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Content personalization still has a long way to go

Erica Ogg — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:30:25 +0000

Two companies who are leading the way on personalized digital magazines agree that we haven’t yet come close to unlocking the power of true personalized content yet.

At paidContent Live 2013 Wednesday, Prismatic co-founder and CTO Aria Haghighi said those in the business of helping readers discover new content can’t even agree on a definition yet. “We don’t all agree on what personalization means. I agree (that it means pointing you to) stuff you care about … some people think it’s only getting signal from noise,” he said. “I think we’re really early. I don’t think we’ve matured to point where we (the industry) have philosophical differences yet.”

Mark Johnson, who is CEO of competing product Zite, agreed that there’s so much more to do. “We’re good at finding stuff, but we can be so much better. We haven’t had that Google moment yet that’s, ‘Aha! That’s what personalization is.’” He compared it to when AltaVista users turned to early Google search and said, “So that’s what search is!”

That point of personalizing reading content for users is also the challenge: everyone’s feed will always be different because no one likes the same stuff. Improving that capability will depend on big factors that haven’t quite been figured out yet either: the social aspect and helping people understand why content is recommended to them.

Both Prismatic and Zite agree that helping users understand why you’re showing them content is key: “Even if you do world’s best job recommending an article or content to people, if they don’t have an explanation of why, people feel uneasy,” said Haghighi. “You have surface parts of the system to give information to people. That’s where user response intersects with AI.”

Part of recommendation is social — what your friends or people with your same interests liked — but no one has done a good job of that in their industry yet, Johnson thinks. Social “sharing is the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “There’s something deeper you can do in these applications that no one has nailed yet.”

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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Why a LinkedIn acquisition of Pulse would make sense — content requires context

Mathew Ingram — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:52:24 +0000

According to a number of reports from insiders close to the company — including some who have talked to Om and some who have talked to All Things Digital — LinkedIn is considering an acquisition of Pulse, the news-reading app, for as much as $100 million. At first glance it might seem like an odd pairing: why would a site that is focused on corporate networking want to buy a content-recommendation app? But as the world of content continues to evolve, such a combination actually makes a lot of sense.

Pulse is one of a number of news-recommendation apps that try to apply algorithms and other filters to suggest content to users — a group that includes Zite (which was acquired by CNN in 2011) as well as News360, Flipboard and Prismatic. Pulse was one of the first to make a big splash, in part because Apple founder Steve Jobs mentioned it on stage during the launch of the original iPad, and also because the New York Times accused the company of copyright infringement for aggregating its content.

Since its launch, Pulse has grown to the point where it has about 20 million users, but it’s still seen by many as a runner-up to Flipboard in the news-recommendation market, so an acquisition in the $100-million range would likely make sense for the company and its backers.

LinkedIn is becoming a media network

For LinkedIn, meanwhile, the purchase of a service that aggregates and recommends content from a wide variety of news sources would be an interesting extension of its recent moves to bulk up the media side of its business. When the company first launched its LinkedIn Today service — which aggregated news based on which links were shared within a user’s network of contacts — it seemed to some (including me) like a side project designed to primarily to drive traffic to the site, which was mostly being used as a place to store a resume or connect with potential employers.

Since then, however, the company has made a number of other efforts on the content side that are more ambitious — directed by former Fortune magazine staffer Dan Roth — such as the launch of the Influencers program, in which the site gets prominent personalities such as Richard Branson and Reid Hoffman to blog about topics of interest to its users. In many ways, this is analogous to what alternative blogging platforms like Medium and Svbtle have been doing (and WordPress seems to be interested in doing as well). (see disclosure)

So what could LinkedIn do with something like Pulse? Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has one idea, based on a video that Dan Roth made for a Fortune app that had LinkedIn integration — so that users could see who they were connected to at a specific company that was mentioned in the news. But while this might be useful to some, it seems a lot less interesting than using it as a kind of extension of LinkedIn Today: in other words, a way of recommending content that would target users based on their interests.

It’s all about the “interest graph”

As we’ve tried to explain a number of times, this kind of “interest graph” targeting is the holy grail for both content companies and social networks. It’s the reason why Facebook is constantly tweaking its news feed, and why Twitter is pouring resources into improving recommendation filters like its Discover tab and other features — and why Google is trying so hard to get people to share and “plus one” more content through its Google+ network.

