Dan Ackerman

SIIA Previews Interview with Narrative Science

February 2, 2012 By Dan Ackerman

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. Today we’ll be taking a look at PNarrative Science.

Narrative Science, a Chicago-based technology company, transforms data into stories and insights through its’ proprietary artificial intelligence authoring system. Narrative Science was recently among the top ten winners of the prestigious Chicago Innovation Awards, for which there were over 500 applicants. Narrative Science was founded by Stuart Frankel, Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum. Professors Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum are from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Studies at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and developed an early version of the Company’s core technology at Northwestern. INVO interviewed Stuart Frankel, the company’s CEO. Mr. Frankel, an experienced technology executive was a member of the senior management team at DoubleClick and is the former CEO of Performics, a performance marketing services agency that is now owned by Publicis. Mr. Frankel is a lawyer and a CPA.

What is Narrative Science? How did it get started?
Narrative Science is a technology company focused on the automated creation of narrative content. Our technology generates news stories, business reports, tweets, texts, snippets and other kinds of text content purely from the analysis of data. We work with media publishers and businesses in a variety of industries. The product can be used to create editorial content across a variety of media verticals including sports, finance, real estate, and politics. In addition, our system can be used by businesses to create narrative reports that communicate information and insights gleaned from large data sources such as sales, and marketing data, or operations data and market research

The genesis for the idea began when my two co-founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, taught a course at the Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications. Kris and Larry worked with one of the project teams in the class to develop a prototype of a technology that automatically generated editorial content from data. The project team focused on creating baseball-related content and one of the first stories generated by the technology was a story about a Northwestern Wildcats baseball game. The story was generated entirely from the game’s box score and play-by-play information.

How did you first learn about the work of Kris and Larry?
John Lavine, the Dean of Medill introduced me to Kris and Larry and they exposed me to their research lab that they ran at McCormick. Following that introduction, I met regularly with Kris and Larry to help them evaluate some of their research projects for commercial viability.

What compelled you to continue to spend time evaluating the core technology?
I was really blown away when I first saw a demo of a prototype of the early technology (initially called Stats Monkey). In particular, I was struck by the quality of the initial output — it read shockingly well. I was also impressed with Kris and Larry as well as the two Medill students, Nick Allen and John Templon, who were on the original project team. Following some initial discussions with Kris and Larry, I spent several months doing diligence around the idea of building a company from the technology. Based on that work, it seemed pretty clear to me that if the technology could be developed beyond the prototype, there would be a very real opportunity to build a sizable business.

Can you share some important milestones?
The first significant steps were incorporating the company and negotiating and executing a license for the technology with Northwestern, both of which occurred in the early part of 2010. During April 2010, we raised a little more than $1M from angel investors. During this time, it became clear to us that the original application needed to be rewritten in order to create a horizontal platform that could be in used to write about any subject matter using just about any kind of data. This process took about six months and was a key inflection point for us because it really allowed the company to scale.

Another milestone was raising our first institutional round of $6M from Battery Ventures in January 2011.

We ended 2011 with about 25 customers and 24 employees, who are split between Chicago and New York.

Can you speak to the difficulty in transitioning the core application from what was initially research into something more commercial?
Like many technologies developed within a university, the initial version of our technology was not developed (and with good reason) with an eye towards things like scalability, reliability and security. When we decided to rewrite the core technology, we really made a significant investment in the future of the company, but this investment allowed us to move from a developmental stage to a commercial stage. I consider us fortunate in that it has primarily been customer demand that has required us to move rather quickly into an execution mode. We do not have time to think about the abstract very much. Every day it seems like we have more employees, customers and projects – we have to get things done.

