Although many are using smartphone tools and games everyday it can be difficult to grasp the full potential of a Genwi powered app. The word “app”, itself, has a non-specific meaning that varies whether considering apps for the web or apps for smartphones. As well, smartphone apps are relatively new products with a quickly maturing marketplace. (It’s hard to imagine if any one of us will be able to keep up with all the possibilities.)

No matter how smartphone appstores develop it is likely that apps should likely evolve themselves. Games sometimes stay the same to invite nostalgia, but productivity and media apps typically invite new features and style. Apps built with Genwi’s iSites are capable of the most responsive iteration because the look, feel, and organization can all be changed by our partners directly. Updates are made “on the fly” by partners from their accounts at http://iSites.us.

When logged in the partner can manage content sent to the app by selecting the “Add feeds” screen. And they can modify the look that is presented on the iPhone by selecting the “Customize iPhone” screen as demonstrated in the image to below.

Modify how the content looks on the iPhone by selecting "Customize iPhone"

Direct access to our platform permits our partners to easily modify both the style and the content organization of their apps exactly when the desire arises. In this way our partners self-manage their apps. As soon as they save any changes from the iSites system the updates appear automatically to their app. Both the app your audience has already downloaded as well as the presentation of the app in iTunes will reveal changes. It really is that easy for Genwi’s iSites partners.

For example, if you want to update the look of your branded app, simply go to http://iSites.us, login, and download new graphics or experiment with new shades from the color picker. Any saved changes will instantly update the design of your app. You decide when to implement a new style of your homepage, your header, or even when to modify the sponsor footer banner.

You may also decide you want to change the presentation and organization of content within your app. This is also self-managed directly by logging into your account on the iSites platform. Add a content ‘category’ or change the names and shuffle the order of your app’s current categories.

Genwi designed the iSites app platform to allow partners to instantly update apps in real-time. If you think of a new way to present your smartphone app iSites allows you to implement the change with no delay.

A smartphone app is a creative and clever way to package content. With Genwi’s iSites it by no means has to be a static means. You never have to wait for us to process your suggestions. We will be working hard to bring new features while optimizing fast delivery of your content. Your app style and organization can change whenever you see fit.

We introduce iSites – a new content management and smart phone app publishing platform. We developed iSites technology to intelligently bundle content packages that can be delivered to any device and featured in any app store.

In its first three years Genwi has delivered systems that facilitate convenient and organized packaging of all types of digital media. iSites is the latest demonstration of this mission and will serve the growing smart phone user population craving easy and novel access to their favorite publications’ content. News apps, with frequent updates, have already proven to show high customer retention rates – ten visits each week by over 40% of its users. Those retention rates beat all other categories including social networking applications.

iSites apps offer an exciting new opportunity to engage the growing mobile device audience. We bring clean design and fast, reliable access to content. The clearest fonts and the crispest sound and video are utilized.

The newspaper app packages emphasize quick access and pleasurable reading. A custom and branded homepage fades to a menu that categorizes your content and suggests viewer navigation. Your reader can choose to either scan brief article descriptions that accompany headlines or to access the entire length of an article with a flow that is very welcoming.

iSites newspaper packages also include a feature for sharing. The reader can choose a quick posts through a social network profile or through a thoughtful forward to an email contact. The following screenshots demonstrate each of these features:

You can also gain a more in depth exploration of the iSites enabled experience – download the free app for The Daily California, the University of California – Berkeley student newspaper, by clicking the button at the bottom of this screen: http://isites.us or by clicking this link Daily Cal iPhone App.

Genwi is releasing newspapers today. Newspapers make it easy for anybody to publish their own website. TechCrunch calls these “vanity URLs,” we first heard this term last week.

What is so exciting about “vanity URLs?” Vanity URLs can lead to a web of individuals – not just a web of websites. With a newspaper, every person online can publish all of their public content, favorites and updates at their own domain. With vanity domains, people are free to go out and get their own followers and share their content with their audience on their own site. Newspapers are a straight forward solution to putting stuff in one place for friends, family and followers to find.

Newspapers can be published at custom URLs

Newspapers can be published at custom URLs

There are so many dozens of great web services available today. Newspapers help people publish what they choose, from the services they use in one place. Newspapers solve the problem many face with consolidating their content while maintaining access to a variety of the best services. Newspapers make this easy and automatically update activity from linked services. Friends, family and followers will always be able to catch updates. Newspapers enable sharing with a single web address compared to a myriad of usernames.

