For fans of stand-up comedy: Laugh.ly launched today what is described as a “Pandora for standup comedy” smartphone app. It features 400 comedians such as Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, George Carlin, Aziz Ansari and also - you!

Self-publishing tools provide users with the means to create, publish and distribute their own stand-up act. 

Deals with large media companies such as Comedy Central provide a media library of tens of thousands of comedy routines. 

I recently received this well written pitch from Kaitlyn Garcia at VSC Consulting:

Print is dead. Magazines are dying.

Not so, thinks Creativ.

This magazine did something unique. They launched on mobile first, thanks to a large but relatively under the radar startup known as issuu, a platform that helps content creators build long form content vs. the short-form stuff we’re used to on apps like Flipboard.

Creativ, an independent arts and culture magazine grew its readership from 20k to 500k on mobile through issuu first. The rabid popularity of the content on mobile gave Creativ the ability to then expand to print.

The result: Creativ is in 1,700 retail locations across the country.

Why this matters: Publishers are feeling the same pain as musicians — the fear of losing their revenue streams to digital consumers. Platforms like Flipboard, Facebook and Twitter don’t really care too much about publishers, so who does?

Enter issuu: The company is publisher-focused, does no real marketing for its own brand and expects each of its publishers to market their content to their audiences and find it in the issuu app, which has become the largest digital newsstand on mobile, bigger than Apple News Stand.

We think there’s an interesting story here about entrepreneurs like Creativ, and how they plan to make mobile work for them vs. giving up and waving the white flag to their long-form content which people around the world still love.

Foremski’s Take: I’ve always been [puzzled why some people have a hatred of paper-based media versus electronic. Surely it’s about the quality of the content? Paper or electron, if there’s a business model for it it shouldn’t matter how the content is delivered and Creativ is an excellent example of a media company leveraging both forms.

There’s additional benefits to paper. Paper-based media companies such as newspapers have struggled in their transition to a digital business model. But the transition is relatively slow compared with the transition to mobile news media from desktop versions.

The transition has been in progress for at least a decade and it will likely continue for another decade. That’s not true for the transition to mobile media formats from desktop, which is happening dizzyingly fast. 

The smaller screen space and the smaller revenues from mobile advertising are making life very difficult for digital-first media organizations.

Those media companies with legacy paper-based business groups, such as The New York Times, have some protection for their nascent digital businesses. Revenues have been falling faster in digital advertising than in newsprint advertising. 

Paper or electron? It’s good to have both.

The recent vast viral distribution of "The Dress" story through Buzzfeed, and many other popular news sites, created a media tsunami.

It's an example of Foremski's First Law of New Media at work!

Silicon Valley investors love the scalability of a software-based startup. If business takes-off you add more servers and run more software.

There's far less need to add people, which is good because a people-dependent business doesn't scale through technology, e.g., public relations.

The traditional media industry is a people-based business and it usually requires additional people to produce additional media. It's not scalable in the same way as a software-based business, by adding more machines.

However, there is a very important distinction about a media business that is usually missed:  Content is near infinitely scalable on the Internet. The Internet was built to scale content in seconds.

Other people's servers will gladly carry your content to wherever the Internet ends -- for free!

With one story you can potentially imprint the entire Internet! Try matching that performance with a servers and software business, for example, offering a web service. 

Back in 2006 I cheekily dubbed this effect: Foremski's First Law of New Media -- Content is infinitely scalable. 

I'll tell you the Second Law in a future post! 

DNN today launched an enterprise-class content management system optimized for marketing allowing multi-format publishing and tracking visitors to a company's web sites.

The Evoq 8 system allows companies to manage and control every web page and sub-sections while at the same time assigning editorial controls and security. It is integrated with Marketo.

I spoke with Will Morgenweck (above) VP of Product Management at DNN, here's my notes:

- Evoq is based on an open source content management system from Microsoft for .Net, which has a hundreds of thousands of users. 

- DNN offers enhanced features on top of the open source version and also support, it has more than 2,000 customers, some very large organizations such as Department of Defense, Whirlpool.

- It has a simple user interface, if people can use Squarespace they can easily adapt to Evoq.

- It can be used to publish an entire web site while having embedded tracking available on a granular level of detail. 

- It is available as a cloud service and it will work with all the online file storage services such as Dropbox, giving easier, centralized control over media assets.

- It is integrated with Marketo, Box, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft SharePoint, and Salesforce.

- Billing is based on pageviews. You can have unlimited numbers of editors and stakeholders accessing the system and not be charged unlike other services.

-DNN has 80 employees and was founded in 2008. 

Here's more information on Evoq 8:

Evoq 8 enables customers to build personalization rules that tailor site content based on visitors' profiles. Rules are based on geography, account registration (i.e., registered versus non-registered users), gender, age, recent visits, referral source, search terms and ad clicks.

Page-Level Content Analytics: Statistics on page views, referrers, unique visitors and conversions are presented as an overlay on each web page, via data collected and managed by Evoq....

Evoq 8 includes built-in connectors to Box, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and SharePoint, making it easy to access any piece of content or digital asset from a single window...

Advocate Marketing: Evoq 8 enables Marketers to activate the brand advocates already on their website by rewarding them for sharing content on their personal social networks. The advocacy marketing capability is integrated with Evoq's native gamification engine, and engages customers by issuing challenges, tracking challenge completions, and awarding points, badges, or other designated incentives.

