SIIA Digital Discourse Industry Blog

SIIA Announces 2013 Previews Companies: Europe’s Top Early Stage Digital Content Companies

September 23, 2013 By Carolyn Morgan

SIIA today announced the 2013 Previews Companies – Europe’s most innovative early stage content or content technology companies. The six companies will present at the Digital Content & Media Summit, held at One Wimpole Street in London September 23-25, to showcase their creative solutions before an audience of industry leaders, potential clients, and media.

The Digital Content & Media Summit is the premier event for digital media and publishing executives. The three-day conference will provide a global perspective on the 10 most pressing digital content and media challenges and trends. Topics include new ways to charge for digital content, turning free users into paying customers, developing compelling mobile products, expanding media brands internationally, successful collaborative advertising, and more.

The SIIA Previews Program selects and then spotlights the next generation of the most innovative new content creators, aggregators and technology vendors. During sessions held throughout the Digital Content & Media Summit, company CEOs will highlight the innovations that have made them successful.

[Read more...]

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Filed Under: Content, Content Events, Digital Content & Media Summit, SIIA UK

2013 Model of Excellence Companies Unveiled

September 23, 2013 By Nadia Hassairi

For 10 years, the Model of Excellence program has answered one question: who is re-setting the standards for data excellence?
Each year, the InfoCommerce Group, reviews the data industry landscape to identify the data products that are pioneering or perfecting new business models, exhibit best practices or offer technological innovation. The results are the Model of Excellence that are honored throughout the DataContent Conference.
During the “Excellence in Action” showcase session, we’ll present to the audience both examples of companies with intriguing business models that can offer insights and inspiration to other publishers, as well as new ways to think about and apply data. The session is designed as a showcase, so presenters are encouraged to provide a brief overview of their products and talk about their businesses generally. Here are a few teasers to get started:

Equilar is based on public domain data, and will describe what’s involved in normalizing and enhancing it so that it can become premium-value content.
Equilar MOE Profile
Segmint will highlight the power and value of this real life example of Big Data at work, with near-real-time analytics and predictive models (and how this technology can be applied to other markets and databases). Segmint MOE Profile
Enigma provides consolidated access to thousands of public domain databases whose owners generates immense amounts of high-value data at little or no cost, but have no real incentive to make it easily accessible. Enigma MOE Profile
FindTheCompany mixes public domain,licensed and harvested data, yielding deep profiles and insights that many publishers have talked about but few have delivered.

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Filed Under: Content, Content Events, DataContent Tagged With: Content, datacontent, Datacontent13, Models of Excellence

Twelve smart insights from the speakers at SIIA Digital Content & Media Summit

September 22, 2013 By Carolyn Morgan

Get a sneak preview of what some very smart media and publishing innovators will be saying this week at the SIIA Digital Content & Media Summit in London. The event opens on Monday evening with a networking reception, followed by two days of panel Q&As, workshops, roundtables, with over 40 speakers and moderators sharing what they know about succeeding in digital content across web, mobile, social, video, online communities and events. With 170 media and technology attendees, it’s also great networking.

There’s still time to join us to get the full story… [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Content Events, Digital Content & Media Summit, SIIA UK Tagged With: Business Monitor International, CABI, Digital Content & Media Summit, Economist, EMAP, Future, Immediate, Incisive, Shortlist, UBM, WGSN

SIIA Alert: Government Shutdown Looming — How Government Contractors Should Prepare

September 20, 2013 By Mike Hettinger

With Congress and the President seemingly at loggerheads over federal spending, there is an increasing possibility that the federal government will shut down on October 1 when the funding for the current fiscal year expires. While we’ve been down this road before, each of the last 3 years for example, prudent business planning suggests that government contractors should be preparing themselves in the event there is a shut down.

What’s the status? Congress has failed to enact any of the 12 annual appropriations bills for FY 2014 and the current fiscal year funding is set to expire at midnight on October 1, meaning funding for the entire federal government is at stake. On September 20, 2013 the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government through December 15. Also included in this legislation was language defunding the so-called Obamacare health care plan. The Democrat-controlled Senate is expected to strip the language defunding Obamacare and send the bill back to the House. This sets up a potential gridlock situation and it is unclear if either side is willing to budge.

Why does this matter? As a government contractor you need to be prepared in the event of a shutdown, since funding for many if not all of your current contracts may be affected. Your employees are reading the news and they know the potential and they want to know their leadership is making contingency plans.

What should you do? OMB has sent a memo to government agencies telling them to prepare for a shutdown and prudent business planning suggests you need to be ready too. Here’s a quick checklist of things you should be doing and thinking about related to a potential shutdown:

Be Proactive: Don’t sit back and let the rumors swirl, take charge of the situation within your company.
Communicate: Communicate honestly, early and often with your employees about what you know and what you expect will happen if the government shuts down. Make sure your company speaks with “one voice.” This will keep misinformation (i.e. rumors of furloughs and layoffs) to a minimum.
Understand Your Contracts: Review your current contracts to understand which will be affected in the event of a shutdown and which will continue. Projects funded by revolving funds for example won’t be affected.
Gather Intelligence: Gather as much intelligence as possible by talking to industry partners and trade associations and having your engagement managers talk to their contracting officers and COTRs, i.e. the client.
Set Up a War Room: Set up a formal process inside your company to monitor developments related to the potential shutdown, a “war room” if you will. Be ready to kick it into high gear if a shutdown occurs.

