Folkene bag liveblogging-værktøjet Cover it Live, som bruges af en lang række sites (blandt andet ekstrabladet.dk, hvor jeg arbejder) har oplyst, at Demand Media har foretaget en “strategisk investering” i værktøjet.
Cover it Live, der er baseret i Toronto, Canada, gør det muligt at live-opdatere fra eksempelvis begivenheder og blandt andet tilsætte billeder og videoer, lade læserne kommentere samt integrere Twitter.
Paidcontent.org har også skrevet om investeringen.
Long term viability – There will always be a good supply of new/neat/cool/interesting web applications out there. At some point though, you need to move beyond being a couple of smart people with some code. We could not have found a better investor than Demand to help us ‘rise above the widgets’ to send a message to our current and future users that CiL is a software service you can depend on over the long term.
Strength in Numbers – In working to get this partnership done, I have talked about CiL to pretty much the entire Demand senior management team and they in turn to hundreds of Demand employees. Moving from four to five smart people with a vested interest in your company to several hundred people with diverse backgrounds will ultimately improve the CiL experience in many ways.
Service & Support – Pluck (acquired by Demand in early 2008) has sales & service people who really REALLY understand social media and work with some of our largest users…and now they’re on our team. There is just no way a company of our size could ever afford to keep this kind of talent on staff. Some of you have been clamouring for this and others have held back with expansion until we provided it. Case in point, if you are a medium/large media company or sports league in Europe thinking about how to use the Live Web, Pluck has people on the ground in London who now represent CoveritLive.
Content distribution – If you don’t know what Demand Studios is and how they are leading the way in the field of distributed content, you should take the time to read up. Suffice to say, there are an increasingly large number of days where CoveritLive has the most broad range and highest quality of live coverage on the web (think: NBA Draft, G8 summit, Sotomayor confirmation, Tour de France). With Demand’s help, our users will have the opportunity to get their content in front of more readers in ways they never thought possible.
JUST FOR PLUCK CUSTOMERS: Credit the Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe and the CBC for this one…CiL will very quickly provide all Pluck users with Single Sign On (SSO) for their readers so they can use their existing usernames, passwords and avatars within your CoveritLive events. That is where we’ll start…more to come on integration in the coming months.
Last, on September 10, I will be attending Pluck’s Socialize event in Austin, Texas (http://socialize.pluck.com/agenda/) where I will announce our most significant feature rollout in over a year. For those of you who might attend, I look forward to meeting you in person. For those who cannot, I’ll announce all the upgrades in a newsletter the next day.
As always, a very large and sincere thank you to everyone who has helped us get this far.