Visit dnnsoftware.com 

Among the social media celebs in Niche's network with the biggest reach are Nash Grier, a teenage Vine star with nearly 25 million followers across his social media accounts, and singer Kevin Jonas, who has a total reach of more than 22 million users.

Each celebrity is a big media publisher in their own right and the deals brokered through Niche aren't simple sponsor or advertising opportunities, the "celebrities" will be paid to create the social media content for Weber's clients. 

Weber Shandwick's global president of digital Chris Perry... estimates about 15% to 20% of Weber Shandwick's PR programs involve social media influencers and that's growing fast, especially for consumer brand clients.

Read more: 

Weber Shandwick Partners with Niche to Tap Social Media Celebrities - CMO Today - WSJ

Foremski's Take: [I'm working with Weber Shandwick's Mediaco on an unrelated project.]

Partnerships such as this one are a smart way to jumpstart an audience for a brand if it's part of a long term strategy to build a loyal audience, it has to be more than just a three-month campaign.

Borrowing the audience of a "social media celebrity" is fine but at the end of the day companies need to learn how to become "celebrities" in their own right, they need to learn to become media companies with direct access to their own audiences, unmediated by Google or anyone.

Weber Shandwick's Mediaco group is worth watching because it is directly focused on helping "every company become a media company."  It's a trend I first spotted nearly ten years ago and it has now reached a tipping point influencing the content marketing initiatives of companies worldwide.

Media publishing success has the additional benefit of blocking attention to competitors. It's a killer competitive strategy -- if you aren't seen online you don't exist.

Tooling up for business...

There's tremendous business opportunities for PR and marketing agencies to capitalize on this trend, and there's opportunities for many others, too. For example, software developers of media technologies.

Corporations will need to equip themselves with an arsenal of media publishing platforms, apps, tools, analytics and infrastructure, all made complex by the fragmented nature of tens of millions of media channels; and made even more complex by the extraordinary two-way nature of our modern media: we can publish content to any screen and each screen -- pocket or desktop -- can publish back, through comments, video, clicks, silent cookies, etc.

Companies need to become good at interpreting and engaging with all that media feeding back to them, as well as know how to produce great media content. And they'll have to feed (and walk) that media beast every day. It won't be easy.

They'll need a lot of help from a lot of people. And hopefully, they won't have to relearn basic rules of ethics and best practices that we've accumulated in the media industry over hundreds of years.

The media is dying ... and growing

The old media might be dying out but before it disappears, it can teach the new media how to walk. It's an important lesson. 

We face a democratic crisis in that special interest groups will gladly pay for the media they want people to read but people won't pay for the independent media they should read.

Brands becoming media publishers will be tempted to skew things their way, all the way. But they should be careful because they will be subject to the same ethical scrutiny as a Wall Street Journal or any other media company. Learning to walk straight will be key.

It might not seem surprising to my readers that I'm working on a project with Mediaco, a Weber Shandwick business that advertises, "We Help Every Company Become A Media Company." 

Helping companies be great media companies is a noble calling these days, especially with the huge loss of skilled and experienced media professionals. There's hundreds of years of best practices that still apply regardless of paper and electron.

I'm working on an interesting project with Mediaco's West Coast lead Luca Penati and an enthusiastic team of professionals across many disciplines and locations.

This is what's needed in today's digital media worlds — the complexities of managing fragmented media channels and user interfaces across many devices requires integrated tech, media, design, SEO and communications professionals on the same publishing teams.

Brand publishing on today's scales requires sophisticated tools and apps. There is an opportunity to create a new type of enterprise app, a media publishing platform for corporations that also acts a listening post.  After all, it's a two-way Internet and each screen is both publisher and published.

We live in a world surrounded by media technologies. Computer pioneer Ted Nelson, said "We live in media as fish live in water."

Silicon Valley is a Media Valley, our largest and most dynamic companies are tech-enabled media companies or sell media technologies. Google, Facebook, Twitter publish pages of content with advertising. Intel microprocessors decode and encode high definition video streams in parallel; Apple sells media players and media making devices.

From Gutenberg's movable type to Silicon Valley's dynamic reprogrammable media — it's a huge leap. We know that leaps in media technologies have dramatically changed our society so what will this do?

Media Management Tools...

Enterprises will need a lot of media technologies and this will become a new genre of enterprise apps,  more importantthan ERP and CRM.

Selling media technologies to the enterprise will be a lucrative business and it is one that makes full use of advanced cloud technologies and subscription business models. 

PR is artisanal...

A year ago I asked where are the technologies from the public relations industry? How can PR firms also become tech firms? Where are the scalable technologies of promotion? Ad agencies are great at scalable promotion and this is a vulnerability.

Brand Publishing...

Somehow I missed this last week but Weber Shandwick's Mediaco launched a publishing platform that seems headed in this very direction. It comes from its just announced media tech group focused on brand publishing led by Eric Helgesen. 

Weber Shandwick uses the term "brand publishing" rather than "brand journalism" — a practice that other firms should adopt because it is more accurate and it doesn't snag.

Mediaco Publish is customized for brand publishing. It is built on open-source technologies and industry standard Wordpress that combines custom workflow, multi-channel publishing; tracking and reporting, and all the other features corporations need to be effective digital media publishers. 

Eric Weitner, head of Technology Platforms at Mediaco, used to work at Forbes and helped design its multi-author content management system. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I'm also looking forward to the arms race as Weber Shandwick's competitors announce their media products and roadmaps. The media tech sector is getting interesting.

