Viafoura Opens New York Office

By Chris Advansun | Posted in Uncategorized | May 8, 2013 | Comment(s)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Toronto – May 8, 2013 – Viafoura announced this morning the opening of a New York office, which is located at 291 Broadway in lower Manhattan, just north of City Park Hall. The office will primarily house sales, marketing and account management personnel, and will accommodate the rapid growth of Viafoura’s team.

The company’s first satellite outpost, Viafoura’s New York office will allow it to more effectively serve its growing roster of local clients and partners. “Given the traction we’ve gained in New York, opening an office in the city made perfect sense,” said Jesse Moeinifar, CEO of Viafoura. “We look forward to staffing up the new office in the coming months, eventually building out a substantial sales and marketing team as well as account management and integration personnel.”

NEW YORK ADDRESS
291 Broadway, suite 302
New York, NY 10007
Google Map

ABOUT VIAFOURA
Viafoura is the leading audience engagement and monetization platform for large media companies. Our software‐as‐a‐service platform helps our clients increase audience engagement, capture valuable user data and deliver smarter, data‐driven monetization strategies. Our growing client roster includes Hearst Media, France 24, Bell Media, Discovery Channel, Gatehouse Media, and other top‐tier media brands. To learn more about our technology and how it can drive monetization for your company, visit www.viafoura.com.

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MEDIA CONTACT
Chris Advansun, Director of Marketing at Viafoura
Cell Phone: 647.966.6743
Email: chris@viafoura.com

Anonymity, Balance and Better Comments

By Hamza | Posted in Industry | May 7, 2013 | Comment(s)

There’s a habit that’s circulating around a lot of Internet writers that is simple and to the point: never, under any circumstances, read the comments to something you produce. It’s gone so far that there’s even a Twitter bot that will remind you at 12:30PM EST, every day, that you should avoid it whenever possible. There’s a reason for this: from a writer’s perspective, it’s often worth avoiding the chance of a barrage of useless, harassing comments than the odd good one.

Sites like YouTube are especially hit hard by this, as content creators are starting to omit comments entirely at the expense of alienating a fanbase. While the marketer in all of us would cringe at such a prospect, the human being may not: especially seeing the vitriol that some have to put up with, it becomes difficult to blame them. While positive feedback may bolster a writer’s ego, it is all too easy for one negative comment to foster the seeds of doubt; it rarely matters if it’s substantiated or not, either.

The writer feels attacked, closing their comments, and the community, without a place to feel interactive, feels victimized.

Why Does This Happen?

  • The ability to create anonymous “throwaway” accounts makes it easy for words not to have consequences.
  • Due to the ability to spew hate and then evaporate, it is often more work for a writer to moderate than to turn comments off altogether.
  • There is only so much mental capacity that one has to get harassed or attacked.
  • Low quality discussions foster large amounts of “noise” that still may be dealt with, even if they are not particularly negative. This generates apathy towards the comments section regardless of content.

How Can I Change This?

  • Sadly, a large part of the solution is to simply be better. By being the change you wish to see in the world, you both foster a better environment for users around you, but also may make a positive name for yourself, as well.
  • By using a “real name” account for your comments or by using a social media account, you enter into a social contract with the writer. You show that you are willing to stake your reputation on the words you’re speaking, and there are consequences if you choose to be inappropriate. In return, the writer can put greater stock in your answer.
  • Make your comments harder to gloss over. If you like a certain part of an article, say why. This may seem like more work, but it is easier for a writer to appreciate the system of commenting if he doesn’t have to put up with seeing “First!” or simple “Good post.” contributions. Especially for publications where the writer is not being paid, positive feedback reinforces that their work is appreciated; if it isn’t, well-thought-out criticisms (not attacks) will allow them to improve.
  • As an admin, consider a posting system that rewards users for connecting “real” accounts like Twitter or Facebook. Consider gamifying your comments with badges or upvotes/downvotes, giving the users incentive to self-moderate or be better themselves.

As more and more of our content creators shift to the Internet to drive their brands, the importance of cultivating a positive ecosystem intensifies. While most writers are aware of the vulnerability of posting an article online, it it not unreasonable to want a certain level of courtesy while they do it.

There will always be a balance, however: some users prize and value their anonymity, and will resent that being taken away in the event of a registered account or forced social media usage. Sadly, one might need to consider what’s more valuable: a happy content producer, or a happier (if not more rambunctious) audience to consume it.

