SIIA Digital Discourse Industry Blog

This week in the Federal Cloud: May 13-18

May 18, 2012 By Mike Hettinger Leave a Comment

There was big news in cloud this week with the announcement by GSA on May 14th of the first certified 3rd Party Assessment Organizations (3PAOs). The initial 3PAOs include a federal agency (DOT Enterprise Service Center), SRA International, and a number of small to mid-size companies specializing in FISMA certification. The 3PAOs are an integral part of the FedRAMP process so this action represents a major step forward for the FedRAMP program and vendors wishing to go through the FedRAMP process can now hire one of these approved 3PAOs to assess the security of their system. The link below will take you to GSA’s list of accredited 3PAOs.

Also this week, we began to get some clarity around the role of industry in the shared services initiative, with public comments from OMB Officials about how the strategy will be implemented and what role industry and government shared service providers will play in the initiative. According to OMB, they are not distinguishing public and private sector service providers. Read more from Federal News Radio.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

Filed Under: Government, Policy, Policy - Cloud Computing, PSIG, Software Tagged With: gsa, OMB, shared services

Big Data: A Long Way from Plug-and-Play by Nancy Ciliberti

May 18, 2012 By Jennifer Hansen Leave a Comment

One of the key markets for all the new big data analytics providers is marketers themselves, a group that should be a natural for turning deep customer insight into increased revenue. But are they ready?

Well, according to a study by Columbia Business School and the New York American Marketing Association, although nearly all (91 percent) of marketers value and want to make data driven decisions, 29 percent report that their marketing departments have “too little or no customer/consumer data.” Thirty nine percent of the marketers surveyed said their data is collected too infrequently and “not real-time enough.” Two in five marketers admit that they cannot turn their data into actionable insight and about an equal number (36%) report that they have “lots of customer data,” but “don’t know what to do with it.”

VIA Recap

May 18, 2012 By SIIA Leave a Comment

Angus Robertson

On May 9 & 10, the SIIA Content Division hosted Content VIA Platforms – a conference dedicated to educating media, publishing and information professionals about the technology and business issues related to distributing content via mobile, social and other platforms. Guest blogger, Angus Robertson, Principal Robertson Advisors LLC, gives his write up on the Conference and the content covered.

About Robertson Advisors: For 10 years Robertson Advisors has been providing content creators and distributors with strategic and tactical consulting services. Angus can be reached at angusrob@mac.com.

A major theme emerging from SIIA’s Content VIA Platforms conference in San Francisco last week was the impact that mobile is having on the distribution of content.

One lesson from the success of iPad apps is that the simplicity dictated by the format can be a benefit that has relevance to other offerings as well. The limitations of apps forces greater focus on what is truly important, a lesson that is increasingly being incorporated into web products.

Newstex President Larry Schwartz offered a useful walk through of the process and timeline of developing mobile apps. He stressed the importance of following the Lean Startup model of “Nail it and scale it.”

Dan Bennett, VP of Technology for Thomson Reuters, provided a handy comparison of the pros and cons of native apps versus HTML5 and sounded a note of caution about jumping on the app bandwagon. Developing and supporting apps for Apple devices always adds to costs but not always to revenue, so it is important to understand what you are trying to do with apps, he said. He likens apps to puppies: everyone loves them until they get big and tear apart the house.

Barry Graubart, VP Marketing, ReisReports, led an informative Executive Bootcamp on Platforms that included Teri Mendelsohn of Mendelsohn Consulting, Ann Michael of Delta Think, Robin Neidorf of Free Pint and Mark Strohlein of Agile Business Logic.

Some of the key pointers from this session were:

Mobile strategy needs to:

embrace the constraints; focus and simplify; and leverage mobile features such as geolocation, but only where they add value.
iPads are now outselling PCS, which represent less than 50% of the market.
About one in ten new products will be successful.

Security and authentication remains a significant hindrance to going fully mobile in the enterprise market, especially for businesses such as financial institutions. Still, Free Pint surveys of enterprise users show that mobile is growing strongly in the corporate world. Two years ago Junior Analysts were asking “Why can’t I get this on my iPhone?” Now, senior executives are saying “Get this on my iPad, I don’t care how.”

Peter Marney, VP Content Group, Thomson Financial Research, gave an overview of how Thomson Reuters is handling the issue of fully leveraging the vast amounts of data across the company to support multiple platforms and markets. His goal is to make news dynamic and interactive across the merged enterprise. “Knowing the value of the connections (between content) is more important than the content itself,” he said, citing the links between companies, people, patents and legal issues.

