The Winksite Difference: Part 2

“In order to create communicontent, pure content needs meta-data, and pure communication needs organization.” – Russel Beattie.

Look around. Winksite delivers benefits very different from Blogger, TypePad, NewBay, TextAmerica, TagTag, MyWap, UPOC and Blah! et al. Although we provide various tools for moblogging, we should not be mistaken as a competitor to blogging companies. More accurately we should be considered a useful service available to the entire blogging community. Winksite is unique to the space, providing mobile-to-mobile enhancements to any blog or journal.

One of our goals is to help get content onto subscriber’s phones and so grow the author’s audience. Why? The mobile audience is huge – The GSM Association has announced that the number of subscribers to GSM wireless networks has surpassed the one billion mark. That’s roughly equivalent to one-sixth of the entire world population. In fact, worldwide most people access the Internet not from their desktop or wi-fi notebook but from handheld web-enabled devices.

Let’s connect everyone to all the great content and thoughts bouncing around the “Blogsphere.” Don’t leave anyone out or behind or without a voice. If you want to place an even grander purpose to that objective just think of how concepts published in such works as Joichi Ito’sEmergent Democracy” could transform the world as they flow free and actionable across phones of citizens throughout the world.

The Winksite Difference:

  1. Any individual or group using their choice of weblog service (via any flavor of syndication feed) can create a mobile edition of their blog that’s viewable universally across a broadspectum of web-enabled devices and carriers worldwide.
  2. Any individual or group can choose to activate ancillary mobile channels that transforms this mobile content space into a powerful communication, collaboration and coordination tool, increasing its utilitarianism.

Content + People + Mobile Device = Mobile Community

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The WINKsite Story

Phones are Changing and Phone Usage is Changing Alone With It. There is a revolution going on all over the world. People from Japan to Korea to Europe to the United States are engaging content on mobile devices in record numbers – in fact mobile access to the Internet has already surpassed desktop access. Also rising are expectations as to how you should be able to share content and communicate with the people around you.

Fueling this increase has been the astonishingly rapid rise of blogs in the last 18 months along with the proliferation of web-enabled phones – the most enthusiastic bloggers could now go mobile and with the adoption of web-enabled phones by the mass market this opportunity is rapidly spreading into mainstream. The market is literally exploding, with 1.2 billion mobile devices currently in use – and is projected to grow to 2 billion by 2006 (Cover Story: “The Next Big Thing . . . Is Now,” Business 2.0. July 2003).

As the World Wide Web showed, things really take off when users build out their own real estate rather than relying on vendors to supply accommodations. The success of the Web was due not to mass production and economies of scale, but rather to distributed development of local content and economies driven by individual passion.

WINKsite Mobile Communities – A Better Way to Stay Connected. The blogging world is overflowing with ways to send information – text, photos, video, geographical data – from a mobile device to a conventional Weblog or Web Site. But, what is blatantly missing and quite critical is a community-based solution that provides a space where individuals can meet, share and interact with content from mobile device to mobile device – “closing the loop.”

Tapping into the metadata capabilities of RSS/ATOM feeds, WINKsite is able to go beyond the limits of basic content publishing to deliver a more relevant, more precise means of information distribution and device independent delivery. WINKsite provides a platform for creating true mobile communities: spaces both publishable and accessible via phones and other mobile devices. Taking that much deeper, WINKsite integrates this content with mobile-to-mobile networking and syndication features, transforming your mobile device into a powerful publishing, collaboration and coordination tool, increasing its utilitarianism.

Critical to the creation of truly useful mobile communities is providing features that support the needs of various social networks (as described in Ross Mayfield's “Ecosystem of Networks”): (1) the “Me” network, consisting of one person who needs personal productivity tools, (2) the “Creative” network, in which a dozen or more people collaborate on a project, (3) the “Social” network, in which hundreds of people share a common interest need to communicate, and (4) the “Political” network, in which thousands of people need to access breaking news and calls to action.

