In Conversation with Shannon Low, co-founder of Mobrick

Mobrick is a web technology company that creates new ways of socialising in online networks and communities. They have produced two interesting products: (1) Zinerepublic, an easy way to create and distribute your own crowdsourced zine, where anyone can be a reader, writer and editor, create your own zine out of your own and other users’ articles, and submit articles that other editors might like to use in their zines; and (2) Shoplette, a collective shopping intelligence service you can use to tell your friends what you bought and where you bought it, and find out what your friends have bought and where they’ve been shopping. We have managed to catch Shannon Low, one of the co-founders of Mobrick to tell us the story behind their latest launch of Zinerepublic.

BL: Tell us your story. What did you do before starting up Mobrick?
Shannon Low: Prior to founding Mobrick, I spent 8 years in the public service working at various government ministries and agencies, the most recent being my last 4 years in the Media Development Authority where I worked in industry development, investing in local animation and game development companies. At the end of 2007, I decided to do something different, and left the public service to start up Mobrick.

BL: Tell us the story behind Mobrick and how you guys started up Shoplette and followed by Zinerepublic.

Shannon Low: Mobrick is a web technology company that creates new ways of socialising in online networks and communities. In short, we create web 2.0 community platforms for people to share their passions. The company is run by two partners, Loon Kok Keong and myself, who used to be schoolmates.

Our first released product was Shoplette (www.shoplette.com), a niche social network for shoppers, where users could tell their friends what they bought and where they bought it from, kind of like a Twitter for shopping. The idea came from a typical conversation among friends – one person would say “Check out this new … that I bought!” and show it off to their friend, and the friend would almost always ask in reply “Where did you get it?” That gave us the idea to create a social shopping intelligence tool to enable shoppers to take that conversation online among a community of like-minded shopaholics.

Zinerepublic (www.zinerepublic.com) is our second released product and was a spin-off from a monthly online zine called the2ndrule (currently in deep freeze) which I started with some friends in 2000. It became a way for writers, designers, photographers and other creatives to get their work published. Zinerepublic started out as an experiment while we were working on Shoplette. We wanted to see if we could do something interesting in the publishing space. We saw a need to make magazine publishing easier, more accessible and more democratic than how the traditional publishing industry does it. So we decided to build a prototype early on and play around with it. We continued working on the prototype as we were running Shoplette, until eventually, we decided to find out what people thought of the idea, so we released it for public testing earlier this month.

BL: What does Zinerepublic do? What makes it different from the magazine publishing platforms in the past?

Shannon Low: Zinerepublic is our attempt at a revolution aimed at democratizing magazine publishing. We believe that magazine publishing – from article sourcing and content generation, to editing, assembling and publishing issues, to subscription and distribution – should be open to everyone, so we’ve created tools to make it easier.

Zinerepublic is an easy way to create and distribute your own crowdsourced zine. On Zinerepublic, anyone can be a reader, writer and editor, create your own zine out of your own and other users’ articles, and submit articles that other editors might like to use in their zines.

On the site, users can create zines, submit articles for zines and subscribe to zines. To make zine publishing easier for zine editors, Zinerepublic allows users to crowdsource for articles, edit, assemble and publish periodic issues of their zine, and also provides a subscription and email distribution system so that people can subscribe to and receive new issues of their zine.

BL: What are the three main features in Zinerepublic that you like the users to explore?