In a two-part profile, ScribbleLive co-founder and CEO gives his frank appraisal of media in the social age and his very unCanadian vision on how they can adapt to survive (and conquer).
When asked to give the Reader’s Digest version of his life, Michael De Monte, CEO and co-founder of the Canadian content management company ScribbleLive says simply, “We are awesome.” He is not shy about advocating for his business, nor is he afraid to offend when outlining why media outlets need to abandon the Social ship and look to authoritative voices to fill the content gap. De Monte created ScribbleLive to do just that.
The self-taught entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience in the ever evolving content and new media space, founded ScribbleLive with his business partner Jonathan Keebler in 2008. Their technology enables online publications and corporate clients to create, publish and syndicate real-time news and information through a digital medium, creating a rich user experience for their digital and mobile readers. Some of the biggest news agencies in the world including Reuters, AP, CBS and CNN use the ScribbleLive’s platform to push original, real-time coverage of the days’ most important news.
De Monte doesn’t deny that a sound digital strategy is critical to success for news organizations. In fact, as the one-time Director of Online Production for CTVGlobe Media, one of Canada’s largest privately owned media conglomerates, De Monte was the standard bearer for change in the early days of the social web. He does, however, think that most traditional publications are using the online space ineffectively.
“When the social web started to encroach on newspaper sales, publications rushed to platforms like Facebook and Twitter without any real strategy,” says De Monte. By doing so, many publications have made two Internet-sized tactical errors; they rely too heavily on crowd-sourced content and they have stalled in their quest to monetize social and owned platforms.
“The publications that continue to struggle as the online news industry matures are the ones that allow digital experts to dictate social strategy instead of allowing editorial staff to drive real-time content and provide their sales team with new opportunities. It is not enough to engage readers on Twitter; outlets must find a way to monetize those interactions. The publications that do this successfully will thrive in the digital age; the ones that do not will disappear.”
ScribbleLive allows online publications to do exactly that. By using our Syndication Marketplace, content producers have the opportunity to create real-time content and provide new revenue streams, and content consumers can offer readers original, authoritative coverage as it happens.
Recently Mashable syndicated their coverage of the Apple iPhone 5 announcement more than 80 media outlets around the world, extending their brand while receiving outlets were able to provide coverage of an event that would have been otherwise unavailable, or worse, based coverage on unreliable social fodder.
ScribbleLive is poised to create a new ecosystems of content creators, distributors, brands and journalists that emphasize original, real-time content.
There’s no event like an Apple event. The tech giant’s annual conference, WWDC, kicks off Monday with a keynote by their CEO Tim Cook at 10am PT/1pm ET. Like previous Apple events, this one won’t be streamed live, so your best way to follow the presentation is through the real-time coverage of liveblogs.
In addition to supporting liveblogs around the world, we will also be syndicating content from two of the world’s top technology sites, Mashable and Apple Insider. This exclusive, high-quality content is available for our clients to syndicate into their liveblogs; each client can then edit it and customize it for their audience.
We’ve highlighted the liveblogs covering the keynote event and will be updating this blog post throughout the day.
Apple WWDC 2012 – Keynote Tim Cook Live Blogs
Mashable
Apple Insider
CNET – WWDC 2012 live blog
The Next Web – Apple’s WWDC 2012 Keynote
CNN – Apple Keynote Liveblog
TechnoBuffalo – WWDC 2012 Live Blog
Today’s iPhone
International Live Blogs
Apfeleimer.de – German
iphoneItalia – Italian
Le Journal du Geek – French
Giga – German
Vocento – Spanish
ispazio.net – Italian
Syndicated Live Blogs (syndicating Mashable +AppleInsider’s content)
Variety – Live from Apple’s keynote
Irish Examiner – Live coverage
Canada.com – Live coverage
WPTV News Channel – Apple Keynote (syndicated from Mashable)
MSN Russia (Russian) – WWDC 2012
CBC (Canada) – WWDC Liveblog (syndicated from Mashable)
Toronto Star (Canada) – (Syndicated from Mashable and Apple Insider)
Boston.com - Liveblog Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference
Local Syndicated Live Blogs (syndicated from Mashable & AppleInsider)
WMTW News 8 – Portland, Maine
WMUR 9 – New Hampshire
WPBF 25 – West Palm Beach, Florida
WPTZ 5 – Burlington Vermont
WXII12 - Winston-Salem, North Carolina
WYFF4 – Greenville, South Carolina
WLWT - Cincinnati, Ohio
WLKY - Louisville, Kentucky
WISN – Milwaukee, Wisconsin
WGAL 8 - Lancaster, Pennsylvania
WDSU 6 – New Orleans, Louisiana
WBAL 11 – Baltimore, Maryland
WTAE – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
WAPT News – Jackson, Mississippi
KSBW – Salinas, California
KCCI – Des Moines, Iowa
KOCO – Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
With rapid growth comes challenges, and during the Apple event today we stumbled. This was a disappointment to our customers, who expressed their unhappiness in no uncertain terms.
Since the last major Apple event in October, we devoted significant resources to prepare for today. We believed we solved the problem. We didn’t.
Here’s what happened today:
Throughout the morning, we saw a steady climb in traffic. Our servers performed well until 12:45 p.m. when the CPU spiked on all servers responsible for serving our customers’ websites. Our team began investigating immediately, and discovered the processes responsible for serving our websites were using excessive resources. The issue was traced to a problem connecting to our database cluster from each web server. This caused the sites to lock up and become unresponsive.
Over the next hour, we tracked down a configuration setting that limited the number of database connections. It wasn’t a limit we hit during our load-tests, but it became a factor under the load of an Apple event, which is significantly higher than our average daily traffic. We immediately changed our load-balancing configuration to spread the traffic between all available servers. Our sites quickly began to stabilize.
[Graph: CPU utilization on one of our web server nodes. The peaks represent the CPU spikes, followed by a recovery once we changed our load-balancing configuration]
The platform is now up and running normally to meet the needs of our customers.
Some of our customers may have lost confidence in us. We’re committed to identifying and repairing all problems, and restoring their faith in a platform that we firmly believe is second to none. To demonstrate our commitment to this goal, we will announce a date for a public load-test within the next two weeks. Anyone interested can watch a real-time test of our technology equivalent to an Apple event.
We know we have to work hard to win back our customer’s trust. This will be a long-term effort but we are committed to doing whatever it takes to prove to our customers and their customers that ScribbleLive is the world’s leader in real-time content delivery.
We value our customers and trust they have in us every day. We look forward to our next opportunity to prove that trust is well placed.
Michael De Monte, CEO
Livebloggers all over the web were in a flurry over Apple’s education announcement today.
The tech giant announced iBooks 2 and iBooks Author, two iPad tools the company released with hopes to “reinvent the textbook.”
Apple did not provide a live stream of today’s iBooks releases, so it was up to livebloggers to keep information flowing.
Using ScribbleLive, media such as CNET, The Verge, Reuters and Mashable updated their readers every few seconds during the event.
Reuters published a stream of quotes from the announcement and photos of the presentation. Their liveblog also featured posts pulled in from Twitter and readers’ comments.
The Verge filled eight pages with photos, links and text in their liveblog. They added more than a photo a minute during the event.
Mashable and CNET used embedded Scribble liveblogs to inform their readers about the announcement, keeping the conversation with readers lively and up-to-the-minute on their sites.