Slippin' into neutral (IfraExpo retrospective)

Much of the IfraExpo buzz was about editorial and advertising systems ... and interest from major Australian publishers had added a frisson of excitement to the chase. An editorial request for information from News Limited was a talking point at TeraDP, while EidosMedia’s Steve Ball says the company has been fielding interest from Australia derived from its Méthode installation at the ‘Wall Street Journal’ (see page three). A new driving force at Italian-headquartered Tera Digital Publishing has been the appointment last year as US-based manager of worldwide marketing and reseller sales of John Juliano, whose industry background includes a quarter of a century of newspaper publishing consultancy, integration and project management. Despite the changes it has undergone over the years, Tera is known for its ability to turn vision into reality and Juliano emphasises customer retention the company says runs at 99 per cent. An advantage is that Tera owns its own application code, an asset Juliano says avoids cost, delay and risk. There are no Australasia installs yet (Juliano aims to change that) but NST, Utusan and Kosmo! in Malaysia, Kompass in Indonesia and the ‘Philippines Daily Inquirer’ are among Asian clients. At IfraExpo, there was a new advertising campaign on the ‘single’ theme of its newsroom offering ... and the occasional bagful of cash for those seen around the show with the campaign material. Tera showed products based on the content management service architecture (CMSA) it announced last year. New is a GNPortal ‘content ingestion’ product shown publishing a story with video, pictures and text gathered during the demonstration ... simultaneously to web and print. DTI is another newspaper systems specialist which is expecting to announce Australian orders shortly. At Ifra it introduced a new browser-based content management suite, which can also be integrated with DTI’s advertising solution. Automation capabilities mean pages and stories can effectively assemble themselves according to design rules, especially in web publishing applications. With high-profile installations including ‘Osterreich’ and the London ‘Daily Telegraph’, DTI has been increasing its presence around the world, most recently with the addition of four new members to its professional services team in Europe. CCI Europe put its NewsGate multimedia editorial system ‘front and centre’ at the show, demonstrating features which allow multiple ‘papers’ to coexist in a single installation with a media neutral content repository, and the ‘story folder’ where content and resources can be assigned, created and shared. Customers who ordered NewsGate in recent months include the ‘Times of India’, ‘Adresseavisen’, the McClatchy Company, and the ‘Globe and Mail’ in Toronto. Atex had a new corporate logo and promised “new opportunities and new solutions,” according to chief executive john Hawkins. On show were aspects of workflow integration for media-neutral publishing, ‘citizen journalism’ and content-based advertising. Apart from specific demonstrations, the company presented its technology strategy for editorial and advertising integration with Polopoly content management. It previewed an Adobe AIR-based technology codenamed Oxygen, which uses a web browser to assemble elements of content from Atex and third-party sources. At Miles33, Albert de Bruijn – who once drove systems business in Australia for Atex (in its Kodak incarnation) and others – had switched across from new acquisition netlinx to present his new employer’s licence-based business model. Customers pay for implementation and then an annual fee ... with the opportunity to switch off seats if they are under-utilised or business falls back. A new initiative is ‘intelligent internet advertising’, a concept designed to provide incentives to advertisers through devices such as web ads and directory entries which stay live only as long as they continue to take space. Another add-on is a pop-up system to allow users to request quotations from participating traders. Melbourne-headquartered Advanced Publishing Systems had a team of four at the show, both on their own account and to support partners Roxen and Mindset. International sales manager Terry Flynn says the company is involved with its QuickLayout and Optima Viewer products in a number of projects including a new Mindset site at Florida’s ‘Sarasota Observer’ and an order for ‘hot property’ the ‘Seattle Times’. In Australia, West Australian Newspapers is among clients, while News Limited now has the two key APS products across 300 seats. Roger Tidmarsh of AdLizard was supporting the Adelaide company’s export drive following a successful Nexpo earlier this year. In addition to exhibitors, a number of other Australian systems and integration companies were ‘doing the aisles’ ... among them Shelley Hando of Pongrass Publishing Systems and Matthew Green and Andrew Lomax from Sydney-based CreativeFolks. Woodwing Software was also spreading the media-neutral message, showing a new Content Station application to version 6 of its Enterprise platform it used to call Smart Connection Enterprise. President Erik Schut says the integrated environment is unprecedented: “In the past, most publishers would produce the print stories and photos first, and then push that content to the Web. Now, once the content is created, it can be published to any channel at any time.” The client application uses Adobe’s AIR technology, and allows a user preview for each channel before distribution. Schut says the release is the largest Enterprise update in the company’s history: Internal architecture has been changed, features upgraded and a new layout module introduced which allows several people to work on pages at the same time. CoreMedia was on the stand of Vjoon (formerly SoftCare) to demonstrate media solutions and its integration with Vjoon’s K4 publishing system. The Hamburg-based company has an office in Singapore and counts the ‘Straits Times’ RazorTV portal among its clients. This presents interactive video-news, live chats and lifestyle features in a free service which allows user contributions and encourages users to broadcast themselves live. Uncertain times or not, there’s business to be done here.