Content Matters

Last night's Content Next mixer at the IAC/Interactive Corp building was great. I'd say that the crowd and the ambience was clearly the best they've had yet.  The turnout was strong - somewhere north of 600 people registered, probably due to curiosity about the venue. Last night's mixer celebrated the 6th anniversary of the launch of PaidContent, so congratulations to Rafat and the team.

I got the chance to reconnect with some people I'd not spoken with in a while and met some new ones as well. So, as a networking event, it was clearly a success.

For those who did not attend but are curious about the inside of the IAC/Interactive building, here's a brief clip from last night. Rafat has posted some photos from the mixer to PaidContent. Of course, for those who really want to know about the building, IAC has a website with a 360-degree spin around it.

Ever wonder what the inside of the Frank Gehry-designed IAC/Interactive Corp building looks like?  That's just one more reason to stop by tonight's Paid Content NYC mixer. Of course, the better reason is to congratulate Rafat and the PaidContent team on their sixth anniversary.
Hope that you registered when I first posted about this a few weeks ago because I'm pretty sure that it's sold out.

Hope to see you there.

Since we were livetwitting NetGain, I didn't live-blog it. Here are some of my thoughts post-conference.

NetGain was the first effort by the SIIA to bring together its Software and Content divisions. The SIIA was formed through the merger of the Software Publisher's Association and the Information Industry Association in 1999. So, it was about time to actually let the members of both divisions come together for an event.

The dual audience made for some challenges but clearly benefited the conference as a whole. One key challenge was how to level-set the audience for a given topic. For example, in the Platforms panel which I sat on, we knew that the software division members would have a strong understanding of platforms, while many from the content division would not. We decided to target our discussion at the content side, though at times the discussion clearly veered too far to the technical.

The major themes of the conference were centered around SaaS, Platforms and cloud computing. One interesting twist was that while the tech companies are typically ahead of content businesses in adoption of technology, on the business model side, SaaS may be new to software, but the ASP subscription model is old hat to the publishers. Of course, what's new to that model is the use of open APIs, as opposed to the walled garden ASP models of the traditional publishing market.

The other change to the program this year was the inclusion of Previews, an event that has run as part of the Information Industry Summit the past two years. The Previews event showcased ten emerging content and technology companies. While the New York previews was held as a stand-alone half-day event, at NetGain, Previews sessions were interspersed through the main program. I found that I prefer the dedicated Previews event, but integrating it into the main program provided stronger attendance.

I thought that the best speakers over the two days were Matt Glotzbatch, Product Management Director for Google Enterprise, Sphere CEO Tony Conrad and Webb Shaw of JJ Keller. Barry Bealer ran a compelling session on emerging business models. Clay Shirky was entertaining, though for people who are close to the Web 2.0 world, there was not a lot of new ground covered.

Among the Previews companies, I thought the stars were SlideRocket, which provide a SaaS presentation tool that supports rich media and community, Zuora, a SaaS billing and entitlement solution for complex subscription models, founded by ex-Salesforce.com execs, and ReachForce, a lead generation data service.

Tuesday night wrapped up with the 23rd annual CODiE Awards. For the first time, this year, the SIIA included a CODiE showcase where about a third of the nominated companies presented their capabilities. Congratulations to all of the CODiE Award winners (including Alacra Book).

Were you at NetGain? What did you think? Please put your thoughts in the comments.

PS - Regarding our efforts at LiveTwitting, I think the results were mixed. You can view all of the tweets here. The Newstex team was kind enough to stitch the tweets together into a single RSS feed here. It's clear that the short-form communications are good for sharing quick snippets or quotes but, as John Blossom pointed out, the instant nature of twitter makes it hard to distill your thoughts into a comprehensive analysis. Pithy is good for some things but not all.

Tonight were the 2008 SIIA CODiE awards, which recognize excellence by companies in the Content, Software and Education markets.

I was honored to accept a CODiE on behalf of Alacra for our Alacra Book application.
Alacra Book was the winner in the Best Solution Integrating Content into Workflow category. It was especially gratifying to be selected when we consider the tough competition in that category, including CCH, Cicero, EDGAR Online and Generate.

The CODiEs are awarded through the votes of our peers in the content, software and education space. This year, there were over 1,000 CODiE applications submitted, so we're somewhat humbled to be recognized among the many industry leaders.

During the past year, we have upgraded Alacra Book clients to the latest version of Alacra Book. The product enhancements were directly driven by client feedback, so we feel confident that the new version is living up to the goal of integrating content into workflow.

Congratulations to Product Manager Janet Tarendash, Vice President of Development Ajit Tharaken and the entire Alacra team who have been actively involved in the development, testing and rollout of Alacra Book.

The website that I've visited the most the past few days is Is Twitter Down?

It's no secret that Twitter has had numerous outages lately. It's hit or miss at any moment as to whether the site will be up.

The timing was not great for me. Along with Larry Schwartz, Ed Keating and John Blossom, I've tried to get attendees at this week's SIIA NetGain conference to livetwitter the event.

The composite stream of our tweets is now available as an RSS feed (thanks to Larry and the Newstex team).

Twitter has had tremendous growth (at least on the two coasts), purely coming via word of mouth from the digerati. Unfortunately for them, the barrier to entry would not be very high.  If they can't get the uptime problems solved quickly, I fear that Google or another will step in and take their position.

