The founders of Milwaukee-based StageBloc, a custom online platform used to manage individual’s online presence, has launched the private beta of the platform.
BizTimes Milwaukee reported on StageBloc in an Innovation column in December.
“We’ve already gotten a lot of really good feedback from our private beta users,” said Tom Giles, co-founder of StageBloc. “We’ve been rolling out a lot of updates that support custom domains and auto syncing to provide a real maintenance free experience.”
According to Giles, StageBloc is an online platform that fills a void between Tumblr and WordPress. “It helps you build and manage an online presence more efficiently and effectively,” Giles said.
Initially designed for musicians, the StageBloc platform gives users as much freedom and flexibility as they want. Users will have the ability to create a web presence by using StageBloc hosted sites and templates or use the platforms API and open-source Front-End Framework to design, develop and manage a completely customized site, Giles said.
“Our team has spent the better part of a year building out the infrastructure to support future growth,” Giles said. “We want to fill a need and provide a way for people to create, share and discover individuals or personalities online.”
In addition to letting users post post blogs, create an event calendar, post photos and update statuses for Facebook, Twitter and individual websites, users can also import their Instagram account. The auto-syncing capabilities allow for on-the-go photographs to be automatically uploaded to a StageBloc account in real time.
Right now, open theming is available for all private beta accounts, which allow users to customize and create their own themes using the online theme editor, Giles said.
“We really wanted to give users the flexibility to have complete control over their web content,” Giles said. “We’ve found that existing platforms fall short in a variety of ways, and we’ve developed StageBloc to fill that void.”
In addition, users can do everything from the StageBloc mobile application for iPhone and Android, Giles said.
“Too often, mobile applications don’t allow users the full capability of their website,” Giles said. “We think that’s a problem. Mobile is the future and the StageBloc application has full network integration so users can manage their blogs, post statuses, videos and photos directly from their mobile devices.”
“A large portion of our usage comes from mobile devices,” Giles said.
Right now, StageBloc has approximately 1,000 beta users. BizTimes readers are invited to try out StageBloc for free by visiting www.stagebloc.com/signup and using the sign up code BizTimes
Giles and the rest of his team will be at this year’s South by Southwest festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas and plan to launch the public version of StageBloc sometime in March.