I recently met Jeffrey Shaw (above) , CEO of Underground Cellar, a startup focused on helping wineries sell wine online. He and his team has developed a great technology platform to allow wineries to market themselves and sell their wines but it is also using its own platform to sell wine on behalf of many wineries -- using a clever business model.

Shaw explained that when wineries want their help to shift certain wines, Underground Cellar will taste the wines first and then agree to sell a set number of cases and take a sales commission. It always asks the winery to give it additional cases of some of its other lines, often high-end expensive vintages, and those are used to reward its customers.

When customers order wine, they have a chance to win additional bottles for free, equivalent to what they have ordered, or better. The probability of winning extra bottles is shown each time in real time.

[All it needs (below) is some revolving cherries to create a virtual one-armed bandit.]

Customers used to have to wait until their order arrived to see if they had won but Shaw says telling them immediately if they have lost gave them a ready opportunity to place another order and try again, and many do. 

Additional services include storage of customer's wine in its "Cloud Cellar" with courier shipping for same day delivery.

Shaw says that his startup is a technology platform and he thinks it could be used for many other types of products and services. But it clearly is more than that. The startup also represents wineries online with sharp marketing and page designs, and it is becoming an important e-commerce partner for many wineries.

Underground Cellar is really a new hybrid, a high-tech enabled marketing and e-commerce agency. I'm sure we'll see more of this type of company because it combines three essential business services in one package.

Marc Canter on stage and screen at a panel moderated by Dan Farber at the Mac 30 Anniversary event in January 2014.

Marc Canter, a leading pioneer of multimedia technologies with his work at Macromedia 25 years ago, has launched Interface, a startup focused on authoring mobile apps across all major platforms.

Canter says he hopes to emulate the power and popularity of authoring tools he helped develop at Macromedia, which led to an explosion of creativity in producing interactive media. At the time, CR-ROM based media titles were the only way rich interactive media could be distributed and presented on a computer. San Francisco in the late 1980s and early 1990s was at the epicenter of CDROM multimedia development and Canter was its leading figure.

Canter is founder and CEO of Interface, He's recruited an impressive team of industry veterans and former colleagues, plus advisors such as top tech editor and journalist Dan Farber, and popular blogger Robert Scoble. 

Canter says that his inspiration for the venture came from a project he was considering based on the "Internet of Things." He realized that this future world of massive interconnectivity would require a great user interface otherwise it would be hard to make use of its potential. Authoring tools that "mere mortals" can use would be the key to success of for the Internet of Things. The easier those tools are to use the more apps will be developed, and more users of those apps will be enabled. 

"We're starting with an application framework for smartphones aimed at quickly developing apps for five different use cases based on people's daily activities, such as a personal trainer." If personal trainers, and others such as a life coach, home assistant, or a tour guide can use the authoring tools to create customized mobile apps for their clients, Canter believes this will prove that Interface has a great user interface. 

Canter says the choice of name is designed "to make you hate it. We're looking to standout and be seen."

Interface is developing a series of frameworks for each user archetype so for example, the Personal Trainer app development tool is preconfigured to easily integrate Fitbit, and other digital sensors, into an exercise regime that can trigger music or words of encouragement at key points in the user's activity stream. 

Interface will be free for creating up to five mobile apps per user -- a generous allowance. Interface will also act as "the player" of the apps allowing it to hide the complexity of backend functions. The startup is starting to talk with investors and set its development schedule. 

Plans include a marketplace for Interface apps and additional tools for Internet of Things platforms.

I had an interesting conversation with Patrick McKenna (above), CEO and co-founder of Strike Social, a Los Angeles based startup that focuses on Youtube-based advertising by large brands.

The company is able to analyze a brand's YouTube channel and also identify other YouTube channels that are a good fit for the client. Its technology works exclusively with Google's TrueView metric and AdWords. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Brands can't easily see which of their Youtube content is working best. We can quickly identify videos that have viral opportunities and the brand can then boost traffic to those videos.

- We initially built our tool for agencies so that they could monitor in real-time the performance of the Youtube channels of very large brands. Our tool can analyze any Youtube channel and report on how it is doing, and how much is being spent on advertising. 

- For example, we discovered that Nike's Youtube campaign around World Cup soccer was far more successful than Adidas, which spent far more in advertising. 

- Google's TrueView metric has been controversial. It only counts Youtube ads that have been watched, rather than partially watched to prevent unscrupulous publishers from getting paid for partial views.

- The integration with Adwords gives brands a way to quickly increase the performance of advertising by using our algorithm and placing those ads on channels with highly relevant audiences.

- We know where a brand's audience is going and we can target those channels. Google loves it because the video ads perform well and this reduces advertiser bid costs. Poor performing ads are penalized by Google.

- We are going to stay focused on Youtube, that's where our expertise is rather than on Facebook or Twitter.

- The company is profitable and has 25 people with offices in LA, New York, Chicago, and developers in Poland .

- We make money from a percentage of ad spending on campaigns, working with mostly agencies that have Fortune500 clients. We do not charge a monthly subscription for our services.

- People can use the tool for free and analyze their channels, and their competitors, too. 

- We are bootstrapping the company. I have met with Silicon Valley VCs but they don't understand the advertising industry. I'd rather get a percentage of a $20 million ad campaign than get a monthly subscription fee. Ad campaigns are a recurring revenue stream that is far more profitable than subscriptions.

SF historian Gary Kamiya signing a copy of his book "Cool Gray City of Love."

