Portable Porn: Pocket-XXX Is For Everybody

Steve Tietze (pron. "teetz"), co-founder of PDA adult content site Pocket-XXX (www.pocket-xxx.com), describes his site's edge thusly: "The unique thing we did with Pocket-XXX is it's not only a PDA site. When you sign up, you get access to a full-blown Website as well, with pictures that are high-res, with videos to download. The PDA provides the added bonus of getting, each day, a portable magazine."

Tietze's adult site development diary reads like The New Webmaster's 1-2-3. Here's the guy who did everything right. "We decided to do Pocket-XXX after we'd been running non-PDA sites for about eight years. I run two non-adult, and the rest are adult sites."

Step one was doing a lot of research in the beginning. "My background is in developing video games; I got tired of doing that. I've always been a tech guy. I learned as much as I could. Some of it helped, some of it didn't.

"Before I did a PDA site, I started poking around in the adult entertainment industry. I spent a lot of time learning how to build a site, how to get traffic."

What he learned, he applied to his new venture. "Most of our sites are niched," Tietze says, "shaved, Gothic, amateur. We didn't focus on making a megasite." That's step two.

"I think when I first started, I went to the New Orleans ia2000," he remembers. "I had met people online, through chat and Webmaster boards, the networking thing. Then we went to [other] conventions, did more networking; went to the seminars.

"I've always gotten out there and talked to people... a lot of trial and error, obviously."

Since Tietze's background is primarily technical, he was mainly looking to bone up on legality, protecting his company, and the finer points of dealing in gray-area content distribution. "Once I got the information - because I've found there's a lot of contradiction out there, going from Website to Website - I'd read it, I'd formulate my own opinion, and then I'd go ahead and research it and try it out. If it worked for me, great; if not, I'd go to the next thing."

Developing a good PDA site was a struggle at first, Tietze admits, as early devices didn't have much memory. Finding, posting, and offering downloads within those constraints was a challenge. When dealing with content, he says, "the user's probably got applications already installed; trying to fit images and text is really hard to do.

"Anyone who gets into this has to know the different [palmtop] devices" and build a provider site accordingly."We did a lot of tests. Images look different on different devices. We wrote a lot of special code to create content we found acceptable."

Containing growth has resulted in a healthy company for Tietze, although it keeps him busy. "We're just a small group of people, about two or three of us, a jack-of-all-trades company. We contract out a lot of work. Under our network there are about 30 sites. It's been hectic."

One way he keeps the operation running smoothly is by implementing forward-compatible variables. Of the sites, Tietze says, "They pretty much run themselves; everything we do we make sure to do dynamically," so not a lot of time is wasted on grunt work. "That helps out quite a bit."

Here's what you'll get with Pocket-XXX: "Every day when a user syncs the PDA, they get a download of news, pictures, an erotic story, jokes," Tietze explains.

Pocket-XXX also offers a countrywide strip club database, with ratings posted by Pocket-XXX subscribers. Tietze hopes to expand this feature in conjunction with the clubs themselves, providing coupons or specials for Pocket-XXX users.

"I'm continuing to build what I call my own little empire of PDA sites. I'm also in the process of developing my own technology that's going to help bring content from the Web to the PDA more easily." The problem, he says, is that users sign up for these services and then they have to be pretty Net savvy to take full advantage of them.

Tietze is dedicated to making PDA advantages accessible to everybody. That, of course, is the biggest step of all.