More than 450 companies entered and were whittled down to 150 in 19 categories. We fall into the ‘Innovation in Publishing, Media and Entertainment’ category and are up against the following prestigious companies:

• Random House Publishing
• Sunday Publishing
• The Sunday Times
• Movellas
• [Visual Revenue Inc.]

Are we happy – you bet :-)

In a nutshell there are two key components to this release:

1) Real-time Recommendations: Up until now we have packaged recommendations in 15 minute cycles – we have now removed this and provide all recommendations as they happen.

2) Collaborative Editorial Environment: Enables a media organization’s Editors to see what each other are doing from their individual Platform logins – if ‘Bob’ accepts a recommendation ‘Jill’ can see this reflected in her UI instantly.

We’ve spent a significant amount of time discussing the pros and cons of an environment that provides recommendations in real-time or in cycles with our partners, which is why we felt it was time to address this feature. Our partnerships tend to comprise of web properties that are an ‘hourly’ destination so to speak (those that provide and/or break news on a minute by minute basis – think NYTimes, USA Today) and those that are more of a daily/weekly destination (think The Atlantic, Wired, Esquire). Neither’s immediate goal is different, they all want to ensure that the right content is placed in the right position on their respective front pages – the hourly destinations will just do it more frequently than the daily/weekly ones.

Providing recommendations in real-time (and allowing these recommendations to be temporarily paused) enables both destination types to benefit equally, ensuring they have the most relevant data at their finger tips, day or night.

I’ve spent many hours sitting in newsrooms and regardless of Editorial team size the room is always in discussion. What to place in this position? Isn’t it about time we refreshed that module? Can’t you find a better article for that position? We were very keen to take this discussion online and into the platform, hence the reason for launching the collaborative editorial environment. Editors can now interact directly with the Platform, provide signals to the engine and see which of their fellow editors accepted or passed on a particular recommendation.

Thanks to the all the feedback we’ve received from our partners! Being able to take this newsroom discussion and mirror it in the VR Platform has been one of the most pertinent launches we’ve done to date .

A fair question we often receive from Editors is ‘how do you ensure that your recommendations are in-step with what we would or wouldn’t do on a day-to-day basis’? Or put another way, how can Editors maintain control over the scope of the recommendations.

This question was put to Dennis at ONA’11 and here is his response:

The three of us took to the stage and pitched our respective products to a panel of judges that included John Cantarella, president of digital at Time Inc. News Group; Charlie O’Donnell, principal at First Round Capital; David Tisch, managing director of TechStars New York;  Alexa Von Tobel, founder and CEO of LearnVest.com; and Margaret Tuohy, director of product for CNNMoney.

After the pitches were over, the judges headed off to deliberate and returned to announce that…drum roll please…

Visual Revenue had won!

We’ve spent the last two years interviewing editors, wire framing, coding, tweaking, more interviewing, alpha testing, beta testing, (more interviewing :)) and finally launching the Visual Revenue Recommendation Platform!! We’re extremely fortunate to have such an awesome team (pretty aren’t they!) and I know I speak for all of us when I say we’re truly humbled to have won this event – GREAT job all!

Sadly I was unable to attend the event, but managed to follow it on the train (on my way up to ONA’11) via Twitter. Here are some of the Tweets that were bouncing through the twittersphere:

@ctull13: Key takeaway from #StartUpCNNMoney – if you want that capital, you’d best show some pride in (and passion about) your product.

@lyndabauer:”Really having the value proposition for CNNMoney right up front is most important” Margaret Tuohy #StartupCNNMoney #nyc-tech

@CNNMoneyTech: It’s official. @visualrevenue has won the first-ever #StartupCNNMoney event. Congratulations!

Thanks to the CNNMoney Team for the opportunity to pitch alongside the great guys from Qwanz and Roboinvest and we look forward to partnering with you!

In order for us to provide our recommendations for what to put where on the front page, we use a plethora of signals as inputs for our model (our secret sauce if you like!). One of these is how well each article you promote on a front page drives further ‘down-stream’ engagement or, put another way, how deep that article drives a user into other site content once they’ve finished reading it. We choose to expose some of the metrics we use for our modeling – article engagement will join others such as individual front page position value and its real-time CTR.

