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

Sharing 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.

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