If there’s one overwhelming reality of the digital age, it’s that we are all to some extent drowning in content from an ever-growing range of sources, and we all spend an increasing amount of time trying to filter out the noise and find the signal. LinkedIn has a large and growing graph of the social-network connections between people based on their work — a graph some believe could make the company an acquisition for someone like Bloomberg — and that could potentially be very valuable for users.

So a LinkedIn-Pulse combination might start as a version of the app that functions almost exactly like the current version, but also tracks content shared by a user’s business-related graph from LinkedIn, and then grows into a larger service incorporated into the site itself. And data from such a service would likely also be very interesting to Pulse partners like the Wall Street Journal, who use the app as a secondary method of distribution and subscription revenue.

And if such a deal does end up happening, of course, a LinkedIn purchase of Pulse would be just another example of a non-media company (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) establishing a powerful foothold in an area of the business that has traditionally belonged to newspapers and magazines.

Disclosure: Automattic, the developer of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Arvind Grover

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Who’s going to capture the social news reader market? Thirst throws its hat in the ring

Eliza Kern — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:00:43 +0000

At this point, there’s no question the internet offers more than we can reasonably ingest. Even trying to keep up with Buzzfeed’s Beyonce posts while holding down a full-time job would be exhausting.

So who exactly is going to organize the web’s information into a digestible format? That’s still TBD. Flipboard and Zite and Prismatic are just a few solutions (if you look beyond my beloved Google Reader to social, iPad-oriented apps), but they haven’t necessarily won the market yet. Flipboard announced in August that it’s been gaining traction, but that still only translates to 20 million total users, compared to Twitter’s 200 million active users. So the social reader market remains an interesting one to watch.

And one of those apps to watch is Thirst, which is relaunching its product Tuesday as a social reader for news. The company’s first product was more of a social reader for tweets, organizing the ones you missed in a new format. While that product was interesting, it definitely did not jibe with Twitter’s new API restrictions, and Thirst announced it would expand into other types of content after presenting at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference.

Rather than shuffle tweets, the new Thirst app instead tries to do what most social readers do: it presents with you the most popular news stories of the day, lets you select topics and categories that interest you, and read articles within the app. The big question is still traction and users, obviously — you need friends using the app to make sharing and commenting interesting, and your users have to be willing to declare their interests and set up the app. These are significant hurdles, no doubt.

But one of my favorite features in the app is the ability to like or comment on articles, which is reminiscent of the old function on Google Reader where you could like and comment on articles among your friends. Google unfortunately axed the feature despite user protest in favor of rolling out its social product in Google+. It’s smart that Thirst would model that feature in hopes of capturing some of the enthusiasm that the old Google Reader did.

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Prismatic gets $15M to build a recommendation engine for the world

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 19:12:06 +0000

We’ve written many times about how the profusion of information from social networks and the web in general makes it harder and harder to find what matters to us, and how new tools are required to filter that vast ocean of content. Prismatic is one service that is using algorithms to try and become a smart recommendation engine for news and eventually expand into other content as well, and co-founder Bradford Cross and his San Francisco-based team have just raised $15 million in financing from a star-studded group of venture-capital firms that they hope will enable them to do so.

In an email interview about the funding, Cross said that the financing will allow Prismatic to grow from a group of just six, and allow it to take on more of the recommendation and filtering tasks it is trying to build into the product:

“This financing finally allows us to have the team that we need to tackle the problems we have ahead in the next 24 months. To date, we’ve run Prismatic with only 6 people, and built it with only 5… the active customer base is growing fast, and we need the resources to keep up and move on to our new product, distribution, research, and revenue ideas.”

As we described in a profile of Cross and his startup earlier this year, Prismatic is one of a number of tools that are trying to fix the problem that media theorist Clay Shirky once described by saying “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.” The service is based on machine-learning algorithms developed by Cross — a data scientist who used to run a hedge fund and later worked as a consultant on a number of Google projects — and his co-founder Aria Haghighi, and is designed to learn from users what they like or dislike about the content they are reading through the service.

The news-filtering business is a crowded field

In that sense, Prismatic is similar to Zite, the Canadian-born startup that was acquired last year by CNN and recently came out with a revamped version of its service, and other smart filters such as News360 and Pulse. But only Prismatic has explicitly said that it wants to use news-recommendation as a kind of Trojan horse to get a foot in the door with users, so that it can eventually learn enough about them to recommend all kinds of things to them — including purchases. As Cross explained it recently:

“The idea is that we become this trusted agent that you rely on to show you things, and over time we can really start to learn a lot about you. We do care a lot about [news recommendation], but we’ve also thought through how it’s a stepping stone to something much bigger. And a lot of what we do in the background, and how we slice and dice data and so on… is relevant across a really wide range of problems.”

