Filed under: media monitoring
THOMSON REUTERS OPENCALAIS SEES COMMERCIAL ADOPTION FOR MEDIA MONITORING, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, READER ENGAGEMENT, CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND MORE
Pioneering Partners Include Moreover Technologies, Morris Communications,
Media General, Magus Ltd. and Prefix Technologies
SemTech 2010 – San Francisco, Calif. – June 23, 2010 – Thomson Reuters today cited five innovative companies that are pioneering the large-scale and commercial use of its OpenCalais service to enrich and optimize digital content.
They include Moreover Technologies, a world-leading media aggregation and monitoring provider; Morris Communications and Media General, two top-tier regional publishers; Magus Ltd., the British pioneer of enterprise website governance, and Prefix, South Africa’s leading Content Management System (CMS).
“Two and a half years in, we are extremely pleased to be part of leading publishing platforms and media monitoring solutions around the world,” said Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We’re processing five million documents per day and storing 90 billion triples, reflecting a large and growing percentage of the English language news articles, blog posts and social media status updates posted on the Web every day.”
Joining CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and more than 50 other publishers, entrepreneurs and service providers using OpenCalais are:
Moreover Technologies One of the original news aggregators on the Web, Moreover provides companies with “news and views” in a comprehensive solution for business intelligence, mainstream media and social media monitoring. It aggregates, refines and delivers millions of daily articles, blog posts and social media updates from more than a million editorially vetted sources spanning 800 searchable industries in 100-plus countries, and 50-plus languages.
Moreover Technologies uses OpenCalais to categorize and tag news and blog content as well as social media status updates to provide superior mainstream and social media monitoring services to clients of all kinds.
”Equally important to quantity of information is quality,” said Paul Farrell, President of Moreover Technologies. “It’s imperative to be able to retrieve rapidly the most relevant and pinpointed results possible from vast repositories of business intelligence. Our partnership with OpenCalais substantially enhances our ability to make sure clients get the right results at the right time.”
Morris Communications A leading southeastern media company, Morris Communications has newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising, radio, book publishing and online properties. Its digital arm, Morris DigitalWorks, turned to OpenCalais while digitizing the archives of its 13 daily newspapers, including the Augusta Chronicle; the Florida Times-Union; the Savannah Morning News; the noted local Journalism experiment Bluffton Today and more.
“We strive to be unrivaled in the delivery of local news and information to our readership in every possible medium. So it is essential to be able to repurpose our content for any number of uses – including digital distribution on the Web, mobile, etc.,” said Michael Romaner, President, Morris DigitalWorks. “OpenCalais has helped us achieve that mission in two ways. By improving the relevancy of our content for Web searches, we have increased both our overall page-views from search engines, and our retention of those readers once they arrive. We look forward to expanding on this successful alliance.”
Media General A publicly-owned communications company, Media General has interests in more than 35 newspapers, 15 television stations and a wide array of interactive media properties. Media General turned to OpenCalais when porting 60 of its content-rich sites – including The Tampa Tribune; the Winston-Salem Journal; and the Richmond Times-Dispatch – to a new CMS for superior Search Engine Optimization (SEO), improved content navigation and greater utilization of archived articles.
Magus Ltd Magus is the pioneering UK company behind ActiveStandards™: the market-leading SaaS platform for enterprise website governance used by Unilever, Shell, Philips, ING and more. ActiveStandards takes web content governance to a new level by enabling companies to coordinate the policies, processes and people that underpin their web presence within a single integrated framework, and monitor and manage compliance.
Magus uses OpenCalais to power ActiveStandards’ “Content Insight Reports” – a suite of powerful semantic reports which extend the reach of online governance by providing visibility and control over unstructured content.
“Semantic Web technologies are revolutionizing the way people find and use information online,” said Simon Lande, CEO, Magus Ltd. “Our alliance with OpenCalais enables us to leverage this technology to bring about a step-change in the way that companies monitor and manage their online content. We see it as a revolution in content governance.”
Prefix Technologies Provider of South Africa’s most popular off- and online CMS, Prefix is a trusted Web-applications development company. Prefix solutions enable magazine, newspaper and online publishers to collect, store, share and monetize content in new ways that increase competitive advantage while improving efficiency and reducing costs.
Prefix uses OpenCalais as a processing layer for Preditor’s Semantic Tagging Engine. With a powerful tagging rules toolkit on a per-magazine basis, Preditor customers with multiple magazines on Preditor are able to draw content out of their archives and build smart links across a the network for their readers. In one case study, they’ve scanned through and linked over 10 years of archives.
”We’ve seen significant increases in archive monetization for our customers with our OpenCalais implementation. Equally, it’s been incredible to explore new ideas in both the print and digital worlds to create content packages through semantic discovery,” said Josh Adler, CEO, Prefix. “We feel we’ve interpreted the semantic opportunity in a unique way for traditional media and OpenCalais opened that door for us.”