Striking A Balance With Social Logins

By Hamza | Posted in Technology Blog | May 7, 2013 | Comment(s)

The topic of social log-ins has always been polarizing. One one hand, they offer convenience by being able to centralize logins for users, and can often make inroads to engagement easier by lessening the hoops that users have to jump through in order to find your brand. On the other hand, users may see the login as a hoop itself, a barrier between them and your site.

TechCrunch recently made a post highlighting the stats from social login service Janrain, which allows sites to plug in social media credentials from other services to sign up for their own. Of course, the primary leader seems to be Facebook, with Google Accounts bringing up a respectable second place. As Google+ accounts have been enabled recently, the next set of data could include Facebook’s 46% lead dropping more than it already has.

That 46% represents a 3% drop since Q4 2012, as Google’s share rose by the same amount. While that’s hardly a large chunk, it shows a previous leader losing ground and someone seizing it almost immediately. The question is: why?

The typical reason why users enter a site through social login is convenience. This is the foundation which the concept is built on, as if it’s more convenient to sign up with a separate account, they would. For brands, they must keep this in mind: all benefits to their product are secondary in the users’ mind to a basic need for a smooth, easy transition.

However, as Facebook has grown, the added layers of complication for the user has frown with it. Often having to sign up for a site in the first place represents one barrier, but being asked to give a brand access to their account, even through a prompt for an automated Like or Follow, give another. Throw possible notifications, event invites, or other pestering, it becomes a matter of what users are willing to stand for the original convenience of being able to use their Facebook.

Often, the best-implemented social logins will use the service in the more subtle ways possible. A game that gives users the options of signing up won’t make them choose another username if one already exists. They won’t need to choose a new password or e-mail. They will be able to integrate their already-existing friends list to reduce the amount of work they have to in order to connect. Having a value-added convenience to using Facebook with your product allows you to gain goodwill the old fashioned way; users don’t like feeling that they’re just another asset being monetized.

Perhaps that’s where Google and Google+ are gaining ground. The advantage of their low population is that brands may not see them as valuable, making the overall experience smoother. Without being pestered to join Circles, subscribe to a page or turn their feeds into billboards, they can get around what they wanted to do in the first place: using someone’s service without being encumbered.

The balance between benefiting from your users and providing them a pleasurable service is complicated to strike. Sway too far to one side and you’ll alienate them, and stray too far to the other and you won’t be able to monetize. However, it may be wise to err on the side of caution when adding layers of complication to your service: brands can always find new ways of engaging users to grow, but the PR that comes with a disgruntled base is hard to make up.

A Deeper Look At Google Glass: Monetization, Competition & Personalization

By Hamza | Posted in Industry | May 7, 2013 | Comment(s)

The Internet was in an uproar the other day after Google announced that developers would be unable to both charge for and advertise in apps for Google Glass, their wearable computer. Naturally, this stirred a debate; how would Google be able to foster its main business (ad sales) with a new product that seems to shirk them?

Eventually, news came to light that this would likely be changed in the future, but it’s still interesting to think about both sides of the argument.

On the Side of Developers

  • Without a way to monetize their creations on the platform, developers may not find the Google Glass project attractive. Everyone is entitled to payment for their work, but only the biggest companies may be able to afford a free app to satiate users.
  • Even with those large companies (I could imagine Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare) that can afford to offer their products for free, there ususally is a catch. All of these services use the data that their users provide for tailored (and sponsored) results. Such companies would likely need this policy to change to make Glass attractive to them.
  • Without these A-list developers making quality apps for the partform, Glass stands at a massive disadvantage, especially if other companies decide to put out competing products. While Glass is a “killer app” in itself, it will be sustained in the long run by passionate people making great products – without those, the platform could flounder after its initial fanfare.

On the Side of Consumers/Google

  • Google Glass represents a complete tonal shift in the way we compute. Like the shift from desktop to mobile and tablet screens, a projected image in front of our face changes everything from personal safety to social conventions. Google likely recognizes this and wants the transformation to take place as smoothly as possible. Being able to advertise (heh) a platform free of corporate hitches would likely make it a lot easier to sell to the public.
  • This goes double when the inclusion of the Glass’ camera is thrown into the mix. People are concerned about their privacy and personal time as it is, and to introduce ads that the user has less agency over may complicate integration into daily life. With hypotheticals already being brought up about the unwanted use of the camera to analyze surroundings, preferences and to take stealthy photos, Google needs to avoid looking like a boogeyman as much as possible. Their corporate “Don’t be evil” credo likely plays a large role here.
  • Also factoring in is the personal safety of people, and the introduction of standards when it comes to these ads. The ability to be distracted, even for a moment, jeopardizes Glass as a product in a driving/cycling situation, and any chance of minimizing that risk must be taken. It may only take one bad PR story about a drive crashing while Glass-ing in order to deep-six the project as a whole.

