While in the midst of organizing the annual unConference event, e27 went under the blankets with the founders of Mobrick, Shannon Low and Loon Kok Keong. These two lads have launched two products, Shoplette and Zinerepublic.

These two lads have always been interested in technology, the web and what it can do to bring people together in online communities and collaborative situation. Loving how it allows people to share information and ideas across borders, and enabling people to gather around a common passion. What is really fascinating to them is not the web and technology, but the outcome of when people gather and share – what people are able to do when to collaborate openly and virtually. Both dudes, like seeing that happen and thus inspired.

The ideas for one of their product, Shoplette (www.shoplette.com), came from a typical conversation among friends. As one would say “Check out this new… that I bought!” and showed it off to their friends, and typically, a friend would ask in reply of “Where did you get it?” That everyday conversation gave them an idea to create a niche social network for shoppers and shopping intelligence tool to enable shoppers to take that conversation online among a community of like- minded shoppers.

Their later product, Zinerepublic (www.zinerepublic.com) was a spin- off from a monthly online zine called the ’2ndrule’ (currently in deep freeze), which Shannon started with some friends in 2000. It became a way for writers, designers, photographer and other creatives to publish their work. Then, as well as now, they saw a need to make magazine publishing easier, more accessible and more democratic than how the traditional publishing industry is, leading a way to create something for people to publish and distribute their own crowdsourced zines, allowing anyone to be a read, writer and editor. By doing this, they have thought to provide tools to allow users to crowdsource for articles, edit, assemble and publish issues of their zine, and distribute their zine through a subscription system.

By doing this, the two lads would like to see Zinerepublic make an impact on the publishing industry by introducing more people to the idea of self-publishing and collaborative publishing, using methods such as crowdsourcing and various forms of web distribution to create and distribute magazines. Hoping these will change the landscape of the publishing industry by empowering more people to publish their own magazines in a different, crowdsourced way. Ultimately, they would like to see Zinerepublic become a major publishing platform for independent zine publishers and content creators.

The common characteristics in both Shoplette and Zinerepublic, are the ideas of sharing content within niche communities. These aims, to bring together like- minded individuals (shopaholics and people who want to read and publish zines) to share content and information that is relevant and interesing to the community and allowing the members to use the content further. Both products provided a specific context in which the context is shared. In Shoplette, the context is to discover great places to shop and new stuff to buy; in Zinerepublic, the context is to create, publish and discover new zines. In that, they hope to provide meaning to the content and experience.

The ‘Mobricks’ have a basic understanding of online publishing, from publishing the ’2ndrule’ for 7 years (2000-2006). They had great fun learning alot about creating, editing and distributing a magazine from there. They have also self- published a few printed books for projects associated with the ’2ndrule’, giving them some perspective on traditional book publishing.

Earlier, talking about crowdsource. Mobrick thinks that crowds are a beautiful thing. There are both advantage and disadvantages, but the risk and surprise are what that makes it fun. Zinerepublic employs crowdsourcing at two levels. One is the creation of articles for magazines – the crowd of writers, photographers, designers and lots to submitting articles to Zinerepublic for use in their own magazine as well as other editors to use. This helps editors source for all kinds of articles and the best articles generally start to float up. On another level, crowdsourcing also employed in the editing and creation of zines. The crowd of editors to help to pick the best and most suitable articles for their own zine and helps readers find the best, most relevant or most interesting collection of articles within a single zine. In general, these guys see corwdsouring as a way of sourcing for fresh content, and a way to help the best content float up.

‘Customer-led innovation is the wave of the future’ quoted by Patricia Seybold, author of “Outside Innovation: How your customer will co-design your customer’s future?”

The above quote happily describes what they’re doing in Zinerepublic. Letting people decide what kind of magazines they want to read by allowing them to create their own magazines out of their own and other people’s articles on the site. In a sense, that’s a “customer (i.e. magazine reader)-led innovation” applied to magazine publishing and it’s one of the things that underlie their idea of “democratizing magazine publishing.”

A company’s bottom line (i.e. its revenue) is built by its customers, and a company’s brand is a collection of customer experiences and value that a customer associates with the company. It would be silly not to listen to customers and care for their needs. ut at the same time, a company can’t try to do everything that every customer wants (e.g. in terms of feature requests), simply because different people have different perspectives, experiences and desires. What Person A wants or expects out of a product or service might be quite different from Person B. In that sense, a company also needs to maintain its own vision for its product or service, and provide what it believes is valuable in the market. It’s a difficult balance, and the best you can do is release, test and improve. But that’s probably a subject for another long conversation.

Till then…