About the OpenCalais Initiative
The OpenCalais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters mission to deliver intelligent information by connecting all the world’s business-relevant content. It offers free metadata generation services, developer tools and an automatic connection to the Linked Data cloud. Found at OpenCalais.com (http://www.OpenCalais.com), OpenCalais is the fastest, easiest and most accurate way to tag the people, places, companies, facts and events in content to increase its value, accessibility and interoperability on the Web. For a quick and easy demo of how OpenCalais can add intelligence to your content, visit http://viewer.opencalsis.com, paste in a news story and hit submit.”
About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare and science and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs 55,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to thomsonreuters.com.
Contact:
Krista Thomas
Thomson Reuters OpenCalais Initiative
415.202.3523
Krista.Thomas@ThomsonReuters.com
June 29, 2010
Hot on the heels of our recent announcement concerning a whopping 390% increase in the number of social media sources we monitor we’re pleased to say ain’t finished there.. This week our social media sources numbered over one million for the first time, grabbing around 1.5m individual posts a day, looking something like this :
We fully intend to keep driving forward not only with our social media sources, but news as well, and ensure we offer the most complete media monitoring solution out there. So thanks to the Team for all their hard work in getting us here and we’re already looking forward to the next million!
June 11, 2010
Aggregation pioneer marks one-year milestone with new Social Media Metabase portal, expanded news coverage, new search engine tools, new publisher product, new mobile app
Reston, VA—Aggregation pioneer Moreover Technologies has moved aggressively on their mission to solidify the top spot in breadth and depth of social media and news capabilities in the year since a private investment group acquired the company from VeriSign, Inc.
According to company President Paul J. Farrell, investment team leader, “The ink on the May 2009 acquisition contract wasn’t even dry when a product team started expanding our social media and news presence to help our clients monitor what’s happening, identify trends, and use the information to enhance their customer support and marketing services. This was one facet of an overall strategy to address many challenges at once, beefing up combined news and social media monitoring and improving our analytical tools.”
Leading the way is a newly launched Social Media Metabase business intelligence portal with expanded content filtering, sharing and analysis tools. This repository includes 976,000 spam-free, editorially reviewed White List feeds providing 1.4 million average daily posts refined from more than 12 million sources. “We cover all the Web’s most prominent social media sources, commentators and discussions,” notes Product Manager Brian Mackie. “A year ago, the Metabase contained 250,000 feeds, chiefly blogs and podcasts, with 500,000 posts. That’s a 280 percent increase in posts coupled with a 390 percent increase in sources.”
Moreover’s social media universe includes forums, microblogs, consumer review sites, video and photo sharing sites, wikis, social networks and comments, including such key sites as YouTube and Twitter.
The new Metabase portal provides detailed source lists and indexing statistics, giving customers more detailed insight into coverage. Other enhancements include comprehensive categorization and metadata tying to country, language, publishing platform, topic and media type. Quantity of tagged feeds, and countries, languages and platforms covered is constantly growing. Currently, Moreover indexes more than 100 countries and 50 languages.
Also noteworthy is the impending combination of the Social Media Metabase and News Metabase into one portal. “Having the news and social media all in one place will provide clients the ability to understand connections between the content. This shows metrics we can support, analysis of data returned, most linked sources, and the most salient pieces,” emphasizes Mackie.
News coverage also is up considerably, with 218 percent growth in average daily article count to 600,000 from 275,000; and with a 15 percent increase to 35,000 sources.
Farrell notes, “To help fuel our growth, Moreover has more than doubled the size of our client service team, enabling our clients to filter through all the noise and identify the information they are seeking.”
Moreover Technologies’ Search Engine Toolkit (SET) now offers a search API across all news and social media types (versus just news a year ago), offering “direct query access to our index for custom feeds and search implementations,” says Mackie. “It’s fairly plug-and-play, and goes in some pretty fancy directions. We can provide very specific content by topic, news and social classifications.”
Other value-added applications, such as Moreover’s Newsdesk, sit on top of SET. Newsdesk provides an intuitive dashboard that enables access to breaking Web news and fast creation of branded information-sharing tools such as newsletters.
Responding to publisher interest in monitoring and complementing how and where their Web content appears, Moreover Technologies has developed the MetaMonitor content discovery application. MetaMonitor enables publishers to compare and contrast details of original and republished content. “It’s a great analytical tool for publishers,” notes Farrell.
Rounding out first-year accomplishments, Moreover Technologies also launched an iPhone application as part of a wider mobile strategy.
For more information, contact Ryan Roe at salesinfo(at)moreover(dot)com.
