Digital Discourse / Archives for Jennifer Hansen

IIS Breakthrough Recap: Viewpoints of the 4th Estate

February 4, 2013 By

 

by Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

A distinguished panel gave SIIA members a roundup of the top issues facing information companies. The need for Big Data in investigative reporting, integrating with a Reader’s workflow, the recognition that self-publishing is going mainstream, and the desire to monetize mobile apps were top of mind for these executives. Pictured from left to right are Gordon Crovitz, Journalism Online; Steve Lohr, The New York Times; Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica; Laura Hazard Owen, GigaOm; Bob Felsenthal, BtoBOnline; and Barbara Brynko, Information Today.

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Breakthrough Talk Recap: Using Big Data to Build Prognostication Capabilities

February 4, 2013 By

Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

In a back stage interview, Factual Inc. CEO Gil Elbaz and Cortera Inc. CEO Jim Swift discuss the drivers and requirements to build a Big Data capability plan.

By Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

Tracking Behaviors Fuel Big Data
“It’s all about tracking events and behaviors in order to improve the accuracy of your decision making” asserts Cortera CEO Jim Swift. Cortera produces credit worthiness rankings from tracking the purchases and payments that a Company conducts. “When evaluating companies it’s good to hear what they are saying, but most important is to see their actual behaviors; tracking actual payments and purchases, for example will give a more accurate prediction of a company’s credit worthiness” continues Swift. Factual’s CEO, Gil Elbaz, agrees: “People expect and need the context to correctly interpret data… stitching together the facts and illustrating the backdrop is what Big Data is all about.” Factual offers a path for companies to source external data, enrich their own data and incorporate a variety of new data sets.

Prognostication Capabilities – The Next Competitive Battle
Behavioral targeting has been used extensively by online companies to target advertisements. Now, this concept is gaining broader appeal as a long term competitive advantage enabling Information Companies to match their content to their client’s workflow and distribution preferences. Companies can use behavior tracking to build predictions about client preferences, to identify partnerships and to develop value added services.

The pursuit of prognostication capabilities has a tremendous consequence: It redefines the importance of data in an organization. It puts an emphasis on data management capabilities. Can I handle streaming data from Twitter feeds or social media outlets? Is a ‘just in time approach’ to data collection needed? Can I enrich my data in order to monetize it? Is the data accurate and extensible?

The Strategic Information Spine

“A lot of companies are living with inefficient collection and maintenance of data. They ignore missing data and inaccurate data because they do not associate the underlying data to their ability to compete” comments Factual’s CEO, Gil Elbaz.

However, as soon as executives link their ability to compete with the value and accuracy of their data, the ROI presents itself. “It’s like an Information Spine” reflects Cortera’s CEO, Swift.”For information companies, the core stream of data is the spine and off this, hangs all their products and services.” The implication is that a company’s ability to compete will come back to the design, sourcing, accuracy and strategic health ‘of the spine’.

An Asset or Liability?

As firms embrace the use of big data for a competitive advantage, it changes all the questions and answers. It leads companies to develop a more strategic view: they identify data assets and data liabilities around maintenance and accuracy.

“Many companies have not yet thought through which data sets provide a competitive advantage and which ones won’t.” comments Factual’s Elbaz. “If you can buy the data, it is most likely not an asset” continues Elbaz. Data that is missing, inaccurate and difficult to maintain may not only be an opportunity cost, but it could actually be a liability, especially if not kept fresh.

For non-proprietary data, companies are developing Data Acquisition plans to give them new agility along with a managed cost structure. “Just as IT Managers embraced Open Source code, now Business Managers are embracing Open Sourced Data” Factual CEO Elbaz concludes. Elbaz points to dozens of internal databases that should be deleted and licensed from readily available, external, sources. He asks, “Why allocate internal resources to manage data you don’t have to?”

Finding the Skills
But finding the skills to manage the internal build, the external licensing and the data architecture is hard to find. “The biggest problem is the lack of people and talent needed for companies to bootstrap their efforts” claims Cortera’s Swift. Data architects and data developers are very different from software developers and IT managers. And both CEO’s agree this is not -necessarily- the role of a CTO or CIO.

Who, inside your company, could nurture and expand your newly found Data assets? The first step, it seems, is for us to prognosticate on that.

