Hundreds of specialist publishers gathered in Washington DC in June to swap practical ideas on making more money in niche markets at the 37th annual SIPA conference. If you missed, it, here are my top 20 tips from the event.
Meet Previews Presenting Company Delve
January 21, 2013 By
Sandeep Ayyappan, CEO, Delve
Meet Previews Presenting Company Delve, from the voice of the CEO, Sandeep Ayyappan.
What does Delve Do?
Delve helps organizations turn news into knowledge using a personalized news reader for each employee and a private social layer where anyone can recommend and discuss relevant stories with their colleagues.
What is your secret sauce that will make you successful?
We use our algorithms to identify and recommend the most relevant stories to professionals in a range of industries, and then we make it much easier to engage colleagues on what they’re reading and why it matters. Being able to find better stories and share them more easily creates better questions and conversations inside any organization.
What are you looking to achieve in presenting at IIS (Investors, Partners, Content)?
We’re currently working on our seed round and we’re looking for potential strategic investors, and we’d love to build relationships with publishers who might be interested in distributing content through our platform as well.
What would you say is your favorite breakthrough technology or company?
I don’t recall a technology that changed my life in as many ways as the original iPhone. I bought it a few months after the first one came out. It was painfully slow and often couldn’t get reception, but how much it allowed me to do and the simplicity of its interface changed the way I listened to music, talked on the phone, played games, and even surfed the internet.
Learn more about Delve, and the other 2013 Previews Presenting companies at IIS Breakthrough. Each presenting company will deliver a 5-minute presentation to an audience of key decision makers during the IIS Breakthrough event being held from January 30-31, 2013 in New York City. Presenting companies will also have 5-minutes for audience Q&A and an opportunity to showcase their companies to IIS attendees during the SIIA Previews and CODIEs Showcase and Networking reception. To top things off, the IIS audience will vote on the company they believe is most likely to succeed.
About Previews
Over the past six years, SIIA Previews has showcased innovative content companies, including publishers, media, aggregators, and technology plays, and 2013 SIIA Previews will feature the 100th Preview Company!
Got Klout?
July 2, 2012 By
We are excited about our partnership with the InfoCommerce Group to produce DataContent 2012, coming up October 9-11 in Philadephia. The conference will focus on discovering the next big thing in publishing: The intersection of Data, Community and Markets at DataContent 2012. If you don’t know him, Russ Perkins the founder of InfoCommerce Group, is one of the more thoughtful individuals in our industry on all things data. As we lead up to the conference, we will be highlighting posts from his blog which focus on the issues and topics we will be discussing at DataContent 2012. Enjoy!
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Imagine a business based on a mash-up of social media, analytics and ratings. And that’s exactly where a company called Klout plays.
Klout exists to assess your social media importance. Using advanced algorithms, it looks at how active you are in social media, how big your audience is, how influential are the people in your audience, and the impact of your social media activity. All this gets rolled up in a Klout score – a number from 1 to 100… Read more.
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Post is written by Russell Perkins, Founder & Managing Director, InfoCommerce Group Inc.
Russell has over 20 years experience in all facets of the database publishing industry. He is the author of Directory Publishing: A Practical Guide, which is now in its fifth edition, and InfoCommerce: Internet Strategies for Database Publishers.
VIA Recap
May 18, 2012 By
Angus Robertson
On May 9 & 10, the SIIA Content Division hosted Content VIA Platforms – a conference dedicated to educating media, publishing and information professionals about the technology and business issues related to distributing content via mobile, social and other platforms. Guest blogger, Angus Robertson, Principal Robertson Advisors LLC, gives his write up on the Conference and the content covered.
About Robertson Advisors: For 10 years Robertson Advisors has been providing content creators and distributors with strategic and tactical consulting services. Angus can be reached at angusrob@mac.com.
A major theme emerging from SIIA’s Content VIA Platforms conference in San Francisco last week was the impact that mobile is having on the distribution of content.
One lesson from the success of iPad apps is that the simplicity dictated by the format can be a benefit that has relevance to other offerings as well. The limitations of apps forces greater focus on what is truly important, a lesson that is increasingly being incorporated into web products.
Newstex President Larry Schwartz offered a useful walk through of the process and timeline of developing mobile apps. He stressed the importance of following the Lean Startup model of “Nail it and scale it.”
Dan Bennett, VP of Technology for Thomson Reuters, provided a handy comparison of the pros and cons of native apps versus HTML5 and sounded a note of caution about jumping on the app bandwagon. Developing and supporting apps for Apple devices always adds to costs but not always to revenue, so it is important to understand what you are trying to do with apps, he said. He likens apps to puppies: everyone loves them until they get big and tear apart the house.
Barry Graubart, VP Marketing, ReisReports, led an informative Executive Bootcamp on Platforms that included Teri Mendelsohn of Mendelsohn Consulting, Ann Michael of Delta Think, Robin Neidorf of Free Pint and Mark Strohlein of Agile Business Logic.
Some of the key pointers from this session were:
Mobile strategy needs to:
- embrace the constraints; focus and simplify; and leverage mobile features such as geolocation, but only where they add value.
- iPads are now outselling PCS, which represent less than 50% of the market.
- About one in ten new products will be successful.
Security and authentication remains a significant hindrance to going fully mobile in the enterprise market, especially for businesses such as financial institutions. Still, Free Pint surveys of enterprise users show that mobile is growing strongly in the corporate world. Two years ago Junior Analysts were asking “Why can’t I get this on my iPhone?” Now, senior executives are saying “Get this on my iPad, I don’t care how.”
Peter Marney, VP Content Group, Thomson Financial Research, gave an overview of how Thomson Reuters is handling the issue of fully leveraging the vast amounts of data across the company to support multiple platforms and markets. His goal is to make news dynamic and interactive across the merged enterprise. “Knowing the value of the connections (between content) is more important than the content itself,” he said, citing the links between companies, people, patents and legal issues.
VIA Recap: Audience Engagement 3.0
May 15, 2012 By
On May 9 & 10, the SIIA Content Division hosted Content VIA Platforms – a conference dedicated to educating media, publishing and information professionals about the technology and business issues related to distributing content via mobile, social and other platforms. Guest blogger, Angus Robertson, gives his write up on the session Audience Engagement 3.0
Burt Herman, Co-founder, Storify
Go away helicopter before I take out my giant swatter :-/
Shoiab Athar posted this tweet on May 1, 2011, unaware at the time that he was witnessing the assault that led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
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.