ZATZ Mobile Network now available on AvantGo.com
"We are pleased to be offering the network of ZATZ publications on AvantGo.com because ZATZ is an authority when it comes to covering the handheld market, providing tips and information for device users and developers," said Felix Lin, AvantGo's CEO. "With strong relationships between AvantGo.com and content partners like ZATZ, we are achieving our goal, which is to make it easier for individuals to access the information they want and need - any time, anywhere."

Over the next year, we expect to introduce many more online technical, creative, and general interest magazines. Because the ZENPRESS editorial production system automatically builds the mobile magazines at the same time it's building the online publications, all future commercial ZATZ magazines will "mobilized" and available for handhelds.

Here's a short quote I gave for our press release:

The Internet really took off when desktop browser technology like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer became widely available. AvantGo has introduced what we consider to be the first viable off-line and wireless browser for mobile devices. With millions of mobile device users (and with most of our readers being these users), it made a lot of sense to not only create mobile magazines, but to build a true network that takes advantage of handheld devices. And that's how the world's first mobile magazine network came to be.

We've written a bunch about AvantGo. We also awarded it a Product of the Year award last year. Basically, AvantGo offers a service/product combination. On the product side is a piece of software you download to your Palm device or your Windows CE-based computer. For all intents and purposes, this is an offline Web browser (meaning, it'll let you read Web pages that have been downloaded to your handheld device).

On the service side, AvantGo offers a central subscription hub, where you can sign up to have the Web sites of your choice downloaded to your handheld. In a sort of retro "1996-we-want-to-be-like-TV-and-PointCast-is-so-cool" use of terminology, AvantGo calls the Web sites you can download "channels".

When you visit their hub, located at http://www.avantgo.com, you'll notice you can sign up for "optimized channels," "user-contributed channels," and those channels you define yourself. Optimized channels are those channels that have been specifically put together to work with AvantGo and handheld devices. Generally, what AvantGo calls "optimized channels" on their site are also those Web sites that have some form of linking agreement with the company.

A "user-contributed channel" is one where another user decides that a given Web site would be nice if it were available for download. The upside for this is that any publication, including, say Upside, could be downloaded if some user gave it enough thought to configure it on the AvantGo site. The downside is that while AvantGo does its best to make something "handheld friendly", it really isn't unless custom modified (as we've done with our publications). In fact, someone had graciously contributed a user configuration for PalmPower's news center, but it also tried to download our logo and formatting. It worked, but it wasn't quite pretty.