At SIIA, identifying the next generation of game changers is as much our passion as it is our job. Join us as we take an inside look at six companies that are poised to make an impact on the content industry: BestVendor, Crowd Fusion, First Stop Health, Narrative Science, Praetorian Group and ReportLinker. Check out our interview with Barry Graubart – VP of Customer Development at Crowd Fusion.
1. What problems does Crowd Fusion try to solve?
Traditional web content management systems were designed for publishing on the web. As the iPhone and iPad gained in prominence, digital media companies launched apps, but these stand-alone or bolt-on solutions were rarely integrated within the core publishing platform.
As new devices come to market (Android phones and tablets, Chrome Books, webOS and the HP Touchpad, RIM Playbook and whatever may follow) the challenge grows significantly.
Crowd Fusion’s publish everywhere model employs the concept of design bundles – groups of templates optimized for each platform, so you can layout your pages for many devices in a single process. Whether you’ve built native apps, use HTML5 or a hybrid model, you can drive them all from one platform with existing resources.
Crowd Fusion reduces costs, speeds time to market and scales for data, traffic and workflow.
2. What advantages do you have that are unique to your company?
Crowd Fusion is designed specifically to help publishers solve real-world problems. Our “publish-everywhere” platform lets you layout pages for multiple devices and platforms at once.
Crowd Fusion also has been designed for integration. Legacy CMS platforms insist you store all your content within their system. Crowd Fusion was built for the web services age – we provide adapters to easily integrate content – whether from your internal silos, from external web and data services or a combination.
Most content management platforms focus on unstructured text (articles). Crowd Fusion is engineered for both structured and unstructured data. This allows us to use the platform for sophisticated data publishing. Any web CMS can likely be used to create a blog. But creating pages and apps that show relationships between data is much more complex.
Crowd Fusion is also cloud-native, enabling publishers to focus on content and functionality, not on hosting – and scaling – web and mobile applications.
3. Where does your company fit in the business life-cycle?
Crowd Fusion has been live with brand-name media customers for nearly two years and are currently profitable. We last raised capital more than three years ago; our investors include Fuse Capital, Greycroft Partners, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Today, our growth is funded through our revenue.
4. What are your goals for presenting at IIS?
To-date, much of our success has come with large consumer-facing publishers. Our goal at IIS is to begin conversations with b2b and information publishers so that we may better understand how we apply our technology to their unique needs.
5. What’s something unique about your company?
Crowd Fusion is run as a virtual company. While much of our management team lives in the northeast, we have developers around the globe. This has helped our rapid growth – 18 months ago we were 8 people; today, we have more than 30 employees located in 22 cities in five countries.
The flexibility to recruit across the globe has many advantages and some challenges as well. But having a globally distributed workforce provides Crowd Fusion with a great diversity of expertise, opinions and ideas and round-the-clock coverage. But, perhaps most importantly, it’s forced us to adopt methodologies and processes for working with remote teams. That, in turn, has been applied to the way we work with customers. Our customers are often (pleasantly) surprised at the level of process we have in an early stage company, but we see it as key to our ability to scale our business.
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