San Francisco's transformation into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley's business parks is a huge mistake because tech companies should be exposing their people to the city's rich diversity and its incredible culture, a history steeped in more than 150 years of media innovations.

San Francisco historian Gary Kamiya, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, tells the story of San Francisco's early newspapers (and the passionate duels using the pen and the gun):

By 1853, 12 dailies were being published in the city. During the 1850s, no fewer than 132 newspapers, including all of the state's six literary journals, saw the light of day in San Francisco.

Historian Hubert Bancroft estimated that during the city's first decade, 1,000 people were working in journalism in San Francisco. Since the city's population in 1860 was 56,800, this meant almost 2 percent of residents were employed by the press — the equivalent of 16,000 today. The city boasted that it published more newspapers than London, and those papers had a per capita circulation greater than New York.

These journals served every constituency and covered every type of news. There were Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Jewish newspapers, medical journals, religious and party papers, shipping and mercantile papers, temperance organs and a police gazette.

Amid old S.F. newspaper wars, real blood was shed - SFGate

He writes that newspapers were popular during the Gold Rush because of the large number of college graduates attracted to dreams of prosperity — which is certainly true today, too.

Earlier this year I wrote a three-part essay on San Francisco's impressive history of media innovation from newspapers to radio, movies to the web... Silicon Valley is a Media Valley. 

San Francisco's Incredible History Of Media Innovation -SVW

 San Francisco's Culture War With Silicon Valley's Cubicle Culture -SVW

San Francisco: An Epicenter Of Creativity -SVW 

An article from Ad Age about a recent campaign from video ad server firm Vindico.

I recently spoke with Forensiq an interesting startup based in New York that has technologies capable of shutting down advertising fraud -- a huge problem for the media industry.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) trade body estimates ad fraud in 2013 to be at least $6 billion to $7 billion but it could be as high as $16 billion in the US. The Wall Street Journal reports that 35% of Internet traffic is bogus.

And no one is prosecuted.

The WSJ says that the fraud "cheats advertisers." But that is not true, it is the media industry that is being cheated.

The advertising agencies always knew half their advertising was being wasted, now with digital advertising it is only one-third wasted through ad fraud, so they are ahead of the game.  

Ad agencies aren't seeing their revenues plunge because of ad fraud. But media companies are facing massive revenue shortages and ad fraud is one part of that reason.

The fraud is done knowingly by the ad buyers who's interest is in looking good by topping up their numbers for their ad campaigns. They know full-well the traffic is, as the WSJ plainly says, bogus.

But it's easy to stop most of the ad fraud. I recently spoke with David Sendroff, CEO and founder of Forensiq. Its technologies allow ad buyers to identify in real-time if a site is fraudulent with a high degree of accuracy.

Here's some notes from our conversation:

- We inject a tiny bit of code into a client's ad and that enables us to detect many types of fraud based on where the ad is shown.

- We can tell if a site is fraudulent in many ways. We can see if a site is using 1-pixel frames, or is showing hundreds of ads on the same page. Or is showing only part of a client's ad. Or is nesting i-frames inside i-frames. We can tell if there is no real content but the site has been built just for bots.

- We provide a comprehensive database and statistical analysis to identify the problem sites and our dashboard allows clients to only pick high quality pages. 

- There have been university studies showing that there is a high conversation rate for ads on high quality pages. 

- We can distinguish between real people viewing an ad and the use of automated systems.

- We build an overall risk score in real-time that clients use for deciding where to show their ads.

- Our database is updated in real-time because fraudsters are repetitive and the patterns identify the problems. 

- We are also able to monitor for cookie stuffing which is important for affiliate payments. We can detect spoofing of addresses and identities. Clients include AOL, Lendingtree and Groupon.

- Our latest product is LeadiD which helps identify fake leads.

- - -

It's clear that ad fraud can be stopped. However, it won't stop until ad buyers stop the widespread industry practice of buying bogus traffic which make them look good but it is at the expense of huge harm to the media industry.

Centro, the Chicago ad technology giant, is one of the smartest in this sector. It has put together a publisher advertising network that consists of hand-selected and invited publishers. Key requirement is that the publisher has to employ journalists and other media professionals. This guarantees there is no advertising fraud.

Centro will also manage the cookies deposited by advertisers and prevent data collection by unauthorized third-parties,  which becomes a secondary revenue stream for each publisher.

Please see:  Centro: Chicago's Ad Tech Giant Aims To Revive Journalism -SVW

David Matahai, Director of Marketing Communications at Hyundai.

Every company is a media company because it has to be, because the traditional media outlets no longer have the means, or pageviews to help tell the stories of companies, and their communities. 

The explosion of content marketing is proof that the concept of 'every company is a media company' is becoming understood by the mainstream. It is resulting in a tidal wave of media content about companies, commissioned by the companies themselves.

However, this is nothing to do with being a media company. Media companies don't write or produce media about themselves. What do media companies do?

Media companies provide a service. 

The Financial Times, my former employer, provides a financial news service. Look around at all the media services media companies provide, from stamp collecting to the latest developments in Washington, DC.

24-hr corporate newsrooms

Companies need to move beyond content marketing and produce a media service.  No one, including the executives of a large company, want an online newsroom that just produces media about itself. 

I was on a panel with David Matahai, Director of Marketing Communications at Hyundai, (above) earlier this year at The Holmes Report's Innovation Summit. He said there was a lot of pressure for Hyundai to operate a 24/7 newsroom, but that even he would be hard pressed to be interested in Hyundai every hour of every day.

