Local internet celebrity Vinny Lingham has launched his much anticipated Synthasite project into closed beta. Truly one of the first world class web 2.0 apps to come out of South Africa getting reviewed on the holy grail of web 2.0 news, Mashable.
The goal of SynthaSite is to bring the offline functionality of a WYSIWYG web site editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver to the browser in a rich Internet application. Synthasite enables you and your team to collaboratively work on your website design using the tools available within its service, which easily arrange text, images, badges and buttons to create a professional-looking site. There are a few items available by default, such as a YouTube video or a Flickr photo search, which can be dragged and dropped into your design. The functionality is very easy to maneuver, enabling novice users to create feature rich websites and easily choose between a selection of professionally designed templates!
Up next for Synthasite is file management, publishing, deployment and hosting, collaborative site building, chat, SEO, graphic design, blogging, wikis, developer resources, site analytics, and a whole set of features designed to build a community around Synthasite features and users.
You can follow their development progress from the Synthasite blog
Vinny hit me up late Saturday night to grab a Synthasite account before it went open to public registration – there’s only 1000 (maybe less) accounts left over so shoot over and get yours!
Here is the press release for the launch:
Synthasite, an AJAX based Web Publishing Platform, emerged today from stealth mode. The 6-person startup based in Cape Town, South Africa was recently spun out from the incuBeta group as a separate stand-alone company that will focus on delivering a world class web based software platform for web publishing, focusing specifically on Widgets & Mashups. Synthasite looks and feels like desktop software, but remains firmly rooted in the browser with no reliance on client side technology.
Synthasite CEO, Vinny Lingham (Founder of a leading Search Engine Marketing company, incuBeta), said the following: “œSynthasite‘s Alpha [Tech Preview] release today was a milestone in the company‘s aim to become the standard for web publishing. We‘re releasing it at this early stage in order to allow the community to assist in the direction that we will take Synthasite and we are very excited about the potential for this space, especially with the rapid rise of Mashups & Widgets. Synthasite ushers in a new era for web publishing; where people construct using existing building blocks, rather than build everything from scratch, and publish collaboratively from any machine rather than being stuck on a single PC or OS. We‘re very excited about rapidly releasing many of the features on our extensive roadmap. We‘re opening the Synthasite framework to the developer community so that they can build their own components and templates, and we will also be enabling source code level editing – although this will only be available in the Beta released, scheduled for Q4.“
Or if your to lazy to read just watch the alpha release video (the video is a bit dated, it looks much better now in beta!)