Filed Under: Content, Content Events, Content VIA Platforms, Events Tagged With: b2b, Content, digital content, platforms, social media, technology

VIA Recap: Syndicating Your Content and Working with B2B Aggregation Platforms

May 17, 2012 By SIIA Leave a Comment

Angus Robertson

On May 9 & 10, the SIIA Content Division hosted Content VIA Platforms – a conference dedicated to educating media, publishing and information professionals about the technology and business issues related to distributing content via mobile, social and other platforms. Guest blogger, Angus Robertson, gives his write up on the session Syndicating Your Content and Working with B2B Aggregation Platforms.

This panel at the SIIA Content VIA Platforms, moderated by NewsLook CEO Fred Silverman, provided a good representation of the spectrum of attitudes towards syndicating content. In the traditionalist’s corner was Eric Johnston, Publisher and President of the Modesto Bee and the Merced Sun-Star, owned by McClatchy Newspapers. Johnston was quick to draw the distinction that “We are journalists, not content creators or providers. We do our best to protect our copyright.” Johnston also took comfort in the advent of the iPad, which he said allows a return to the “serendipity” of newspapers. This led to a discussion among the panelists of the “lean back” movement that, for example, has people spending 2 continuous hours with the iPad version of The Economist in a quasi-print format.

Johnston says his papers syndicate broad interest stories, but keep hyperlocal news within their own system, believing that local news is not of much interest outside the community. (But what about those who have left the community who may still be interested in home town news?) Despite the challenges facing the industry, Johnston thinks it is an exciting time to be in the newspaper business: “We have strong digital assets and we’ll be prepared for future delivery.”

Anthony Capon, Vice President for Content at Dow Jones oversees Factiva, which has more than 36,000 content providers. Capon noted that anyone can aggregate and webcrawl: “We make it legal and present people with something they haven’t seen before.” Curation becomes more important as the playing field levels, with data mining and visualization emerging as key differentiators: “People want to discover things they don’t know, rather than just searching,” he said. While it is more complicated and expensive to syndicate through multiple platforms, “We have to be on all platforms our users use or we don’t get paid.”

Jeffrey Massa, President and CEO of syndicator YellowBrix, wants to make sure the content gets to the customer and that each of the 3,000 publishers gets credit. Massa noted a trend recently for publishers, especially newspapers, to try to pull back content that they previously syndicated through aggregators. Agreeing with Capon, Massa noted that syndicators have to add more value: “deduping content is not enough.’ Over time he expects to be syndicating less licensed content and more unlicensed content. YellowBrix is putting its money where its mouth is through its new iSyndicate product. Rather than the traditional usage-based model, iSyndicate buys in bulk: for example, 10 million page views for a set fee. Clients are charged a flat monthly fee regardless of the amount of usage.

NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam, emphasized the importance of paying attention to packaging and making sure the display of content is optimized for different platforms, including billboards. He said NewsCred aims for an “immersive content experiences” using a combination of algorithms and an editorial team. NewsCred was able to sign up the Financial Times, which is known for keeping fairly tight control of its content, by “showing how we can take them beyond where they are. It has to be more than just revenue in some cases.” As an example of how curation of syndicated content can serve niche markets, NewsCred also has worked with the Daily News to create an online section aimed at the South Asian community in New York.

Many publishers still expect higher fees for content appearing on display screens, such as Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters terminals, but NewsCred charges clients the same amount, regardless of the platform they receive it on. Noting that “Advertisers want to control the relationship with the customer,” Islam said brands such as Pepsi are the fastest growing customer segment of NewsCred’s business.

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Post written by Angus Robertson, Principal Robertson Advisors llc.

For 10 years Robertson Advisors has been providing content creators and distributors with strategic and tactical consulting services. Angus can be reached at angusrob@mac.com.

Filed Under: Content, Content VIA Platforms, Events Tagged With: b2b, Content, digital content, technology, video

An Honor to Present Education Awards to Industry Veterans

May 16, 2012 By Karen Billings Leave a Comment

Presenting this year’s education awards during the recent Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco was very special for me personally. It was great to be up on stage with two very key people in our industry as we honored them with SIIA’s education awards. We presented Charles Blaschke with the Ed Tech Impact Award, an honor we started just four years ago. We then presented Dr. Patrick Suppes with a Lifetime Achievement Award, the first time this award has been given at the Summit.

Each of these awards were given after reviewing quite a list of candidates. Our education technology industry has a growing number of veterans who have contributed ideas, products, and services for some decades– and some for over 50 years!

Our Ed Tech Impact Award went to Charles Blaschke, Founder and President of Education TURNKEY Systems, Inc., an education industry veteran whose work goes back over four decades. He is president of his Washington D.C.-based firm, where he provides data and analysis about Federal funding policies and K-12 technology spending, including Title I, IDEA/Special Ed, the new ARRA stimulus funding, and other related Federal programs.