Prismatic, which has about six staff — many of whom work out of a small office in San Francisco’s SoMa district that looks a lot like a university dorm room — also recently launched a mobile version of the app, which Cross said was designed to take advantage of the down time that many phone users have while waiting for the bus or standing in line at the airport. The information needs of mobile users are difficult to satisfy in part because they have so little time, he said, but Prismatic managed to build what amounts to a specialized mobile browser that makes the process far more painless than the usual mobile web experience.

I experiment with almost every news-recommendation app or service that comes along, from News.me (which eventually merged with what was left of Digg) and Summify — which was acquired by Twitter and became the foundation of its daily emails pointing users to worthwhile content — to News360, Pulse and Zite. So far, Prismatic is one of the few that has been able to capture my attention and keep me coming back to the app, although the new Digg has also quickly become almost as important in my daily browsing habits as the old version of the service was.

That’s the central risk for Prismatic: the world of news recommendations is a harsh one, and users are always looking for whoever can give them the best fix. Twitter is clearly focused on doing this, as Cross has acknowleged, and so are plenty of others with fairly deep pockets. Hence the need to raise a $15-million Series A round — which came from Accel Partners, along with a personal investment from partner Jim Breyer, and from Russian oligarch and Facebook investor Yuri Milner.

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Zite’s new Android update ditches support for large-screen tablets

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:00:17 +0000

In an Android update it is releasing Tuesday afternoon, personalized tablet magazine Zite is ending its support for tablets with screens larger than 10 inches. It’s also making other tweaks and bug fixes, including enhanced sharing options.

Zite, which released its Android app in March, still doesn’t have an official Android tablet app. Its Android app is designed for smartphones, and though it technically works on larger screens too, the company says 7-inch Android tablets like the Nexus 7 are the limit. The app won’t work at all on 10-inch Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

That raises the question of when Zite will release an app designed for Android tablets. (A search through the reviews in the Google Play store reveals that many users are asking for one.) The company is “not currently” focused on an Android tablet app, though, a spokewsoman told me. “We’re focused on making the Android phone app the best it can be.” Zite competitor Flipboard’s Android app is also not optimized for tablets.

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Zite adds LA Times, Chicago Tribune, others to its publishers program

Laura Hazard Owen — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 15:00:56 +0000

Personalized reading app Zite is adding more publishers to its three-month-old ZitePublisher program. The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar, the International Business Times, Entrepreneur magazine, Macworld and PC World magazines, and tech blogs TechHive and Cult of Mac are joining the program and will have their own sections within Zite.

Zite was already working with CNN (its parent company), Fox Sports, the Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Bleacher Report, HLNtv, Motley Fool, The Next Web and VentureBeat.

Zite publisher partners share their “best-of” content in their own sections of Zite’s app, which is available for iPad, iPhone and Android. Like the rest of the content delivered through Zite, partner publishers’ content is subject to an algorithm that delivers personalized stories to users based on their likes and dislikes.

Publishers don’t pay Zite to be included in the program. “We believe there is adequate value being created for both parties in the terms of the agreement,” a company spokeswoman said.

Zite’s competitors are also entering into more partnerships with publishers, though their business models work in different ways. The New York Times is now making its content available to paying subscribers through Flipboard as part of its “NYT Everywhere” program, with Flipboard’s revenue derived from advertising. Pulse partnered with the Wall Street Journal to offer content subscriptions through its app and is sharing the subscription revenue.

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Read It Later’s app goes free and gets a new name, Pocket

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:00:43 +0000

Read It Later is making its app completely free — no more $2.99 Pro version — and renaming it Pocket to express “how simple it is to take any content users discover with them, no matter where they go.”

“Read It Later was profitable from the first day it launched its original, paid iPhone app,” Read It Later founder Nate Weiner told paidContent. Before today’s change to free, it’s been the number-one paid news app on Android and Kindle Fire. “However, just because our company made money, it doesn’t mean we were making it in a way that fit our business best.” Weiner said “part of the reason we raised money last summer was because I recognized this and had a different model I wanted to go after”; he said he’ll share more details about the new business model this summer.

