Digital Discourse / Information Industry Summit

An Industry that Never Stands Still: The History and Future of the SIIA CODiE Awards

August 1, 2012 By

Now in its 28th year, the 2013 CODiE Awards will be launching Monday. I sat down with SIIA President and CODiE Awards founder, Ken Wasch, to discuss why the program is so meaningful to the industry and what contributes to its success. Since this is my second year as the program coordinator, I wanted to find out why Ken has invested a great deal into the program and why he gets so excited at the start of each CODiE Awards season.

Why did you start the CODiE Awards?

Every industry should have an opportunity to celebrate its own achievements, and the CODiE Awards were the very first peer recognized awards in the personal computer/software industry. Over the years, we modified the categories to reflect the dynamic changes in the industry, but what we never changed was the fact that it was a peer reviewed program.

What’s important about peer review?

Unlike awards that are based on sales, what’s important about peer review is that there’s a leveling of the playing field. Great products from smaller companies have an equal shot at winning a CODiE Award. If you have an awards program that is based on sales, obviously the industry giants will always win them. And so, awards that are based on sales reflect the marketing muscle of the publisher, not necessarily the intrinsic innovation of the product. The CODiE Awards sometimes recognize great products that may not achieve great commercial success.

Why do companies nominate for the CODiE Awards?

The hallmark of our industry is the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of software developers who are hard at work, innovating in a way that was unimaginable a few years ago. It’s good for the industry, it’s good for the customers, and it’s good for developers themselves to be recognized for that innovation.

What do you love about the CODiE Awards?

This time of year, it’s very exciting to see all the new products. I love the CODiE Awards season. It lasts from early August to mid-October, when all the nominations for the next year come in, and I’m always blown away by some of the new products that are nominated. It’s an industry that never stands still.

How have the CODiE Awards changed over the last 28 years?

There are so many different categories. The CODiE Awards have grown in scope from initially 20 categories, to 79 categories. Originally, the awards were largely focused on entertainment and education, and they expanded to a broad range of business and information categories. You know, the words software and information have become so broad they touch almost every human endeavor, so there are almost an unlimited number of categories we could establish. This year, we have limited the categories to the 79 where we believe there’s a critical mass of companies that we can reach.

The nominees have changed so much. I remember one CODiE Award winner 20 years ago. It was a product called Coupon Clipper, where you would take the coupons that you get from the newspaper and enter them into a database. It would keep a record, so before you went to the supermarket, you would know which coupons are about to expire, and how you might adjust your shopping so you get maximum impact from your coupon collection. The product won a CODiE Award, but I thought anyone who would use this product has too much time on their hands. It was too much work to manage it! But, even though the product didn’t do well in the market, because our program recognizes great products, and not sales, it was recognized for its innovation.

What is the future of the CODiE Awards?

When something has been around as long as this–28 years–it has stood the test of time. We have been smart enough to freshen the program every year or two. The CODiE Awards will thrive if we keep modifying the categories to keep current where the industry is innovating. The categories can’t remain static.

A decade ago, the word cloud meant something totally different. The cloud categories have now become mainstream. The mobility categories cut across all of information and all of software, and the development and distribution of video products has become a mainstream new category. On the ed tech side, the use of technology in education is nothing new. What is new is the multiplication of devices within an educational environment, whether it’s mobile, tablets, laptops, desktops, or electronic whiteboards. The number and diversity of devices is spurring innovation in the software applications that run on them.

Why do you think companies should nominate for the CODiE Awards?

For small and medium-sized companies that want to distinguish themselves from their competitors, the CODiE Awards provide a great opportunity to set themselves apart from other innovators. It’s a great reward for the developers, but it also has significant payoff in terms of bragging rights in a CODiE Award winner’s market.

Wendy Tanner Wendy Tanner is CODiE Awards Coordinator. Follow the CODiE Awards on Twitter @CODiEAwards

Share|
Filed Under: All About the Cloud, CODiEs, Content, Ed Tech Industry Summit, Education, Information Industry Summit, Software, Software Events Tagged With:

Buyer-Seller-User: Learnings from the Buyer Supplier Forum

February 24, 2012 By

In case you missed it, the Buyer-Supplier Forum at this year’s Information Industry Summit finished strong with buyers, sellers and users in breakout sessions discussing key issues from some very different points of view.  Courtesy of Robin Neidorf, leader of the Buyer-Seller-User session, and Director of Research for Free Pint Limited, has provided key takeaways on what was covered:

If you are interested in attending or receiving information on future Buyer supplier events please contact Jennifer Hansen.

Jennifer HansenJennifer Hansen is Program Manager for the SIIA Content Division.

Share|
Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: , , ,

Disruptors of the Next Internet Generation

February 2, 2012 By

Contributed by Susan Becker, Consultant

John Patrick, President of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet Technology at IBM, addressed the Information Industry Summit about progress on the Internet on Jan 25. In Patrick’s estimation, the Internet has finally reached adolescence, but we are only 5% – 10% down the road of total possible transformation. In fact, expectations are rising by the day and disintermediation is just beginning. The health care industry and we as individuals will greatly benefit.