WINKsite Leads the Next Generation of Mobile Applications Delivering Benefits Very Different from Blogger, TypePad, NewBay, TextAmerica, Tagtag, MyWap, UPOC and Blah! et al. We've spent close to three years developing our platform and it lets individuals publish, share, broadcast and interact with mobile content in ways not previously possible. We made WINKsite so simple that if you know how to make a phone call or use voice mail you will understand how to use it after a single glance. Now that the core WINKsite platform is complete and a significant amount of data usage is streaming through the system, WINKsite is growing to include Photoblogging, Downloads, Group Messaging & Coordination, Location-Based Services, Microcontent Catalog & Payment Systems, Personalized Content Feeds, SMS/MMS Feed Notification Services, Personalized Interfaces/Skins, Automated Enterprise Content Syndication, Rich Media Delivery, Social Network Mapping (FOAF), Paid Search & Content Listings, Direct Integration with Weblogs and other valuable features.

As an intrinsically XML-based system, WINKsite will grow into the role of a clearinghouse mobilizing content both local and global in nature supporting a directory, content & community mobilization service, becoming embedded into other companies' web sites in a way not possible for other content publishing or blogging systems. The features that we add to the system will generally have accessible APIs that third parties can use to tap our services at the data level, creating innovative services dependent on WINKsite.

The Rapid Financial Success of Messaging and Downloading Mobile Content Will Soon Grow Beyond Fragmented, Single-Focus Services. Therein lies a phenomenal market for brands, entertainment, portals & directory services, financial institutions and media companies to leverage their culture, messages, and offerings through mobile communities – extending their brands in a mobile environment. WINKsite offers the world's leading brands an opportunity to integrate mobile as part of the company's everyday media mix or service process. WINKsite's systems integration approach to the production and distribution of wireless online content services eliminates the barriers that have limited the “adoption of” or “traffic to” wireless applications in the past. WINKsite provides a suite of turnkey applications and mobile channels that enable brands to manage and distribute mobile content, media and promotions to the masses within a community-based environment. The result, their audience be it subscribers, customers, or fans can easily interact with the brand's programs via their mobile device within an environment that's useful, sticky and builds loyalty. These mobile concepts can be implemented together with a client or in cooperation with a third partner such as a systems integrator, advertising companies, carrier or media company. Wireless Ink is already working with various players in the television, music and publishing industries to mobilize their offerings.

Warren Ellis Goes Mobile

This just in from Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing – “New mobile short stories for your WAP — Warren Ellis Portable — phone.

“Warren Ellis Portable” — Thirteen ultrashort stories in permanent installation, from author/blogger/geek-mentor Warren Ellis, “For those long train/bus trips, extended visits to the toilet, whatever.”

Warren Ellis writes, “I've set up two new sites for WAP-enabled mobile phones or wireless-enabled PDAs.”

Warren Ellis Portable” : I've loaded it up with thirteen short stories from here and elsewhere.

“Phone Puny Humans: The Winksite system — about which more another time — hooks into the RSS feed from a blog and turns it into a WAP site, doing all the work for me. All you do is copy the URL your RSS feed is on, and paste it into the related box on your Winksite control panel. So there it is — diepunyhumans.com in mobile phone flavour.”

About Warren Ellis
Since 1990 Warren Ellis has written some thirty graphic novels, including the award-winning sf work TRANSMETROPOLITAN, the best selling DV8 and WOLVERINE: NOT DEAD YET, the influential THE AUTHORITY and STORMWATCH, and the optioned-for-television PLANETARY. He has also written the PC game HOSTILE WATERS, has had short fiction published by NATURE and White Wolf, adapted the sf novel MINDBRIDGE for an animated feature film currently in pre-production, and created a book of short prose and photography, AVAILABLE LIGHT. He is currently under exclusive contract to DC Comics for graphic novel and serial comics work.

He was featured in Entertainment Weekly's 100 Most Creative People In Entertainment, and in Rolling Stone's Hot Issue list of creatives. He has the International Horror Guild award for graphic narrative.