Imagine the level of interest from the public? Imagine having to produce media content constantly about your company. It won't work. People have a sparrow's appetite for reading or watching self-serving, narcisistic content marketing.

But companies need to keep their names in front of the public constantly because if they aren't seen they don't exist.

So, if content marketing in its current autobiographical form can't carry the weight of being noticeable and notable, what's the answer?

Companies need to find a media service that they can provide on top of their "about this company" content in their newsroom. Content marketing then becomes content as a service, which is far more appealable than just another way of selling products or services. It becomes useful.

It could be a service that local media outlets no longer can afford to provide, maybe it is reporting from City Hall, since many towns no longer have local newspapers; or the local Little League scores;  or a media service for their industry; or a media service for a totally different industry to their own, to avoid possible conflicts of interest. 

First mover media advantage...

There are many types of media services companies could provide to their communities. However, there is not an infinite supply. 

Those companies that can establish their media service as the de facto source will be able to retain that position for a long time. Because there is an unwritten rule in the media industry, if you become the go-to publication for your community, people will come back again and again, even if the quality of the service has slipped -- it is very hard to dislodge.

But media brands take time to build. Upworthy and Buzzfeed think they have won the battle for top slots in the media industry but let's wait and see. Such laurels are only won after many years of consistent, high quality media services.

The Wall Street Journal today celebrates 125 years. The Financial Times was founded one year earlier in 1888; the New York Times was founded in 1851. 

It can take decades to establish a media brand. If a company decides it wants to provide a media service it needs to know that it is a lifetime commitment.  

Media as a service is an incredibly powerful proposition because it underlies the fact that every business is a service, if it isn't it ceases to matter. 

What content service will your company provide?

This video is superb and I can't stop playing it: Shawn Riegsecker, CEO and founder of Centro, explains at a 2013 TechWeek event in Chicago, why he focused his company's culture on the happiness of its employees.

It's working: Centro has become a giant in the hot ad tech sector. With more than 500 staff and over $300m in revenues it is Chicago's fastest growing tech company. 

His staff attrition rate is an unbelievable 4% a year. He has no HR problems. Centro has now won "Best place to work" four years in a row -- no company has ever won the accolade twice in a row, in any city.

Please see: Centro: Chicago's Ad Tech Giant Aims To Revive Journalism -SVW

Co-founders of InPowered and NetShelter: Peyman Nilforoush and Pirouz Nilforoush.

InPowered today launched a free version of its trusted content discovery and promotion services as a way of gaining new customers for its core service: the promotion of trusted stories.

I saw a preview of the service last week and was impressed at the many features and tracking metrics offered for free. The company is making a big bet that users will become customers of its paid services, which promote positive stories through advertising.

The free tool is very compelling in what it offers: discovery of what has been written about a product or brand; the ability to share that content to your social networks; a filter that only surfaces independently written content free of any commercial taint; metrics on sharing; and on number of people that read the entire article -- not just the headline.

The company is very much focused on discovery of content that is trusted, that hasn't been paid for by any vendor or manufacturer.

The founders, (two brothers, above) are very savvy about media and sold their ad display network last year to Ziff Davis. They are also very much opposed to the native advertising trend because it dilutes readers' trust in articles.

Here is my recent interview with them here.InPowered Founders Interview: Trusted Content Is 4 Times More Effective Than Native Ads -SVW

- - -

SF Creators media salon will be meeting at InPowered's San Francisco HQ on March 13.

- - -

www.inpwrd.com/about

"It is increasingly difficult to find credible information from trusted third-party sources in an ocean of ads and branded content. inPowered is changing that.

At inPowered, we help brands discover and amplify credible, trusted content so that they can contribute to a more informed marketplace. And when you help educate consumers so they can be better informed, you establish your brand as one worthy of consumers' trust.

As a result, consumers can easily cut through the noise and get access to the most credible information, enabling them to make more informed decisions."

If paper were announced today, as an alternative technology to digital screens, its tech specs would be madly impressive. Paper is a media technology without equal:

- Imagine a lightweight display as thin as a single hair, capable of displaying high resolution color images.

- It's always on and more than one hundred of these paper displays can be stacked together into a $5 information appliance (called a magazine, or book). 

- Each display is flexible, tearable, and can be folded into a myriad of origami forms.

- It is very green. It is constructed from a sustainable substrate that is 100% recyclable.

- The material substrate for the paper displays comes from large outdoor production areas that protect tremendous numbers of wildlife.

- It is made through a natural solar powered process that captures massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to slow the greenhouse effect. The waste product is pure oxygen. 

- Paper is touch responsive and highly interactive allowing users to quickly thumb through content. 

- No batteries required -- paper uses ambient light to display its contents. If there is no ambient light available, one of the displays can provide light for the others, through a non-reversible oxidation initiated with a single click of a Bic lighter.  

- The displays last for decades and archives can be hundreds of years old and are still legible and legal.

- They are 100% hacker proof.

- DRM features are built-in preventing a perfect copy -- but users are allowed to make second-rate copies.  Copies of copies gradually degrade in quality unlike in the digital world.

- Paper is resistant to all tracking technologies, commercial and NSA.  User privacy is completely protected because there is no history of pages visited, or time spent viewing pages. 

- Paper displays extremely rugged. They can be run over by a steam roller with no damage. If dropped, each display will gently flutter to the ground.  

- They are water resistant.