Can you describe the company’s value proposition?
We create two broad types of content – media content and business reporting, although we use the same technology platform for each segment, For media publishers, our technology allows publishers to expand current content areas or enter new areas of coverage at a very reasonable cost. For instance, earlier this year, we partnered with GameChanger, a mobile scorekeeping application with a statistics management website for youth, high school and college baseball and softball. We have integrated our technology with GameChanger and now generate a story for every game scored through the GameChanger application. Our technology wrote 300,000 stories about youth baseball in 2011

In terms of business reporting, we’re essentially helping businesses deal with the problem of data overload. We’re finding that companies across a wide range of industries are inundated with too much data and would benefit tremendously from tools and applications that help them understand and communicate insights from data in a more efficient and understandable manner. The narrative form not only makes data more understandable but also more consumable. For example, we are helping some advertising agencies and advertising technology companies present online advertising campaign data to their customers and employees in a simple, easy to understand narrative format. This allows these companies to leverage the investment that they have made in data and to communicate much more effectively with their customers.

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: IIS12, Information Industry Summit

SIIA Previews Interview with BestVendor

January 19, 2012 By Dan Ackerman

As part of our Previews program at the Information Industry Summit, SIIA provides attendees with an inside look at companies poised to impact the Content Industry. Check out our interview with Previews participant BestVendor, and if you haven’t done so already register for IIS12 here

1. What problems does your company try to solve?

BestVendor helps you quickly find the best business tools based on the recommendations of people like you, using social recommendations. Our vision is to provide a Yelp-like “social discovery” resource for all business products, starting with business software and apps. We want to be the first place you go whenever you need to figure out what to buy. At the same time, we want to provide vendors with a highly efficient vehicle for engaging and attracting new customers throughout the funnel. SMB buyers are notoriously difficult to reach, and BestVendor aims to be the No. 1 pipeline to that audience.

2. What advantages do you have that are unique to your company?

We’re the first to bring social recommendations to business purchasing, and have a viral, network effect model. If we can establish a trusted brand and scale our audience quickly and efficiently through SEO, viral product design, distribution partnerships, and other channels, we can establish a dominant position in the marketplace. Efficient user acquisition is key. Then, as we focus on monetizing, we’ll have a huge advantage by virtue of context: people come to us to figure out what to buy, and the markets we touch are pretty large.

On top of that, we have an amazing team with a unique UX and product development capability. We also have fantastic backers with lots of access.

3. Where does your company fit in the business life-cycle and why?

We’re barely a year old and pre-revenue. That’s a fancy way of saying we don’t make money. We launched a beta version of our product in November and have just over 6,000 users sharing an average of 14 products each, with more than 5,000 products in our database. Our focus now is on building our product and user base as quickly as possible

4. What are your goals for presenting at IIS?

We have a big vision and need all the help we can get! If we can inspire a few people who see our vision of greater openness and sharing in business purchasing, that would be great. I also hope we can build relationships with potential partners and investors. For example, we see a ton of opportunity to use BestVendor as a social “preferred vendor list” type platform.

5. What’s something unusual about your company?

We like Whiskey. We name our product releases after different Whiskeys (just finished Blue Label), and there’s a secret Whiskey category in BestVendor.

Don’t miss out on presentations from exciting start-ups and industry experts – register for IIS12

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Filed Under: Uncategorized

SIIA Previews Interview with Praetorian Group

January 12, 2012 By Dan Ackerman

1. What problems does Praetorian Group try to solve?

Praetorian Group provides first responders with an array of expert content that helps keep themselves and their community safer on a daily basis. Officers are constantly in need of information to increase their awareness or refine their training and we provide an online network where this is readily available. Additionally, we effectively connect leading public safety manufacturers and distributors with our substantial member base in an environment where they are proactively researching their products or services.

2. What advantages do you have that are unique to your company?

Our primary competitive advantage is being able to effectively combine over a decade of public safety market expertise with online knowledge and resources. Within our market we are the leader in linking first responders with online technology as well as being able to successfully monetize those resources.

3. Where does your company fit in the business life-cycle and why?

Praetorian Group has been profitable since 2005 and currently services 450 active advertisers within a network of over 850,000 subscribed members. In 2011 we generated $8.5M in revenue and are growing at a rate of 15% per year.

4. What are your goals for presenting at IIS?

We are looking to increase our company visibility, network with like-minded organizations and make connections related to growing our business through partnerships or investment.

5. What’s something unusual about your company?

There is an inherent contrast between our employees and our members that, while unusual, has worked out very well and lent us balance as a company. Praetorian Group is a young, thriving online media company headquartered in San Francisco who serves a very traditional and for the most part conservative market. As it turns out, our creative strengths and personality as a business in many ways compliment the evolving public safety market as they continue to become more technology savvy.

