an exciting adventure for us, to test our engine in a different space from Shoplette, and we hope you’ll help us test it out too.

Watch this space for updates, which we’ll be releasing oh so soon!

(Trivia: Bjork fans will recognise the above video still from her “It’s Oh So Quiet” video released in 1995.)

A Shop with E-Commerce Features in Under 5 Minutes

We’re happy to announce the release of a new set of features on Shoplette to help shop owners set up a shop with e-commerce features in under 5 minutes.

With Shoplette’s new Shopping Cart Service, you can easily and quickly open a shop on Shoplette with e-commerce features and a custom payment or ready-made Paypal payment system for just USD 15 per month.

The features

You’ll get a full-featured shopping cart and buy buttons for the items you post for sale so that Shoplette users and visitors can easily order items from your shop directly on Shoplette, as well as simple inventory control and order management features.

You can choose to hook up your shop with a ready-made Paypal payment system so that customers can buy from you using their Paypal account or credit card, or you can choose to make your own payment arrangements with your customers via email once you receive their orders from us.

Why we did it

With this new service, we’d like to make it easy for independent shop owners to own an e-commerce activated shop and sell online without the expense of building a new online shop. We’ve intentionally kept the features simple so that independent shop owners don’t overpay for stuff they don’t need.

Try it out!

So if you’d like to set up an e-commerce activated shop that’s plugged into a community of shoppers, please check out our new service here. Just fill in your details, click “Sign up for Shopping Cart Service” and we’ll set you up right away!

And if you do decide to try it out, please let us know what you think!

Shoplette in the News

We got some coverage in Digital Life, the IT supplement of The Straits Times, on 7 January 2009. Here’s a quick extract from the article:

Sharing best buys

Now you can show the whole world the bargain you unearthed – and see if everyone agrees

By Chan Chi-Loong, ST Digital Life, 7 January 2009

SHOPPING is a very social thing as people ‘just love to tell others what they have bought, especially if it is a bargain,’ says Shannon Low Shen-Li, 32.
Armed with this observation, he and good friend Loon Kok Keong, 32, set up www.shoplette.com in May last year to do just that – tell people about great shopping bargains.

The duo quit safe, well-paying jobs – Shannon was in business development and Kok Keong was an IT engineer – to pursue the dream of starting up their own tech venture

‘Think of Shoplette as Twitter for shopping,’ Shannon says. Twitter is a popular mobile blogging tool where people send text messages to give updates on their life.

Similarly, Shoplette uses mobile phones to create content for a shopping social media network.

Say, you spot the latest Prada bag at a fire sale in an upmarket boutique in Kowloon, Hong Kong. You whip out your mobile phone, snap a picture, write a quick description and send text and image to Shoplette, where they are uploaded straight away.

Immediately, friends with a Shoplette account will be notified of what you just bought.

Furthermore, any Shoplette member can track your purchases and even vote on whether the buy is a terrific bargain or not. The more highly rated your purchase, the more visible it is on Shoplette’s main site.

This is a good approximation of the word-of-mouth effect, according to Shannon.

The fact that Shoplette is easy to use is another plus.

Besides user-submitted content, business owners can also set up a virtual shop on Shoplette. Basic accounts are free (for now) but featured sites which appear in a prominent position on the website are charged an affordable fee of US$10 (S$14.50) a month.
…

You can read the full article here.

Shoplette Reloaded!

We’ve been pretty quiet on the development front for a while, largely because we’ve been working on a revamp of Shoplette’s user interface and Shop-related features over the past month. We’re now happy to announce the relaunch of Shoplette with a spanking new interface that’s more fun and easier to use.

The new interface features an easy-to-use “Show me” navigation widget in the right-hand column that brings you to all our shopping feeds, as well as related shopping information when you’re looking at shopping locations and items. The new gallery also simplifies everything and lets you focus on what you’re really interested in – what other people bought and where they bought it.

Special thanks to our friends Andy Croll at Deepcalm and Stuart Wason at Headspace for their invaluable help and advice in our revamp.

We’ll also be releasing a new set of shop-related features very soon, so look out for it!

In the meantime, please explore our new look!

Talk to us: What do you think of our new look?

Sharing Experiences

One of Mobrick’s central philosophies is about sharing experiences around people’s passions. That reflects the kinds of community platforms, crowdsourcing sites and social networks that we build. Given that, we came across an interesting quote in relation to the photographer, Ansel Adams, today.

It is probably correct to say that we can describe an idea more precisely than we can an experience. Perhaps experience itself cannot really be described, and to distract attention from this fact we retreat to metaphor, and say that the dawn came up like thunder or that the fog crept in on little cat’s feet. The simplest and most common experience – the taste of water, let us say – has not yet been communicated in words or pictures, and most of us probably do not expect this breakthrough soon. Yet we might agree that our arts are at bottom an effort to do this – to give objective form not to our ideas but to our visceral knowledge.

- From “Ansel Adams at 100″ by John Szarkowski

So one way we look at our challenge is how to find meaningful ways for people to share experiences in more than the usual “status update”. That’s what makes this journey interesting for us.