###
Since 1998, Moreover Technologies has been a trusted aggregator of global news and social media. Through US and UK offices, the firm offers corporate customers worldwide direct access to comprehensive, yet targeted, real-time business and consumer information from the Web’s most read and respected sources. Daily, Moreover Technologies aggregates two million news articles and social media posts from more than a million editorially vetted sources across 100+ countries, 50+ languages and 800+ searchable industry categories (statistics as of June 2010).
June 9, 2010
Organized or Overwhelmed? Almost universally, employees feel frustrated and overwhelmed when they can’t put their hands on needed business intelligence quickly.
Compounding the situation today is the widespread expectation that people will be able to find and share information rapidly, given the rise of digital files and explosion of mobile as well as on-site communication and collaboration options.
In a paper world, hours or even days might have been the accepted standard. Now, it’s often minutes—or even seconds.
A clear message emerges from all this: Information that’s well-organized and easily accessible by all authorized users will drive up employee productivity and customer satisfaction ratings.
Conversely, employees underperforming for any reason, including frustration over lack of organization, are costing companies a lot of time, which translates into money.
World-famous Gallup, the polling company, notes that in an average organization, 40% of employees aren’t performing optimally (based on a ratio of 1.5 engaged for every 1 disengaged employee). In contrast, world-class organizations have an 8:1 ratio, according to Gallup findings.
Other findings show that when someone is interrupted by a distraction, such as trying to find information in a disorganized venue, it takes roughly a half-hour to get back on track.
Conversely, according to a survey from the Global intelligence Alliance (GIA), a global market intelligence firm, “Systematically organized market intelligence operations report time savings of at least 1.5 hours per week per end-user…about 9.5 days a year per end-user.”
That’s a lot of money annually PER employee. This addresses the importance of having an organized, digital way to access and use information. In content aggregation, monitoring and sharing, this leads to several conclusions:
1. Having a single-source provider of all business intelligence—news, social media, and even non-feed articles—helps companies organize and keep track better than when multiple suppliers are involved;
2. Digital trumps paper in so many ways—speed of getting information in and sending it out, mobile access, ability to filter and refine relevant business intelligence from huge numbers of sources, articles and posts…the list goes on and on;
3. User-friendly digital distribution tools play a major role in the well-organized workplace. Ability to capture and re-distribute business intelligence rapidly and reliably saves time, money…and sanity.
May 21, 2010
From going green to going broke, the arguments for transitioning from paper to electronic media monitoring are numerous. Many are aware of the high cost of paper-based systems, from the impact on tree-cutting and associated industries (e.g., transportation costs, pollution, and processing) to the hard costs associated with printed documents.
Putting an exclamation point on the financial impact of paper-based solutions, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in a report on its innovative ink-saving measures, estimated that printer ink costs about $10,000 per gallon (Source: ABC News Technology, 3.26.10, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/techbytes-netflix-wii/story?id=10208224). Somebody’s footing the bill for that, likely the end-user.
In a report released January 2008 by the Environmental Paper Network (http://www.environmentalpaper.org/documents/paperefficiencyfactsheet.pdf), the view of hard costs is expanded: “Lower paper volumes benefit your bottom line directly by reducing your purchase costs. They also have indirect cost benefits that can be 10 times the cost of the paper alone. These include reducing the costs of technology like photocopy toner and printer ink, paying for less storage space and filing equipment, slashing postage costs and saving time.”
The report continues, “Paper production causes a wide range of environmental impacts, so by using less of it you can press many environmental buttons at once: you can reduce your pressure on forests, cut energy use and climate change emissions, limit water, air and other pollution and produce less waste…The climate benefits of reducing paper consumption are significant. If, for example, the USA cut its office paper use by roughly 10 percent, or 490,000 metric tons, greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 1.45 million metric tons. This is the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.”
In an April 22 SmartPlanet.com article, (http://www.smartplanet.com/search/?q=Joe+McKendrick), writer Joe McKendrick states, “E-business may dramatically cut paper waste.” He goes on to say that INTTRA, an e-commerce platform for the ocean freight industry, has identified savings in going the e-commerce route. Among cited statistics: INTTRA claims that freighter providers using its e-commerce network annually save potentially 25,000 trees. The INTTRA platform that handles transactions potentially saves more than 222 million sheets of paper annually. The organization even has a calculator to show savings from paper to electronic commerce: http://www.inttra.com/home/Pages/Go_Green_With_INTTRA.aspx
McKendrick also references a study conducted by Joseph Fuhr and Stephen Pociask in 2007, who looked at the environmental impact of broadband adoption. He notes, “The greatest potential for greenhouse gas reductions, the authors say, appears to be in e-commerce (206 million tons), telecommuting (over a half a billion tons), teleconferencing (200 million tons) and paper reduction (57 million by reductions in newspaper circulation alone). If all of the greenhouse reductions noted in this study were converted into energy saved, Fuhr and Pociask forecast that IT applications could save 555 million barrels of oil by year 10, or roughly 11% of the oil imported into the US today.”
