Kontexto is an official member of the UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) Global Entrepreneur Programme (GEP), more information on UKTI GEP. We have been part of the programme for over a year now and it has helped us navigate the waters of setting up our European HQ in London, not to mention provided us with loads of other valuable advice as an emerging software company. As an organization they are available to assist with business introductions, financing introductions and general assistance on a business level. Most importantly to me though has been the pleasure of getting to know the team members over the past year.

I have just spent a catch up week with some of the team members at UKTI GEP and there is alot of new activity going on within the program. I am looking forward to working closely with them over the next year to move our UK operations forward. If anyone is contemplating setting up shop in the UK, explore this program for sure.

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

“By being simply too good at raising money, it enabled us to perpetuate poor organizational structure and suboptimal strategic decisions. We weren’t forced early on to be scrappy and revenue focused.”

Simply a fabulous blog post by Roger Ehrenberg at Information Arbitrage called “Monitor110: A Post Mortem” that chronicles the story of startup company Monitor110, a financial technology and data services company going after the hedge fund industry.

It is a timely post for us here at Kontexto and I am sure for countless other emerging technology companies. How much money? how soon? and what are the possible consequences? As we consider our second round of financing at Kontexto, Roger’s blog post captures probably every thought we bash around each day at our offices about technology and business divides, what to do with money, product expectations, customer expectations, investor expectations etc…

While none of these considerations is particularly unique to us, one thing that really jumped out in his post is that in Monitor110’s case, taking more money early on made them “less scrappy and revenue focused”. More venture money without revenue in Monitor110’s case did not work.

It got me thinking about this Taoist saying:

Through sight, the colours may be seen,
but too much colour blinds us.
Apprehending the tones of sound,
too much sound might make us deaf,
and too much flavour deadens taste.
When hunting for sport, and chasing for pleasure,
the mind easily becomes perplexed.
He who collects treasures for himself
more easily becomes anxious.

Great post that has changed the way I approach Kontexto and our next round of financing… if there is one.

We are cranking away to get the Kontexto Inc. corporate website ready for launch.

Soon after, in the fall of 2008,  we will be rolling out our portfolio of on-demand media measurement and analysis services for bloggers, web publishers and advertisers.

I wanted to get the Kontexto Inc. blog up and running so our team can start throwing up posts as we get closer to launching.

We will try and keep this updated as much as possible and get as many voices within our company contributing so you get a good dose of geek, business and general banter.

Later.

TJ