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I'm really pleased to announce the unveiling of two new widget campaigns that utilize some of the richest features of NewsGator Technologies' widget framework. Portable cobranded widgets extend your brand, and related topics widgets offer up trusted content to enhance readership.
Discovery Channel and HowStuffWorks.com today introduced these syndicated content offerings for online news publishers' Web sites. Here's what each one has to offer:
Discovery Channel's Science and Technology News Widget
From cutting-edge medicine and renewable energy to nanotechnology and flying cars, Discovery Channel’s portable widget features science and technology news from its award-winning Discovery News service. Since 1998, Discovery News has produced breaking news and in-depth coverage and analysis of technology and space-related news, as well as developments in earth sciences like meteorology, geology and ecology. With credible and compelling science and technology content updated daily, the new portable widget provides publishers such as online news organizations with a turnkey solution to bolster science and technology coverage and engage online audiences.
“With our high-quality engaging content, Discovery Channel has always been a trusted source for people online who want to explore the rapidly advancing world of science and technology,” said Iain Langridge, vice president, operations, digital media, Discovery Communications. “Using NewsGator’s service, we provide publishers a way to deepen their consumer experience with original science and technology news from a credible brand in an easy-to-distribute-and-digest package.”
HowStuffWorks.com’s Related Topics Links
HowStuffWorks.com, the Web site famous for demystifying the world, is on a similar mission to better inform visitors while supporting publishers. HowStuffWorks.com’s new “Related Topics” offering allows visitors of a participating newspaper’s or content partner’s site to follow related topic links next to a story they are reading and discover articles that illuminate the original story.
“People want to know more about the world around them. The news tells readers what happened, HowStuffWorks.com explains why and how,” said Jason Hoch, vice president, product development, HowStuffWorks.com. “From the ways in which a tornado forms to the science behind multiple births, the new ‘Related Topics’ modules offer readers more in-depth information on the latest headlines allowing them to learn more and further satisfy their curiosity.”
“Succeeding on the Web means putting your content where your consumers want it, when they want it, and NewsGator’s Syndication Service does that by making it easy to share content with other sites in ways that benefit both the publisher and the audience alike,” said Walker Fenton, general manager of NewsGator’s media and data services division. “Our offerings bring tremendous value to publishers by giving them greater access to high-quality content from trustworthy and recognizable brands like Discovery Channel and HowStuffWorks.com.”
The new Discovery Channel and HowStuffWorks.com offerings seamlessly integrate into a publisher’s Web site – augmenting the publisher’s existing content with relevant partner information that increases page views and ad revenue, improving search engine optimization and increasing lift. The offerings are available to qualified media companies, and there are no maintenance or resource requirements.
Want more info? Here are a few helpful links to get started:
I'm excited to announce today that Public Radio International (PRI) has tapped NewsGator to syndicate their high quality content across the web through free widgets. The premise behind this offering is that listeners increasingly find their radio online, so PRI -- with help from NewsGator -- decided to syndicate their content through viral widgets that serve up both audio and text headlines. These widgets capitalize on the fact that radio-related websites saw a 30% jump in visitors last year.
If you're not familiar with PRI, they produce and distribute programs such as "The World," "The Takeaway," "This American Life," and also distributes news services like BBC World Service and Capitol News Connection. In fact, PRI provides more than 400 hours of audio content each week, which is heard by 12 million listeners on over 800 public radio stations as well as online via streaming, podcasts and on-demand.
The new viral widgets, which are available at http://www.pri.org/pri-widgets, feature an in-page audio player as well as headlines of PRI stories so listeners can freely embed them wherever across the social web they like: on web sites, blogs, social networks, and personalized start pages, for example. These widgets were created to automatically to track usage volume as well as to allow PRI editors customize the widgets' look, feel and behavior through our Editor's Desk platform.
The new PRI widgets are offered in three separate flavors:
- an Economic Security widget
- a Global Health & Development widget
- a Social Entrepreneurship widget [note: shown at right]
Also neat is the fact that other media organizations can co-brand the PRI widgets with their own logo upon request to PRI. Headlines link back to the approved co-brander's site, increasing page views, time spent on site, and brand visibility. In addition, there are no setup, hosting or licensing fees for co-branders.
As Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator Media & Consumer products, says, "PRI is the epitome of quality programming an exemplar of how premier content producers are expanding audience and consumer choice at the same time. Media today is as much about reaching out to listeners where they are as attracting them to your station or site, and that's what NewsGator Widget Services help accomplish for our customers.
You can check out the new PRI widgets here or co-brand the widgets here.
I'm excited to let you know that Variety.com has just launched a brand new iPhone app along with a widget on their site (seen at right), both powered by NewsGator. Variety is one of the premier sources of business news covering the entertainment and media space, and its new iPhone app allows readers non-stop access to the most compelling entertainment industry buzz.
The iPhone app was developed using NewsGator's content syndication services and Reed Business' Search Zibb on Demand search engine. Neil Stiles, President and Publisher of the Variety Group explains that their audience "includes some of the world's most powerful professionals and busiest stars, all of whom want information as and when it happens" and that the new Newsgator-powered iPhone app and widget give them "a competitive advantage" that offers their readers "greater choice in a market with an ever increasing number of media outlets."
In addition to the speed of content delivery, the iPhone application and widget both allow users to select only the content they're interested in, whether that's news, reviews, videos, photos, or interactive tools. As Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator's Media & Consumer Products, explains, "the media landscape is changing, and publishers are looking for creative ways to increase revenues while holding the line on costs. Viral content syndication meets this need head on and, in the case of the Variety Widget and iPhone app, rides the world's relentless interest in movies and entertainment."
How exactly does it work? NewsGator servers drive content quickly and continuously to the iPhone app and widget, and NewsGator's Editor's Desk application provides control and customization directly to the media source, allowing Variety to edit its content feeds on the fly. The content within the app and the widget is generated through Zibb, the business-to-business search engine of Reed Business, one of the premier providers of business information to the world.
Check out the cool new iPhone app and widget today!
Last month, I introduced you to our innovative new advertising solution called AdBurner, which optimizes ad placement, management and revenue across any platform. I also explained that this program is the result of an impressive collaboration with the following partners: Technorati, Admeld, Gigya, Medialets, and Tremor Media.
 As a reminder, the premise behind our creation of AdBurner is the
realization that a significant roadblock for media companies attempting
to monetize social media and mobile applications has been the lack of
process standards and optimization methods for inserting and tracking
ad placements. NewsGator's announcement today brings welcome relief to
media clients struggling with explosive ad inventory growth and
literally hundreds of online ad networks complementing their own
internal ad sales efforts.
With AdBurner, NewsGator's premium publisher clients can
choose to monetize via high value display ads, video pre-roll and
overlays, widget ads, and iPhone display ads through an integrated
process engine and a single management console. And, in addition to
managing ad units inserted into products that NewsGator provides to
publishers, the process integration extends to unrelated online ad
inventory.
I wanted to let you know that we have a new page up on AdBurner that includes a spiffy graphic which much better demonstrates the power of our new advertising solution than me simply telling you about it. You can view this new content on AdBurner here, and the graphic we've included along with that new information -- above.
Last week I told you the cool news that USA.gov has adopted NewsGator technology and expertise to create RSS breaking news and information feeds on their website. The tie-up has been receiving some good publicity, and I wanted to point you to a couple of articles on this news.
ReadWriteWeb has a story called "USA.gov Embraces RSS: Launches Breaking News Service." It's worth a read.
Also, Information Week published a story today titled, "Feds' Internet Site Goes Web 2.0." It quotes Beverly Godwin, the director of USA.gov's Web Best Practices division as saying, "using these Web 2.0
tools is a huge opportunity for government to be transparent and save
valuable tax dollars. Tools such as RSS feeds and gadgets allow the public to directly access content from the original source, no matter which Web site
they're on. It reduces duplication across government because an agency
creates content once and makes it available for reuse by others."
