Digital Discourse / Events

DataContent 2013: Is Data YOUR Destiny?

July 23, 2013 By

Now in its 21st year, DataContent 2013, co-produced by SIIA and the InfoCommerce Group, convenes high-level information content producers to explore data and content.

Our theme this year is ”Data is Destiny” because as data producers know, if you’re in the information business, you’re also in the data business. And while data IS destiny, success is far from inevitable. It’s easy to see that there are huge opportunities in data, but it’s hard to assess those opportunities and turn them into successful new data products. That’s because data is different – it has its own application, business, content and distribution processes. At DataContent2013, we’ll examine these processes, applications, etc., and identify best practices and trends, all while providing you with an insider’s view of what’s working and where things are heading.

Throughout DataContent, attendees will hear from amazing thought-leaders, including:

  • Jeanette Horan, Chief Information Officer, IBM ─ Keynote Speaker
  • Neal Goldman, Chairman & CEO, Relationship Science ─ Keynote Speaker
  • Michael Bird, President, NetProspex
  • David Chun, Founder & CEO, Equilar
  • Keith Cooper, CEO, Connotate
  • Charles Dolan, CTO & Co-founder, Sequoia Waste Solutions
  • John Ernsberger, Co-founder, Stella Service
  • John Felahi, Chief Strategy Officer, Content Analyst
  • Len Gilbert, VP of Business Development, Yodle
  • Russell Glass, CEO & Co-founder, Bizo
  • Chris Golec, Founder & CEO, Demandbase
  • Sam Hamadeh, Founder & CEO, PrivCo
  • Rob Heiser, President & CEO, Segmint
  • James Hobson, COO, OnDeck Capital
  • Eric Irani, Associate, S&P Capital IQ
  • Vinit Khanna, Chairman of the Board, OKS Group
  • John Lawler, Chief Executive Officer, Buyers Lab
  • Mark Leher, COO, Wand, Inc.
  • Matt Manning, President, Information Evolution
  • Gerry Mintz, Managing Partner, Percepta Partners
  • Mark Piening, Founder & CEO, Circle Media

Register now to reserve your spot as our early-bird rate expires September 9.

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Learn more about Data and Content  through the following activities and upcoming events:

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SIIA Policy Forum Supports Dialogue between Education Leaders and Technology Developers

April 23, 2013 By

SIIA’s long tradition as liaison between education leaders and technology developers was continued recently at SIIA’s annual Ed Tech Government Forum in Washington, DC. The annual forum brings SIIA member developers of educational applications and digital content together with policymakers, administrators and non-profit leaders.

The discussions help both inform publishers about the impact of publich policies on education so they can better meet the needs of students and educators, as well as drive conversations regarding the public-private partnerships needed to address educational (technology) challenges and opportunities. This year’s forum was enhanced by the participation of some 75 local and state education administrators attending the second half of the event through SIIA’s partnership with the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), and the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA).

Among the highlights this year:

  • Keynote speakers U.S. Rep. George Miller,  Mary Esselman (MI Achievement Authority), and Michael Yudin (USED Acting Assistant Secrtary) all spoke about the critical role of technology and digital learning to meeting the goals of educational access and personalized learning.
  • Leaders from the PARCC and SBAC CCSS state assessment consortia solicited support to better prepare students for the new standards and assessments, talked through the challenges of ensuring technology readiness, and indicated that some states and districts may delay their shift to online testing.
  • Leading policy analysts and advocates outlined the growing digital learning momentum in state capitals across the country, discussed the politics of education reform, and identified key policy initiatives in NC, AZ, HI, ME, LA and other states.
  • Higher education leaders Amy Sherman (CAEL) and Hal Plotkin (USED) shared how federal policy changes are poised to drive a shift from seat-time credit hours to competency-based learning, including the expanding use of prior learning assessments to better target instruction and improve learning efficiencies in time and resources.
  • FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel announced a package of proposed changes to the E-Rate, which would increase its funding, improve its administration, and enhance digital learning access to students and teachers.
  • Capitol Hill advocacy day with education and industry leaders helping inform Members of Congress and their staffs about the important federal role in supporting educational improvement through technology and digital learning.
  • Education leaders also addressed the issues of funding, NCLB waivers, ESEA reauthorization, and the balance between data-driven improvement and student privacy.

Speaker presentations, audio recordings and session summaries will be made available to SIIA members.

