Tattletech Hot Seat

Martin Ferro-Thomsen is a Co-Founder of the leading digital publishing service Issuu, a Time.com best website and twice a SXSW finalist that today serves 3,6 billion monthly pages & 47 million monthly users. He is currently Founder & CEO at Conferize, a stealth startup looking to become the main destination for all conferences in the world.

This week, I exchanged emails with Martin regarding the orgin of Issuu and digital publishing’s rise in popularity.

Tattletech: Everybody loves an origin story. How did Issuu come to be?

Martin Ferro-Thomsen: We wanted to do something around publishing. We had seen Youtube and Skype challenge the existing world in each their category. With publishing what you had back in 2006 was basically dull and heavy PDF files being emailed and downloaded. Or you’d pay a gazillion for a bad pageflip application that really didn’t look like publishing to us. So, we wanted to build the world’s best publishing solution that came as close to the real world as possible, with a few extra digital tricks up its sleeve of course. And then we’d give it away for free to empower anyone to publish online, other than just putting up blog or go on MySpace (which people did in the millions back then). We wanted to make print digital, so to speak. The ‘free’ part was hard to swallow for most investors, but eventually we found someone who shared our vision of things and they’ve backed us ever since.

Tattletech: So you killed MySpace! Did you ever think of charging for the service or was being able to offer it for free always a central part of the idea?

M F-T: I think MySpace pretty much engineered its demise on its own. Well, free doesn’t pay the bills and eventually we ended up with huge hosting costs, literally serving billions of pages. Today it’s close to four billion pages a month. Who said people didn’t read? Happily lots of people were asking for special features and we introduced Issuu Pro that is selling really well. This week we introduced Issuu Reseller so you can actually make money with us. So we do alright. We also serve ads, or, I should say, ad, singular, cause we only have one ad per publication. But without ruining the reading experience. That’s pretty dear to us (unlike some competitors we know but don’t speak of here).

Tattletech: This seems to have been a spring of really good growth for you guys. Could you explain a bit of what you are trying to accomplish with Issuu Reseller?

M F-T: Well B2B is still a valid business model in the digital publishing space. We have publishers and businesses coming to us that used to pay as much as $1,000 per publication. Not kidding. Our Issuu Pro is $19 for all you can eat, err publish. That’s an incredible margin and the creative agencies and freelancers with publishing clients of course noticed that and wanted to create a business around that. And we’re not looking to hire a huge support and sales staff because we’re all about automation and scalability. So it was a no-brainer for us. With Issuu Reseller you can manage any number of accounts on behalf of clients and even get discounts the more you use it. The reseller can bundle our service with his special talents, e.g. more customization and support than we offer, and charge whatever he likes. Everyone wins! Although the product is less than a week old, we’ve already seen twice the adoption we expected, so it’s all good.

Tattletech: There is a dangerous conception that digital publishing’s goal is to kill of traditional “paper” publication. How do you see your relationship with other method of publication?

M F-T: It’s no more dramatic than the CD replacing vinyl, and eventually MP3 and lately the rise of streaming music on demand. It’s progress and that’s a good thing. In a decade or so, only the retro fetishists will use print, like with vinyl today. We know that all media evolution happens on a cumulative basis (I still listen to FM radio sometimes!). That said though, at Issuu we’re fanatical about print. I used to be a print editor and journalist. There’s still something about print that cannot be reproduced on digital platforms. It’s tangible, it’s mobile and durable, and it smells nice. Especially if it’s your own writing you see for the first time in print. Look at Google! They recently put out their Think Quarterly in print, which is hand delivered for free to special VIPs. There’s nothing VIP about an ebook, right? It’s also out in HTML and mobile web – and on Issuu. Reading is not going away, but reading itself and it’s vehicles are changing and multiplying. But it’s not the end of print, it’s the end of out of print (to quote Finnemann). And without print, no Issuu. Let’s never forget that.

– Jason Oberholtzer

Follow Martin on Twitter and check out his brain-children Issuu and Conferize.

Tags: digital publishing, Electronic publishing, Google, HTML, Issuu, Jason Oberholtzer, Martin Ferro-Thomsen, MySpace, Portable Document Format, Publishing, Q&A

Show me the way (that is a Frampton reference)

This week in a ReadWriteWeb article on the changes of MySpace, the writer Marshall Kirkpatrick said “Facebook can’t rule the world for ever.  No one can.” We could not agree more – we believe social networking should represent a free exchange of personal data, contacts, photos, videos and any content the user want to share. Instead of a walled garden, we see a community garden that allows users interact, share, exchange, collaborate, and discuss whatever they want to.  This raises a question around social networking in general – is it “platform agnostic” or not?  Absent any substantial differences in quality, does it really matter whether you park your online persona at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of other sites?

Obviously, we don’t know exactly what the future looks like – if any of our readers do, please e-mail us!  But we do think that the future of social networking is not going to be about the providers/platforms per se, but about the larger community and how providers facilitate user interaction.  Open standards or open social may be at the bedrock of this future networking, going hand in hand with the augmented reality demonstrated by LBS.  Just a quick glance in the direction of Egypt in the past year or two, and more recently Iran, shows exactly what we are talking about: its back to the old saying that its the message (real time interaction) that counts, not the media (Facebook, Twitter, et al). – JLH

Tags: Facebook, Marshall Kirkpatrick, MySpace, Social network

Download this! Loopt and iPhone

So today TechCrunch ran a story about how Loopt (which turns your iPhone into a social compass – jeepers, we love that tagline!) has surpassed Facebook and MySpace in terms of which is downloaded more – apparently Loopt which embraces location based services is the 20th most downloded application for iPhone. Okay so to put into perspective, since June 2008, there have been more than 6,000 applications created for the iPhone. And since you know love math, that translates into the top 1/3 of the top 1% -fancy!

And for a sidebar that isn’t related since Tattletech is jet lagged, a great story on NPR about all the games that have been created for iPhone- we specially like this one game created by Neil Young (not the singer) who used to be at Electronic Arts who calls his move “temporary insanity” which means he will do really well.

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Tags: Entrepreneurs, Facebook, IPhone, Loopt, MySpace, Social network, TechCrunch, Twitter

Getting inside mySpace at ETRE

Great link posted on the BBC today — Rory Cellan Jones talked to MySpace and gets a pretty candid discussion out of him about the future. He also pointed out the politics of both Tim Draper and Rob Glaser and how they both tip toed around them on stage in the middle of this political race and market turmoil. Good stuff.

Tags: BBC, Cellan Jones, MySpace, Red Herring, Rob Glaser, Rory Cellan Jones, Tim Draper

Missing from ETRE – Noovo

Image via CrunchBase

Noovo. Andrej Nabergoj and his brilliant team have delivered the next generation for social networking centered around content creation. That is what we think. We use it. Daily, like oxygen. It is more than Facebook, more than MySpace  – it’s usable, practical and brings in feeds from all your other applications. No, not like that traffic jam of a mess over at FriendFeed, but real convergence of your social networking applications and real content. Creation of content! You just don’t pass it around or send a fun game or tag, you create content and that content generates more content so your pool grows. Your access to content expands and is related to you because you decide what to read, share and send.

It is what the next billion users will turn to – as systems that is fluid, intuitive and  a part of your community and who you are. Feel the force, Luke.

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Tags: Andrej Nabergoj, Facebook, MySpace, noovo, Social network service