Contributed by Grace Schalkwyk, Gramercy Digital Strategy Advisors
Larry Schwartz, Previews Chair and president of Newstex, outlined the evolution of the Previews program which celebrates its 6th anniversary this year. Started as an experiment, this year it is a core part of the main-stage program at Information Industry Summit with 6 company previews and 6 mobile previews. Next year’s conference will feature the 100th preview.
Dow Jones Investment Banker for iPad
Ian Rosen presented Dow Jones’ new app for investment banking end-users. Dow Jones’ strategy is to combine its content assets with its editorial expertise to create relevance for end-user groups. Its Investment Banker personnel are from the banking industry, and they employ ‘curation, creation, workflow knowledge and tools’ to assemble their service. The layout is similar to the Wall Street Journal app, leveraging users’ familiarity with it. All content is downloadable to be usable offline. It offers news customization as My Topics, and market-specific Collections, such as Energy, that feature Opinion and Strategy. It rounds out the service with Banker Moves, a sort of bankerly Page Six.
Lexis Nexis
Scott Livingston presented Lexis Nexis’s legal news awareness offering, which is in its 5.0 version in the mobile space. It seeks to serve lawyers who are untethering from their offices, providing a searchable, contextual, and exhaustive legal news source on the go. It is tailored to the use cases particular to lawyers, such as the on-commute work flow, the quick-briefing need prior to meeting with a client, and the working-remote workflow. Its components include Breaking News, Legal News focused on legal practice areas, Legal Blogs, Mealeys proprietary short form content, Communities, Twitter, and Video. It permits archival searching and access to full text content. It is available to the public as an in-app purchase. Lexis-Nexis is testing various pricing models including $1.99/month through the App Store.
Pubget for iPad
Pubget is one of those amazing services that so good that it shouldn’t be free, but it is. Recently acquired by the not-for-profit Copyright Clearing Center, it is a search engine for science, technology and medical (STM) articles and peer-reviewed papers and is intended for life science researches and practitioners. It is cloud based service hosted and sold via a freemium model that allows users to legally find and directly retrieve research papers from their sources. It has access to 3 million medical and STM articles and knows where 30 million academic papers live across 30,000 institutions.
Pubget is led by Ryan Jones, a FAST and Microsoft veteran. It is looking for publishers who want their content accessed by Pubget’s system, and enterprises that are interested in employing Pubget’s unique search capability.
Factiva for iPad
Factiva’s new app easily enables people to monitor news across the world, leveraging its new and popular web feature Snapshot. Its consumer-like feel, elegant and simple, reflects the demands of professional consumers for a great user experience. On the go, it gives the capability to spot trends, risks and opportunities. It also gives access to Factiva Search from anywhere. Features include Top News, with headlines, audio, video, trending companies, trending people, and visualization. On individual companies it provides news volume vs. stock price graphs with click-throughs. Other features include Radar, news volume on top trending companies; My Alerts, an RSS feed module; and article views with tagging.
PR Newswire for iPad
PR Newswire’s app is designed for PR professionals and journalists. It offers top headlines for all categories with drilldowns to appropriate sectors. It includes extensive coverage of PR blogs which will expand to 100 blogs over time. It offers in-app search, push notifications, saved searches and numerous other convenience features. It is available free on iTunes.
Nexis News Search
Nexis’s app is free to its customers, and essentially ports the website experience to the iPad. It provides nested search on news content options, with two-year history, date range search, article length search, and numerous other options. Articles can be saved and emailed. Articles highlight the user’s search terms, and other features are available.