Magazines which can interact with your touch, let you play games and videos, and run widgets have been mostly available only through PC web browsers or multimedia CDs played on computers, whether PCs or Macs.

However, local start-up company, Terato Tech, launched its e-magazine AIYO, named based upon the technical term “I/O meaning input/output” on Friday 6 August.

Terato Tech managing director, Reza F. Razali demonstrated AIYO to the most recent Content Malaysia gathering at the thunder sized PJ Trade Centre in Damansara Perdana, Petaling Jaya on 3 August, just a few days before its official launch.

It not only lets users literally thumb – oops! forefinger – through  stories on its 40 or so pages on an Apple iPad, but also to jab characters such as the warrior hero of the company's its role-playing game Qalvinius to get it to say something, play games like tic-tac-toe, watch embedded videos and quickly scroll through thumbnails of its pages for quick access to your one of interest.

We gave it a try and WOW! the pages glided smoothly by with the flick of the forefinger on the iPad's and they appeared sharp, clear and in vibrant colours, while we also watched an embedded video, albeit a promotional, about AIYO and the company's SilentMode publishing engine which enabled it.

Despite being produced by a tech start-up, AIYO, edited by Calvin Tam, is far from being a tech-only publication, with its wealth of well written and laid out stories, mostly about lifestyle and travel, as well as humorous stories about local places and ironic situations submitted by contributors. It also includes articles syndicated from overseas, which are licensed under a Creative Commons license.

High touch through high tech

Whether it's Terato Tech's intention or not, AIYO is certainly reminiscent of an observation of life in the Silicon Valley, made by trend forecaster John Naisbitt in his seminal book, Megatrends published in the mid-1980s.

Devoting a whole chapter to it, entitled “High-Tech, High-Touch,” Naisbitt described how high-tech knowledge workers in the Silicon Valley resorted to fine recreational pursuits in fine food, fine coffes, fine wines, high culture and art during their leisure time to counterbalance the rather cold, precise and clinical technologies they handled during their work, and this kind of interest is reflected in the articles in AIYO, which are contributed by various writers.

“We basically want to provide a platform for people who are tired of blogging and websites, and who want to move to e-magazines, said Reza in Terato Tech's rather unpretentious shoplot premises in the Bangi Business Park, Bangi.

Within one week, AIYO reached number 39 in the U.S. lifestyle section of the iPad appstore, number 9 in Bulgaria, number 16 in France and number 21 in Malaysia.

“It was among the top iPad app accros 50 countries and has proven to be more popular in the non-English speaking countries, though 90% of downloads are from the U.S.,” said Reza.

Currently available only on an Apple iPad, AIYO can be downloaded for free from the iPad store and Reza aims to publish a new issue every month.

“We focus on the iPad since its larger screen size is more practical for publishers, and we may later extend it to other tablet devices based on Android, MeeGo, Windows Phone or any others provided there's sufficient acceptance to make it worth our while,” said Reza.

“However, we have no plans to make it available on netbook, notebook or desktop PCs, since that's already a saturated market,” he added.

Mobile World also got a preview of Terato's next publishing venture of a children's story e-book based on the same technology.

While publishing is one of Terato Tech's three main lines of business, the other two being mobile games development and the provision of services, AIYO is more than its first e-magazine, but is very much a reference for its SilentMode publishing engine, which is still very much a work-in-progress, which Terato hopes to be commercially ready in October.

SilentMode's front end was developed using Objective C, while its back-end is a mashup (mixture) of various types of web services, mostly based on open source applications such as PHP, mySQL and it will be offered to publishers as a cloud-based service hosted by Terato.

SilentMode accepts magazine pages laid out in Adobe PDF format and it adds the interactive games, videos and other active or interactive content to it to produce the final published form.

“We're in discussions with various publishers, currently only in Malaysia and Singapore, who're interested in using it for their publications, and we plan to become a recognised provider of publishing apps worldwide,” said Reza.

Happy birthday to you!

Terato Tech was founded two years ago in September 2008 and received a grant worth RM150,000 from the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC). The company currently comprises 15 staff.

Besides SilentMode and AIYO, Terato also builds applications for the Apple iPhone and Android handsets. For example, it built a mobile banking app for CIMB Bank, which runs on the iPhone and Android phones, a halal products location app on the iPhone for the Halal Development Corporation and it collaborated with the Yellow Pages Malaysia business directory to produce the iMalaysia Hotline app for the iPhone, which lists the hotline numbers of emergency services such as fire, ambulance and police.

“We're currently developing a BlackBerry app for a customer but I can't tell you more,” said Reza.

Meanwhile, its iPhone-based RPG game Qalvinus enjoyed 20,000 downloads from the iPhone appstore within three days of its release, priced at U.S. 99 cents each. It came number 4 for downloads from Taiwan and was among the top 10 for downloads from France but rather unfortunately was not well received in Malaysia but instead received some unfavourable reviews from Malaysian reviewers.

So Terato Tech will most probably have to look overseas to realise its success, given that bashing things Malaysian is the favourite pastime of Malaysians.

Reza himself, is not a qualified techie, in that he has no official qualifications in information and communications technology. Instead, he taught himself programming in Basic on DOS-based PCs since when he was 10.

He graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelors degree in a rather dull and boring subject – i.e. finance. Upon graduation, he worked for Dell in Texas in tech support, then in business development with a local IT company after his return, before starting Terato Tech.

Conducive environment

While based in Bangi, close to many universities, most of Terato Tech's developers are from universities in the Klang Valley, though Bangi provides a more conducive environment, away from the hustle, bustle, stress and distractions of the Klang Valley, somewhat reminiscent of Texas, with its pace of life moving to the unhurried beat, in sync with gestation of livestock and their time to reach maturity, as well as the time it takes for crops to sprout from the ground and ripen.

The pace of life in New York was super-hectic in comparison, as if in synch with the manic beat of traders on the stock exchange floor, while Reza also loves the casual and laid-back lifestyle of the Silicon Valley, which he makes a point to visit every year.

However, this isn't a contradiction, since the development of quality technological products and services, have their gestation periods too and cannot be hurried to market, or they risk ending up as rubbishy products which will be laughed at and ridiculed.

That said, Reza does not believe that the Silicon Valley and the cultural and other factors which contributed to its success, can be found or replicated elsewhere. The cover story on Silicon Valley in a 1998 edition of Business Week also drew the same conclusion, even in other parts of the United States.

However, that does not mean that other ICT initiatives outside of the Silicon Valley have not been successful, except that they have achieved success in their own respective ways, relevant to their own unique local situations, time, factors and circumstances.

If you want to contribute to AIYO, visit www.teratotech.com for more information.