- They are shareable.

- They can be annotated with a stylus using any color.

- The displays can be rolled up into a useful dog training tool or crumpled into a fun cat toy.  

- Paper displays are available in a 3-D pop-up format that doesn't require special glasses to view.

- The displays are safe to use in a bath or hot tub. 

- Paper can be used transmit data wirelessly to smartphones and computers at the speed of light, using QR codes, or data embedded in images. 

- Paper can be scaled to the size of a house and used in giant outdoor displays in all weathers. 

That's a fabulous list of technical specifications for paper and the environmental features are incredible:  it is produced in a natural, solar-powered bio-chemical process that eats up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the waste emission is pure oxygen. 

The paper then traps the carbon for decades, sequestering it away from the environment in a normal landfill, unlike special deep wells used for carbon dioxide sequestration efforts, which have caused concerns that they could leak and suffocate people.

Digital displays don't look quite as good when compared to paper especially in displaying green credentials.

Paper or electron? You can choose both.  

I recently met with Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of Skimlinks, a service that helps publishers monetize their sites by sharing affiliate partner revenues if readers buy products or services.

Skimlinks automatically adds a link to key words on a web page, if a reader clicks on that link and buys the product or service, Skimlinks gets paid a commission and splits the money with the publisher. 

However, Skimlinks has found that publishers are not getting the credit they deserve in the sales process. Buyers will often check out price comparison and other sites following their initial exposure to a product in an article. Those latter sites will overwrite the affiliate tracking cookies of the first site and claim the entire affiliate commission. Yet without the original article the sale would not have occurred.

Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Online publishers are struggling to make a living and affiliate programs offer a source of revenues, it's not enough but it helps. They are losing out because current affiliate programs only reward the last click.

- Online articles are important to the sales process because they initiate customer interest but their importance isn't noticed because of the way affiliate payments are tracked.

- If publishers go out of business then that could be bad news for merchants because they won't be producing the content that is the starting point for the sales funnel.

- If the publisher is losing out then Skimlinks is losing revenues too.

- The solution is complex because it is difficult to determine how far back to track the sales process.

- Affiliate programs can be a problem because their design encourages bad behaviors. When it's the last click that's rewarded then it encourages third-parties to use sometimes nefarious ways to overwrite affiliate cookies, such as through toolbars and pop-unders. 

- The last-click is part of the reason that high quality content isn't appreciated by merchants and advertising agencies. They pay attention to end-of-funnel sites.

- Key research findings from Skimlinks: Content sites are the first place users read about a product 27% of the time, and they are the source of new customers 55% of the time, 

- Content sites drive nearly 30% more new customers to brand sites than the average of all other channels.

- When consumers start reading a content site about a product it sparks a growing desire for the purchase: 9% of sales occur within one hour, 16% within 24 hours, and 31% within 3 days. Yet they receive only 6% of affiliate payments.

Foremski's Take: In online publishing everything that a visitor does can be tracked, which is often lauded as great for publishers and advertisers. Publishers have an instant read on what articles or videos resonate with visitors and advertisers know which sites provide the best conversions and can focus their ad budgets on their best prospects.

But the sales process is never clear-cut, which is why marketing requires a multi-channel approach and multiple messages. Everything can be tracked but that doesn't mean that it is, and that the right metrics are being examined by merchants to identify cause with effect. 

Skimlinks has identified an important problem facing all media companies: they can't capture the true value of the content that they create. They can't convince advertisers and sponsors that they provide an important service that is vital to their sales. 

Fixing affiliate payouts to be fairer, and to give credit where it's due, would go a long way to helping media companies make the transition to an online business model. But a lot needs to change.  

- Affiliate tracking systems aren't designed for such tasks and are vulnerable to multitudes of shady practices by companies trying to hijack the last click. 

- How would commissions be divided among affiliates feeding the sales funnel? Which type of content is more valuable to a merchant? 

- Merchants often have a love/hate relationship with their affiliate networks. They are glad for the sales but aren't always happy with the way they are made. And they will sometimes actively undermine their successful affiliates by copying their marketing programs to save on commission payments. There is little motivation for merchants to change their affiliate systems to make them fairer.

This is a great example of the complexity in determining the value of an independent media sector to society and the economy.

Even with the enormous amounts of Big Data collected about online commerce and user behaviors, the value of quality content remains unquantifiable.

When the last-click can come from pirate sites publishing content scraped by automated bots, and that's what's rewarded by the affiliate networks, then it's not surprising that the scourge of poor quality web content and scummy practices continues to grow. There is no economic reason for publishers to invest in better content.

What's the answer? No one has figured it out, not even the massed computer scientists at Google have come up with a solution.

Yet this is the most important question facing the future of the Internet and a healthy democratic society: how do we quantify and capture the value of high quality media so that there's a clear incentive to produce more of it?

How can we ensure a vibrant, thriving media industry that educates and protects people from egregious acts by governments and business self-interests?

We have the technologies to reward low-quality content but not the reverse. Something is very seriously broken here, yet it's not being addressed by any of our leading Internet companies, government economists, or academic institutions.

The last-click economics of the web is a very important issue and one that Skimlinks is right to draw attention to because its resolution is very much in the public interest.

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Press - coverage and press releases | Skimlinks

In three days I'm off to London for a week,  then Amsterdam, hopefully a few days in Berlin, and then Warsaw (above) returning in early June.

I'll be making a series of presentations around my favorite topic: "Every Company Is A Media Company - the transformative business equation of our times."

