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VIA Recap

May 18, 2012 By

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.

 

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Business Intelligence in the Cloud: SIIA’s All About the Cloud

May 17, 2012 By

After attending this year’s All About the Cloud, Abdullah Mashuk shared a summary about the Business Intelligence in the Cloud Presentation.

Moderator: Phil Wainewright, Procullux Ventures
Speakers: David Abramson (LogiXML), Eileen Boerger (CorSource Technology Group, Inc.), Vincent Lam (Information Builders), Roman Stanek (GoodData)

Discussion Points:

  • There are benefits to the cloud and there are benefits to on-premise
  • Cloud is not a zero sum game. If you go to cloud you do not have to lose out on-premise
  • Cloud offers a new paradigm and there is an audience for Business Intelligence in the cloud, on the flip side there is an audience for Business Intelligence for on-premise.
  • At the end of the both Cloud and on-premise here to stay. The challenge will be to how to make both cloud and on-premise to work together
  • Roman disagrees with Vincent think it is zero sum game and he build his company with that notion and IT is generally moving in towards the cloud direction.
  • How cloud is different:
  1. Cloud based services can scale better and faster than the on premise services
  2. Additionally cloud services can easily extend to different types of devices (mobile devices, laptops etc)
  3. Enable collaboration
  • Cloud provides real time data and Business Intelligence that was not easily available for on-premise system. For on-premise systems real time BI was available in the form of real time warehouse
  • Cloud enables BI accessible to other members of the organization, not just the Business Analyst. BI is not just for the analyst.
  • Two solutions to cloud BI:
  1. If data is to tell story, it cannot be isolated, it has to be visual and cloud enable that. Standardizations are happening around data visualization so user can easily understand that data at various time spent.
  2. Data should be measurable.
  • Users are becoming data savvy and also consumerization of BI is happening.
  • Important words to related to cloud BI Deployment:
  1. Agility
  2. Adoption
  3. Planning and understanding
  4. Success
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Filed Under: All About the Cloud, Software Events

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

May 17, 2012 By

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.

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Filed Under: Content, Content VIA Platforms, Events Tagged With: , , , ,

The Power of the Customer: SIIA’s All About the Cloud

May 16, 2012 By

After attending this year’s All About the Cloud, Abdullah Mashuk shared a summary about the Power of the Customer presentation.

Moderator: Shubber Ali, Accenture
Speakers: Todd Bursey (FinancialForce.com), Dominique Levin (Totango), Jon Miller (Marketo), Jeff Yoshimura (Zuora)

Discussion Points:
The context of the discussion is how the power of customer is changing.

  • Subscription Economy
    1. Focus changed from one-time transaction to subscription base meaning calculating the value for customer over lifetime
    2. Value of the customer is calculated based on monthly recurring revenue. Also based on influence revenue (is the customer a good referral source)
  • Where is big gap in information and who is going to fill it?
    1. People’s action is lot louder than their words. People leave digital footprint all over, in their engagement, in their transaction. Measure what people do vs. what they say.
  • How consumerization of IT changing customer’s behavior?
    1. The way people go about research and buy things have changed. People are different than they were very recently. Marketer need change their tactics to how they engage with customers.
    2. Customer know more about the companies that the companies though the customer knew.
  • How do you retain and sustain customers?
    1. Pace of innovation is picking up. If a company is not paying attention the competition will be leap frogging. If no innovation then the company will fall behind.
  • How do you build trust with customers?
    1. Trust is tied to emotion and emotion is heavily involved in B2B decision making. In B2C aspiration and positive emotion plays role is decision making.
    2. Companies are moving away from attending trade shows and creating more content to build trust with customers.
    3. The content are consumed by the customer without marketing shield, so with this process the companies can build relation and in turn build trust. Trust is super important as a marketer companies can encourage trust by building great content.
    4. Beyond content companies can build trust my giving away product
    • 44% offer free trial model
    • 14% offer freemium
    1. 3 dimension of stuffs that can be put out there
    • Expertise
    • Utilities – Free trial, freemium, free product
    • Affinity – Community, community affiliation will drive inbound marketing
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Filed Under: All About the Cloud, Software Events

Boundary-Free Enterprise- The New Master Architecture: SIIA’s All About the Cloud

May 16, 2012 By

After attending this year’s All About the Cloud, Abdullah Mashuk shared a summary about the Boundary-Free Enterprise: The New Master Architecture Presentation.

Presenter: William McNee, Saugatuck Technology Inc.

Discussion Points:

