Moglue Makes It Dead Si...

Creating and publishing content-rich, interactive ebooks without programming skills or distribution power: that’s the problem New York- and Seoul-based startup  Moglue  is trying to solve. The  TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing finalist  offers two products: MoglueBuilder (a desktop app that makes it dead simple for authors and artists to create and publish interactive ebooks) and  MoglueBooks  (an ebook store on iOS for users who just want to browse and consume content). MoglueBuilder ( download  for Windows and Mac) has been in open beta for a few weeks and was downloaded by more than 20,000 creators worldwide so far, according to Moglue. With the new version that just launched, authors and artists can create interactive ebooks using a drag-and-drop-based UI and directly publish them to MoglueBooks to reach their audience – no programming required. Moglue is currently focused on children’s books, but the platform is suitable to make any kind of content interactive. It’s possible to spice up texts with images (backgrounds, characters, etc.), effects, sounds, and animations. For instance, a bird appearing in a children’s book could start flying up into the air and chirping when touched by the reader’s finger to make the story more appealing to children. All elements can be customized in the property editor to, for example, determine how high the aforementioned bird should fly on the given page when touched. Creators can also record and add voices to each page to tell the story: all that kids need to do in that case is to listen, interact with the elements and touch the screen to turn pages. MoglueBuilder offers a whole range of other bells and whistles, i.e. background music, that can be uploaded and added to the ebooks. With Moglue, amateur authors can create interactive ebooks that actually look and sound fantastic. Just check the 11 sample ebooks that are currently available in the MoglueBooks   iOS app  (which is the store that creators publish to). These selected ebooks (interactive versions of Pinocchio, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, etc.) are available for free for the next four weeks. All books published to MoglueBooks must be set to free by authors between now and the next four weeks. As in the case of the aforementioned sample ebooks that are currently free, Moglue uses this measure to kick-start demand on the platform: after the four weeks, authors can start charging for their ebooks freely. Creators using MoglueBuilder can publish to MoglueBooks for free during a promotion period, which ends this summer (publishing details and pricing plan  here ). 23-year old Moglue CEO Taewoo Kim tells me that starting around the same time, authors will also be able to publish directly to the App Store, under their own developer account. From summer, it will also be possible to publish books as individual apps to Google Play and Amazon’s App Store through MoglueBuilder (MoglueBooks for Android will be rolled out during that time, too). The startup has raised about US$450,000 from Korean investors last month, following a US$540,000 seed round in October 2010. A big distribution deal has been closed in April, too:  Kyobo , Korea’s largest offline and online book store as I’ve been told, chose Moglue as the platform to expand its business to interactive ebooks. With Kyobo covering the domestic market, the startup is now planning to keep focusing its energy on the global market for interactive ebooks. Moglue is, for instance, thinking about expanding the platform to other categories such as educational books, manuals, visual novels, etc.

Facebook Now Lets Users...

Facebook has been credited with helping to power the ‘Arab Spring’ movement of democracy, and in further ‘we plan to save the world’ news, it is now unveiling a new feature: tell the world you’re an organ donar. Starting today, you can add that you’re an organ donor to your timeline, and share your story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor, says Facebook . If you’re not already registered with a U.S. state or U.S.-based national organ donation registry they are linking to the official donor registry as well. However, support for sharing that you are an organ donar in another country outside the U.S. is very patchy. “London” is not recognised, although “Londonderry” is. Cardiff returns a blank, though it’s fine if you happen to be in “Moscow City, Russia”. Maybe all it’s based on where you’re more likely to be injured? Go figure. Here’s their full post. Organ Donation: Friends Saving Lives May 01, 2012 Facebook is about connecting and sharing – connecting with your friends, family and communities, and sharing information with them about your life, work, school and interests. On any given day more than half a billion people share billions of stories, updates and photos. What has amazed us over the past eight years is how people use these same tools and social dynamics to address important issues and challenges in their communities. Last year in Missouri, Facebook users tracked down and returned treasured mementos to families who thought they’d lost everything in the Joplin tornado. In Japan, people used Facebook to locate family and friends following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Smaller acts of kindness happen millions of times a day on Facebook. We never could have anticipated that what started as a small network would evolve into such a powerful tool for communication and problem solving. As this happens, we hope to build tools that help people transform the way we all solve worldwide social problems. Today, more than 114,000 people in the United States, and millions more around the globe, are waiting for the heart, kidney or liver transplant that will save their lives. Many of those people – an average of 18 people per day – will die waiting, because there simply aren’t enough organ donors to meet the need. Medical experts believe that broader awareness about organ donation could go a long way toward solving this crisis. And we believe that by simply telling people that you’re an organ donor, the power of sharing and connection can play an important role. Starting today, you can add that you’re an organ donor to your timeline, and share your story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor. If you’re not already registered with your state or national registry and want to be, you’ll find a link to the official donor registry there as well.

