Miaplaza Upgrades Customized Community Portals for Business Partners

Palo Alto, 3/28/2008 – miaplaza, a platform for web 2.0 communities, relaunches with new technology and a new user interface. ”We are now able to offer customized portals for our partners and have enhanced miaplaza with many features, including one-of-a-kind privacy control,“ explains CEO Johannes Ziegler. ”Together with our new navigation and the new design, this represents a huge step in upgrading miaplaza, a process we started last year.”

In 2007, Miaplaza started collaborating with the German Ippen Group, a media holding consisting of several dozen regional newspapers and radio stations, to offer community portals. As a pilot, a first community portal was introduced last August. Three additional portals followed in fall 2007, and additional newspaper portals are in preparation ”miaplaza is well positioned to work with regional newspapers because we can narrow the gap between their regional focus and the global reach of the Internet,” says CEO Johannes Ziegler. “We provide portals that have a regional focus, but also benefit from interesting national or even global content. We provide technology and features that are clearly superior to what a regional newspaper can develop on their own. With an attractive community offering, newspapers have new opportunities to tap into the regional
advertisement market on the Internet. The pilots show that very diverse communities can be attracted to the portals. In Germany sports clubs and school classes were among the first communities, as were local activists and many hobbyists.”

Post-college communities, such as school parents, are particularly interested in the high standards of privacy protection on miaplaza, says Ziegler. He is convinced that effective privacy control will increase in importance: “After playing around with Web 2.0 applications for some time, many users increasingly care about privacy and become reluctant to post content publicly.”

Tobias Bielenstein
miaplaza Inc.
210 Fell Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
USA
Telephone +1 (650) 515 3729
eMail: tobias.bielenstein@miaplaza.com

miaplaza makes the full range of Web 2.0 features available for both public and private communities. The visibility of each individual posting can be limited to specific communities or selected individuals, thus providing a unique level of privacy control.

miaplaza Inc. is a Silicon Valley based US-German startup. It started as a recommendation sharing platform in May 2005 and was enhanced step by step to the current feature-rich community platform. The platform offers an English and a German language user interface. To date there are more than 1000 private and public communities on miaplaza.

This release was published on openPR.