The team at Twitter is clearly aware of their precarious position as shown in this blog post.

At the same time, posting quotes like this doesn't instill confidence among your users:

The issue that we experienced today is actually not related to the problem we experienced yesterday. In turn, these two problems do not share the same cause with the downtime we experienced last week. At root is the database, but the cause is different

via @lfschwartz and @mashable, something to keep you occupied while waiting for Twitter to come back up - the video of Allen Stern's "Twitter Come Back"

PaidContent has announced the date of their next NYC Mixer - it's June 4. Invitations are available on the PaidContent site.

As in the past, the mixer is free, but tickets go quickly.  They're always a great time and a great chance to meet up with your digital media peers.

The June mixer is being held at the IAC Interactive building. That's the funky, Frank Gehry-designed
building you might have seen from the West Side Highway. Worth coming just to check out the building.

Hope to see you there.

Am at SIIA NetGain.
Rather than live-blogging it, we're trying to livetwit it.
As with any new technology, some hiccups, particularly as we learn that it seems to be case-sensitive.

Can follow the posts at http://livetwitting.com/events.html

For more info, take a look at this earlier post.

I will be at the SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco Sunday – Tuesday. NetGain should be a very interesting conference, as it brings together both halves of the SIIA – the software and content groups.

The convergence of these two groups at the conference takes place at an opportune time, as the emergence of new application-led platforms from companies like Google and Salesforce.com which marry technology with content in a software-as-a-service environment.

I will be discussing the impact of these emerging platforms on a panel Monday afternoon entitled Platforms – Will They Tilt in Your Favor? The panel also features Tom Herrmann of Oracle and ZoomInfo President Bryan Burdick and will be moderated by Tim Miller, analyst at the 451 Group. It looks as though our panel is the last one before cocktail hour, so I hope you’ll join us for what should be a fascinating discussion.

For SIIA attendees who use Twitter, we’ll also be using LiveTwitting, a service that will enable participants to twitter the SIIA event, with all of the results displayed in a single RSS feed or website. I’ve provided instructions on how to LiveTwitter the event here. If you’re a Twitterer, please join us in live-twitting the conference.

For SIIA NetGain attendees who use Twitter, we’d encourage you to LiveTwitter the event.

LiveTwitting is a channel that allows us to post tweets during the conference. All of our tweets will be organized according to the appropriate panel.

Here are quick instructions on LiveTwitting:

First, from your Twitter account go to www.twitter.com/livetwitting and select follow (or, if you use a different Twitter client, just follow @livetwitting).

Next, to turn on Live Twitting:

• d livetwitting ON NetGain # Session Title (a session will be created for each panel session)
• Simply send your tweets as usual
• When finished, end livetwitting by typing:
  • d livetwitting OFF
• More features can be found here

Please use the session titles below for each of the conference sessions (this will ensure that everyone’s comments are mapped to the same sessions):

Monday
Welcome Remarks:            welcome
Keynote - John Hagel:        Hagel
State of the Industry:        Industry
Previews (morning):          Previews1
Blurring Perspectives:        Blurring
Play With a Partner:          Partner
Software and Content on the Mobile:        Mobile
Previews (afternoon):        Previews2
Revelation or Revolution:   Social
Platforms – Will they Tilt?   Platforms

Tuesday:
Keynote – George Hu:            Hu
State of the Industry-Private Equity:        PE
Previews (morning):            Previews3
Enterprise Opportunities:     Enterprise
Keynote: Matthew Glotzbach: Glotzbach
Previews (afternoon):            Previews4
Keynote – Clay Shirky:            Shirky
State of the Industry-CEO:     CEO

Need help? Send me a tweet @graubart

In an earlier post at the MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions conference, I promised to share some charts from Stefan Tornquist's presentation. Stefan is the MarketingSherpa Research Director and these charts are from a survey of 400+ content publishers.

I take these survey results with a grain of salt; publishers may respond differently based upon different understanding levels of the questions or simply because they want to seem ahead of where they actually are. That said, the year-over-year numbers are probably somewhat useful.

This chart asks b2b publishers to assess the impact of various Web 2.0 efforts. Again, my impression is that some of the responses are aspirational and that these publishers are not yet providing these capabilities, but that's just my gut. The key takeaway is the large amount of blue - publishers today largely have no idea of the impact of any of these things. But a few things surprised me, notably how they feel that tagging is having significant impact. I'm guessing this is simply use of Digg and other chiclets in the footer of an article. Meanwhile, uploading photos and videos is assigned minimal impact or no idea, again, I assume, largely because they're not doing it today.

The next chart asks the same b2b publishers for their impression overall of the effects of Web 2.0 initiatives. Three quarters of the respondents believe that it will increase the engagement of their readers, increasing page views and/or time spent on the site. Others are seeking awareness or improved customer retention.

This final chart asks the b2b publishers which Web 2.0 things they are currently doing or have set as a high priority and compares that number to the prior year. The biggest gain is in the use of video clips, which at 35% is much higher than I'd anticipate. Larry Schwartz noted that the 50% figure for blogs seems quite high as well, but I'd guess many trade publishers now have their editors doing some form of blogging, so maybe it's not unrealistic.