Tips For Flacks From A ...

Editor’s note: Nick Gonzalez is a web entrepreneur and former journalist for TechCrunch. Nick has seen the PR business from both sides; first while at TechCrunch and later working with Covered Co. , a Silicon Valley PR/Marketing agency that has worked with companies like Dropbox, WhatsApp and Secure.me. Nick currently resides in Dubai, where he co-founded Nervora , which represents MENA region ad sales for the world’s leading publishing brands including Conde Nast, CBSi, Hearst, Gawker Media, and more. He can be found on LinkedIn . There are two kinds of stories: great ones and the ones that have to be pitched. This article isn’t about great stories. I have a lot of fond memories from TechCrunch — being there when the YouTube acquisition broke, covering the rise of Y Combinator, and generally speaking to people a recent college grad had no right chatting with, let alone interrogating about their company. However, getting pitched wasn’t one of them. Pitching the press is a lot like trying to close any other business deal — sans the excitement of any money changing hands. In fact, “selling” a pitch means creating more work for the writer, who has to dig into the details of your pitch and craft a story. That being said, let me help the inquisitive PR professional or budding startup CEO with some perspective on how to help the stories that need to be pitched make it through the process. Know the Type of Story Before you even bother picking up the phone, know what kind of story you’re pitching. While creativity makes a story interesting, most follow a pretty standard template. There are financing stories (Company X raised Y from Z), traction updates (X is growing like a week), product launches (X wants to be the Y of Z), the counterfactual (you’d think X, but really it’s Y), wow numbers (Did you know that X,XXX,XXX do Y?), and many more. Notice the patterns. Be the patterns or break them with a thoughtful opinion piece. Be genuine I always preferred talking to founders over their PR handlers. They could not only answer the questions more completely, but also conveyed a real excitement about what they were doing. Also, founders garner a lot more empathy because not so secretly everyone writing at a tech blog wants to be them ( Paul Carr , Ben Parr , Eric Eldon , need I go on…). If you’re not a founder, you’ll need to figure out how to get a lot nerdier quickly and network with all those wanna-be founder writers. Know Your Writer Each writer has their own perspective and style. Get to know them and it will help guide who to approach and how. Follow up with writers that covered similar companies. Share an intelligent perspective based on their previous stories. In other words, don’t pitch MG on anything other than Apple. Find Free Cycles TechCrunch now has a lot of writers. You may want your story to be written by one of them in particular, but you’d be better served by realizing they all reach millions of readers each month. Mostly likely the top writers are busy on pressing stories or pet projects, so you could do yourself a solid by reaching out down the lineup to find someone with some free time, the kind of free time that can be spent vetting your story to write-up themselves or pass on to someone covering your beat. Writers are Lazy It may not be so much that writers are lazy, as they are pressed for time and starved for the kind of attention that only writing yet another story about the Facebook acquisition of Instagram can sate. But what I really mean is that writers are the curators of interestingness. News is by definition what is now novel. You make your story infinitely easier to get picked up by doing some of the heavy lifting and placing it in an interesting package. Story vehicles like industry studies and info graphics educate while letting the writer take care of the rest of the exposition. Exist At the end of the day, it’s all about trusted relationships. By staying in the industry, your longevity lends some credibility to your competence and ideally more solid connections. If you know a writer well, it’s not a guarantee of a story, but it’s the best shot at getting written up. Also keep in mind that it’s a small industry. So try not to be this guy .

Tips For Flacks From A ...

