Burt Herman, Co-founder, Storify

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

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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Kathy: Hi Brian, tell us about your Crowd Fusion, what you do?

Brian Alvey, CEO, Crowd Fusion

Brian: Crowd Fusion is high-end multi-platform publishing software. These days publishers need to do more than ever, but they need to do it with tighter budgets. Crowd Fusion makes it easy to publish the same content to all the latest platforms and devices — all without expanding their production teams.

Kathy: Who are your customers?

Brian: Publishers and large brands. Our platform has been used by TMZ, Warner Bros/Telepictures, Myspace, The Daily, Essence and Best Buy’s Tecca.com.

Kathy: Tell is what is unique about Crowd Fusion?

Brian: We invented an agile data model that lets us and our customers get sites and apps to market faster and iterate more frequently.

Kathy: What are some unique challenges you’ve experienced at Crowd Fusion?

Brian: We work with high-end publishers and big media brands, so we’ve had to solve for 3 kinds of scale: traffic, content and workflow. One of our strengths is that our platform is cloud-native. Not only can you manage content in our CMS, you can also launch new servers and coordinate infrastructure all using a web browser — even on an iPad.

Kathy: What do you see as the biggest trends in the industry the next 12-18 months?

Brian: Tablet publishing. Multi-platform publishing. Mobile commerce.

Kathy:  What do you hope to get out of your SIIA membership?

Brian: Meeting people who face the same publishing and technology challenges we deal with.

Kathy: One thing the industry doesn’t know about you or others in your company?

Brian: We are a completely virtual company. We have no real office space. Our team works from home, Starbucks, customer offices, grandma’s house, wherever. We have 30 people and they are spread out across 18 U.S. states, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Italy.

Kathy: Whats the best way to contact you?

Brian: On Twitter: @crowdfusion or @brianalvey for me, Or by email: brian@crowdfusion.com.

Kathy Greenler Sexton is Vice President

Content VIA Platforms will be held May 9-10 in San Francisco. SIIA will preview the event during a free, one-hour webinar next week, on March 1 at 1:30 p.m. Eastern/10:30 a.m. Pacific. Members of the media are invited to attend the conference and participate in the webinar.

One of the key challenges many publishers, new and information providers face today is publishing and distributing content in real-time across multiple content platforms. These content distribution platforms include everything from mobile, tablets, aggregation to even scholarly platforms. We launched Content VIA Platforms to help publishers to make smart product and strategy platform decisions in order to help them maximize their audiences, customer base and revenue-without breaking the budget.

The Content VIA Platforms conference will feature a number of mobile, publishing and technology thought leaders and key executives from the information industry. Panels and presentations will focus on equipping participants with tools and strategies to successfully utilize a variety of different platforms, monetization strategies, devices and app distribution models, and more.

The Content VIA Platforms webinar, which will be held next week on March 1, will provide an introductory overview of key content platforms and discuss strategies for harnessing these platforms to drive visibility. The basic tools introduced during the webinar will be covered in more depth at the Content VIA Platforms conference in May. Next week’s preview will be led by two top digital content strategists-Ann Michael, President of Delta Think, and Barry Graubart, Vice President for Customer Development at Crowd Fusion and SIIA Member Chair of Content VIA Platforms.

Almost every publisher I speak with these days is in the midst of developing, implementing or revising their mobile and tablet strategy. With technology changes coming faster than most can keep up, the mobile strategy you developed six months ago (post iPad 2 but pre-Kindle Fire) is most likely out of date.

And with the news that there were more iPads than desktop computers sold in the fourth quarter of 2011, it’s no surprise that mobile strategy is on the top of everyone’s mind…

(continued at)

http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2012/01/going-native-deciding-between-html5-and-native-apps.html
 

1. What problems does Crowd Fusion try to solve?

Traditional web content management systems were designed for publishing on the web. As the iPhone and iPad gained in prominence, digital media companies launched apps, but these stand-alone or bolt-on solutions were rarely integrated within the core publishing platform.

As new devices come to market (Android phones and tablets, Chrome Books, webOS and the HP Touchpad, RIM Playbook and whatever may follow) the challenge grows significantly.

Crowd Fusion’s publish everywhere model employs the concept of design bundles – groups of templates optimized for each platform, so you can layout your pages for many devices in a single process. Whether you’ve built native apps, use HTML5 or a hybrid model, you can drive them all from one platform with existing resources.

Crowd Fusion reduces costs, speeds time to market and scales for data, traffic and workflow.

2. What advantages do you have that are unique to your company?

Crowd Fusion is designed specifically to help publishers solve real-world problems. Our “publish-everywhere” platform lets you layout pages for multiple devices and platforms at once.

Crowd Fusion also has been designed for integration. Legacy CMS platforms insist you store all your content within their system. Crowd Fusion was built for the web services age – we provide adapters to easily integrate content – whether from your internal silos, from external web and data services or a combination.

Most content management platforms focus on unstructured text (articles). Crowd Fusion is engineered for both structured and unstructured data. This allows us to use the platform for sophisticated data publishing. Any web CMS can likely be used to create a blog. But creating pages and apps that show relationships between data is much more complex.

Crowd Fusion is also cloud-native, enabling publishers to focus on content and functionality, not on hosting – and scaling – web and mobile applications.

3. Where does your company fit in the business life-cycle?

Crowd Fusion has been live with brand-name media customers for nearly two years and are currently profitable. We last raised capital more than three years ago; our investors include Fuse Capital, Greycroft Partners, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Today, our growth is funded through our revenue.