 

Mark SchneidermanMark Schneiderman is Senior Director of Education Policy at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Ed Tech Government Forum, Education, Education Events, Education Policies, Education Policy, Events, Personalized Learning, Policy, Uncategorized

This Week in Public Sector Innovation

January 31, 2013 By

Cloud/GOV 2013 to feature keynote address from Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel: SIIA’s annual Cloud/GOV Conference announced earlier this week that Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel will provide the opening keynote address at the association’s the 7th Annual Federal IT Conference. VanRoekel joins an already impressive list of keynotes that includes David DeVries, Deputy CIO for Information Enterprise at DOD and Rep. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The conference will also highlight the latest developments in federal IT with panel discussions on FedRAMP, choosing the right cloud solution for your agency, the convergence of data and cloud and the ever popular CIO Panel. Attendees can expect to network with attendees and speakers from DOD, DHS, DOL, DOE, the RAT Board and many others. See the full agenda.

USPS moves ahead with cloud ID management program: The US Postal Service continues to solicit proposals for a cloud-based ID credentialing hub pilot project. The program seeks a software-as-a-service solution that would provide access to non-government providers of ID credentials who have been approved under the Federal Identity, Credential, and Access Management (FICAM) initiative. Responses are due February 11th. GCN has more.

OFPP to push contractor past performance reviews: The Office of Federal Procurement Policy announced an aggressive effort to ensure that all contractor past performance information is entered into the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS), aiming for 100 percent compliance by 2015. The effort comes on the heels of a recent report from DOD that showed only 67.5 percent of required contractor reviews at DOD were added to the system. By making this push OFPP hopes to achieve better outcomes for taxpayers by ensuring that contracting officers better understand specific contractor performance. Read more.

Dell announces Project Ophelia cloud key: This week Dell announced what they are calling a cloud key, which looks to me like an operating system in a flash drive. The idea is to allow you to carry your desktop functionality with you and plug into any device with an HDMI jack, allowing you access to what is now only available on your desktop or laptop. GCN asks whether this is the future of remote computing.

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

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Events, PSIG, Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software, Software Events

SIIA Announces 2013 Previews Winners: Top Early Stage Content Companies

January 16, 2013 By

SIIA today announced 11 winners of its “Previews” competition, which annually selects the country’s most innovative early stage content or content technology companies. Winners will be showcased at the 12th annual Information Industry Summit in New York City, January 30-31.

The SIIA Previews Program selects and then spotlights the most innovative new content creators, aggregators and technology vendors that are transforming the information industry. A panel of judges from the SIIA membership reviewed and judged a field of innovative companies to select the 11 Previews winners.

The companies (listed below) win a slot at SIIA’s Information Industry Summit (www.siia.net/iis) to present to 300 leaders from the information industry. During SIIA Previews sessions held throughout the Information Industry Summit, company CEOs will highlight the innovations that have made them successful. After the presentations, conference attendees will vote on the company “Most Likely to Succeed.”

As a result of presenting at Previews alumni have received investments, have been acquired, or created partnerships with SIIA member companies. Over the past 6 years, 91 companies have been featured and at SIIA events. In 2013, the program will celebrate its 100th presenting company at the SIIA Information Summit on January 30 & 31. The Class of 2013 SIIA Previews :

  • Appinions: Appinions is an opinion-based influence marketing platform designed to give companies the ability to identify, analyze and engage influencers, then measure the results of their influence marketing efforts.
  • Automated Insights: Automated Insights provides high-quality, real-time content automation services to help companies realize the full monetization potential of their data assets.
  • Buzzient, Inc.: Buzzient, Inc. provides Software as a Service that enables F5000 companies the ability to leverage social media (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook) for improved customer service.
  • Consensus Point, Inc.: Consensus Point, Inc. is a social analytics software company revolutionizing market research with a new prediction market research platform providing tremendous value from communities and new revenue to market research companies.
  • Datamyne, Inc. : Datamyne, Inc. provides international trade intelligence covering the import and export transactions of some 50 countries across 5 continents, including the US, and key markets in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the European Union.
  • Delve: Delve offers a personalized, curated, news reader for professionals with a simple social layer to share relevant stories with colleagues turning news into knowledge inside organizations.
  • Enlyton: Enlyton is a cloud-based enterprise search and content discovery platform that inventories, organizes, connects and presents creative search-based applications to organizations that manage diverse digital assets.
  • Gust: Gust provides investors, entrepreneurs, and organizations that support them with tools to connect and collaborate on funding decisions and investor relations from pitch to exit.
  • Movable Media: Movable Media has developed a unique technology solution that allows brands to become successful publishers through partnerships with established content creators.
  • PublishThis: PublishThis is a cloud-based content marketing platform that enables brands, retailers, media companies and trade associations to more easily publish fresh and compelling content across all their marketing channels at scale.
  • Visual Revenue Inc.: Visual Revenue Inc. provides real-time content placement recommendations for online publishers based on audience interest, publisher objectives, and editorial tone.

Kathy Greenler Sexton is Vice President and General Manager of the SIIA Content Division. Contact Kathy at kgsexton@siia.net.

