[Release] Naker 1.0 “Hérodote” is here!

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Naker

5 min readJan 11, 2019

🎆!! HAPPY NEW YEAR!! 🎆
Holidays just finished already, we are all tired from celebrations, depressed by the weather… but also full of motivation and hopes for 2019 coming ✨

If you don’t know us already, we are Valentin & Nicolas, founders of Naker. After launching our first beta version in September 2018, we decided to start this new year by launching our first public release: welcome to our 1.0, welcome to “Hérodote” 📚
This post will let you know everything about this release: how we came to it, what is it about and of course why we think it will help you to make the web cool again 🤓
Don’t worry, at the end of this post, you will know why it’s called Hérodote!

1. A story of a launch

Naker was officially created in August 2018 but was born earlier. Everything started with a side project, a 3D strategic game online, Wazana.io 🎮 (your new favorite weekend activity). We realized that 3D web was full of potential but quite challenging to manage 😵

Seeing the rise of PlayCanvas (3D web game engine) or Sketchfab (3D assets library), we got convinced that 3D was the future of the internet… We had to do something about it and help to make the web cool again.
BOOM, we had a vision 👁‍🗨

Coming from this vision and after doing our market study, we built a 3D web editor only based on drag and drop 👾 After gathering more than 350 beta-users, we launched the beta version in September to test our vision and our platform with brands, agencies and UX designers mostly. Three months of feedback later, we were more convinced than ever to democratize 3D creation on the web 👌

Concerning the platform itself, the overall feeling was that everything was potentially possible but nothing was entirely doable on a professional level 🙅‍♂️ Focusing on one kind of 3D website, one use case and some features is necessary to allow you to create engaging experiences!

Which new media could be used to fulfill the rising gap between brands and customers?

2. 2019, the year of digital storytelling?

Do you see what I did in the first part of this article?
I told you the story 📖 of Naker and how we did get to this new release. I used one well-known marketing methodology that increases engagement and gets the brands and the customers closer.

According to Jeanne Bordeau, “consumers are now more inclined to enter into pedagogical and emotional conversations with brands and companies. Digital storytelling can captivate them with more authentic messages compared to traditional marketing.’’ (in Havard Business Review, 2018, FR).

Indeed, Our 🧠 are far more engaged by storytelling than by cold, hard facts. When we read a story, any part of the 🧠 that we use if we would experience what we’re reading about becomes activated as well 🔥

If storytelling is an effective methodology to increase engagement and create 🆒 experiences for your audience, we think that it’s even better associated with what 3D has to offer.

Interactivity makes the experience more relevant to a customer’s interests and builds loyalty since you’re delivering what the customer wants: from awareness and passiveness to engagement 🤝

Meanwhile, Immersion enhances everyday experiences, making them more realistic, engaging, and satisfying on all devices, smartphone, desktop, or Virtual Reality (VR) headset.

So the 3D-web use case we decided to focus on for this new release gather storytelling, interactivity and immersion. We decided to call it Intale for Interactive Digitale Tale 🌐

3. What is an intale?

An intale is a combination of 2D editorial content, like storytelling chapters, through a journey in an immersive and interactive 3D virtual world.

We didn’t invent anything, storytelling is one of the primary use-cases of interactive web and 3D. More than 350 websites on awwwards use storytelling and lot of them use 3D. According to our study, 6% of 3D websites on awwwards are Storytelling ones. Here are some examples:

Hundreds of interactive stories combining 2D and 3D are created by digital agencies all around the world. They are tailored-made and very expensive, only seen as a niche and luxurious marketing experience 💰
We want you to be able to create the intale you want for your company, organization or yourself. We want to democratize intales to become a new media Like Wordpress did with blogging 😎

4. How to create your intale?

We did our best to give you a seamless creation experience for this Hérodote version. Sign up or Log in to the platform, select your template, write your story and share it with your audience 📈
Don’t forget to have fun and to contact us if you need anything, that’s what we’re here for!

PS: Why Hérodote?

We decided to name our different versions after famous explorers.
Our beta was named after the first known explorer, the Egyptian Hennu.

For the 1.0 version coming after the beta, we chose Hérodote!
It is the French name for Herodotus, considered as the Father of History, which we think is a cool title when you’re trying to push digital storytelling!