Read It Later (the company name stays the same) has 4.5 million users and says YouTube is its apps’ most popular source of content (YouTube is also the company’s most-saved domain across platforms). Forty percent of items saved aren’t articles but content like videos, images, things to buy, travel tips and recipes. Fifty percent of items saved through the app are viewed on mobile screens, up from 34 percent in January. And 33 percent of saved items come from third-party apps like Twitter, Zite, Flipboard and Pulse.

The new app makes it easier to filter content by type and to tag and organize it. The interface looks more like Flipboard or Pulse, with images instead of just a list of articles.

Users who already have Read It Later Pro just have to update the app to get Pocket. Users of the free version have to download Pocket separately.

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The AP's New Apps: The Style, Substance And Strategy

Jeff John Roberts — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:08:16 +0000

The Associated Press this week unveiled snazzy updates to its popular news apps. Here’s a review plus a look at what the apps mean for the AP and its newspaper partners.

The Style

Credit where credit’s due, the AP designers got it right. The updated apps offer a pretty, collage-like interface that is somewhat akin to Facebook’s timeline, and the navigation is quick and intuitive. The white on grey text is easy to read and slide bars let users customize the font and headline size.

AP has bet big on visual so there are pictures everywhere on both the iPhone and iPad versions (the app will be available on other platforms later this year). The pictures look terrific with sports and entertainment stories but, as others have noted, the photos can feel busy on the smaller screen.

The interface makes it easy to quickly add or drop sections like “lifestyle” or “wacky,” and users can customize the “local” tab to include a list of different regions. Ads appear at the bottom of the screen from time to time but they are not obtrusive.

Best of all, the app loads like lightning which makes it ideal for news junkies looking for a fix on the subway or in a Starbucks (NSDQ: SBUX) line.

The Substance

This is the AP so news comes by the bucket with frequent updates. The revised apps also include a new “Big Story” feature that chains together items on topics like “2012 Presidential Race” and “March Madness.” So far, there are only four “big stories” but editors say they will add and remove topics in response to breaking news items.

As with the app’s earlier iterations, the AP’s broad reach makes it a good one-stop shop for everything from sports to politics. Major breaking stories are announced via a streaming red banner across the top of the screen.

The most intriguing feature, though, may be the apps’ extensive local coverage. Users can add different regions and toggle between them on the local tab, meaning it’s possible to quickly keep track of what’s going on in Boston and Boise. Except for New York City which is fed by AP, the local coverage is culled from regional papers like the San Jose Mercury News and the Casper Star Tribune and curated by local editors. In some small areas, the process appears to be still under construction; some papers display a “no content available” message.

The Strategy

The new apps are good-looking and ambitious but there is still the question of how they will help the AP and its clients make money. Even if the product is good, it must still stand out against mobile offerings from rival news organizations and from personal aggregators like Flipboard and Zite.

Like its precursors, the new iOS apps are free although SVP for Digital Products, Jim Kennedy, says the AP is considering charging for deep content or adding in-app payment options in the future. For now, Kennedy says the AP is focused on executing a shift to comprehensive real time news on mobile — which is what he says is the future of news.

The deeper collection of local news is a boon for consumers but also raises the question of cannibalization. If users can read the Idaho Statesman through an AP app, will they still go to the Statesman itself? Kennedy says the AP’s local offerings are not a substitute but a “great complement to local apps.” He adds that the AP apps provide local publishers “additional shelf-space and inventory.”

As for the AP itself, Kennedy says that once the mobile service reaches profitability, it will be in a position to share revenue with partners. The association says that, overall, its apps have been downloaded more than 11 million times, including 3.5 million downloads to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) products.

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Zite Brings Intel Inside Its Technology Section In Sponsorship Deal

Tom Krazit — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:29:14 +0000

Zite has cut a deal with Intel (NSDQ: INTC) to have the chip giant sponsor the technology section of its mobile news reading app, only the second sponsor to grace its pages. Intel will sponsor Zite’s technology section and will get to promote selected articles in exchange for its financial support.

It’s not the first deal that CNN-owned Zite has cut with a sponsor: last year Lululemon created a custom section of the application focusing on yoga-related content. But Intel will sponsor an existing section, one that Zite said in a blog post was one of its most popular sections.

Zite said the Intel deal won’t affect how stories are personalized using its algorithm but stories from Intel’s MyLifeScoop will get prominent placement inside the tech section, as seen in the screenshot below provided by the company. Turning on advertising within a news application known for curating content based on one’s preferences is a tricky affair, and Zite said that “we’ll also continue to respect your choice to block sources when it comes to promoted content.”

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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:39:31 +0000

The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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