I’m proud to announce that Synthasite has finally launched its Beta! After many long hours these past few weeks and many years in development, we are proud to open up what we think is the future of web publishing. I invite all my readers to signup and give it a test drive - please spread the word - I would appreciate any and all publicity and reviews (and be honest!). If you have signed up previously, your username and password is still active. All previous websites were removed, as per the warnings in the Alpha release, but from going forward, the Beta websites will be maintained through all future versions - so your data will be safe!
Here is the quick (3 min) tutorial video - if you watch this, you will be pro by the time you open Synthasite
Synthasite, a next generation web publishing startup, has just announced the launch of its
Beta version, which is available online at www.synthasite.com.
The Synthasite platform integrates APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) from third
parties to be integrated into a single environment that allows users to drag and drop
content into their webpages from multiple sources, without requiring any prior
programming experience.
The latest features include free hosting and sub-domains, widgets from multiple platforms
and services, templates with dynamic menus, image hosting, layouts and many others.
The intention of this version is to demonstrate the ability of Synthasite to integrate with 3rd
party APIs, but still allow the average user the benefit of simple drag and drop.
The Synthasite Beta platform currently supports drag and drop functionality from the
following content & widget providers, with many more to come:
YourMinis
YouTube
SmugMug
FlickR
Revver
MetaCafe
Google Video
Synthasite has opted for a familiar desktop software look and feel for its application
utilizing AJAX to deliver a fully browser based solution.
For more information, please contact:
Vinny Lingham
Chief Executive Officer
Vinny@Synthasite.com
Synthasite announced this morning, that it will be giving away 1,000,000 free shares in Synthasite (Pty) Ltd to it’s community. As far as we are aware (and correct me if I’m wrong), we’re the first Web 2.0 company that has ever offered to give away free shares to it’s web community in exchange for helping to build the business. I’ve often thought that early adopters for startups should share in the successes of the companies that they support. I know how much I would have liked to be given free shares early on in Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Digg and other such companies, when they were still fledgling. Well, luckily, I can now deliver to our users, what I’ve always wanted to receive. In the true spirit of Web 2.0, we want to empower our community and make them feel like stakeholders in the business, with all the upside.
Synthasite aims to build a very strong and devoted community over the next few months and years, and to that end, we will be releasing free shares for certain development projects that the community can assist us with, in today’s example, Template Design, but in future, it will include stuff like language translations, component development, activity in the forums, etc.
Please help spread the word to designers out there - this is a milestone for us, and with the upcoming Beta, you can play a part in building out our template library, and see your templates used by thousands of people (and get free links back to your site, in addition to the free shares!).
Update: Synthasite’s share offer just got featured on TechCrunch
In keeping with Synthasite’sexplosive Alpha launch, we decided to coincide the launch of our Beta with Guy Fawkes Day (5th of November)! Since the Alpha launch, we’ve been inundated with both end user & partner enquiries, and we thank everyone for all their feedback and support! We signed up over 6,000 users in less than 2 months and we’re now moving into a very exciting growth phase of the business, and we will be focused on a number of things in the Beta, including achieving some measure of scalability, as well as what you’ve all been waiting for…
So, what are the top 3 major features that will be released in the Beta?
1) The ability to publish your Synthasite created website on a subdomain of Synthasite.com (xyz.synthasite.com) with free hosting
2) You will be able to download your website, and host it on your own domain and server (and edit the PHP code if you so choose)
3) Multiple website templates for use in publishing
What’s after Beta?
We have a great roadmap ahead, but our focus is to release the Beta, which is a major milestone, with the core architecture that will allow us to quickly add new features in the weeks and months that follow! Thanks again to everyone for their support!
I’m proud to announce that Synthasite has finally gone live today (as promised!), into Alpha. Remember, this is basically a technology teaser, which will indicate more about what we are doing, but we are still a long way off! Comments, feedback and reviews are most appreciated - please blog about it, tell your friends & spread the news - Synthasite is now live!! We’re limiting accounts right now to the first 1500 users, hurry and get yours now, even if are only going to play with it later!
Please feel free to distribute the following press release:
For Immediate Release:
Synthasite, an AJAX based Web Publishing Platform, emerged today from stealth mode. The 6-person startup based in Cape Town, South Africa was recently spun out from the incuBeta group as a separate stand-alone company that will focus on delivering a world class web based software platform for web publishing, focusing specifically on Widgets & Mashups. Synthasite looks and feels like desktop software, but remains firmly rooted in the browser with no reliance on client side technology.
Synthasite CEO, Vinny Lingham (Founder of a leading Search Engine Marketing company, incuBeta), said the following: “Synthasite’s Alpha [Tech Preview] release today was a milestone in the company’s aim to become the standard for web publishing. We’re releasing it at this early stage in order to allow the community to assist in the direction that we will take Synthasite and we are very excited about the potential for this space, especially with the rapid rise of Mashups & Widgets. Synthasite ushers in a new era for web publishing; where people construct using existing building blocks, rather than build everything from scratch, and publish collaboratively from any machine rather than being stuck on a single PC or OS. We’re very excited about rapidly releasing many of the features on our extensive roadmap. We’re opening the Synthasite framework to the developer community so that they can build their own components and templates, and we will also be enabling source code level editing - although this will only be available in the Beta released, scheduled for Q4.”
Synthasite is also being tested on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which in theory allows it to be infinitely scalable, although accounts will initially be limited.
Synthasite is currently being seed funded by Lingham Capital, incuBeta & Miombo Capital, all South African based investment firms.
Update: 5 June
Less than 1000 accounts left! Here is a quick video of the Synthasite Alpha Release:
This is almost a desperate plea for help! Our group is growing rapidly and we really are looking for some amazing people to join in the business! With our recent funding from HBD and the rampant growth, particularly in our services divisions, we have about 10 positions open!
If you’re (or anyone you know is) at all interesting in working in Sunny Cape Town, please have a look at the jobs on offer within the award-winning incuBeta Group.
More specifically, with my Synthasite CEO hat on, we’re desperately looking for great people with great attitudes and exceptional talents, to contribute to a fast growing Web 2.0 startup!
If you know of anyone that would be interested, please steer them our way!
