Pinota began as a hacked together personal image gallery program I wrote for the web so that I could view the images I uploaded to my personal web site.  Each image was resized to fit my Blackberry Curve’s screen and I even rotated some of the picture to maximize the use of the screen and eliminate having to scroll to see the entire image.  From this point I realized how much fun this had become and I really wanted to begin publishing my own adult content site with this new software and thus Pinota was born.  On a side note I chose the name Pinota because it was in reference to pin-ups over the air.  I actually didn’t know it mean to stack in Swedish which I think is an interesting consequence.

As one of the many things we decided early on was that we wanted as many people to enjoy the site as possible.  One of the biggest hurdles we were faced with was the browser settings which we had absolutely no control over.  It didn’t help that the default settings was low image resolution.  Then I discovered mobile flash.  Mobile flash is the same technology used in the blackberry themes with the backgrounds that switch or that have planes or fishes moving across your screen.  Using this technology I built what I believe is the worlds first all flash web site for the Blackberry. By using flash, it gave us the ability to show high resolution images, place objects anywhere on the screen, do a slideshow and enable short cut keys for easy viewing. It also enabled us to server always changing dynamic content to the site without daily administration on our part.

When we launched the beta program for Pinota we offered over 100 free accounts and thus attracted over 15,000 people to signup within a month.   I had not anticipated this level of growth or the diversity of devices to emerge and it was defiantly a challenging beta period.  For example, as a Canadian CDMA user I had not even considered the wi-fi browser to view Pinota.  In retrospect this should have been part of our test cases and we were able to resolve it but it threw me in a development spin for about a week during an already hectic beta period.  In the end and with the help of the beta members we were able to iron out the final issues and launch Pinota in late November.  Thanks to those initial beta members, Pinota’s launch was a success.

Unfortunately the steep learning curve did not end at our launch date and to add to the new influx of technical issues, we had a content supplier dry up.  This was a dark period for Pinota as we had difficulty launching content on time and helping people with their questions and concerns.  I know that we were not at our best and sometimes did not deliver as we had always promised especially with respect to videos.In the end we decided to do away with the videos and concentrate on the image sets.  It was a tough decision to nix the videos but since the quality was so grainy and poor and the content available was so … well poor we were left with little choice.  I decided that it was better to get the images right 100% then to server both images and videos at less than a passing grade.

Thus I began rebuilding Pinota in March and launched the latest version of our site in May.  With the new version we have tried to address issues like the uniqueness between devices and error messages on broken images.  We also added new features like the slide show and automatic content releases for daily deployment.

Our membership has also grown 10 times faster in the month of May than previous months and is directly attributed to our free trial viewable at http://www.pinota.com/trial .  We also continue the tradition of no referral ads on the mobile members site and unlike other sites, we are 100% committed to protecting our members privacy information.  We have also implemented a new way for Blackberry bloggers and fan sites to earn 25% from all membership sales through our new Pinota E-Cash Affiliate program.

To me though, the most exciting part of the new Pinota is we are offering other content holders the ability to brand Pinota for their own content.  The same system I use to publish Pinota is fully available to anybody else wanting to sell content to subscribers and there is still lots of space in the genre.  Even though Pinota focuses on straight, lesbian and racial sets and some sex scenes, we do not have any Gay, bondage or any knish fetish content sets.  So there is lots of room for this kind of content to become available to other enterprising individuals. We are also looking for any Adult entertainers with establish web sites looking to publish their own branded Pinota for their members.  As you can see we have plenty of room to grow.

What is next in store for Pinota?  Well now that we have settled the image issues and are up and serving over 200,000 images daily to our members, we are free to concentrate on the issue of quality videos and how to serve them best to the variety of different devices that view Pinota every day.  As some carriers have different download caps, we will need to overcome this as well as the variety of different screen sizes and resolutions.  So look forward to a Pinota video application coming soon to your Blackberry device.