Dominic Turnbull Tells Us How He Uses Calameo To Create Unique Publications

Today, we’ve decided to introduce you to Dominic Turnbull.  He’s been using our tool for over a year now and has created very interesting publications destined to his professional contacts.

 Dominic smartly uses our platform to promote and share the activities of the index provider EPRA. But let him present his view of Calameo with his own words:
“Having tried various viewer tools and found that either their support team was unresponsive, or their claims about there being no branding untrue, Calameo has met our needs very well. One year in, and we’ve not yet explored all the possibilities. Ironically, I came across the tool on a competitor’s forum as everyone generally grumbled and suggested alternative effective viewing options out there.”

 

“We need to add rich content to our magazine/publications… but also it’s useful to have an alternative method of downloading pdfs files in case for any reason our server/network crashes. Of course this means some duplication in that you need to upload the file twice – but anyway we tend to generate a viewer version and a print/pdf version. The flash is especially good (small flash files only of course) as they need far less buffering and don’t come parceled up with video browser branding. This is early days, and there are various function which would be extremely useful for an index provider such as EPRA.”

 

When we asked him what his favorite feature is, Dominic answers that “having the ability to add ‘rich’ content to a fixed .pdf is great – of course it needs to be done tactfully rather than just dumping in clips, etc. They can be distracting for the reader and sound isn’t always appreciated. But generally, my view is that a small flash can bring a page to life and hugely adds to the experience. Most people may prefer paper print, but this is a great way of adding value to the online versions. In the end it all comes down to content for us.”

 

His Flash animations are a great addition to their publications, as they represent a very creative way to illustrate articles. Check out his latest EPRA issue to get a better view on this unique feature.

 

If you want to know more about our features, click here.

 

 

Promote Your Digital Catalog On Calameo!

Check out these few examples to learn interesting ways to promote your catalog with the help of Calameo!

As you’ve probably already noticed, many of our users promote commercial products by publishing their latest brochure on Calameo. Uploading a PDF, adding links and videos to the document or personalizing its skin, are all very easy to manage. If you want to take these easy steps to share your catalog online, why don’t you have a look at these few examples?

Here you can see Colchon Expres presents its latest products with external links and videos:

Modho and IdealSedia created new skins to dress up their viewer:

 

Don’t forget you have many useful tools to set up the most interactive catalog possible! If you manage to be creative and original, your digital brochure will become an important asset to your website.

 

How 241 Media Uses Calameo to Promote Their Magazines

David Faulds, Managing Director at 241 Media Limited, and his team have now been using our platform for over a year to promote their clients’ work. They publish many amazing magazines, including one about soccer and another famous one about clubbing. Both display video and sound to illustrate their colorful articles.

“We have been publishing magazines for 20 years and have been exploring other platforms before reaching the conclusion the Calameo works best for our needs.

David actually discovered our service 18 months ago on Facebook.  “One of the other magazines posted a mini Calameo link and that stood out. Calameo gives the publisher strong marketing assets so you can increase the size of your audience. So far we have achieved over 5.2 million views on Calameo.

We integrate the magazines into our sites so that the core audience can read the publication easily enough. Key sites for this are Tilllate.com, the leading clubbing website in Europe and also Celticquicknews.co.uk, which is a football site for Glasgow Celtic. We have also created property, solar energy, fashion , jewellery retail and educational magazines using Calameo in the past year or so with many more in the pipeline.

“We also use Calameo – set at private – to build magazines so that our team, who are based around the UK and internationally, can check in on the progress and get an idea of how the project is developing.

As stated earlier Calameo is excellent for promotion via Facebook, although changes on the social media site have restricted the benefits somewhat recently!

“We also take full advantage of the option to personalise the magazine using background images, links and videos and this really adds to the reader’s enjoyment of our magazines.”

You can have a look at his publications below… Lots of good ideas to pick up on how to personalize each issue, including its background and its multimedia additions!

Welcome to our millionth member!

We’re happy to officially announce that you’re now more than 1,000,000 to publish, download, and share amazing content on Calameo. Many of you are now displaying documents on your website with our viewer, and we’re happy to see that our service is getting more viral every week!