Many of those in the audience raised their hands when he asked if any were or had been his clients. I raised my hand, remembering how I would get his monthly reports that my company had subscribed to. I would then share those reports with our sales reps who were always interested in Charles’s specific state-by-state funding information.

It’s become a tradition for the new Ed Tech Impact honoree to receive the award from the last recipient. The first awardee, Ellen Bialo (IESD), presented it to Tom Greaves (The Greaves Group) two years ago and Tom presented it to Kathy Hurley (Pearson) last year. This year Kathy, now with the Pearson Foundation presented it to Charles Blaschke, this year’s awardee and her husband!

For the Lifetime Achievement Award, we chose Dr. Patrick Suppes, now the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University. Suppes began conducting research using computers to teach students in the 1960s and even though he recently turned 90 years old, he is still doing online instructional development! He founded Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC) in 1967, and served as CEO for many years, while maintaining a large class schedule at Stanford University.

We were lucky to have Ron Fortune, a colleague and CEO at CCC, introduce Dr. Suppes by providing background information about his 50+ years of experience in education technology. Dr. Suppes accepted the award from SIIA President, Ken Wasch, and gave very insightful comments about how far we’ve come – and haven’t come – in our industry. He pondered on the effects of cross-age tutoring via online, as well as the opportunities with voice recognition technologies. After his award, many in the audience came up to congratulate him and request pictures; some were SIIA members who had worked at CCC at the same time as Suppes and Fortune.

Few attendees with start-ups and early stage companies attending this year’s Ed Tech Industry Summit likely knew either of these men – or were aware of their work – before we presented them with the awards. Jenny House, President of RedRock Reports who sponsored the awards luncheon, remarked afterwards that the audience at the Summit luncheon was ‘getting older and – at the same time – younger’.

But we also agreed that whether young and old, the audience really appreciated the accomplishments and contributions the two awardees have made to our industry. It was truly an honor to introduce Patrick Suppes and Charles Blaschke to everyone in the audience, but in particular, to those very young companies who will grow and advance the use of technology in K-20 education.

Karen Billings is Vice President for the Education Division at SIIA.

Filed Under: Ed Tech Industry Summit, Education, Education Events Tagged With: Awards, Education

This Week in IP Enforcement

May 16, 2012 By Keith Kupferschmid Leave a Comment

ICANN Targets May 22 To Reopen Web Address Application System (The Hill)
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it expects to reopen its application system on May 22 after a glitch forced the organization to temporarily stop accepting applications for new Web domain endings.

Court: Schools Can Publish Small Excerpts Of Texts Online For Students (eCampus News)
U.S. District Judge Orinda Evans sided with Georgia State University on a range of copyright infringement claims filed by Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications and Cambridge University Press, in a ruling that administrators said could set an important precedent regarding the “fair use doctrine” and how educational material is used by schools.

Member Of Internet Piracy Group ‘IMAGINE’ Pleads Guilty To Copyright Infringement Conspiracy (US ICE)
A California man pleaded guilty to conspiring to willfully reproduce and distribute tens of thousands of infringing copies of copyrighted works without permission, and faces up to five years in prison, a fine of $250,000 and three years of supervised release.

Backed By Microsoft, Russian Anti-Piracy Firm Pirate Pay Eyes International Expansion (VentureBeat)
Anti-piracy firm Pirate Pay, which aims to tackle Bittorrent piracy by confusing clients and preventing users from connecting to each other, is planning to expand its foreign operations and spearhead the ongoing fight against online piracy.

Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.

Filed Under: Anti-Piracy, Policy - Intellectual Property

Lorraine Landfried, Deputy CIO for Product Development at VA to speak to SIIA Public Sector Group

May 16, 2012 By Mike Hettinger Leave a Comment

Lorraine Landfried

As part of its ongoing Executive Roundtable Series, SIIA will host Lorraine Landfried, Deputy CIO for Product Development at the Department of Veterans Affairs for a roundtable discussion on the latest developments around IT enhancement and strategy within VA.

In her role at VA, Landfried facilitates all IT development activities, including planning and oversight of the IT projects supporting the Secretary’s 16 major initiatives.

The roundtable will be the first executive discussion before SIIA’s new Public Sector Innovation Group, a newly created division of SIIA comprised of innovative software and IT services firms seeking to take advantage of the evolving Federal investment in Cloud-related technologies.

The event is open to all SIIA members and invited guests. Please contact Mike Hettinger for more information.

Event details:
What: SIIA Public Sector Innovation Group Executive Roundtable
When: May 24, 2012, 11:00am
Where: SIIA Offices, 1090 Vermont Avenue, Suite 600, Washington, DC

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

Filed Under: Government, Policy, Policy - Cloud Computing, PSIG, Software Tagged With: cio, executive roundtable, Veterans Affairs

SIIA Digital Discourse