Editor’s note: Nick Gonzalez is a web entrepreneur and former journalist for TechCrunch. Nick has seen the PR business from both sides; first while at TechCrunch and later working with Covered Co. , a Silicon Valley PR/Marketing agency that has worked with companies like Dropbox, WhatsApp and Secure.me. Nick currently resides in Dubai, where he co-founded Nervora , which represents MENA region ad sales for the world’s leading publishing brands including Conde Nast, CBSi, Hearst, Gawker Media, and more. He can be found on LinkedIn . There are two kinds of stories: great ones and the ones that have to be pitched. This article isn’t about great stories. I have a lot of fond memories from TechCrunch — being there when the YouTube acquisition broke, covering the rise of Y Combinator, and generally speaking to people a recent college grad had no right chatting with, let alone interrogating about their company. However, getting pitched wasn’t one of them. Pitching the press is a lot like trying to close any other business deal — sans the excitement of any money changing hands. In fact, “selling” a pitch means creating more work for the writer, who has to dig into the details of your pitch and craft a story. That being said, let me help the inquisitive PR professional or budding startup CEO with some perspective on how to help the stories that need to be pitched make it through the process. Know the Type of Story Before you even bother picking up the phone, know what kind of story you’re pitching. While creativity makes a story interesting, most follow a pretty standard template. There are financing stories (Company X raised Y from Z), traction updates (X is growing like a week), product launches (X wants to be the Y of Z), the counterfactual (you’d think X, but really it’s Y), wow numbers (Did you know that X,XXX,XXX do Y?), and many more. Notice the patterns. Be the patterns or break them with a thoughtful opinion piece. Be genuine I always preferred talking to founders over their PR handlers. They could not only answer the questions more completely, but also conveyed a real excitement about what they were doing. Also, founders garner a lot more empathy because not so secretly everyone writing at a tech blog wants to be them ( Paul Carr , Ben Parr , Eric Eldon , need I go on…). If you’re not a founder, you’ll need to figure out how to get a lot nerdier quickly and network with all those wanna-be founder writers. Know Your Writer Each writer has their own perspective and style. Get to know them and it will help guide who to approach and how. Follow up with writers that covered similar companies. Share an intelligent perspective based on their previous stories. In other words, don’t pitch MG on anything other than Apple. Find Free Cycles TechCrunch now has a lot of writers. You may want your story to be written by one of them in particular, but you’d be better served by realizing they all reach millions of readers each month. Mostly likely the top writers are busy on pressing stories or pet projects, so you could do yourself a solid by reaching out down the lineup to find someone with some free time, the kind of free time that can be spent vetting your story to write-up themselves or pass on to someone covering your beat. Writers are Lazy It may not be so much that writers are lazy, as they are pressed for time and starved for the kind of attention that only writing yet another story about the Facebook acquisition of Instagram can sate. But what I really mean is that writers are the curators of interestingness. News is by definition what is now novel. You make your story infinitely easier to get picked up by doing some of the heavy lifting and placing it in an interesting package. Story vehicles like industry studies and info graphics educate while letting the writer take care of the rest of the exposition. Exist At the end of the day, it’s all about trusted relationships. By staying in the industry, your longevity lends some credibility to your competence and ideally more solid connections. If you know a writer well, it’s not a guarantee of a story, but it’s the best shot at getting written up. Also keep in mind that it’s a small industry. So try not to be this guy .

Mike Daisey Says His Sh...

The episode and transcript of the This American Life episode retracting Mike Daisey’s piece about Apple and Foxconn are now live. If this is an issue you care about, you should listen to the whole thing. As host Ira Glass announced yesterday , the show found “significant fabrications” in the story, to the point where “we can’t vouch for its truth.” For example, Daisey admits that he never met a worker who had been poisoned by n-hexane, as he claimed in the episode (which was a version of his one-man show “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”) Many other aspects of Daisey’s account, like his meeting with allegedly underage Foxconn workers, were also disputed by his translator, although Daisey still says that they happened.  In a blog post , Daisey says he stands by his work, but he regrets allowing TAL to excerpt the show because it’s “not journalism.” One of the most amazing things about the episode was the fact that Mike Daisey is, in fact, an eloquent critic of Mike Daisey. At one point, Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz (who tracked down Daisey’s translator) asks, “Does it matter if the things you’ve said in this play are untrue?” Daisey replies: Yeah I think the truth always matters, truth is tremendously  important. I don’t live in a subjective universe where everything is up for grabs. I really do believe that stories should be subordinate to the truth. To which I can only say: Yes. Even if “most of what he said was, technically, true” and “his mission to help the oppressed was a good one” ( as our own John Biggs put it yesterday ), it sounds like Daisey still failed to get the facts right. To borrow his own phrase, he subordinated the truth of what he actually saw to the larger story that he wanted to tell. Daisey seems to be a member of the William Faulkner school, which holds that “ the best fiction is far more true than any journalism. ” Except he isn’t willing to call his show fiction. When asked if he should label his show a “work of fiction,” Daisey pushes back, arguing that it’s true “in a theatrical context” (at which point I started to think about Bill Clinton dissembling about “ the meaning of word ‘is’ “). Glass says: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word. The real tragedy here is it reduces this enormously complex, difficult issue into the story of one man. Luckily, no one seems to be saying, “Okay, well, Mike Daisey’s story was untrue, so I don’t have to think about that stuff anymore!” This American Life closes its retraction with an interview of Charles Duhigg, one of the reporters of an investigative series in The New York Times about Apple. Duhigg goes into a lot of detail about what we know and don’t know about how Foxconn treats its workers, and what Apple is doing about it (again, listen to the whole episode). Ultimately, he says we still need to ask ourselves, “Do you feel comfortable knowing that iPhones and iPads and, and other products could be manufactured in less harsh conditions, but that these harsh conditions and perpetuate because of an economy that you are … supporting with your dollars.” It’s something that people have said before , but it’s something that we need to be reminded of again and again. Which is what Mike Daisey did.