We're just excited that the "Feds," as that second article refers to them, chose NewsGator to implement the technical challenges behind their entrance to Web 2.0. Welcome, I say. :)
I'm pretty excited about this latest development. The news officially comes out today that USA.gov has adopted NewsGator technology to create RSS breaking news and information feeds on the USA.gov website, managed by GSA. The site has been created in order to streamline access to pertinent information so that the public no longer has to scour a bunch of government websites to find what they're looking for. Simplicity = good.
The service that's just launched allows any visitor to the USA.gov site to subscribe to RSS feeds in the following categories:
- Agriculture
- Environment & Energy
- Family, Home & Community
- Consumer News & Recalls
- Health & Nutrition
- Defense & International
- Public Safety & Law
- Education & Employment
- Science & Technology
- General Government/Reference News
Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator's Media & Consumer division explains how “we pioneered commercial RSS and today
have the only proven scalable RSS infrastructure for delivering the
steep mandate for open government access that the Federal government is
committed to delivering.” He adds, "the Federal government is
awash in content and it is an exciting challenge to help streamline
access to this information. It is also an honor to be selected for
helping to inform the citizenry; there are few responsibilities more
important.”
We hope that this is only the first in a series of products that we might eventually support for the federal government!
Today NewsGator is announcing the creation of a brand new online advertising program called AdBurner. AdBurner is a turnkey advertising solution, which optimizes ad placement, management, and revenue across any platform. This program is the result of an impressive collaboration with the following partners: Technorati, Admeld, Gigya, Medialets, and Tremor Media.
Adburner is aimed at optimizing the CPM for, and process of, inserting and managing advertising into NewsGator's publisher products suite, including services as diverse as widgets, related content, and iPhone applications. What makes this initiative especially exciting is that it's built around the best of breed advertising partners mentioned above.
The premise behind our creation of AdBurner is the realization that a significant roadblock for media companies attempting to monetize social media and mobile applications has been the lack of process standards and optimization methods for inserting and tracking ad placements. NewsGator's announcement today brings welcome relief to media clients struggling with explosive ad inventory growth and literally hundreds of online ad networks complementing their own internal ad sales efforts.
With AdBurner, NewsGator's premium publisher clients can choose to monetize via high value display ads, video pre-roll and overlays, widget ads, and iPhone display ads through an integrated process engine and a single management console. And, in addition to managing ad units inserted into products that NewsGator provides to publishers, the process integration extends to unrelated online ad inventory.
According to JB Holston, NewsGator's CEO, our clients have told us that "lack of inventory is not the problem they have, it's selling the inventory they already control along with the additional inventory we are creating for them." He adds that, "what we're providing to them are pre-packaged integrated ad placement scenarios that can be used across a range of products, covers all of our inventory, and does so in a manner that is fully transparent and optimized to deliver the highest ad value per placement."
I'd like to pass along reaction from our partners on this AdBurner initiative:
- Technorati's CEO, Richard Jalichandra, says, "this initiative aligns Technorati's clients with news from a variety of sources across the tail to be delivered in innovative ways to their online readers. NewsGator brings a top tier client list and proven media syndication technology that is a perfect fit for Technorati Media.
- Admeld's CEO, Michael Barrett, adds, "we are very pleased to be working with NewsGator and their high quality publishing partnership. [This] partnership will drive higher revenue for participating publishers."
- Gigya's VP of Sales & Biz Dev, Ben Pashman, says that "monetization is a major challenge for publishers of distributed content, so we're pleased to be working with NewsGator to deliver comprehensive widget monetization solutions to their publisher clients."
- Medialet's CEO, Eric Litman, says that "Medialets is excited to work with NewsGator on this program...and we're looking forward to providing the premier mobile advertising solution for NewsGator's clients."
- Tremor Media's CEO, Jason Glickman, explains that "Tremor Media & NewsGator have been working together to delieve rhigh quality, high value video pre-roll to NewsGator cleints" and that "this initiative builds on the success we have had with NewsGator around delivering video monetization for widgets and non-viral distributions by offering our respective publishers a compelling pre-integrated approach to monetization of their inventory."
Our AdBurner program is available immediately for existing NewsGator clients.