2012 is about the pervasive Internet where everything is connected to everything. Patrick went on to describe eight defining points:
1) The Internet is fast.
2) The Internet is always on. Literally everything we use can be connected. 90% of all the data in the world has been created in the last two years, and “It presents tremendous opportunity.” Figuring out how to monetize this data will be the key.
3) The Internet is everywhere. No longer is the Internet “on the PC”.
Now it’s wherever we are. Almost 80% of the world has a cell phone.
With a market penetration rate far greater than the computer market, mobile presents a huge opportunity.
4) Social networking is not just social, it’s about connecting people.
It used to be that content was published by experts, but now more of it is published by us.
5) iPad Heaven – Why is the iPad a growing substitute for the PC? Most of the time users are not in the creation mode, they are in the consumption mode. There is new hope for magazines, papers and textbooks provided that new sustainable models can be created.
6) Intelligent – Putting big data to work represents huge potential.
Furthermore, HTML5 eliminates the need to write apps for each device.
7) Easy – IPads eliminate the set-up hassle that most of us remember about buying a new PC. It’s all there and it’s all in one box.
8 ) Trusted – Patrick’s last point was about security. “Can we trust the Internet?,” he asked. Yes, he says, but trust requires each and every one of us to be vigilant. He suggested hiring people to break into your computer systems in order to avoid exposure.

In his close, Patrick urged the audience to anticipate the evolution ahead and get moving: “Think Big, Act Bold, Start Simple, Iterate Fast”, he said.

Share|
Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: ,

SIIA Previews Interview with Narrative Science

February 2, 2012 By

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.

Share|
Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: ,

Go Mobile: SIIA Previews the Newest in Information Industry Mobile Apps

January 30, 2012 By

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.

Share|
Filed Under: Content, Content VIA Platforms, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: , ,

Inside Secrets of a Media Investor, Michael Chen, Former President, NBC News Strategic Initiatives Group, and Founder, Peacock Equity Fund

January 27, 2012 By

Contributed by Rich Kreisman, Principal Partner, Kreisman Information Consulting, San Francisco.

IIS Jan 2012 NYC-108Sharing wisdom to a group of info industry pros can be a tricky thing – we’re a tough crowd – but that’s exactly what Michael Chen, Former President of NBC News’ Strategic Initiatives Group, and, Founder of NBCUniversal’s Peacock Equity Fund, did to kick off SIIA’s 2012 Information Industry Summit.
Highpoints of Chen’s advice, looking at the world from an information industry investor’s viewpoint:

#5 – See the Future
To win in a confusing and competitive information market, we all need to be futurists. “And, hopefully, you will see the future before everyone else gets into the markets,” Chen said. Citing a range of stats, including tablet sales moving rapidly from 10% of the mobile market to 19% of the market because of greater-than-expected Christmas 2011, he discussed many of the key platform changes anticipated to impact content providers in the future – more smartphones, more Internet-connected TVs and more mobile e-commerce transactions.

#4 – Have a Simple Communications/Public Relations Strategy
Like all of us, investors are busy… very busy, as many of us know who have tried to raise money. Chen’s advice: “In 1 minute or less, you need to describe your product or service, why customers would buy it, what is your ‘edge’, and why is it sustainable.”
Investors like to be able to easily explain their investments, says Chen – to their business colleagues, their personal friends and their families. In order to do so, simplicity and directness is key.

#3 – Do Not Just Be an Innovator; Show Investors You are an Entrepreneur
Chen, who has seen his share of pitches from prospective companies, made this observation: “Innovators create new ideas; entrepreneurs commercialize them and make money”.
In other words, being an entrepreneur involves a lot more than just having a good idea. I saw a lot of heads nodding on that point. Many people in the room must have worked at great startups that lived – and died – on their founding team’s execution abilities.

#2 – Understand the Language of your Investor… Finance
Fascinating to hear Chen tell a room of publishers to listen and learn the language of their audience. Investors are not interested in just hearing the CFO talk about finances, for example, Chen said. They want to have confidence that the entire management team understands where and how money will be spent. Other good points:

  • Do not build hockey stick financial plans to present at investment pitches
  • Have a reasonable base case plan and also a downside case
  • Show frugal management of costs and overhead in the existing business
  • Have an exit strategy plan that you can explain from the start

#1 – Investors Invest in People
Chen spent the most time discussing this point. Simply put, he says, investors will not invest in people they do not have chemistry with. While chemistry is elusive, it can be created by being prepared ahead of investment meetings and understanding an investor’s key drivers.
Chen concluded with an important notion: “Your reputation will precede yourself, making it important to build a personal brand along the way.” How to do that? Throughout your business dealings, focus on the 4 “I’s” – integrity, inclusion, impact and inspiration!