You are now more than 1M to trust us with your publications and to use our professionnal features everyday. This is probably why over 1 billion pages were viewed in 2011 on Calameo and we’re now considered one of the 4,000 most important websites worldwide.

1,000,000 is also the number of publications currently powered by Calameo. Most of which are public, meaning that everybody can access them directly from our platform.

We’re very proud of our international community (remember that Calaméo is currently available in 10 different languages), with members coming from all over the world. We value your feedback as your suggestions open the door to many improvements. We’ve tried to incorporate most of your ideas into our soon-to-be-released viewer!

Offering you a way to publish and share your content is an incredicle experience. Thanks for your help in making this dream come true! And welcome to our millionth user… looking forward to celebrating the second million soon!

Happy New Year 2012!

As 2011 comes to an end, we wanted to thank you for the amazing support we got from you all… It’s been an exciting year, with many additions to our team and passionate working projects!

2011 represents a turning point – especially with the introduction of the iPad and iPhone compatibility. We realize how important smartphones and tablets have now become in everyday life, and online publishing is a key factor in this recent change. That’s why you can read and share your documents directly on mobile devices since April!

The Calameo community has been growing drastically over the last semester. You are now more than 22,000 to have joined us on Facebook and 3,300 of you are following us on Twitter! Don’t forget to give us some feedback whenever you want: we’re always listening…

The coming year is already packed with exciting challenges – including the release of a new viewer by next spring. We’ve added many features that will be a major step forward for our professional users, and have also worked hard on improving old favorites! No doubt you’ll like our little surprises for 2012.

We’d like to thank you all for trusting us and sharing this incredible publishing experience with us. Happy new year and happy publishing on Calameo!

Calameo is giving you a chance to get what you want for Christmas!

2011 is coming to an end, and the holiday season is almost here. It’s time to drink eggnogs, sing Christmas carols and write your letter to Santa Claus…

Talking about presents, what would you like for Christmas?

Calameo is helping Santa to get you what you want – including 10 incredibly well-fitting T-shirt!

As you probably already know, we are currently working on an amazing new viewer with many awesome features that will revolutionize the word of online publishing at the beginning of 2012… We’ve already incorporated many useful functionalities but we’d like to hear your feedback on the matter. What would you like us to add to our current viewer? What would be your idea of the best feature to improve your use of Calaméo?

Tell Santa, tell us! We’ll give away fashionable Calameo T-shirts to those with the 10 most interesting answers!

HOW TO PLAY?

You can either post a comment on our Facebook fan page

OR

send us a tweet with the CalameoXmas hash tag…

Calaméo is working on a new viewer!  I’d like … #calameoXmas http://bit.ly/udfu6Y

Click this button to tweet it now!

Contest rules:

  • The contest runs from December 1st till December 31st
  • The winner is chosen by the Calameo Team regarding his/her suggestions.
  • You cannot be employed by Calaméo.
  • You can play either on Calameo’s Facebook fan page or on Twitter.
  • On Facebook, post a comment with your idea of what we should incorporate to our new viewer.
  • On Twitter, tell us what we should add to our new viewer and add the calameoXmas hash tag.

Happy to introduce Indie Islands and their talented clients on Calaméo!

This month, let us introduce you to Indie Islands, an incredible company that uses our platform to promote the work of talented artists from around the globe.

David Erik, Indie Islands Creative Director, explains why Calaméo has drastically changed the way they publish their online music magazines

“Indie Islands is a group of songwriters and music industry journalists – Wendy, Beth, David, and Jeanne. We first began as a free, online Country Music eMagazine in 2005… Since then, we’ve evolved to provide creative services to labels, music websites, and indie artists. We offer what call eBIOS, ePress Releases, ePKs (Press Kits) and more for musicians, bands, artists, and those indies within the movie, TV and film industry. We do both digital design and creative writing for these professionals.

Recently Calameo has been an enormous and vital tool for what we do. We actually found them after getting frustrated with a similar service, and its lack of both features and forward-looking development.

We began using Calaméo instead in the summer of 2011 to provide our clients with custom designed publications, press kits, biographies, and more! Our new website (Jan 2012) will integrate Calameo even more…

Another thing that has driven our use of Calameo is the fact that we no longer have to produce our eMagazines, ePKs and eBIOs via Flash and Actionscript. This saves a lot of time, and allows us to concentrate on what our clients really want – aesthetics, and interactive options. Calameo has a high score on user intuitiveness, and GUI on the design end.

