Inform Reveals Publisher Services and Initial Customers

Inform Technologies LLC today announced Inform Publisher Services, a Web service application for media companies who need a high-service, low-cost technology solution to leverage existing editorial assets, drive incremental page views and strengthen brand loyalty. Additionally, Inform announced its first six Publisher Services customers, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, The New York Sun, NewsOK.com (Web site for The Oklahoman newspaper and News9, KWTV CBS Affiliate), The Huffington Post, The Deal LLC, and NameMedia. Inform’s technology will enable these publishers to further establish themselves as a news destination, rather being relegated to a search result.

Beginning today, consumers and publishers can begin to experiment with Inform’s technology after registering at NewsOK.com or directly at Inform.com, the company’s new technology showcase site that also serves as a free news aggregator. And, in early August, users can see Inform working some of NameMedia’s thousands of targeted domain verticals.

"We’re always in search of innovative ways to engage users and lead them deeper into our quality content," said Caroline Little, CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, whose sites include washingtonpost.com, newsweek.com, Slate and BudgetTravelOnline.com. "By working with companies like Inform, we will make our content easier to find and read, which keeps readers engaged longer, drives more traffic and ultimately helps us make more money."

Inform Publisher Services provides a fast and easy to implement, industrial strength solution by which publishers can consistently, precisely and automatically repurpose and re-circulate branded and Web-based content to attract and retain topic-driven news consumers.

"Search engines are beating us in our local market," said Kelly Dyer Fry, director of multimedia for NewsOK.com. "Inform gives us a chance to win back those ad dollars and more — it’s like I’ve hired 30,000 journalists to generate and relate content from our site, archives and the Web. Now, readers can click several layers deep on any topic, turning a single page view into three-to-five. And, if they want more news, we point them to articles on the Web."

The Inform Platform

Inform’s Web-based engine ingests and translates all Internet content into its common semantic elements through the use of advanced algorithms. Through this process, Inform systematically tags and scores every component of each article, identifying every topic, industry, organization, person, place and product mentioned throughout the entire article. In technical terms, this process is called meta-tagging, and the promise of consistent, automatic meta-tagging has been heralded by publishers as the "Holy Grail" for online information retrieval.

Inform’s core technology employs relationship algorithms, ontological structure and natural language processing to surface relevant, interrelated content in real-time from the publisher’s data repositories and other third-party sources. Whereas most online publishers employ humans to manually tag content, Inform’s engine ingests all content and automatically tags and links related entities. And, once the ontological structure is set, the system can ingest and relate enormous amounts of content in less than a day, entire editorial ecosystems in several days, and decades of editorial archives in less than a week.

Publisher Services

Users will no longer read articles on news sites only to click away to do further research and topic-based surfing on search engines. With Inform’s services, readers can find related articles from within each publisher’s site, from its family of affiliate brands, its archives, or from articles, videos, podcasts and blog entries from across the Web in a seamless and fully integrated manner. Inform Publisher Services drives incremental page views and strengthens brand loyalty by capturing readers’ interests and holds them by providing a deeper, richer online news-reading experience. Currently Inform offers publishers the following services:

– SmartLinks — Each entity (people, places, organizations, companies, products, topics and industries) becomes a "SmartLink" to a results page, displaying other news content highly relevant to that entity.

– Related Entity and Topic Boxes — A list of relevant entities and topics related to any article where users can view relevant articles to each entity or topic.

– Related Articles — Display all related articles, including text, video, audio and blogs, from a publisher’s site, its affiliate brands, archived content or the Web.

– Search Results Content — Inform is able to provide publishers with all of the related content described above on any search results page which can be accessed by clicking on a SmartLink or using the publishers search box.

– Search Box Enhancements — Enhanced search capabilities and disambiguation of terms. By using normalized tags, results can be far more precise and comprehensive as well as give additional options (such as "Did you mean") to the user. For example, if a user types in "Bush" the system intelligently understands the user likely means "George Bush" and returns articles which mention "George W. Bush, President Bush, President George Bush, etc." but will not return "Reggie Bush" as a search result, instead will list him as a "Did you mean."

– Special Reports — Deliver highly targeted and relevant topic and entity-based news that can require little editorial support to maintain.

– Vertical Pages — Vertically focused sections that deeply engage customers while requiring limited editorial involvement.

About Inform

Inform is a technology company that is in the business of organizing, or structuring, massive amounts of unstructured data. Founded in 2004, Inform has developed a web-based platform that processes and translates web-based content into its common semantic elements. The resulting mathematically describable index enables a wholly different user experience on the web — fast and precise searching and simple navigation. The company is privately held and has approximately 60 employees, including programmers, linguists, taxonomists, library scientists, mathematicians and other professionals based in New York and India.

About Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive is the online publishing subsidiary of The Washington Post Company (NYSE:WPO). Its mission is to develop the company’s editorial products and businesses on the Internet and across all electronic content delivery platforms. WPNI’s flagship products include washingtonpost.com, Slate, Newsweek.com and BudgetTravelOnline.com. The company is headquartered in Arlington, VA.

About NewsOK.com

Powered by The Oklahoman, the largest newspaper in Oklahoma, and NEWS9 KWTV, a CBS Affiliate. NewsOK.com is Oklahoma’s source for news, weather, sports and more.