The default newspaper web address is newspapertitle.genwi.com. The web address is completely configurable. Genwi can map any domain name or sub domain to a newspaper page. The configuration settings are under the domain tab under newspaper settings. Genwi charges $15 per year to map custom domains to newspapers. Newspapers are an off the shelf solution for providing individuals their own web address. They enable access to the best web services and provide a single place for sharing with friends, family and followers. What if everybody had their own website?

Setting up a Go Daddy domain for a newspaper is straight forward. A domain name can be redirected from the Domain Manager. The domain name to be changed must be selected. Once selected, Go Daddy provides a status report for the domain. In this report is a section called Total DNS. “Total DNS Control and MX Records” is a link at the bottom of the Total DNS section of the report. This link is where the domain name can be easily mapped to a Genwi newspaper.

domain-manager

Go Daddy Domain Manager

Total DNS Control and MX Manager

Total DNS Control and MX Manager

For the domain to go to Genwi all that needs to be changed is the first item under A (Host). There is an Edit button in the table under Actions. The Edit button is a pencil in a small square. The Edit button opens up a popup with the fields: Host Name, Points to Address, and TTL. Only “Points to Address” needs to be changed. Points to Address should point to: 68.142.96.178. This is Genwi’s IP Address (web address). Now the domain is ready to map to Genwi. The Domains tab under Newspaper Settings at Genwi contains a field to enter the Go Daddy domain. Once entered, the Go Daddy domain will start going to the newspaper page and the newspaper page will have the Go Daddy domain name.

We’ve got this cool new video. Do you like it? Would it be useful to post a link to this from our homepage? Let us know in the comments. Thanks

more about "New Genwi Video", posted with vodpod

Quick Posts are another Genwi feature that you probably were unaware existed. They are also one of the more social elements(besides sharing) that help make Genwi useful. Quick Posts are exactly what they sound like – a quick way to post something to Genwi.

Quick Post is available when you login from the Wire page. It is located in the footer – hey maybe that’s why you never saw it before! The footer bar features an input text field and a button that says ‘Quick Post.’ When you want to make a Quick Post simply type something into the input text box and click on the button.

Quick Post is available from the footer when you login to your account

Quick Post is available from the footer when you login to your account

Now you might wonder what happens to the Quick Post you just made. Quick Posts show up in several places. First, it will show up in your activity feed. If you maintain a public profile – this means anybody can see it. If you maintain a private profile – the Quick Post is only visible to friends. Most importantly, when your friends and followers login, they can see your Quick Post in their Wires. In fact, they can filter down to only view Quick Posts.

Haboo Quick Posted that he likes the new foreign language support

Haboo Quick Posted that he likes the new foreign language support

Quick Posts are useful when you want to share an update instead of sharing content from your Wire. They are a good way to post anything that is on your mind or your status and instantly let all of your friends and followers know what you are thinking.

One of the advantages of using Genwi is the ability to share everything you want with your friends in one place. Genwi makes sharing super simple. One of our core beliefs is that people you know will have better things to share with you than the picks made by a computer. We built Genwi to enable people to sort out what matters from within the sea of available content. The most direct way to find good content is to share it amongst friends.

When you click ‘share’ on the footer of every item, an overlay appears with all of your friends. You can select all friends or select individual friends. Click ‘share’ after selecting and now the item has been shared with the friends you selected. This eliminates emailing links to friends and puts all of the content friends share with each other in one place. That is how simple sharing is on Genwi.

Share overlay enables selecting friends

Share overlay enables selecting friends

To browse the items your friends have shared with you, simply log in to Genwi. Shared items will always appear in your Wire. You can use the left hand menu to filter your Wire to only show shared items. This way you can browse all of the items your friends have shared in one ‘river of news.’

Another great feature about sharing on Genwi is the ability to send a message with the items you share. When you are selecting friends in the share overlay, you can click ‘add message,’ below the friends list. Add message takes you to a message box where you can type your message that you want to share with the item. When your friends view the item in their Wire, they will see your message in a blue box below the item. They can reply directly to you. You will get their replies in your Inbox, and you will see a new message alert.

Sending messages with shared items is a great way to share

Sending messages with shared items is a great way to share

Finally, when it comes to managing your shared items Genwi makes that easy too. When you click on Favorites in the header, we have all of the items you’ve shared and that your friends have shared with you. You can browse all of them. This way you can see all of the items you have shared with friends. If you’d like to delete any items, simply click ‘remove’ next to any item. When you click ‘remove’ the shared item will no longer exist.