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Filed Under: Content, Content Events, Events, Information Industry Summit

New Trends in Elementary Game Based Education

August 16, 2012 By

Screen time—or the amount of time a student spends in front of a computer or other device–is hitting new records across the educational spectrum. Preschoolers are in front of a screen an average of 120 minutes per day, elementary school aged children are even higher, and it’s projected to rise in coming years.

As these numbers continue to increase, the potential for education has not gone unnoticed by teachers, as well as parents. In the iTunes app store, three-fourths of top selling applications were targeted at pre and elementary aged school children. Most of these applications are used in the home, not in school settings.

At a recent talk put on by Future Tense (a collaboration between Slate, New America Foundation, and ASU) a panel of leaders in the study of elementary education and technology spoke about the changes occurring in early childhood learning. The panelists included Joel Levin-“The Minecraft Teacher”, Creator of “Super Why!” Alice Wilder, and Annie Murphy Paul –Schwartz Fellow with the New America Foundation and the Author of Brilliant: The Science of Smart.  Though educational technology is nothing new, it is less common in K-5 classrooms than in higher grade levels. Much of the educational technology in use for the K-5 age group is used in the home, and it’s mainly comprised of games. According to Paul, the problem with educational games is that many are simply “chocolate covered broccoli” with a fancy coating obscuring traditional ‘boring’ learning models.

Levin discussed his time in the classroom working with Minecraft, a game many elementary school age children already know and love. What’s unique about Minecraft is that it is not inherently educational, nor was it designed to be. It was created to get kids to play and have fun, and it’s classroom adaptation has proved much more successful than Levin predicted.

Several examples of Minecraft being applied in the classroom were covered in the panel. In the game, players mine and create buildings, cities, and more. Multiple students can use it together, to build lifelike digital models of historical sites including the Acropolis and the Alamo. It sparks conversation about digital citizenship, related to how users interact in the game.  Discussing the game in a classroom setting helps students and teachers monitor and filter out inappropriate or intrusive online social behaviors.  New applications are being built, which add to the basic game and adapt it for classroom or educational use.

When teachers think outside of the traditional educational game space, there is huge potential to adapt games children are already interested in. Intrinsic learning, or learning for learning’s sake, is a key element of the intellectual growth of elementary and preschool children. As they grow older, this unique thirst for knowledge tends to diminish in classroom settings. If teachers can keep learning fun, as opposed to making it a chore, children will stay interested in technology. Adapting games they already like so they can have fun while learning is a key to keeping them engaged.

Lindsay HarmanLindsay Harman is Market and Policy Analyst for the SIIA Education Division.

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Filed Under: Ed Tech Business Forum, Education, Events Tagged With: , ,

Meet DataContent 2012 Speaker Gordon Anderson

July 18, 2012 By
Gordon Anderson

Gordon Anderson, VP, Content, InsideView

Meet a very well-connected data publisher, Gordon Anderson of InsideView.

Gordon will be speaking at DataContent and his mission there will be to show you how to turn data into intelligence. He’ll also explain how making your customers smarter can really pay off.

In the Knowing What You Don’t Know session, Gordon will explain how InsideView is turning the tsunami of online data into analysis that salespeople use to identify and connect to the most relevant prospects at the precise moment when their product or service is needed.

We’ve asked Gordon to be sure to explain how 25,000 different content sources, including social media and traditional editorial sources, are turned into real-time intelligent data that makes salespeople look – and work – a lot smarter.

“The opportunities presented by the rise of Big Data are both vast and inexorable. But for all the chatter about zettabytes and petabytes, Hadoop and Hive, an obvious fact is often overlooked: Bad data doesn’t become good just by becoming Big. As processing information becomes easier and cheaper, data accuracy will become more difficult and more valuable.

In fact, the same factors that have led to the rise of Big Data are also accelerating the pace of data decay. As the capacity of systems to process data expands, the range of data that is processed will grow in lockstep. At every point in that cycle, errors in the underlying content sets will be magnified.

The challenge of Big Data, then, is not just to harness greater processing power, but also to address the limitations and deficiencies of content creation and maintenance. The challenge of Big Data, in other words, is a question of Right and Wrong.”

Join Gordon and close to 200 data producers gathering at DataContent to explore the intersection of Data, Communities, and Markets.

Our sessions go beyond the data hype—we’re assembling the people advancing, transforming, and disrupting the industry to give you straight talk on why the data business is the hottest segment of the information industry and why it will continue to grow.

At DataContent, you’ll get a clear understanding of where data fits in your future. Most importantly, you’ll leave with an understanding of the trends that are the most profitable AND the contacts and know-how to incorporate them into your own business.

Attend DataContent Oct. 9-11, 2012
Register today

Quick Links:
DataContent Home
Registration
Conference Program
Networking Opportunities
Speakers
Sponsors
Venue

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Filed Under: Content, Content Events, Data Content, DataContent, Events Tagged With: , , , ,

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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