How it all began - The Zmags Story

Zmags was established in Copenhagen, Denmark, in January 2006. Its founders originally set out to publish an e-magazine. To make it stand out, they developed a proprietary, flash-based publishing platform that enabled them to incorporate video, audio and other types of rich media. When the first issue of the e-magazine was published, the founders were inundated with requests from other publishers, asking “Can you help us make our e-mag look like yours?

They knew they were onto something big. So they spent some time finessing the software, and launched Zmags as a digital publishing platform company.
Zmags stood out for several reasons. First and foremost, it created flash-based publications – at the time most companies were merely turning print output files into static pdf files and calling that their digital edition. Zmags was the first vendor to offer page-flipping technology and the ability to incorporate rich media such as video. Second, Zmags was the first purely self-service solution – users could create their own digital editions with Zmags in just a few minutes, while other vendors required users to submit pdf files and then wait days or weeks to get their finished files back. And third, finished Zmags were very intuitive and easy for readers to navigate – a very different and better experience for readers.

These features set a new bar for digital publishing – one that Zmags’ competitors scrambled to keep up with. The self-service aspect in particular was a crucial industry development, as it made it possible for even very small, low-budget operations to produce professional looking digital editions (and in turn helped facilitate the emergence of hundreds of high-quality, online-only magazines). And the interactivity meant that publishers now had powerful, objective tools to measure and analyze reading behavior.

Zmags also gave publishers new opportunities to generate ad revenue, by enabling them to easily incorporate video and audio ads. Importantly, Zmags also enabled publishers to provide advertisers with rich analytics on campaign performance to prove the value of these new types of ads. Zmags users have found that incorporating video on a page, for instance, double page views and improves click-through rates by 5-10x.

In Zmags’ first year of operations, the company landed 700 customers. Today, that number exceeds 2500 and growing.

Zmags is known for its exceptional rich media, analytics and SEO capabilities, and for its ability to give users wide design latitude within a framework of templates for virtually any type of document. Zmags customers span multiple verticals – principally retail, travel and healthcare – and include Berklee College of Music, Cisco, IKEA, Microsoft, Toys R Us, and Volkswagen.

In 2008, the company tripled revenue, surpassing goals in every region even in the face of a challenging economy. Zmags also landed its second round of venture capital funding in 2008 - $6.6M to fund its expansion into the US, which now accounts for more than half of the company’s revenue. In 2009, revenues have continued to climb, and Zmags was named to the Red Herring Europe 100 and the TechCrunch Europe 100.

Within the first few weeks alone, our client base began to expand rapidly as word spread about our creative approach to e-Publishing. In April 2006 we launched ZmagCMS – an early version of Zmags Publicator - the first system for creating and editing online publications.

Built up and matured by the founders, who still shape the future of Zmags during their daily work, Zmags gained a strong market position in Scandinavia. However, additional funding was needed to operate on new markets. In 2008 NorthCap Partners and OpenView Venture Partners made capital investments in Zmags, and began providing expert management guidance. Not only did the capital investments allow Zmags to expand to the US market, the organization was also built to stand future challenges as market grows.

Today Zmags Inc. is a well established corporation, boasting high levels of growth and customer satisfaction. Our headquarters are located in Boston, while central functions like product development and customer service are located in Copenhagen. In addition, Zmags has sales offices in Canada and Great Britain and has 80 employees.

In 2009 Zmags moved digital publishing to the next level with its launched the idea of Interactive Collateral Management, which broadens the appeal of digital publishing from traditional publishers to marketers and other types of communicators, which moves e-Publishing to next level by introducing is a 360 degrees approach to how entire enterprises get more out of digitizing and analyzing their collateral. While expanding the focus, our goal has remained constant: to create a product that sets the standard within the online digital community, with products that are developed with the reader in mind. At Zmags, we know that product presentation works best when enhanced with proficiency and usability. Accordingly, the Zmag was developed with the reader in mind.

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