As always, our approach has been a simple one for the UI – the modeling we do to come up with the engagement score itself, is somewhat more sophisticated! Simply put, the more ‘orange dots’ you have displayed the better that article is at driving your readers on to consuming more content.

Two examples:

1) Whilst this article might be a great read, it is not driving your readers deeper into your property. This is reasonably typical of new stories that have no related content or back stories:


2) This article is a compelling piece of content, it possibly has a lot of background material or has great surrounding content (an Editor’s Picks, Must Read or Don’t Miss module) helping drive readers deeper into your property:


The engagement is calculated (as with everything else we do!) in real-time, and the score can therefore change during the day. It should be noted that we separately calculate for different content types (text article, galleries and the like) – this will ensure that an article that drives readers deeper doesn’t get eclipsed by a gallery just because it is perceived to have many page views.

This is a ‘tasty morsel’ to wet your appetites and we’ve plenty more to come over the coming month!

Also, do check out the accompanying article written by Julian Baldwin over on UNYstartups.

Visual Revenue, Founder and CEO Dennis R. Mortensen (NYC):

4. Fourth Office (AP, 14th Floor)

We moved into our new office space this Saturday, an environment that allows us to think big! We are still up at the Associated Press building in midtown Manhattan. AND if anything; this phase (summer 2011) is marked by us rolling out the platform to publishers worldwide and supporting ACTIVE USE of our superior value-driven programming tool for home page and section front editors.

We’d love to add more entrepreneurial engineers to this office as we expand the platform with more sophisticated (*and requested) features. Email me, call me, tweet me…

Here’s our Office View, a view of the News Room, and TJ’s new Developer Setup. I think that’s pretty cool! :-)

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

“The proper amount of feed automation versus personal curation.”

The section comments on different methodologies, this including the Visual Revenue platform as follows:

..the money will come, experts say.

Consider a company like Visual Revenue. The New York based company “provides editors with actionable, real-time recommendations on what content to place in what position right now and for how long, using predictive analytics that allow media organisations to proactively manage the cost of exposing a piece of content on a front page, whilst maximising the return they expect from promoting it,” the company’s Web site touts.

The company launched in early 2011. Its analytics tell editors what people are most interested in at the moment, by the minute or by the hour, giving them the knowledge they need to make decisions about moving content around.

Author Marshall Sponder feels such data is key to newspapers trying to engage readers and bring in revenue.

The bold emphasis is mine. I wholeheartedly agree and Marshall certainly get what we do and where the value proposition is (Increase Revenue, reduce process cost and apply accountability at a new level).

INMA says the report is written for news industry executives charged with audience strategy, marketing, editorial, and advertising.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

If you know of anyone in NYC (or wanting to move to NYC) who’s looking for a great opportunity please do send them our way (fse@visualrevenue.com), we promise to take care of them!

So without further ado here is what we’re looking for:

1. First office (Garage).

The garage* part of our story, this is where we founded the company, where we settled on the first algorithmic challenges in predicting the perfect front page. This is where we decided on our back-end technology framework and created the first prototypes. Weekends, weeknights and well, just late nights! *the garage looks different on the east coast ;-)

2. Second office (Bunker).

The grunt-work part of our story, where we spent most of a year in an office without windows to productize our ideas and launch the product – The Visual Revenue Front Page Automation Platform. This is also the space that took us to that first magical customer (which is everything as an enterprise company). If anything describes this phase; it would be HARD WORK! (6 days a week and till midnight every Wednesday)

3. Third office (AP).

We moved into our new office space yesterday (adding panorama windows baby) – we are still up at the Associated Press building in midtown Manhattan – If anything, this phase (next quarter) is colored by us being in full blown sales mode, on that first version of our platform. We’d love to add another 3 engineers to this office as we expand the platform with more sophisticated automation and with more aggressive data modeling. Our vision will also take us down two new exciting (AND) complimentary product avenues. So email me, call me, tweet me.. heck. jump the gate downstairs and see if you can outrun security.

I’m happy. I’m really happy. Probably ecstatic when I think about it – You want that as well! Meet part of the team here.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)