Rich Kreisman is the Principal Partner in Kreisman Information Consulting (KIC), a San Francisco-based consultancy advising publishers on content licensing and distribution strategies.

Share|
Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: , ,

SIIA Previews Companies Showcase Innovation at Information Industry Summit

January 25, 2012 By

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.

Crowd Fusion, Brian Alvey, CEO
Crowd Fusion is a publishing platform that combines several popular applications — like blogging, wikis, tagging and workflow management — with some original concepts to solve the pain points of online publishing at scale.

At SIIA 2012 Brian outlined the features of the “publish everywhere platform”. It is a cloud native, multiplatform content management system that allows editors to design once, instantly format the content for all devices, then provide for painless device-specific edits. It is sophisticated software for large-scale publishers to convert from legacy systems to digital- and mobile- first production capability. In the process it offers the opportunity for significant cost savings from more efficient workflow, and superior published product.

Crowd Fusion counts The Daily and Tecca among its customers.
Crowd Fusion’s personnel have come from the publishing industry and understand the criticality of its customers’ current systems. It is able to transition customers’ current workflow in a multi-stage, non-disruptive fashion, avoiding the business-threatening all-at-once changeover that challenges even the bravest managers. It is based in New York and funded by Marc Andreessen, Fuse Capital, and Greycroft Partners.

Narrative Science, Stuart Frankel, CEO
Narrative Science performs the miracle of creating large numbers of standard-format narrative reports in a human voice. In fact, in a unique voice tailored for each publisher. Instantly, without human intervention or the need for editing. In its own description, it is a technology company that transforms data into stories and insights. Their technology application generates news stories, industry reports, headlines, etc. – in fact they can create narratives from almost any data set, be it numbers or text, structured or unstructured.

Their technology was birthed at Northwestern University and combines technical and editorial expertise. It is a proprietary artificial intelligence platform that is horizontally scalable and has broad applicability. Based in Chicago, Narrative Science was seed funded by Battery Ventures.

Reportlinker, Benjamin Carpano, CEO
ReportLinker.com seeks to solve the problem market researchers and businesspeople have of defining their markets and opportunities. It describes itself as a search engine, offering an access to the largest online collection of industry, company and country statistics and reports available worldwide. It crawls 200,000 trusted sources and millions of documents in as many formats to produce usable, consistent, accurate, fielded data to form the basis of business plans, financing pitches, and strategy documents for businesses everywhere. It operates on an affordable subscription model that starts at $79 per month. Based in France, it has strong European experience and is now expanding its US market penetration.

BestVendor, Jeff Giesea, CEO and Founder
BestVendor helps people in businesses make faster, smarter purchasing decisions through social recommendations. In our over-sharing world, we make our lives easier for each other via tips on vacations and health care providers, but less so for the business enablers we use every day — such as accounting software, CRM providers, and productivity tools. BestVendor uses a give-to get system to populate its recommendations. It combines that with information culled from sources such as Twitter mentions and Youtube uploads to advise who is using what products, and the most recent user generated comments on them. Now in beta, the site is in its content building phase. In the future it will provide vendors with product pages, ways for them to engage with users, and the opportunity to purchase keywords.
BestVendor is financed by venture capital investors including Peter Thiel, RRE Ventures, SV Angels and Lerer Ventures. It is based in New York.

Praetorian Group, Robert Dippell, VP Products
Praetorian serves policemen, firemen, EMS people, Homeland Security, and corrections officers to share knowledge on strategies, tactics, best practices, best supplies, technologies, and devices. Beginning with PoliceOne.com in 1999, and continuing with FireRescue1.com and www.EMS1.com, their online properties are visited by more than 2 million first responders and public safety professionals each month — making them the leading online company in the public safety market.

Calling themselves ‘ESPN meets CNET’, they are a knowledge network with best of breed information: industry content such as tactical tips, and product research in the form of buyer’s guides for 400 product categories. They are ad supported, but their model is a recurring subscription advertising model that is both stable and profitable.

Their newsletters have an audience of 245,000 officers in the US and Canada, which are complemented by websites, iPhone apps and social media distribution. They estimate 35% audience penetration to date. They are San Francisco based.

First Stop Health, Patrick Spain, CEOFirst Stop Health seeks to solve the challenge people face when have an unusual, serious, or long-running health problem. But it also a service for people would like help managing and coordinating a family’s worth of health care providers and coverages, including occasional off-hours crises like mysterious hives. It is a patient-centric health concierge service that offers 24/7 tele-access to qualified medical professionals, coupled with a rich resource of proprietary online health information to help users understand their choices. It offers access to a human patient advocate to provide expert advice navigating the health care system. It offers the opportunity for patient-created and controlled electronic medical records. Its freemium model is priced at $250 for individuals and $750 for families, and includes a certain amount of consultation time. First Stop Health is based in Chicago.

More on SIIA Previews:

John Blossom of Shore Communications’ blog post

Share|
Filed Under: Content, Information Industry Summit Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »