Dennis and I will be heading up to ONA ’11 this Friday and Saturday. We’re proud to be both sponsors of ONA ’11 and members of ONA (Online News Association) and look forward to chatting with as many of you as possible, so do drop by and visit us at our booth (#15) to find out more.

It’s been a super busy summer for the VR team and over the course of the next month we’ll be pushing a significant number of updates to the Visual Revenue Front Page Platform live. We have a host of exciting new features to showcase, the first of which is: The Article Engagement Indicator

One of the features of our platform that some of our customers are super excited about is our ability to assign a value to each of the recommendation we provide. As customers, they are interested in knowing exactly how much value we add, on top of the value their content is already generating. In addition, the Recommendation Values help them in prioritizing which recommendations to take. I would like to dive a little into our Recommendation Value calculation and show you how it works.

Today is a fantastic day. First, we just announced our Series A Seed Funding. Second, with funding comes access to advisors and partners such a Eric Hippeau, Kenneth Lerer (Huffington Post co-founder), Fabrice Grinda, Ron Conway from SV angel and some fantastic entrepreneurs and angels. Third, new super smart team mates started this week. Fourth, we started providing home page content recommendations for one of the big three networks in the US. *plus a refresh of our website :-)

Today sees us roll-out Temporary Editorial Instructions to all our customers – and Charlie is sending hundreds of users emails as we speak. Splendid! I am personally super thrilled to see us continue to expand in this Editor Friendly direction – and cement our status as the most sophisticated and powerful front page programming tool for publishers in the world today. Temporary Editorial Instructions have been designed so the Editor can communicate with the Platform.

Food for thought. When we provide our predictive recommendations for what articles to promote on the front page of a news media destination, where and for how long – I tend to paint a picture of a Wall Street trading floor for those in the newsroom still skeptical about data as a valid input and proper foundation for decision support.