Last Thursday we were one of the demo startups at Launch Party 5, a networking event for the tech startup industry here in Vancouver. One of the other six startups there was ZinePal, a service that makes it easy to print out blogs and websites into a kind of magazine (thus the zine part of the name).
I felt an affinity to the maker of ZinePal and I seen found out why, he’s built his web site using Java as well. He’s using a more advanced method of generating PDF files than I am; he is using XML Formatting Objects and XSLT whereas I’m using the Flying Saucer XHTML Renderer project to generate PDF invoices.
Like many startups, ZinePal is starting with a feature set and looking for a market. So far the project looks really nice, but the big question mark for him is: where is the market?
I was chatting with him and he had some ideas of how people would use his service, like:
- Bloggers can promote themselves locally by printing the magazines and dropping them off at coffee shops and other hang-outs where readers might pick them up and decide to visit the blog online
- Offices can print out relevant blogs and news as a ‘zine to leave in the lounge for employees to read during lunch and breaks
- Transit commuters could print out a ‘zine to read on the way to and from work, to keep amused
Of course, some amount of “printing” is already possible with websites - ZinePal just makes it much easier and prints cleaner, more organized zines than you’d get by hand. So, what are people willing to pay for the “easy factor”?
Also, people with laptops and iPhones might be able to read blogs directly while commuting, and those who aren’t so tech savvy might not run into ZinePal at all.
As it is now, I’m not sure whether people would pay a lot of money for it. However, it could make for an interesting passive revenue stream. People who benefit from the service might be willing to pay a trivial amount for it, say $20 per year. With enough clients this could be a decent supplementary income for someone who is (hopefully) already earning a great salary as a Java software engineer.
The alternative would be to “go big” and turn this into “the”
social magazine publishing platform. If the toolset is rich enough users could literally create their own printable, professional looking magazine or newsletter, complete with ads, pictures, great layouts, covers, classifieds, comic strips, etc.. A concept like “become the editor in chief of the internet” where it becomes really easy to make nice magazines. Then it would be interesting to clubs, schools, churches, hobby journalists, and nice people who want to aggregate internet content into a nice magazines, newspapers, or newsletters to give to (or even sell to) their group.
Tags: flying saucer, invoice software, java ee, pdf, pdf invoices, xml, zinepal
This entry was posted
on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 8:32 pm by Dobes
and is filed under Business Insights, Reviews.
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