Technology Showcase
About this Video
This video is from the The 4th annual SIIA Content Forum conference, which focused on the tools, tactics, and best practices necessary to build, enable and sell content.
The Software and Information Association is the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries.
All companies have different ways in which they evaluate new vendors, products and technologies. Some have vendor fairs while others construct an elaborate system of RFQs and RFPs to vet contenders as the consider bringing them into the fold. In order to illuminate this process, we asked leading service and technology vendors to present their offering to American City Business Journals as a potential client. Each presenter will have five minutes to present their pitch and then take five minutes of Q&A from the “clientâ€.
This year at the SIIA Content Forum, the conference took a different approach to the Technology Showcase.
Rather than have each vendor present their company to the audience, FAST Search and Transfer, Nstein Technologies, and Collarity had to present a pitch to the CEO (Charlie Terry, CEO of MarketResearch.com) and CIO (Barry Bealer, CEO of Really Strategies) of a fictitious company.
Each vendor had to show how their products/services would help this “old world†company to move forward. Charlie and Barry asked questions about how each offering worked, integration capabilities with their current environment, support, training of current IT staff, etc.
FAST went first. Todd Mickelsen spoke about his company’s reputation, stability, and end-to-end solutions. FAST has worked with several major publishing companies to help them do everything from creating data warehouses to successfully implementing collaboration software and competitive intelligence programs.
Next up was Nstein Technologies. Jean-Paul Chevet’s approach was to stress his firm’s knowledge of electronic publishing, speed of implementation, and cost-effectiveness of their solution. His approach was to offer content management capabilities for electronic products that did not require radical change in existing content creation processes.
Collarity batted clean up. Debby Richman described how their product Collarity Compass relies on the wisdom of crowds. It offers a user search terms based on their initial input and past user’s searching behavoir. “Collarity makes the Compass available for online publishers, so that web sites can automatically customize searching based on all visitor interests.â€
This was both an informative and entertaining approach.
Moderators
Barry Bealer, President & CEO; Really Strategies, Inc.
Charlie Terry, President; MarketResearch.com Inc.
Panelists
Jean-Paul Chauvet, Vice-President, Sales, Nstein Technologies Inc.
Levy Cohen, CEO, Collarity, Inc.
Todd Mickelsen, Vice President, Publishing Applications, Fast Search & Transfer, Inc. (FAST)
Write-Up by Ann Michael
About Ann
Ann’s blog
LinkedIn ProfileI’ve worked in several companies while they’ve struggled through change. I was with AT&T right after it divested the baby bells. I was with Prodigy (anyone remember that?) when it was trying to create a consumer oriented online news and shopping experience (before AOL even existed). I’ve spent the last six years working with traditional publishers.
If there has ever been an industry smack in the middle of radical change - it’s publishing. If you’re in the information business the world is a scary place right now.
This article was created by the editors and producers at ScribeMedia.Org.
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