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IIS Breakthrough Talk Recap: How to Stay in the Forefront by Reinventing and Repurposing Your Business

February 4, 2013 By

 

Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

Post by Marie Giangrande, Public Notions Once a push oriented news agency, Christian Science Monitor re-invents itself with the concept of “Content Scaping”, a strategic, ongoing effort to collaborate with its readers, distributors and editors.

Known as “The Monitor”, the Christian Science Monitor is an international News Agency covering political world news across 11 countries. Faced with a continuing decline in earnings, the company embarked on a challenge to explore new digital offerings and re-invent itself.

At SIIA’s Information Industry Summit, Donal Toole, Finance and Strategy Director along with John Yemma, Editor, talked about the key actions they took to change the Agency’s direction. Today the Agency is creating premium digital subscriptions, distribution-specific packages and readership-driven content. The earnings are positive and overall growth is up.

The success of this transformation hinged on a change in philosophy and management processes. The agency started to think about their readers and distributors as new assets. And they nurtured collaboration internally and externally to understand readership needs.

The executives outlined the most impactful steps they took:

1) Tear Down the Chinese Wall

In the past, there was a ‘Chinese wall’ between the editors and readers. This was erected to maintain ‘our independent, unbiased views’ explains Donal Toole. But it meant that they did not understand what the readers wanted.

As an example, The Monitor was serving news about global events while their readers wanted ‘an analysis of the impacts’. This led the Agency to offer a premium product for Global Political Risk analysis. The executives maintain that they now see their business as a collaborative effort with their core readers. Today, they encourage readers to ask questions about articles and this is circulated to the Editorial group to help enhance their coverage.

2) Institute ‘ContentScaping’ Assessing Segments and Trialing New Offers

The term ‘ContentScaping’ refers to an internal management process to develop new information products. Executives described this as ‘constant vigilance to assess our assets and identify underserved segments’. The starting point is to use the Editorial teams to evaluate and identify new skills and capabilities. These newly identified assets are then mapped against market opportunities and market segments.

Once they make a decision to ‘super serve’ a segment, they reshape content and enter a trail phase.

“It’s very critical to test and trial every new offer, because not everything works” commented Yemma. One time they found a video interview was gaining undue attention. People were watching because there was an inappropriate joke made by a Political figure. “That was not the content we wanted to serve,” Yemma continued.

This process is on-going and has helped the organization adhere to a data-driven decision matrix while developing new content packages.

3) Build a Multidimensional, Investigative Team

“Of all the changes made, none are as important as the creation of a new Executive Leadership team,” explains Toole and Yemma. This team establishes the roadmap for the company’s products and drives the ‘ContentScaping’ process. Both executives at The Monitor underlined the importance of the multi-dimensional team to bring together varied expertise. At The Monitor, they instituted a Leadership Team across:

  • Editorial
  • Digital Outlets
  • Content Sales and Partnerships, and
  • Strategy and Analysis

“Ultimately it’s the people” concludes Toole. And for us in the audience, we can only hope we have catalysts like Toole and Yemma to take us on the path of collaboration and innovation.

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About Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

Public Notions provides Thought Leadership Programs for Information Companies

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Meet Previews Company Visual Revenue

January 21, 2013 By

Meet Previews Presenting Company Visual Revenue. In this interview, their CEO, Dennis Mortensen, tells us what makes them unique. Learn more during their presentation at SIIA Previews, January 30-31 at the SIIA Information Industry Summit(IIS).

In a sentence tells us what your company does.

Our real-time predictive analytics platform makes human editors the most powerful force in today’s data-driven newsroom.

What is your secret sauce that will make you successful?

We have a tremendous product today, and it will be even better tomorrow, but that is only a result of our ethos, summarized in 5 points:

  • Our customers drive our product
  • Simplicity and ease of use is paramount
  • Exceptional customer service is a given
  • Honesty is always the best policy
  • We really do care

What are you looking to achieve in presenting at IIS (Investors, Partners, Content)?

We’re looking for partners to participate in what we’re doing (because they too believe it will have a profound impact on the media world).

What is your favorite breakthrough technology or company?

Well, of course our favorite is Visual Revenue, but putting that aside for the moment, we love Square: Simple. Elegant. Highly disruptive.