Ultimately, the whole concept of Glass is interesting because of the extreme potential and extreme care with which it needs to be implemented. If done right, it could change the way humankind looks at the world and the data we consume; if done wrong it could sour the entire category of wearable computing for the foreseeable future.

A Look Back at Big Data Week 2013

By Hamza | Posted in Uncategorized | May 1, 2013 | Comment(s)

Last week, we had the pleasure of playing host to Toronto’s celebration of Big Data Week 2013 (#BDW13). A unique global platform of interconnected community events focusing on the social, political, technological and commercial impacts of Big Data, #BDW13 brought together a global community of data scientists, data technologies, data visualizers and data businesses spanning six commercial, financial, social and technological sectors. Viafoura hosted three days of intensive and enlightening discussions with industry experts, an exclusive cocktail and networking event, and a frantically fun Hackathon. Here’s our recap of all the activity from this past week:

Day 1

The week opened with Ali Ghafour (CTO, Viafoura) and Victor Anjos (Senior Developer, Viafoura) addressing a crowd of CEOs, CTOs, VPs and Developers on How Publishers Can Utilize Big Data. Following that, Christopher Barry (Chief Science Officer, Authintic) took the stage to discuss The Business Value of Social Data.

 

 

Day 2

On the second evening, Dr. Srini Srinivasan (Co-Founder & VP Engineering, Aerospike) addressed a packed house on Big Data Learnings From A Vendor’s Perspective. Following that, Pete Forde (Founder, BuzzData & Unspace) illustrated how People Are Dying To Get The Data.

 

Day 3

The intensity of the discussions went up a notch on day three when Adam Muise (Solutions Engineer, Hortonworks) dove into What is Hadoop, How it’s being used, and What the Future Holds. Joel Perras (Senior Consultant Big Data, Fictive Kin) then proceeded to educate the room on Building Vector Machine Classifier For Detecting Malicious IPs.

 

Cocktail Party

The team suited up on Thursday for a networking event hosted at Toronto’s Drake Hotel.

Our panel was comprised of 3 leading exeucitves from top-tier media brands: Tom Cochran (CTO, Atlantic Media), Craig Saila (Director of Digital Media, The Globe and Mail) and Tessa Sproule (Director of Digital, CBC).

The panel was moderated by our very own Chris Advansun (Director of Marketing, Viafoura).

This invitation-only event saw the venue packed with 200 media industry executives. Lively conversation and great food and drinks went on throughout the evening.

 

 

Hackathon

With a diverse set of projects, topics and languages attempted, the Toronto Big Data Week Hackathon, co-hosted by Viafoura and the Ryerson Digital Media Zone (DMZ) was an overwhelming success. The types of projects taken on ranged from Forex trading applications based on the Sentiment of a company throughout a certain time period (visualized against the currency’s value at that moment in time) by UFinance to an analysis of the newspaper’s (in this case, one of our sponsors, the Guardian) authors throughout their history with the paper. As with many of the competitors in this time-crunched, fanatical attempt at the use of new technologies, APIs and environment, even the judging did not go off without a hitch. But when it was all said and done, House Crunch, an app designed to gauge the level of enthusiasm regarding the Housing Market based on people’s views of it through time, which made the data easy to ingest got highest marks and took home the $1,000 prize for most innovative, useful and creative prize.

 

 

Along with the aforementioned projects, here is a list detailing all the projects completed during the Big Data Week Hackathon in Toronto (in no particular order):

Project/Team Name

Notes

UFinance

A ForEx trading application to help people navigate through the market and make descisions based on the sentiment of a population.

Messi 2.0

An application that attempts to answer the question: does article engagement drive real data?

Blue Monkey

A Google Chrome Extension aimed to determine the bias to the content that the user is consuming.

Emomap

Analyize the emotial score of the authors over time.

Jon/KJ

A timeline visualization of topics, themes and articles from 2003 until 2013.

RAJ

A timeline visualization of sentiment of articles over time using a zoom enabled time slider.

News trends

A visual representation of the newsworthy items over time via engagement.

Richard & Kelly

Statistics and visualizations wrapped around one section of the newspaper; obituary stats.

House Crunch

An easy to follow visual representation of the state of the housing market based on sentiment.

Burrough Broswer

A (near) real-time view of the best things to do or see in the UK based on the news items using sentiment and topic analysis.