While there are not as many options as we have in custom Flash, there are still plenty via the API and other options to meet client needs.

Our favorite functionality is the ability to add live links, this is truly a “show stopper” – adding video/mp3s and more – this is the wave of the future – more and more clients are demanding more and more functionalities such as this as publications evolve to being strictly digital! We hope Calameo continues to push these creative add-ons – this is the single best function, along with iPad support!

Calameo also helps by giving our clients social media and sharing options for our creations – vital in this digital age! We feel we were one of the first groups to see the future of where traditional magazines and publications were heading. Now the future is here!

Calameo “gets” the future of publishing! (especially via mobile tablets, etc!…) Perhaps the biggest advantage is the ability to release our works for our clients to iPad/Android.

Now, Calameo is THE tool … we’ve tried other similar services, and have not found anything with the dynamic and versatility of Calameo.”

If you want to see the result of what they’ve achieved with our tool, check out their online library… It’s also a great way to discover awesome musicians!

Please share this article with your friends to promote the work of these indies!

Team Pictures in Front of the Eiffel Tower

Remember the last sunny days we had before fall finally took over Paris? Taking pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower is definitely not something we could do right now… Happy we didn’t wait any longer!

Anyway, here comes our passionate and “photogenic” team, always willing to provide you with the best publishing features…

[Read more]

Meet Marcus – happy winner of our iPad 2 Twitter Game!

Do you remember our Twitter Game? We asked our followers to tweet about our iPad compatibility and randomly picked up one of the players.

 

The winner’s name is Marcus, and he’s been using Calaméo for professional purposes for several months now. He runs a design studio and publish his projects online with the help of Calaméo. But let him tell you more about it himself…

“I run a small design studio called Shape or Form, mainly working with clients directly on print, web and marketing projects. Naturally I’ve seen a shift from print to web work, and clients hoping to explore more social and interactive options recently.

For economic and usability reasons a few of my publishing clients have been keen to shift focus from the printed magazine to something more engaging, social, and responsive. And of course cost effective.

I work closely with a magazine called Save the Date, which has, over the past year or so, transformed from exclusively a printed magazine to a full online blog and directory, and a feature packed online version of the magazine. We initially tried a couple of other “page-flip” style solutions, and were unimpressed, and finally settled on a third option, mainly as a compromise. When our subscription came up for renewal, bad customer service and lack of iPad support were a major issue, so I knew I had to find something better.

About six months ago I looked around on the internet to read reviews and compare features, and while all three previous options hadn’t moved on much, I discovered Calaméo — and it’s been great ever since. The over-all product is fantastic, from the site, to uploads, to customer support. Crucially though, it’s the iPad support, and the added interactivity (video, music), that makes it a game changer for my clients. We’re still exploring all the possibilities, but combined with the social media sharing options, it’s a dream to use and adds a huge level of marketing to the magazine. We’re excited about further enhancing the magazine and how we use Calaméo, and I’m keen to shift other clients over to the service. They are all so impressed when they see the iPad version, it’s like having their own app!”

If you want to get a better idea of Marcus and his team’s work, check out their library!


Thanks again to all those who played along and tweet about our iPad game.

Happy publishing!

To answer massive demand, we’re now launching payment in US dollars!

Since we’re available in 10 languages, a wide variety of nationalities use our service. So to make it easier for those who live outside the Eurozone, it’s now possible to subscribe to our amazing PREMIUM and PLATINUM plans in US Dollars!

Once more, we try our best to provide you with the best online publishing experience!   Think of all our many original features – such as the iPad and iPhone compatibility, or the insertion of videos and links into your publications… You’re just one click away from sharing information all over the world! Calaméo is truly the only service to offer such a wide range of functionalities – at such a low price. And if you have any questions on how to use these functionalities, feel free to ask us directly! Our help desk is very reactive and we do everything we can to give you useful answers as soon as possible.

Our customer-oriented philosophy is probably the reason why thousands new members join Calaméo every day! Now with the dollar payment mode it will be even easier to do so…