Press Release Live Competitor Monitoring

I have had a few requests from our clients for our most recent press release so I thought I would put it online in our blog so you can access it easily if you wish.





Kontexto Launches the First Live Competitor Monitoring Service for News Publishers

Editorial teams around the world now have access to live competitor publishing data.

(PRWEB) March 21, 2011

Kontexto™, a trusted provider of real time web services for media publishers, has just announced the launch of publishflow™, a live competitor monitoring service for news publishers.

Based on data collected from over 25 professional news organizations, Kontexto discovered that a typical midsize news organization can spend over $1.5 million a year manually and repetitively looking for headline changes on competitor websites. On average, a mid size editorial team will spend upwards of 3000 collective hours every month manually monitoring competitor websites.

Although repetitive competitor monitoring is one of the most common daily activities carried out by editorial teams, it is often overlooked as a major cost point that can be dramatically reduced using software solutions like publishflow™.

"publishflow™ enables news organizations to realize significant cost savings and efficiencies by automating their daily competitor monitoring activities. Not only do editorial teams free up thousands of hours each month, but they also increase the number of competitor websites they can monitor," notes Tom St.John, CEO of Kontexto Inc.

Using a combination of live web dashboards and email notifications, publishflow™ is quickly becoming the service of choice for news publishers who are serious about implementing a competitor monitoring strategy. Managing editors, web editors, reporters and bloggers are now equipped with an efficient way to monitor the editorial moves of their competitors.

Some of the specific capabilities of publishflow™ include:

Live Headline Monitoring
publishflow monitors over 8000 home pages and section pages for lead story changes 24 hours a day.

Live Email Notifications
Editorial teams are notified of competitor headline changes via live web dashboards or email notifications.

Live Competitor Trends
Live publishing trends uncover the categories and stories receiving the most investment by your competitors.

Detailed Competitor Summaries
Intra day and end of day competitor publishing summaries for managing editors, section editors and executives.

"Our desire to build publishflow was born out of conversations with news publishers around the world over the past 2 years. The common thread from these conversations is their desire to know what competitors are publishing as soon as possible. publishflow™ solves this problem for them and makes live competitor monitoring a reality for news publishers of all sizes," says Tom St.John, CEO of Kontexto Inc.

publishflow™ is delivered as software as a service. It takes a few minutes to activate and requires no integration.

A publishflow™ overview video can be viewed here: http://www.publishflow.com/about/product_demo

Live Competitor Monitoring for News Publishers

publishflow™ has just launched a live competitor monitoring service for news publishers.

BILLION DOLLAR HIDDEN COST FOR NEWS PUBLISHERS

Based on data collected from over 25 professional news organizations, we discovered that a typical midsize news organization can spend over $1.5 million a year manually and repetitively looking for headline changes on competitor websites. On average, a mid size editorial team will spend upwards of 3000 collective hours every month manually monitoring competitor websites.

Although repetitive competitor monitoring is one of the most common daily activities carried out by editorial teams, it is often overlooked as a major cost point that can be dramatically reduced using software solutions like publishflow™. With close to 2000 global news publishers facing this problem every year, there are billions of dollars in hidden costs spent each year on competitor monitoring. publishflow™ helps to tame this hidden cost for global news publishers.

DO YOU HAVE A LIVE COMPETITOR MONITORING STRATEGY?

Using a combination of live web dashboards and email notifications, publishflow™ is quickly becoming the service of choice for news publishers who are serious about implementing a competitor monitoring strategy.

Managing editors, web editors, reporters and bloggers are now equipped with an efficient way to monitor the editorial moves of their competitors in real time.

SHORT DEMO FOR YOU TO VIEW

You can watch a brief introductory video below:



SOME OF THE BENEFITS FOR NEWS PUBLISHERS

Live Headline Monitoring
publishflow monitors over 8000 home pages and section pages for lead story changes 24 hours a day.

Live Email Notifications
Editorial teams are notified of competitor headline changes via live web dashboards or email notifications.

Live Competitor Trends
Live publishing trends uncover the categories and stories receiving the most investment by your competitors.

Detailed Competitor Summaries
Intra day and end of day competitor publishing summaries for managing editors, section editors and executives.

IT TAKES UNDER 5 MINUTES TO ACTIVATE

Please be in touch to activate your free 30 day evaluation. Email or Twitter.

Using live web data to drive editorial

As a professional news organization, how do you decide where to place your editorial resources, what to cover and what videos to produce?

At publishflow™, we provide business tools and services that enable online news publishers to monitor live competitor, topic and visitor trends.

So it is exciting to see that at Beet.TV's recent Online Video Journalism Summit from the Washington Post offices, one of the big takeaways is that professional news organizations are starting to to take live data seriously and work it into the content production cycle.

Check out the 3 min video below with some soundbites from Yahoo!, CBS News, Reuters and Brightcove.

Real Time Analytics Matrix

The end of every year brings about a chance to reflect on what has happened and what you want to have happen moving forward with your company, products and customers.

As a software company focused on bringing real time data into the hands of online media publishers, it has been an amazingly interesting year of trying to get our pitch and service correct for various types of online media organizations.

I dusted off this Analtyics Matrix diagram today (from the book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris, and Robert Morison), which we as a company use to remind ourselves of where we are playing in the broad space of "Analytics".

Highlighted in yellow are the "information" and "insight" blocks we focus on with our service publishflow™.

What is happening right now? AND What is the next best action?

2010 was very much about perfecting the "information" side of our platform and services. 2011 will be about working with media publishers to determine what "actions" to take with the all of the real time visitor, content and revenue information they now have using publishflow™.

The problem with Newspapers

The problem with newspapers may not be the 'news' maybe it's the 'paper'.



'For the Wall Street Journal's 10th annual Tech Innovation Awards, Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute received the Gold award for its technology to make paper-thin computer screens with a twist'.

These new flex screens once brought to market, could replace the 'paper' in newspaper.

Full Story

Publishflow API Upgrade

We just released the latest version of the publishflow™ API - version 1.2.

Our new and improved API will now give you the tools you need to access your publications audience trends, behaviors and revenues. You can connect to our API using a simple HTTP POST or HTTP GET. The data is then returned to you in either JSON or XML format. This gives you the most flexibility to connect to us however you like and get data back in a form that's going to be very quick and easy for you to work with.

There are three sets of functions currently covered by our API:

• Realtime data for top stories, authors and categories
• Analysis of authors, platforms, categories, locales and referrers
• Analysis of individual media items

In order to begin working with the publishflow™ API you will require the following:

• An active account
• Developer ID provided by us
• A working knowledge of network programming using a web friendly language like PHP, Python, Java or Ruby

If you are an active developer using the API you should not notice any difference since it is backward compatible to previous releases - but there are new method calls.

Check out the API for more details.

Journalism and Data Visualization

We came across this really interesting documentary on data visualization and the evolving use of info graphics in journalism and thought it was worth sharing.


Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.