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed and hope that Congress and the President are able to work out an agreement that keeps the government open and operating beyond October 1, while preparing yourselves for a potential shutdown through effective communication with your employees and smart business planning. Contact me at mhettinger@siia.net or (202) 789-4456 with any questions.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.

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Filed Under: Government, PSIG, Software

Webinar: The Factors That Drive High Performance Product Teams

September 20, 2013 By Katie Carlson

In early 2013, AIPMM, IPMA, IIBA Chicagoland, PDMA, and Planbox with the support of the SIIA sponsored a global study of product team performance which was developed and conducted by Actuation Consulting. The survey examined the interactions of Product Managers, Project Managers, Program Managers, Business Analysts, User Experience Professionals, Engineers and others actively involved in product development projects.

Listen to this pre-recorded webinar to learn how to improve your product team performance.

Presenters
Greg Geracie
President, Actuation Consulting

Click here to view the executive summary or to view the complete report click here.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: ProductManagers

SIIA Urges US Postal Service Board of Governors to Refrain from Exigent Rate Increase

September 19, 2013 By Mike Hettinger

In a letter yesterday, SIIA urged the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors to refrain from moving forward with an exigent rate increase on periodicals. SIIA sent the letter in response to signs that the board may increase the postal rate by 7-10% when it meets next on Sept. 24-25.

SIIA believes simply that there will not be any positive return from the filing of an exigent rate case. While there may be a short term increase in revenues, this action will force mailers in all classes of mail to take action to reduce their postage expenses.

Recently SIIA surveyed its members, to better understand how their mailing habits would be affected by postal rate increases. SIIA’s members publish more than 600 print periodical titles and mail about 800 million magazines and newsletters each year. SIIA and it’s newest division, ABM, represent about 15% of the Postal Service’s periodicals class.

The survey results support our overall position in opposition to an exigent increase. Two thirds of respondents said they would reduce mailed periodicals by an average of 11% if postal rates increased by 7.5%. If rates increased by 10%, nine out of 10 of our members say they would reduce mailed periodicals by about 13%. Even if rates increased by less than 7.5%, our members would still reduce their mailings. Since we mail in all classes of mail to support our periodicals, mail volume in other classes of mail would be reduced as well.

SIIA has found that in the long run, an exigent rate increase will reduce, if not eliminate, any increase in revenues. It is very likely that the lost mail volume will never return.

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Filed Under: Policy

Public Sector Innovation Roundup

September 19, 2013 By Mike Hettinger

Potential Government Shutdown Looms Large: With Congress back in town, the talk of a potential government shutdown has really picked up in the last few weeks. House Speaker Boehner put together a short term continuing resolution to fund the government through December 15th, with a companion resolution to defund Obamacare but was forced to pull it from the schedule amid concerns by some republicans that the Obamacare provision was not included in the bill itself. That puts the issue back to the drawing board with less than two weeks to go before the end of the fiscal year. It seems like the situation is changing daily or in some cases hourly as Speaker Boehner and other leaders in Congress try to find a way to avoid a shutdown while battling over Obamacare, spending cuts and the debt ceiling. Reuters has a good report from Wednesday on the latest plan.

NIST Recommends Not Using NSA-Influenced Standards: The National Institute for Standards and Technology is now strongly recommending against using encryption standards that leaked documents show were effectively weakened by the NSA. NIST has also now launched an effort to revise the standards, published in Special Publication 800-90A, 800-90B and 800-90C, by reopening them for comment. The original standards were published in 2006. FCW has a good report.

DOD to Mandate Move to Enterprise Email: DOD CIO Teri Takai, in a memo to component agencies on September 5th indicated that the time had come for them to stop running their own email systems and move to an enterprise environment. According to the memo, components have 120 days to draw up plans to migrate their current email to enterprise email. Prior to the memo, DOD agencies had been allowed to make their own determination as to whether or not they would move email to the department’s private cloud, operated by DISA. DOD has potentially more than two million email users. Here’s Takai’s memo.

Obama to Nominate New Deputy Director for Management: President Obama finally got around to announcing a new Deputy Director for Management at OMB, a position that has been filled in an acting capacity by Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel since May when Jeff Zients left the government. The nominee, Beth Cobert, comes to the Administration from McKinsey and Company where she has been for nearly 20 years. On another personnel note, Zients is already on his way back into government, being named as the replacement for Gene Sperling as Director of the National Economic Council. Here’s the latest on the Beth Cobert announcement via Federal Times.

New CIOs to be Nominated for DHS and FEMA: FCW is reporting that President Obama is set to name Luke McCormack, currently CIO at the Justice Department as the new CIO at DHS and Adrian Gardner, currently CIO at NASA Goddard as the CIO at FEMA. McCormack would be filling the spot left vacant earlier this year when Richard Spires left DHS amid some confusion over the reasons for his departure. Here’s the FCW report: http://fcw.com/articles/2013/09/17/mccormack-gardner-dhs-cio.aspx

GSA Official to be FTC CIO: In other personnel news, Bajinder Paul, currently Deputy Associate Administrator in GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies will be leaving GSA to become CIO at the FTC. A long time government technology official, Paul had previously been CIO at the OCC and Deputy CIO at HUD. Fedscoop has the scoop.

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Filed Under: PSIG

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