I’m sitting here with Kevin Mann, Chief Scientist and founder of Graphic.ly and Graham Morley, Lead Interface Designer. Graphic.ly took their social enabled comic reading platform and brought it to the Windows Phone 7 in Silverlight , with fantastic content such Marvel characters, Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. The Graphic.ly application let’s you shop for new content on their store spanning many different brands and varieties of comic novels, from mainstream comics to manga and edgier emerging comic artists. Graphic.ly also runs the comic book fan site iFanboy, giving them the most popular social platform for fan collaboration in the industry. The combination of great content, smooth, compelling navigation, direct social fan access and an ever growing comic store create a comic reading experience that is even better than paper comics.
We are watching Mike Swanson demo Graphic.ly and it really shows off the range of Windows Phone 7. I had chance to play with a Windows Phone 7 last night and yes, I was impressed. One of the constant challenges with rich media on a mobile phone is how do you get a large screen experience, onto a small device, that fits on your pocket. Using the Windows Phone 7 device you get a sense of how that is done. You can move smoothly, panning left to right, up and down, so that you feel like you are interacting with a much larger piece of content, viewing it in high resolution. This is called the “panoramic viewing experience”. And the interface is smooth, super smooth, with none of the lag and jitters that I have learned to hate on older Windows Mobile devices. Graphic.ly deployed Deep Zoom in Silverlight to allow you to pan, zoom, and truly experience the artwork in comics.
Here is the demo on YouTube.
Kevin Mann came up with the idea for Graphic.ly after being frustrated with finding the latest edition of his favorite comics. He founded the company back in January of 2009. Kevin applied and was accepted into the TechStars incubator in Boulder, CO. TechStars is one of the world’s leading startup incubators. Graphic.ly, known as Take Publishing while at TechStars, was selected as one of 10 companies, out of 600, for the summer of 2009. Kevin Mann and Thanavath Jaroenvanit joined TechStars for the summer. TechStars is a BizSpark Network Partner and enrolled Graphic.ly into BizSpark. This gave Graphic.ly a broad selection of Microsoft development tools, as well as a free subscription to Microsoft Azure for server side development. Soon after Graphic.ly completed TechStars they were able to close $1.2 M in venture funding led by DFJ-Mercury.
Micah Baldwin, a publishing and social application serial entrepreneur was one of the mentors for Graphic.ly at TechStars. Like most of the mentors at TechStars, Micah is not paid for his participation, and there is no defined “give” for Micah’s commitment of time and effort to the young startups at TechStars, but is part of a thriving startup mentoring ecosystem. This is a classic example of how Microsoft BizSpark Network Partners, like TechStars, are able to partner with Microsoft and provide all of the tools and technology to build the best solutions. Micah continued to engage with Graphic.ly and joined Graphic.ly as the CEO.
Graphic.ly is currently in private beta and will be launching their public beta shortly.
BTW – all development tools for development on Windows Phone 7 – are free for phone application development. Nice.