Winners:
1 – House Crunch
2 – Blue Monkey
3 – Burrough Browser

We had an absolutely great time hosting #BDW13. We’d like to express a huge thank you to Ryerson University and Ryerson DMZ for making the week possible. We’d also like to thank Semantria, Lexalytics, Amazon Web Services, DataSift and The Guardian for making our Hackathon possible. Most importantly, thank you to all the speakers, panelists and attendees for attending. See you at #BDW14 where we do it all over again!

 

Viafoura Hack-a-thon a Success!

By Ali Ghafour | Posted in Big Data | April 30, 2013 | Comment(s)

The viafoura big data week hack-a-thon was a success! A hack-a-thon is a 12/24 or 48 hour non stop programming marathon (ours was 12 hours held last Saturday). Teams present their ideas at the end. Judging ensues and the team with the best project gets street cred and/or wins a prize. Hackers are usually fuelled by coffee, energy drinks, pizza, subs and a desire to learn.

We had an amazing turn out from multiple disciplines: data scientists, database developers, UI/UX and psychologists. We even had some curious people come by and check out to see what a hack-a-thon is and enjoyed the final presentations.

Thank you all for taking the time to come out, learn and meet other curious people.

Below is a list of the winners, along with some photos from the event.

 

1st Place – House Crunch ($1,000 grand prize)

An easy to follow visual representation of the state of the housing market based on sentiment.

Source code on Github

Team: Kevin Yuen, Kent English and Elgin Chau Continue Reading »

Test Automation/QA Engineer

By Ali Ghafour | Posted in Careers | April 30, 2013 | Comment(s)

Hello, my name is Ali Ghafour co-founder and CTO at viafoura. We are working in a very exciting space and with our growth, are looking for a Test Automation/QA Engineer.  Quality is very important to us and we would like someone to take the lead in this position.

You will work with our entire team (front end, product managers, back end) to expand and maintain our large-scale test automation systems. Every employee at viafoura LOVES what they do. You will need to bring the same level of passion to your role.

Responsibilities:

  • Design, architect and extend our automated test platform while working alongside our development team to rapidly and easily push new code into our codebase
  • Write code for regression / functional / load / integration testing
  • Collaborate with the engineering, support, and management team to improve our software development life cycle and deliver quality software
  • Provide support services to our clients

Skills & Experience:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS, Engineering or related discipline
  • Expertise in working with automated test frameworks
  • Expertise with Continuous Integration (CI) Tools like Jenkins
  • Expertise in using dynamic languages like JavaScript, Node, PHP and Python
  • 2+ Years of Experience in a QA / QC / Agile Project Management role

Nice to Have:

  • Experience with PyUnit, JUnit, Selenium or other automated testing tools
  • Experience with front-end testing strategies
  • Understanding of difference between functional, security, performance testing along with experience of different QA methodologies, and test case generation
  • Understanding of data-structures, modular design, and object-oriented code
  • You must be a self-starter and require minimum supervision. A startup allows you a lot of freedom, use it well!!

About Viafoura

  • Viafoura is a tool for media companies (publishers, broadcasters, brands, etc) that facilitates commenting through text, audio and video and highlights the best people and conversations. We also provide deep insight into these conversations with our analytics.
  • Viafoura is on some of the largest sites in North America including hearst, CBC, TC Media getting your work visible to millions and millions of users
  • We are funded by some great investors have an amazing team and revenues are growing FAST.

 

Thanks for stopping by, please read our career page for more information about our culture and cool office space! http://viafoura.com/careers

 

Viafoura Partners with Ryerson, Amazon, Lexalytics, Semantria & The Guardian to Hack Big Data

By Ali Ghafour | Posted in Big Data | April 24, 2013 | Comment(s)

On Saturday April 27th, viafoura is hosting a hack-a-thon to see what interesting ideas developers, product designers, and data scientists can come up with when given large data sets.

Hackers are armed with 10 years worth of  news stories from the Guardian (one of UK’s largest news publications), computing power from Amazon ($250 credit for each person), a natural language processing tool (Lexalytics, Semantria) and space donated by Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone. Mix all this together and you have all the building blocks to come up with some amazing big data projects.

All projects will be open sourced afterwards for the betterment of the community.

Viafoura will award prizes for first place ($1,000), second ($500) and third ($250). There is also a special $500 prize for best use of NLP (sponsored by Lexalytics, Semantria)

Note: Amazon has some cool data sets that developers can augment the Guardian data with. More info here http://aws.amazon.com/datasets/.

 

3 Simple, Elegant Productivity Apps

By Hamza | Posted in Uncategorized | April 10, 2013 | Comment(s)

A problem that many apps may run into is a desire to be a Swiss Army knife for their users. While the idea of providing many services can be alluring, there’s something to be said for dead-set simplicity. These three companies are making waves with newbies and power-users alike for doing fewer things, but doing them really, really well.