The deadline to register for IIS is fast approaching. Register here

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit, Uncategorized

SIIA Previews Interview with ReportLinker

January 10, 2012 By Dan Ackerman

1. What problems does ReportLinker try to solve?

Any time you need to define a market strategy, work on a business plan or prepare a presentation, reliable, up-to-date industry data – such as market size, market forecasts, market share, demand drivers and technology trends – is key to supporting your arguments and convincing your audience.

Every day, thousands of market data updates are published by trusted public and private sources on the internet, but the information is often buried in different kinds of documents (court decisions, annual reports, investor presentations, trade association presentations, press releases and so on).

ReportLinker bridges the gap, using advanced search technology to find and filter the latest market intelligence available, presenting the results in a format that is easily viewable and usable. ReportLinker analyzes and organizes content by context, offering access to over 1.2 million public reports with key market data on 350 global industries – all in one location.

2. What advantages do you have that are unique to your company?

Unlike our competitors, ReportLinker:

Uses targeted semantic technology to find and index 120,000 reports every day (most of which average about 50 pages in length) published online by trusted private and public sources –– and users can set up automated alerts to get the latest reports for selected industries as soon as they are available.
Filters content according to 100,000 industry concepts across key global industries, including agriculture, consumer goods, technology, life sciences and many more.
Offers global content coverage, with a catalogue containing reports published by more than 200,000 sources on over 350 industries in nearly 200 countries.

3. Where does your company fit in the business life-cycle and why?

Launched in March 2007, ReportLinker currently has 2,000 subscribers. We are growing at an annual rate of 40% and invest 15% of our revenue in R&D, with plans underway to add many new features and services in the next few months.

Our operating company Ubiquick SAS has both won and been nominated for several awards, including the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2010, Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2011, CODiE Award Finalist 2012 and two other leading French technology innovation awards.

4. What are your goals for presenting at IIS?

Online content – and the semantic technology that drives it – is our core business, and we value the IIS summit as an opportunity to strengthen our strategic partnership program with US-based companies as well as a chance to showcase our search engine and share ideas with industry experts. We are also interested in this year’s ‘Buyers and Suppliers’ focus so we can find out about current partnership trends and how information industry networks are evolving.

5. What’s something unusual about your company?

Though we (co-founders) are French and our company is physically based in France, our team of 21 is certainly international, representing 7 nationalities and just as many spoken languages. It definitely helps us keep a global perspective and more easily understand the specific requests of our clients – who (apart from 5% in France) are from all over the world.

To see these and other companies at IIS register here

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit, Semantic Technology Tagged With: Content, IIS12, Previews, Semantic Technology

SIIA Previews Interview with Crowd Fusion

January 5, 2012 By Dan Ackerman

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.

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit, Platforms Tagged With: Content, IIS12, platforms, Previews

Apply to present your Mobile App at the 2012 Information Industry Summit

December 2, 2011 By Dan Ackerman

Do you want a chance to showcase your mobile app to an audience of media executives and industry leaders? Does your content or content-related app need a jump-start? Do just that at the 11th annual Information Industry Summit!

This year the 2012 SIIA Previews program is including an application process specifically for companies with mobile apps. MobileApp Previews highlights exciting apps for the content and content-related industry, including news, finance, reference and publishing. Selected participants will provide 5-minute demos of their app before our audience of potential partners, investors and customers. Following your presentation there will be 5 minutes of Q&A. Presenting companies will also receive promotion on the Information Industry Summit conference website and a 20-minute feedback session with our selection committee.

In order to apply your company must have an iOS app (iPad, iPhone or iTouch) that has been approved and is available in the Apple App store at the time of your application or will be available by January 1, 2012. Applications are due December 16th and selected presenters will be notified by January 2. If you are selected, you must confirm your participation by registering to attend the Information Industry Summit by January 6.

If you would like to apply, please visit:

http://www.siia.net/iis/2012/previews/m_apply.asp

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Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: Content, IIS12