I'll be conducting some sessions with PressPage, which builds digital corporate newsrooms for large corporations; I'll be presenting  at private corporate and PR agency events, and at Ragan's prestigious 2013 International Social Media & PR Summit in Amsterdam.

I first started talking about how every company is a media company more than eight years ago. The concept wasn't well understood at the time but now, interest has sky-rocketed and it's a topic that has shot to the top of the priority list for many corporations, as they try to capitalize on the amazing media technologies that are becoming available.

Silicon Valley is central to this global trend in business, its startups are creating powerful media technologies and services -- it's rapidly transforming into a Media Valley.

Companies can quickly change their competitive landscape, and their position in it, by mastering the art of media publishing. If they are able to do it first, they can overshadow their much larger competitors because in the media world, if you become the go-to media source in your sector -- it's very difficult to challenge that position. It happens all the time in the media industry, and now it is happening in other industries too. Think Zappos, who else do you know that sells shoes online? 

I'm happy to help enterprises become media companies and teach them the best practices of a media organization, and guide them through the treacherous waters of social media, and the many other media channels.

Rediscovering best practices

I often see corporations making big mistakes with their media strategies. Sometimes they are trying to reinvent the wheel, when we already have figured out best practices on how to do certain things, from hundreds of years of newspaper publishing. 

My work in this area will become the foundation for a new, services side of SVW that you'll be hearing more about over the course of this year. It's what will help support the editorial coverage, and enable me to continue working as an independent journalist.

Best-of-breed media services collective

I will also be meeting with companies that offer a variety of media services to enterprises of various types, and pull together the best of them into a group of top-class media services providers.

From digital newsrooms, to crowd sourcing ideas, media content development, to building communities around a company's thought leaders, there is no need for companies to develop their own in-house technologies when there are some excellent platforms available that they can be put to use right now.

Speed to market is vital -- you need to become the "Zappos" of your sector.

I'm hoping this carefully selected media services collective will become an important resource for every company that's trying to become a media company.  

Please stay tuned for more details, and stories from my travels.

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If you'd like to book a session with me and your teams, send me a note: tom at SiliconValleyWatcher.com. From May 5 to 12 I'm in London; From May 12 to 20 I'm in Amsterdam; then possibly Berlin if I can finalize some meetings, and in Warsaw until June 5.

One of my favorite media technology companies is BrightTalk, based in San Francisco and London.

Co-founded in 2002 by Paul Heald and Charlie Blackburn, this privately-held company offers an easy platform to create and distribute live audio and video broadcasts/podcasts. It also helps deliver the audience, with a stellar in-house lead generation team under James Miller. This is BrightTalk's secret sauce because it helps boost potential audience numbers way beyond a company's own networks of contacts, and increases the quality of customer leads.

I'm proud to say that I helped kickstart BrightTalk's online summit business a couple of years ago, which is now a thriving multi-million dollar business group.

I recently met with CEO Paul Heald (above) in San Francisco. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Our customers are large companies presenting on key topics. They can start a broadcast from their desk, and with our platform they have all the tools they need to promote and share their event, gather questions, and target the best leads.

- We work with customers to deliver highly targeted audiences that have shown they are interested in key topics, and help them convert them into customer leads.

- The platform is designed to encourage audience engagement,  during the broadcast events, and in the forums. Plus the content is archived so that people can use the archive as a knowledge resource.

- Our online summits are doing very well, they provide an easy way for people to take part in day-long conferences without having to travel beyond their desk.

- We've made some major upgrades to the platform over the past year to make it even easier to use. And also to make it more into a destination site.

- We are building up an impressive collection of content around key topics especially in the enterprise computing space. People can revisit videos and presentations and take part in communities based around  their interest.

- We have very good relations with large professional associations, which are also a great source of audiences.

- We employ many community managers so that there is always new, interesting things to see, and to discuss.

- Our customers love the platform because they manage to get high-quality leads, which saves them money compared with their other marketing programs. 

- Our users are becoming much more comfortable doing live videos, they aren't as self-conscious as some people were a few years ago.

- There's lots more features coming this year, such as better integration with LinkedIn. 

- We also are increasingly producing original content with long video interviews with key thought-leaders that we edit down to just two minutes.

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Here is a recent video interview with me produced by BrightTalk's talented young team, on my favorite topic: EC=MC - Every company is a media company - the transformative business equation.

2 Minutes on BrightTALK: Every Company Is a Media Company 

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Additional info:

At BrightTALK, we believe that people learn the most when they hear directly from those who know the subject best. We also believe that this experience is enhanced through a dialog between speakers and the audience. Our online event tools offer a dynamic environment for everyone involved. It is the interactions we witness and the advancement of knowledge in our online communities that excites us the most.

You can join BrightTALK's vibrant exchange of ideas as either a viewer or a presenter. We offer viewers live, interactive access to businesses' top thought leaders. You identify the topics most relevant to you by searching communities, channels, summits or individual webcasts and are introduced to new experts via their timely and relevant presentations. Your comments, your ideas, and your voice will not only influence how others think, but can shape future events available for your viewing and participation on BrightTALK. In addition, webcasts are available on-demand for future viewing and for sharing with your peers and colleagues.

Enigma launched today, with an intriguing service: the New York based startup offers an easy way to search through more than 100,000 public databases. 

