A local Boston startup called Zmags (www.zmags.com) just closed on $4.2 million in Series B funding. This was the first I had heard of this company so I decided to check them out. They’ve got some respectable clients including 3M and Microsoft, a good looking website, and they get several hundred thousand hits a day. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I understand the appeal. The premise of the site is that you upload a PDF and it gets converted into a virtual magazine, where pages literally “flip” as opposed to having to scroll. This somehow makes it “interactive”. Now, granted I’m only 24, so maybe I’m not the target audience, but I find scrolling through a PDF to be far preferable to having to flip through the pages of an online magazine. I honestly think this takes something very convenient and user friendly and turns it into something inconvenient for the sake of flashy graphics. Not sure I would have invested 4.2 million…
Are you a business or individual that uses Zmags? I’d love to hear if you like their product.