4. What are your goals for presenting at IIS?

To-date, much of our success has come with large consumer-facing publishers. Our goal at IIS is to begin conversations with b2b and information publishers so that we may better understand how we apply our technology to their unique needs.

5. What’s something unique about your company?

Crowd Fusion is run as a virtual company. While much of our management team lives in the northeast, we have developers around the globe. This has helped our rapid growth – 18 months ago we were 8 people; today, we have more than 30 employees located in 22 cities in five countries.

The flexibility to recruit across the globe has many advantages and some challenges as well. But having a globally distributed workforce provides Crowd Fusion with a great diversity of expertise, opinions and ideas and round-the-clock coverage. But, perhaps most importantly, it’s forced us to adopt methodologies and processes for working with remote teams. That, in turn, has been applied to the way we work with customers. Our customers are often (pleasantly) surprised at the level of process we have in an early stage company, but we see it as key to our ability to scale our business.

To see these and other companies at IIS register here

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As Ed mentions in the video, we have a great keynote line up for the 2011 SIIA Information Industry Summit! Additional highlights include:

* Mobile Technology Trends - John Patrick, President, Attitude LLC and a panel of experts will evaluate the marketspace and provide delegates with insight into the next five years.

* Business Models for Mobile Platforms - walk away with information on techniques that have succeeded and failed for other information companies, and gain a better understanding of the issues that end-users are hoping publishers and aggregators will solve.

* Mobile Social Data Revolution – Ted Shelton, CEO, Open-First will discuss why a new competency in analytics, especially in a data driven culture, is necessary to be successful throughout the next decade. He’ll give examples of companies that are already doing a good job using analytics and how we can position ourselves for success.

* Previews – Start up mobile, content, & content technology companies will be presenting at Previews. This year the audience has the chance to vote on which company they think will be most successful.

* CEO Outlook - hear how CEOs have been preparing for the mobile age and the bumps and successes they’ve had along the way. This is an open dialogue where audience participation is encouraged!

The complete schedule is available online.

See you at the Summit!

• AFP to be the first global news agency to offer High Definition videos| AFP
• Elsevier Appoints Suzanne Bedell as Managing Director, Science & Technology
  Books | Bert Davis Executive Search
• BLR Green Team Recognized for Advocating Green Business Practices | BLR
• Copyright Clearance Center Expands Presence in Europe, Opens RightsDirect |CCC
  Automate to Get a Grasp on Overflow of Web data | Connotate
• CQ-Roll Call Announces Peter Teese as Vice President of National Sales |CQ-Roll Call
  Wall Street Journal to Debut Expanded Saturday Paper | Dow Jones
• Wall Street Journal Debuts New Ranking For Undergraduate Colleges | Dow Jones
• Greenhill Management to Speak at Investor Conference Hosted by JMP Securities | Greenhill SAVP
• Mark Bentley to Join Greenhill as a Managing Director in London | Greenhill SAVP
• Federal Data Center Consolidation May Take A Decade | INPUT
• Seminar Offers Insights Into California’s Technology Infrastructure Overhaul| INPUT
• Employment-based health coverage continues to decline | J.J. Keller & Associates
• Survey examines pay programs | J.J. Keller & Associates
• JEGI Represents Accela Communications in Sale to KIT Digital | JEGI
• MarkLogic Announces Keynote Speakers for Government Summit | MarkLogic
• MarkLogic and Flatirons Solutions Announce Reseller Agreement | MarkLogic
• Content Consumption on Mobile Devices Dominated by Texting | Newstex
• Peer39 Semantic Targeting Data Maximizes Performance and Brand Safety on the
  AppNexus Real-Time Ad Platform | Peer 39
• ProQuest Ranks 17th in 2010 InformationWeek 500 | ProQuest
• ProQuest Appoints Gersch to Lead Serials Solutions | ProQuest
• ProQuest and Condé Nast Team Up to Bring More Than 100 Years of Vogue
  Online for the First Time | ProQuest
• Spiceworks Hosts Session on B2B Marketing via New Social Business Applications
  During OMMA Global New York 2010 | Spiceworks
• New ‘People View’ Feature from Spiceworks Makes IT Management Personal
  | Spiceworks
• TEMIS Announces Public Download Availability for its LuxidBar™ | TEMIS

Member Blog

• 10 Minute Strategy: Succeeding with Content Aggregation [VIDEO] [WHITE
  PAPER] | Content Blogger
• New York Times/NYU Hyperlocal Site: Will News Ever Get Local Right? |
  Content Blogger
• I Wanna Be A Billionaire | Kellblog
• More Emergent Strategies: Groupon, Greendot | Kellblog
• Turn it Off | Manage to Change
• The State of the Blogosphere 2010 Infographic Style | Newstex
• Republicans Beat Democrats on Twitter | Newstex
• SIIA Previews Accepting Applications for 2011 SIIA Information Industry
  Summit Presentations | Newstex
• Voting: It’s Future Ready | SLA
• Business networking — broader and smarter | VIP
• New one-stop financial tool from Thomson Reuters | VIP
• Headline copyright shock horror! | VIP

Upcoming Events

• 10/13 – Executive FaceTime Interview with Thane Kerner, CEO of Silverchair
  | SIIA
• 10/19 – Capital Content Network with Anthea Stratigos | SIIA
• 11/17 – Brown Bag Lunch | SIIA

SIIA All About Mobile is all about the next step in the transformation of the software industry!
For more information on SIIA All About Mobile, or how to submit your own video content to the blog, contact Nate.