Reading on the iPad can be a great experience, but for old school publishers, optimizing content for the iPad can be a costly and discouraging process, albeit completely necessary for survival.
Onswipe, a New York City based startup, aims to make the publishing experience more enjoyable for the reader from both the editorial experience and the advertising side. Armed with skills in coding and software development, and support from TechStars‘, entrepreneurs Jason Baptiste and Andres Barreto, along with their third co-founder Mark Bao launched Onswipe on June 21st of this year.
In July, they opened Onswipe self-serve platform, which means that in less than 3 minutes, anyone can go to Onswipe.com, click and get started. Simply connect your WordPress URL, Twitter account, or Instragram user name, pick a design, upload your logo, pick accent color and copy and paste the Javascript code into the header of your blog theme or CSS, wherever you’d put the Google Analytics code.
This holiday season, Onswipe partnered with WIRED and Conde Nast to power the Wired Store initiative for the iPad. Baptiste says this partnership includes a small preview of where they’re taking the platform in 2012. While Onswipe currently offers just 4 layout choices, the company will offer an infinite amount soon, because anyone will be able to create their own layout. Baptiste says that writing a layout for either articles or table of contents will be as easy as writing clean and simple CSS. While WIRED is the first to check it out, it will be available for everyone else in 2012.
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Custom layout Wired made very easily:
In addition to writing your own layouts, the new version introduces another piece of technology called “Swipecore.” Swipecore is Onswipe’s library for native-like, touch interactions on the web. The technology lets you swipe from page to page, use two finger fastforward and three finger pinch to close, but Baptiste says there will be “way more coming in the future”.
“It’s fully flexible and it could easily be two fingers for an interaction or six. As we move from a touch and swipe world, people are going to need this technology,” says Baptiste.
Swipecore enabled page:
While the new technology is demoed on WIRED’s holiday store, Baptiste says Onswipe is not getting into E-Commerce. “This just shows how flexible and powerful the platform is. Publishers are going to use it to put content on the tablet web in ways we’ve never imagined,” he says.
Onswipe’s business model is still 100% ad driven. It allows publishers to make money with beautiful, custom ads. The more experiences Onswipe powers, the more places it can put its crafted advertising so that readers can enjoy it and publishers can make revenue off of it.
“We want to be the platform that powers the way the world experiences the web on the tablet. If Google organizes the world’s information, we want to be the platform that powers the experience for that information in a touch and swipe world,” says Onswipe CEO Jason L. Baptiste.
Onswipe raised $5 million in a “Series Awesome” round led by Spark Capital, Lightbank, Yuri Milner, Lerer Ventures, SVAngel, Betaworks, Morado, Eniac and Thrive Capital, totaling $6 million in funding to date.
To learn more about how Onswipe works with advertisers, read here.
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