Learn more about Visual Revenue, and the other 2013 Previews Presenting companies at IIS Breakthrough. Each presenting company will deliver a 5-minute presentation to an audience of key decision makers during the IIS Breakthrough event being held from January 30-31, 2013 in New York City. Presenting companies will also have 5-minutes for audience Q&A and an opportunity to showcase their companies to IIS attendees during the SIIA Previews and CODIEs Showcase and Networking reception. To top things off, the IIS audience will vote on the company they believe is most likely to succeed.
About Previews

Over the past six years, SIIA Previews has showcased innovative content companies, including publishers, media, aggregators, and technology plays, and 2013 SIIA Previews will feature the 100th Preview Company!

Each Presenting company has been selected after two rounds of Judging. To qualify, presenting companies must have less than $10 M in revenue, no more than series A financing, and real customers.

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Meet Previews Presenting Company Delve

January 21, 2013 By

Sandeep Ayyappan, CEO, Delve

Meet Previews Presenting Company Delve, from the voice of the CEO, Sandeep Ayyappan.

What does Delve Do?
Delve helps organizations turn news into knowledge using a personalized news reader for each employee and a private social layer where anyone can recommend and discuss relevant stories with their colleagues.

What is your secret sauce that will make you successful?
We use our algorithms to identify and recommend the most relevant stories to professionals in a range of industries, and then we make it much easier to engage colleagues on what they’re reading and why it matters. Being able to find better stories and share them more easily creates better questions and conversations inside any organization.

What are you looking to achieve in presenting at IIS (Investors, Partners, Content)?
We’re currently working on our seed round and we’re looking for potential strategic investors, and we’d love to build relationships with publishers who might be interested in distributing content through our platform as well.

What would you say is your favorite breakthrough technology or company?
I don’t recall a technology that changed my life in as many ways as the original iPhone. I bought it a few months after the first one came out. It was painfully slow and often couldn’t get reception, but how much it allowed me to do and the simplicity of its interface changed the way I listened to music, talked on the phone, played games, and even surfed the internet.

Learn more about Delve, and the other 2013 Previews Presenting companies at IIS Breakthrough. Each presenting company will deliver a 5-minute presentation to an audience of key decision makers during the IIS Breakthrough event being held from January 30-31, 2013 in New York City. Presenting companies will also have 5-minutes for audience Q&A and an opportunity to showcase their companies to IIS attendees during the SIIA Previews and CODIEs Showcase and Networking reception. To top things off, the IIS audience will vote on the company they believe is most likely to succeed.

About Previews
Over the past six years, SIIA Previews has showcased innovative content companies, including publishers, media, aggregators, and technology plays, and 2013 SIIA Previews will feature the 100th Preview Company!

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Meet Previews Presenting Company PublishThis

January 17, 2013 By

Meet 2013 Previews Presenting company PublishThis trough the words of Matt Kumin, the CEO & Founder.

In a sentence tells us what your company does.

PublishThis is a Cloud-Based Content Marketing Platform. Our easy-to-use content solutions help businesses better engage their customers, amplify their website traffic, automate content marketing, build thought-leadership, improve competitive intelligence, increase lead conversion, and reduce digital publishing costs. In short we do 3 things really well:

  1. Amazing Content Discovery: Our next-generation semantic and social technology organizes the world’s content into customized streams based on interests and relevancies in real-time.
  2. Dead Simple Publishing: We remove friction from the content creation and publishing process with sophisticated technology, tools, and systems.
  3. Fuel Audience Passions: With PublishThis be an authoritative publisher and drive deeper customer engagement through content and social in a matter of minutes.

What is your secret sauce that will make you successful?

PublishThis leverages patent-pending semantic search technology to discover the most relevant and socially trending content for over 250,000 topics across a multiple of industry categories from Business, Health and Autos to Travel, Politics and Entertainment Our core technologies include Semantic Search Engine: 250k+ topics semantically tagged across 20 million+ data points; Social Trending Algorithm: Monitor topics that are most retweeted, shared, and liked across social networks; Advanced Filtering: Create custom filters from over 250k+ top sources and twitter influencers; Powerful CUration Tools: Package any content type + add original commentary; Content Library Ingestion: Semantically tag your own content library and mix with real-time web content; Simplified Publishing: Powerful API’s, WordPress plugins & embeddable widgets What are you looking to achieve in presenting at IIS (Investors, Partners, Content)? We are excited to meet potential investors, develop new partnerships, and absorb the great programming.