As a final note, I'd like to say how delighted we are to be working with such an impressive group of ad partners as Technorati, Admeld, Gigya, Medialets and Tremor Media in creating AdBurner.
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that at any one given time, there are a lot of different things going on at NewsGator, since we have a whole host of products that provide solutions for a wide range of issues and end users. You'll also know that I sometimes like to profile exciting developments that are going on outside of NewsGator's Media & Consumer Products.
Well, here's one of them: today we're launching NewsGator Social Sites 2.5. If you don't know about Social Sites, it's an enterprise product that enhances Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007's enterprise capabilities. Today's product launch includes cool new updates that include enhanced analytics, search resources, activity streaming features and more. Basically, we like to see NewsGator's Social Sites as "Facebook for the Enterprise."
In short, companies use Social Sites to drive improved internal communication, simplify the discovery of knowledge and experts and to enhance company-wide collaboration, and improve overall productivity, providing tangible benefits to enterprise companies. For instance, NewsGator Social Sites 2.5 allows users to create a community discussion around any article, document, or blog post created in Share Point, which can be rated on a five-point scale within Social Sites to enhance discovery by other users.
I know that our enterprise software team listened to a lot of customer feedback in creating NewsGator Social Sites 2.5, and I'm sure that the additions this time around make it an even better enhancement to SharePoint.
Since NewsGator Media & Consumer Products is now offering branded iPhone apps for media clients -- indeed, we just had a successful free webinar on the subject last week -- I thought this post, "The Mobile Application Rush: Is the iPhone Really Leading the Way?" makes an interesting read.
Compete's Eleanor Baird asks the simple question:
Are iPhone owners really interested in mobile applications any more than other Smartphone users, or is it just hype?
According to her analysis, the answer is a resounding yes. First, she reports that a full third of of Smartphone owners don't have any applications on their phone, whereas only 7% of iPhone users can say this. Also, nearly three-quarters of iPhone users have 5 or more applications on their phone, while only one-fifth of Smartphone owners can claim this. (You can read the full article here.)
The popularity of iPhone applications, then, underscores the relevance of NewsGator's Branded iPhone Apps, which enable you to:
- Deliver a branded media experience to iPhone users via a custom, native App
- Include text, images, audio, and video
- Market your App on the Apple App Store
- Monetize your App with sponsorships
- Minimize development and support costs with NewsGator’s hosted service
- Provide a superior experience over web Apps by enabling offline features and a richer, faster user experience
You may read more about our iPhone offerings here.
Somehow in the hustle and bustle of last week I forgot to mention the fact that we have loaded a whole slew of cool, new features into NewsGator's widget framework. Our technical engineers have been busy over the past few weeks working on a number of significant changes that are sure to enhance your experience. You can read about all of the changes in this post on the NewsGator Technical Blog, but I'd like to highlight some of the changes here.
- You can now add related content to your widgets; changes to Editor's Desk allow you to automatically offer related content to your readers without the need to manually choose it
- The video player has been modified so that it now supports pre-roll advertisements; volume control has also been added to the video player
- As previously mentioned in this blog, we've added Gigya sharing capability which means you can now port your widgets to the following sites: iGoogle, Facebook, Typepad, Blogger, Freewebs, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Vox, Live Spaces, Myspace, Livejournal, Xanga, Multiply, Tagged, MyYearbook, Orkut, BlackPlanet, and MiGente; (as before you can also manually get the embed code or email the widget to a friend.)
- A few other improvements to sharing have been made: smart sharing has been added so that your most shared-to-site will appear on the widget first, while email sharing has been improved
In addition, a number of improvements to Editor's Desk have been made to make it even more powerful and user-friendly than before. A couple of examples:
- A sharing tab has been added to the "Promote" page
- We've added support for .rss & .flv files to the file upload feature
- Related content has been added to the search content tab
- A number of other upgrades and changes you can read about here
We're confident that the changes and improvements we've made will further enhance the experience with NewsGator widgets, both for developers on the widget creation side as well as for end-users of the widget. Check out these changes today!
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Josh Larson
Assistant Marketing Manager
joshl@newsgator.com
View my page on NewsGator Widgets
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