Tactiloft blog

It is a question that I have mulled over for a decade — comparing the internet to a street: why do we blog in isolated roads rather than set ourselves up along highways? In other words, how we distribute (and sell!) the best of what is produced in the digital sphere?

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A blogger since 2005, I created my own company in 2008 in order to find a solution to what our colleagues call “the media crisis,” aka: the formidable destruction of market value that cultural actors, from the music industry to the film industry, as well those in the press and publishing have been experiencing since the prehistoric era of digital (1990-2010). This also correlates to an overabundance of wide-ranging offerings (the offer strategy)

At my small company, 22MarsSAS, which was created following the adventure of the PoliTIC-Show, we founded OWNI, Object Web Non Identifié (Unidentified Web Object), (the same month the iPad came out!) an open-sky laboratory dedicated to web publishing and data journalism (nb: I ceded OWNI to OWNI SAS, an independent company, in May, 2012).

In 2011, a member of our team won a Knight Foundation fellowship at Stanford University, while OWNI was the winner of the “world prize in journalistic excellence” (Washington DC) and was a finalist in South by Southwest’s start-up competition (Austin, Texas).

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It was at this time that an idea, which turned into a vision and then became the fundamental purpose of our company, began to take form: what if the best place for a blogger was simply a bank or a department store — places where money is exchanged? The only place where the financial transaction is the essence corresponding to the passage is…

The conclusion is shocking: the most efficient digital department store, the only “bank,” needed to activate both terminals and tactile services, is a giant: Apple. Furthermore, Apple only has one terminal dedicated to qualitative media content, the iPad. But…

• To date, there is no blogging solution. A simple, instantaneous and free publishing option optimized for its environment does not exist for iPad, at least not in a satisfactory manner;

• To date, there is no content consultation network truly edited and issued for the iPad experience to target this “rich” audience specific to Apple;

• Finally, no app or read/write platform allows integration of optimized ‘in app purchase’, the purchasing board.

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The RSS era is over, and with it ends the unsatisfactory implementation of web content onto the best tablet. The “hypercards” era is beginning, an era of social publishing in real time, of sharing and buying works in the spirit of “responding to touch and pinch”. 

Tactilize is the result of this vision: a start-up 100% focused on publishing, reading, and social consummation of media in the “post-url” era of tablets, dedicated to the most satisfactory user experience, the Apple tablet — the iPad.

With Tactilize you can create your own interactive cards, rich iPad screens organized in collections and categories that are redefined throughout their distribution, and share them with your favorite social networks.

For those who wish to monetize their creations, you can sell the best of your work within the Apple ecosystem — which is more than an application, more than a blog, and more than a card.

Tactilize will be available for free in the AppStore in a few weeks. Until then, we are coding, coding, coding.

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PS: For more information, you can make appointments, follow our blog, and / or meet us at Techcrunch Disrupt, San Francisco, from September 8 to 12, 2012. And by then, book your @Username /-)

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Nicolas Voisin is the CEO of Tactilize. He was the founder of the media company OWNI. This blogpost was originaly posted in french, on his own blog ‘dot app’.