When adding up all the savings benefits of going electronic—from hard costs to environmental conservation—it’s easy to see why cutting paper use and going electronic just makes good sense.
May 13, 2010
We are pleased and excited to announce the release of our radiant new Social Media Metabase customer portal. The new portal is a full re-write of the previous version and accompanies the dramatic increase in recent months of the number of feeds and different types of social media covered by Moreover. Today’s release underlines our commitment to providing our customers the most comprehensive – and best supported – social media monitoring index available.
The portal is updated daily and provides detailed information of Moreover’s coverage of the social Web, including source lists and numbers of posts over time. Customers can then use a number of filters and criteria to create custom lists and drill down even deeper. This complete insight into Moreover’s continually expanding social media universe provides customers with detailed, complementary information to help manage, prioritize and communicate all the media covered by the Metabase service.
The portal allows for fully configurable source lists to search and browse sources, or mix-and-match filters and feed classes to drill down and view custom sets of feeds to see exactly what is covered by publishing platform, rank, country, language, and more. It is also possible to view and contrast the share of feeds and posts with the Social Media Metabase by various criteria:
Feed and post stats over time display data for the past 30 days, including average posts per day and per feed:
Drilling down deeper still customers can select additional filters to query the data by, and view detailed statistics for the last 30 days. Over time, we will be adding more features to this portal, including News Metabase coverage, API documentation, and customer service options.
Should you be interested in learning more about any Moreover product then please fill out our free trial request form here.
April 16, 2010
Great article here from the Harvard Business Review on the importance of brand management, especially in real-time, as companies get to grips with the frenetic pace of social media.
Former Harvard professor John Sviokla cites the recent example of a Virgin America flight from LA to NYC, which ended up being diverted to Newburgh, N.Y., due to bad weather, leaving the passengers sitting on the tarmac for four hours at Newburgh. Documenting the whole affair was Kontain CEO David Martin, using his company’s social media iPhone app.
Martin was soon contacted by the Virgin America CEO offering him and his fellow passengers a full refund and $100-per-person vouchers for all.
This is fantastic example of how social media has shifted the power of a brand away from companies and to consumers, by responding swiftly Virgin America were able to retain the trust of their customers and avoid a wider backlash (are you watching United?). Sviokla describes the need for every marketing executive to have a “brand radar system”, always watching and listening to the conversations concerning their brand. And with social media moving so fast, a real-time solution is the only real option.
March 22, 2010
The Internet is all abuzz at the moment as the battle lines between media monitoring group Meltwater and Rupert Murdoch become clearer, with the media mogul’s UK flagship the Times Online now blocking Meltwater from indexing Times Online content.
Blog site paidContent:UK broke the story and, as ever, does a thorough write-up on the facts. They report how the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), owned by the major UK publishers, recently introduced a licensing system allowing online access to member sites to those companies signing up for the online use license.
With Meltwater being the only non-NLA compliant agency, and now this action from Murdoch’s News International, it is shaping up to be an interesting year for copyright as the publishing industry adapts to the changes in the online marketplace.
March 18, 2010
IntraTeam 2010 has been taking place over in the Danish capital Copenhagen this past week, a global conference on how to create more effective and valuable intranet tools. The event featured many influential speakers and thinkers in the intranet sphere, including former Shell Enterprise Portal Manager Rossen Roussev who touched upon the successful relationship between Royal Dutch Shell and Moreover.
Wheat & Chaff blog has a good summary of the event as a whole, summing up the benefits Newsdesk provided for Shell nicely by illustrating how the supermajor managed to save millions of dollars by consolidating overlapping media monitoring contracts into the one solution.
The IntraTeam Event 2010 is rounding off today, so catch the latest #IE10 tweets to stay in touch with the latest thoughts and comments while you can!
March 4, 2010
Integrated Marketing Solutions provider Alterian have released a pertinent study into the approaches and investments that marketers are presently utilising to work with their clients.
The CEO gives an interesting quote, stating “2010 marks the start of the digital decade for marketing” with the study going on to show that 66% of all those surveyed are planning to invest in social media marketing in the coming 12 months. The report also touches upon the growth of social media monitoring, with almost 40% of respondents intending to spend on social media tracking tools as we enter the new decade.
Alterian reflects upon the growing understanding that a forward thinking marketing strategy now has to listen to potential customers, especially if a ROI in social media is to be realised, with marketers now being required to appeal to customers at a one-to-one level. A growing power shift that is seeing more control in the hands of the consumer as networks of friends and influence continue to evolve over social networks.
For a full breakdown and details of the survey, sign up here.
January 22, 2010
Next page
Previous page