Since theme is Breakthrough – what is your favorite breakthrough technology or company?

Not surprisingly Mobile/Tablet is an incredible growth opportunity for all us folks in the content ecosystem. Whether it’s Native Applications, HTML5 web experiences, or Responsive Design each area presents a wealth of opportunities and challenges. Here at PublishThis we’re thrilled to be rolling out products that allow Content Marketers to publish their custom feeds of content to Mobile/Tablet ready frameworks with little to no additional IT development effort

Learn more about PublishThis, and the other 2013 Previews Presenting companies at IIS Breakthrough. Each presenting company will deliver a 5-minute presentation to an audience of key decision makers during the IIS Breakthrough event being held from January 30-31, 2013 in New York City. presenting companies will also have 5-minutes for audience Q&A and an opportunity to showcase their companies to IIS attendees during the SIIA Previews and CODIEs Showcase and Networking reception. To top things off, the IIS audience will vote on the company they believe is most likely to succeed. About Previews Over the past six years, SIIA Previews has showcased innovative content companies, including publishers, media, aggregators, and technology plays, and 2013 SIIA Previews will feature the 100th Preview Company! Each Presenting company has been selected after two rounds of Judging. To qualify, presenting companies must have less than $10 M in revenue, no more than series A financing, and real customers.

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Meet Previews Presenting Company Gust

January 17, 2013 By

Meet 2013 Previews Presenting company Gust through the words of David S. Rose, the Founder & CEO.

David S. Rose, Founder & CEO, Gust

In a sentence tells us what your company does.

Gust, winner of the 2012 CODiE Award for Best Collaboration/Social Networking solution, is the global platform for sourcing and managing early-stage angel and venture capital investments, connecting high-growth entrepreneurs with sophisticated investors and providing online support for all aspects of the investment relationship.

What is your secret sauce that will make you successful?

Gust’s secret sauce is our eight years of indefatigable relationship and customer building with large segments of the world’s early stage finance industry. Today, Gust is the official, exclusive platform of virtually every national federation of business angel investors in the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, France, Portugal, Spain, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, India, even China, all in their native languages. Gust is used as the exclusive collaboration platform by 85% of the world’s organized angel investors, by over 1,000 venture capital funds and angel networks, 200 accelerators and business plan competitions, and a host of national and transnational organizations. As a result, over 160,000 companies actively use Gust for investor relations, and over 40,000 Accredited Investors use Gust to manage their deal flow and portfolios. We have already facilitated and tracked over $1.8 billion dollars of seed and early stage investments.

What are you looking to achieve in presenting at IIS (Investors, Partners, Content)?

Partnerships! As the definitive infrastructure platform for the world of innovative startups, we are looking to partner with any organization that is involved with startups, innovation, investment, venture capital, economic development, early stage finance, entrepreneurial ecosystems, or financial data.

Fun Questions – Since theme is Breakthrough – what is your favorite breakthrough technology or company?

Comixology, one of the companies that presented at last year’s SIIA Previews (and that incidentally was funded through Gust), is the world’s largest digital comic book platform, an industry they created. Comixology powers over 90% of all digital comic book sales, and was the top-grossing non-Game application in the Apple App Store for 2012 (and #3 overall, out of 800,000 apps.)

Learn more about Gust, and the other 2013 Previews Presenting companies at IIS Breakthrough. Each presenting company will deliver a 5-minute presentation to an audience of key decision makers during the IIS Breakthrough event being held from January 30-31, 2013 in New York City. Presenting companies will also have 5-minutes for audience Q&A and an opportunity to showcase their companies to IIS attendees during the SIIA Previews and CODIEs Showcase and Networking reception. To top things off, the IIS audience will vote on the company they believe is most likely to succeed. About Previews Over the past six years, SIIA Previews has showcased innovative content companies, including publishers, media, aggregators, and technology plays, and 2013 SIIA Previews will feature the 100th Preview Company! Each Presenting company has been selected after two rounds of Judging. To qualify, presenting companies must have less than $10 M in revenue, no more than series A financing, and real customers.

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