So here we are 30 days later from the last post and it feels like 30 minutes. The last month has seen things go into complete overdrive for Kontexto. Financing, conference presentations, sales meetings, product development, new hires and all of the other things that go along with preparing for a new service launch. In our case the launch of publishflow™, our on-demand news measurement service for large web publishers. Throw in a global recession and things get more interesting.
Here are some of the highlights and learnings over the past 30 days for us:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start Up Tour:
Kontexto was selected to present at the Amazon Web Services Start Up Tour event in London, UK. The event drew about 250 local people from the tech community and the whole AWS crew from the U.S. was on hand to organize and drive the event. Our CTO Rick Van Well was in attendance as well, which let me deflect all the super hard core geek questions his way. All in all a great event that explored how to use AWS to start of software venture. You can check out our slide presentation below:
Met with 3 of Europe’s Largest English Language Newspapers:
I had a chance to meet with 3 of Europe’s largest English language newspapers in the past 30 days. I ran through a full demo of publishflow™ with them and was faced with thoughtful questions about the measurement and analysis we are presently doing with the service as well as other things we had not thought of doing. The feedback was essential in helping us to shape some of the future development tasks for publishflow™. The most important take away was the confirmation that publishflow™ when used in tandem with traditional web analytics packages and ad server data provides almost perfect insight into top performing stories over time. I am going to coin a new phrase for this “Return on Story”. It will be interesting to see if newspapers are willing to adopt new publishing measurement standards as the migrate nearly all of their resources towards the web. Our bet is yes.
New Hires:
We had been planning on doing this in a measured way regardless of the impending global meltdown. We have added a VP of North American Sales and a new programmer to help with some of the crazy things we wish to do with all of the underlying news flow data we are capturing. At this point, we are still very lean and are focused on sales and service improvements. Steady as she goes. We have varying opinions on the global meltdown and how bad it is going to be. If you want to know mine, you have to sit through a publishflow™ demo and then I will tell you.
buzzflow™ Development is Underway
Kontexto has always had the vision of applying our core media measurement and analysis platform to any vertical that either produces media content or needs to consume media content. That list could go on forever, which is exciting for us in terms of reacting to market opportunities, but you have to pick some to attack first in order to get some early feedback and to start making a name. buzzflow™ is our attack on the traditional notion of media monitoring. It is a service targeted at PR professionals who are interested in the next level of near real time news measurement and analysis on behalf of their clients. News in this context goes well beyond mainstream publications and digs into the social web and other dark places that conversations are happening about brands, products, people and events.
Lots more to come. We will be presenting at Money:Tech 2009 at the start of February in NYC, direct link to the session is below.
Amazon Web Services For Cheap On-Demand Text Measurement and Analysis