Mailbox (iOS, free)

Mailbox’s hype is built around the visualization of the queue to get to use it. Since it’s recently launched, they are wisely rolling out service in waves, instead of a potentially crippling mass-opening. However, when you actually get to use the app, it can be a great tool to ease users into the concepts of Inbox Zero.

Since everything is controlled by swiping gestures, it becomes extremely easy to archive, delete or postpone your mail until later. While power users may find the feature set a little lacking particularly due to the lack of labels, Mailbox seems to be concentrating on getting the everyday user (who may still be struggling with iOS mail) a step up from the norm.

Mailbox finds a niche for people who want to deal with mail on the go without necessarily answering it. After prioritizing when you’ll work with it, you can get back to work, worry free.

Forecast.io (iOS/Web, free)

How many times have you gone to the Weather Network or Weather Channel, only to be met with an antiquated interface, poor depiction of data and sometimes more information than you need? With an equal amount of design and elegance being put into apps, why should the weather be any different?

After putting your city information into Forecast.io’s site (or enabling location data on your browser), you’ll find that your forecast data will be wrapped up in a lovely, minimalist package. The animations are simple and you won’t be cluttered by advertisements – somehow, the Dark Sky Company can make the mundane sexy.

You can also save a bookmark to the site onto your iOS or Android home screen for easy reference: it’ll use your phone’s location data to suit your needs on the go.

Do It (Tomorrow) (iOS/Web, free)

Have you ever tried to use a productivity app, but got turned off by the massive amount of user interface you would have to wade through to use it? Like with Mailbox, some people thrive on using labels and lists and reminders to get stuff done, while others need something a little… simpler.

Enter Do It (Tomorrow), which gives you exactly three options: write something down for today, cross it off your list, or move it tomorrow’s list. When the day rolls over, tomorrow’s list becomes today’s, and so on; items never become “overdue”, but if left alone for too long they can pile up quickly. For those of us who like to see all that we need to do (and maybe use Google Calendar for more long-term projects) this can be a lifesaver – however, for many professionals this may just be a stepping stone to something bigger.

Thinking About Intelligent Content

By Hamza | Posted in Industry | April 10, 2013 | Comment(s)

With more and more devices presenting ways to read on the go, a discussion has naturally started on what happens when we run out. Finding ways to get your content onto the devices of users and into their brains has been a longtime topic as well, and with digital devices like eReaders and tablets, there is opportunity to shift some of those curation duties to a computerized brain – one that can be influenced.

Social networks and Google already use your search and browser history to determine what is the most relevant piece of information you need. Soon enough, that same type of recommendation engine may replace traditional gatekeepers like editors, people, or web sites as a whole. This post from PaidContent goes a step further, suggesting that dynamically-generated content could replace web sites the same way that MP3s caused us to shift away from CDs as a complete package of music.

Naturally, there’s benefits to this, as the major advantage lies in discovery of new things and the chance that new readers will latch onto brands they didn’t know existed. It’s part of the allure of music streaming sites like Grooveshark, Pandora or Songza – for many of us, we want our own tastes to exist as a starting point from where we can find other things that may be similar. In these situations we exist not in a series of specific needs, but in abstract wants; we want to read more inspiring stories about people, or more hard-hitting exposés about sports, but don’t know where to find them.

And for people who don’t want to have to sift through hundreds of websites and people to determine “what’s good”, this is perfect.

However, the flip side of the argument may make brands who want to establish communities nervous. With emphasis being places on the minute-to-minute satisfaction of a want, there’s less time spent absorbing a product as a whole. Like how many CDs had awesome liner art, heartfelt thank-yous to fans and hidden tracks, web sites with more to offer than just text between tags may find themselves left behind. By focusing on such a disjointed way of consuming content, there is little commitment to any one person, network or idea: read, mark it done with, then move on.

There is also the question of the power of “the search”. Like many famous quotes suggest, often-times people pride themselves on the journey, not the destination. Being able to look for different articles “the old fashioned way” opens up a number of possibilities when it comes to communities, personalities and viewpoints. While an algorithm may give you exactly what you want, time after time, it may not give you what you need, the chance to explore, broaden your horizons and learn.

Regardless, as technology advances we will probably see variations of both “sides” to this issue, and hopefully a pleasant middle ground. There are indications that content can become increasingly relevant while still placing value on the people, brands and communities that produce it.

About Viafoura

Viafoura is an easy to integrate audience engagement and social monetization platform specifically for premium online publishers. Build a strong and active community around your content with our leading multimedia commenting and community social plugins.

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