Pixelmags Takes a Unique Approach to Digitizing Magazines When Apple introduced its Newsstand feature last October, this startup was poised to provide much of the digital content magazine subscribers wanted.

In 2009, smartphones had gained a solid hold on the mobile communications market. But one industry that had yet to catch up to the possibilities of the new technology was publishing. The few attempts to digitize magazine content for mobile platforms were crude, with pages that were difficult to navigate and not properly formatted for easy legibility. Two friends--Ryan Marquis, director of digital marketing at a Silicon Valley software company, and Mark Stubbs, founder of a London-based digital design consultancy--set out to develop a platform to change that.

"We became one of the first companies to put magazines on the iPhone," Marquis says.

The timing was serendipitous. When Apple introduced its Newsstand feature last October, PixelMags, the company the pair founded, was poised to provide much of the digital content magazine subscribers wanted.