  • New Paradigm – mix of technology will define the new era
  • Cloud can mean many things to many people (mobile/social/integration)
  • Key trends -
    1. Industry leaders fully embracing cloud enabled business computing architecture
    2. Big CIOs fully accepted the cloud
    3. CIOs will tactically and strategically use the cloud
    4. Cloud is seen as catalyst for rapid innovation
  • Sea-change in perspective about the use and value of the cloud has occurred
  • Hybrid on-premise + Cloud architecture -
    1. European / Asian companies leap-frogging in adopting pure play cloud
    2. New role for IT is emerging
  • Data integration and automated workflow remains critical to businesses
  • Cloud provider will increase
  • Among the CIOs/CTOs the level of importance increased from 2.2 to 3.7 from 2010 to 2012
  • Based on a survey results of 225 respondent the on-premise solution remained 50% in 2012 and peaked on 2014; however cloud based solution increased dramatically from 2012 to 2016. On 2016 75% of new Enterprise IT spending will be on cloud based solution.
  • eCommere/collaborative commerce solution will increase the most from 2012 to 2016
  • Most long term benefit (65%) of cloud is greater business flexibility and agility vs. cost savings. Cloud provider lock-in also important (50%). Cloud based solution exceeded value expectation. 32% say cloud is costing more than what was anticipated.
  • New Master Architecture is emerging not from single computing paradigm, but multiple technologies and platform working together. Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics (CMSA) plus the integration define the new Master Architecture and will make the boundary free enterprise.
  • Evolution of IT
    1. Significant shrinkage of IT staff
    2. Shifting from client server architecture to boundary free architecture (CMSA plus integration). Intersection mobile and social. Intersection of cloud and analytics.
    3. Primary mission shifts from business operation to enabling business innovation.
    4. Mission of system development shifts from standardization for technologies to standardization of interfaces to enable the ecosystem of providers to work together. (both internal and external)
    5. Standard approach to IT development and delivery shift from buy build and adopt and outsource to vendor subscribe and may be to outsource.
    6. Integration of data to integration of data and process and processes
  • We are in the midst of very significant sea-change
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Filed Under: All About the Cloud, Software Events

VIA Recap: Audience Engagement 3.0

May 15, 2012 By
 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 Audience Engagement 3.0
 

Burt Herman, Co-founder, Storify

Go away helicopter before I take out my giant swatter :-/

Shoiab Athar posted this tweet on May 1, 2011, unaware at the time that he was witnessing the assault that led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.

Speaking at the SIIA Content VIA Platforms conference in San Francisco, Storify Co-Founder Burt Herman used this as a compelling example of how storytelling is becoming social. Of course his business is predicated on building stories out of social media, but he made a good case, arguing that the web is inherently social media. Examples include how social media can add context and meaning to photos and how pulling together tweets from Apple employees after the death of Steve Jobs provide a touching “story” that would likely not be available through traditional reporting.

Herman also argued that content “curation is incredibly suited to touch,” and showed how easy it is to use Storify to “swipe” social media and other web content into a “story” that can be easily shared as an embedded object:  “YouTube videos are embeddable anywhere on the web, so why not stories?”

As somebody who, like Herman, was once a wire service reporter, I was taken with the way in which constantly updating a Storify “story” with new information is similar to a constantly updated AP story. Storify is also stretching the definition of what a story is. Herman gave the example of the White House using Storify with a headline #DontDoubleMyRate to bring attention to its position on the issue of student loan rates.

Storify is a venture-backed free service that envisages including social ads in its stories as a way of generating revenue.

This post was written by Angus Robertson, Robertson Advisors LLC.

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Filed Under: Content, Content VIA Platforms, Events, Platforms Tagged With: , , ,

VIA Recap: Facebook and Google+: Is the Reach Worth the Risk?

May 15, 2012 By

Rachael Monroe

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, Rich Kreisman, gives his write up on the session Facebook and Google+:  Is the Reach Worth the Risk? 

 

This session, moderated by Rachael Monroe, Vice President, Client Services, BBN Networks, brought two experts on social media, Jim Brady, Editor-in-Chief, Digital First Media, and Christopher Carfi, Vice President – Social Business Strategy, Ant’s Eye View, before the VIA attendees to share war stories of the learning years in social media  (since Facebook’s launch in 2004)– and the future, which both Brady and Carfi see as bright for publishers who innovate and experiment with social media.  Publishers are still finding their own formula to leverage social media platforms – for traffic, customer acquisition or to create new hybrid products combining their own content and user insights, both Brady and Carfi acknowledge.

Jim Brady

Carfi, whose consulting firm advises large companies like Cisco and Starbucks on social business strategies, says most companies (including publishers) view social media platforms as a broadcasting megaphone. “Social media is not just another ‘channel’.” Companies who look at it as a one-way communication tool are not succeeding, he says.  “Rather, my clients who really learn how to listen and engage in the conversations are getting the most benefits.”  Listening involves active monitor of all social media channels and engaging in two-way conversations with users – even if the news is  negative. Talking about his experiences at WashingtonPost.com and at Digital First Media (a venture of Journal Register Publishing and MediaNews Group), Brady notes, “Social media has to be in the DNA of everyone in the organization to make it work…and, in most newspaper newsrooms, it is not.”  To coach editors and writers through their initial forays into social media, Digital First Media offers training and support sessions.  

Christopher Carfi

But unless writers see a direct benefit for their reporting, they are unlikely to take the risk associated with the two-way conversations of social media.  “I always tell people to be patient,” Brady says. “It takes a while to build the conversation up.”   Brady finds when social media does take root in a newsroom, it becomes an important arrow in a publisher’s quiver and can deliver unique insights to readers.  Both men definitely seem to believe the reach of the large social media players is worth the risk.  However, they advise the audience that an 18-24 month learning curve should be expected for the average publisher. Experimentation and learning are key, says Carfi, as well as finding the champions of social media throughout the organization to prove its value to others.

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 Post written by Rich Kreisman, Principal Partner, Kreisman Information Consulting

Rich Kreisman is Principal Partner of Kreisman Information Consulting, LLC, a San Francisco-based consultancy advising publishers, content creators, websites and mobile providers on content licensing, syndication and distribution partnerships to meet their strategic business needs.  Rich can be reached at rkreisman@kreismaninfoconsult.com


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