This post should inspire you to get your friends on Genwi if they’re not already. There is nothing nicer than seeing all the links to cool things your friends share in one place every morning.

We wanted to take the time to explain favorites. With a Genwi account, you can favorite items. Adding favorites is a great way to save things you like and share them with your friends.

When browsing items on Genwi – there is a ‘favorite’ link in the footer. Clicking this link opens up an overlay screen with several options. The options allow you to choose between storing the favorite in a default folder – simply called ‘favorites,’ or creating a new folder – called ‘Collections.’ If you choose to create a new Collection you can call it whatever you like and control its privacy settings independently. Collections are a great way to organize favorites into meaningful categories. With favorites and Collections you can use them to organize things you want to use later or to share with others.

Adding an item to favorites

Adding an item to favorites

Favorites, by default, show up on your profile. Depending on your profile’s privacy, they are either visible to everyone or friends only. When your followers login to their Wires, they will see your most recent favorite. They can also select ‘friends’ favorites’ from the left hand menu to browse all of their friends’ favorites. This is how friends can use favorites to share cool new things with each other. You can also browse friends’ favorites directly from their profiles by clicking on the favorites tab. This tab will also contain a drop down menu with collection names. Selecting a Collection will take you directly to that Collection.

You can make Collections either public or private. If they are public, they’ll show up on your profile. If they’re private, only you can see them. By making public collections, you can create very topic oriented Collections to share with others. This is a great way of aggregating related items from different sources. You can help others discover the great items you’ve collected around any topic or theme.

The favorites tab on the header will help you find and manage your favorites. In the header, you can select ‘favorites,’ and browse all of your favorites, friends’ favorites and shared items. Managing favorites is easy too. The favorites page let’s you edit and delete all of your favorites in one place. You can edit Collections as well as create new ones. In order to edit a Collection, select the collection from the left hand menu. Once selected a blue title bar will appear with a link to edit the collection. This link will help you edit the name, details and privacy of the Collection.

That is favorites. They are a great way to organize and share all the great activity on Genwi.

We are going to spend more time on our blog covering the features Genwi offers. The goal of these posts is to make the site more productive for more people. We find that lots of our features remain undiscovered until we explain them more completely.

Our first topic is importing subscriptions from other feed readers. One important way to begin following sources in Wire is to import an OPML file. The OPML file is a pre-packaged list of feeds. Subscribing to all the feeds in an OPML is as simple as importing the OPML file. Getting the OPML file of a subscription list from Google Reader, Bloglines or other feed reading application is what we’ll explain.

From within a feed reader application the Import/Export tool is usually available. In Google Reader it is under “Settings.” People can get there by clicking “manage subscriptions.” The Import/Export tool is a tab under settings. When the Import/Export tab is selected they have a link to export subscriptions as an OPML file. Once the OPML file is exported and saved to a local disk it can be imported into Genwi.

Exporting subscriptions from Google Reader

Exporting subscriptions from Google Reader

Importing OPMLs to Genwi only requires clicking on the Import feeds/OPML link under the Wire tab. (It is beneath Public Wire on the left side menu.) Within that popup is a field to import an OPML file. Clicking “browse” will find the OPML file that was exported. After the OPML is found, clicking “continue” will begin importing all of the subscriptions from the OPML file.

Check out TechCrunch’s coverage of Genwi’s new release.  Genwi’s new site release brings you your own personal news feed, or Wire. Start following your favorite websites and friends in one place.

Create a Personal Wire

Create a Personal Wire

  • Genwi can show you what the most popular and highest rated stuff was out of all of your favorite sources.
  • Genwi can show you each time your friends add videos, post blogs, post photos or do other things at other sites.
  • Genwi can show you what is popular on the site overall at any given time.
  • Genwi lets you add all of your activity at other sites to one profile for friends to find.
  • Genwi brings you syndicated movies, TV shows, videos and other media in one place.
  • Genwi lets you make Quick Posts which instantly post your message to all of your friends.
  • Genwi lets you send friends messages.
  • Genwi lets you share items directly with your friends.

Once you start following sources and add friends at Genwi you will see updates that matter to you from anywhere on the web. That’s way better than clicking around bored. It’s also better than checking email for shared links and videos. Genwi lets your friends share what they like directly with you on the site. Each time you check your Wire at Genwi you’ll see new content your friends have shared with you.

To sign up, go here:  Sign Up

To follow Genwi’s blog in your Wire go here:  Genwi Blog and click “Add to Wire”

To follow us on Twitter check out:  Twitter/GenwiKP

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