Chris Velazco at TC reports:

Founded by Hicham Oudghiri and Marc Dacosta and helmed by CEO Jeremy Bronfmann, Enigma taps into over 100,000 public data sources from state and federal records to SEC filings to lists of frozen assets in the United Kingdom all the way to Crunchbase. The end result is an incredibly simple, incredibly smart way to sift through and find connections in publicly available data.

Foremski's Take: Within a single public database there's likely little of interest to society at large but if there's links across tens of thousands of databases then we will see many skeletons coming out of many people's closets, and probably on a scale larger than Wikileaks. It's a fabulous bonanza for investigative reporters, the ones that are still around.

However, you don't have to be elite and famous to feel concerned about the Big Data engines of Enigma. All 100k plus databases will be picked over by multitudes of research companies aggregating data on individual consumers.  

You and I are enigmas to most of the outside world, only we know the sum total of our lives and its crevices. But services from companies such as Enigma will make us less mysterious, more ordinary, more able to be dumped into a demographic bucket of one type, possibly two. I'm very much in favor of preserving individual enigmas because the possibilities, and the potential mythologies, are far more interesting stories than judgements about the past. [This doesn't apply to corporations and the elites.]

Big Brother technologies are on the rise and are being used to divine your intent. Fortunately, they aren't looking for mind-crimes but for the mundane -- where you'll spend your next dollar.

Since Google's algorithms have trouble in distinguishing between spam and good content,  a  search-based education isn't much use if students  don't know how to evaluate sources of information.

 Young persons are often thought to be expert at navigating the digital world — they are “digital natives,” after all — but most research shows that when it comes to seeking credible information, they often fall short. Educators note that students sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between commercially influenced sites and peer-reviewed academic journals, for example. They also see many young people whose patience with the search process can quickly run thin.

A Pew survey of teachers: “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World” found:

a majority of this sample (60%), agree with the assertion that today’s technologies make it harder for students to find credible sources of information…. Only about one-quarter of teachers surveyed here rate their students ‘excellent’ or ‘very good.’

He has put together an excellent list of resources for educators. Here are some examples, there's far more on the site.

Dan Russell, Google’s“anthropologist of search,” updates his blog constantly with new tips and exercises that can challenge anyone who is looking to sharpen his or her search skills. The company also offers a variety of educational tools to help train students.

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Media students should probably have knowledge of good tools that relate to obtaining information about specific people and businesses. Barbara Gray of the New York Times and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism offers tips

Students should also know that Google Scholar offers a higher grade of information in general, much of which is peer-reviewed (here are some other quality databases.

Online information, credibility and the “Google generation”: Research review, tips, resources, reading list – Journalist's Resource: Research for Reporting, from Harvard Shorenstein Center

(My readers are familiar with my "every company is a media company" mantra but how do companies become media companies? They need media services and technologies to help them and this will become  a core focus here at SVW - reporting on the intersection of technology and media since 2004.)

I recently met with Scott Kellner (above), Chief Marketing Officer, at INXPO, a platform that lets clients easily set up video broadcasts to internal staff, or an external audience. 

I'm very much interested in companies such as INXPO, companies that provide media technology services to other companies. When every company is a media company it's the ones that have an effective arsenal of media technologies to draw upon that will win out over their competition.

INXPO has pivoted somewhat from a virtual trade show focus a few years back. It's now a sophisticated broadcasting platform used by large corporations to run internal and external meetings, along with advanced audience engagement metrics.

Here are my notes from a recent conversation with Scott Kellner:

- INXPO is about 9 years old. Decided three years ago that webcasting services were over-crowded so developed a platform that enables companies to run their own live video channels called "Social Business TV."

- We are creating channels around topics, so that people can participate in live events around their interests and also return to browse through reference materials.

- Live is important because it helps involve people rather than something that can be seen later. Live drives engagement.

-Most clients are large corporations and they use it mostly for internal communications, which is tough at a multinational, we help with that. It's important to make sure that everyone at your organization is on the same page. We have about 110 people across different locations, we know how tough it is for a company our size, it's much more difficult at large corporations.

- Now we're moving more into external communications with our platform, for producing lead generation. 

-Our analytics is important because we can tell how viewers are reacting, what they are interested in, what they share. That is very valuable because it can show clients who is engaged and who isn't.

- We define someone as engaged if they touch their keyboard at least once every two minutes. And we advise clients on how best to organize their presentations, design engagement, and on length, content type etc. These are actionable metrics.

- We don't help out with lead generation, etc, we are solely focused on being a platform. But we do have a consulting group that helps clients create their channels and how best to design engagement.

- Some of our best practices are keep presentations to below 30 minutes, which includes a 10 minute Q&A. Before noon is the best time. Keep text to a minimum. Tell people upfront what they will get from your presentation, and then say it three times. 

- We provide all the sharing and collaboration tools so that people can reach out to their contacts and make it easier for them to share upcoming events further.

- All the live sessions are archived for return viewing.

- An unlimited channel costs about $4,000 per month or single sessions can also be bought for around $1500 each.

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Additional Information:

Webcasting, Online Events

Social Business TV - Social Broadcasting for Business

Recent news:

- News - Press Releases: INXPO Makes Simple Delivery of High Definition Quality Video to Business Desktop and Mobile Device - INXPO

Founded in 2004, INXPO has delivered nearly 3,000 social business broadcasts worldwide for brands including Autodesk, Cisco, Freeman, George P. Johnson, Hilton, HIMSS, P&G, PCMA, TechTarget, UBM and the U.S. Department of State. The company is headquartered in Chicago.