There are two aspects to the Midway, which will be located alongside the larger ONA19 Exhibit Hall on the third floor of the Sheraton New Orleans. The Midway’s exhibiting area is where attendees can learn about emerging technologies, experience demos and get trained on practical tools to help redefine and amplify their work. The adjacent programming space will feature a series of moderated panels and curated interactive demos.
Now strike up the band — it’s time to announce the ONA19 Midway participants! These groups will be working with ONA to put on a Midway experience that is dynamic and inspires your digital journalism work. We will share programming details later this summer.
- ONA19 Midway Patron Sponsor: WordPress.com VIP offers a scalable and secure managed platform, expert code review and end-to-end guidance on running content applications at scale. They provide hosting and support for some of the biggest brands on the web, including News Corp, Time, Inc., and Facebook.
- AlertMe helps publishers develop deeper 1-1 connections with readers, driving traffic, data, revenue and a reduction of dependency on Facebook. Because readers opt-in for specific story themes, they click subsequent alerts and create site traffic almost 40% of the time. AlertMe will be in the Start-Up Alley on Thursday only.
- Alley, a distributed team located across the United States and Canada, collectively forms a professional fellowship that excels at audience research, user experience, visual design, information architecture, data visualization, software engineering, development operations and technical training to make news products — and processes — run more efficiently.
- Amenaza Roboto is a platform that provides Latin American and global tech news, podcasts and videos for technologists and business people that need to upgrade from analog to digital, in Spanish. Amenaza Roboto will be in the Start-Up Alley on Thursday only.
- Earbank makes it faster and easier for journalists to find, license and download high-quality historical news audio sound bites for use in their projects (think ‘Shutterstock’ for news audio). It is also a marketplace where journalists can sell licenses for news audio clips they have recorded, to buyers such as documentary producers and digital textbook publishers. Earbank will be in the Start-Up Alley on Friday only.
- Embracing both spectacle and story, Espii Studios is an experiential design studio that develops sound and visuals for live performances, immersive experiences, and virtual/augmented reality. Led by Sadah Espii Proctor, the company brings an artistic, technological, and community perspective to each production. Espii Studios will be in the Start-Up Alley on Friday only.
- The Globe and Mail’s innovative predictive analytics tool, Sophi, was built in-house by data scientists to optimize both ad revenue and subscription revenue, going beyond simply clicks and time spent to help newsrooms understand what readers value. It helps their newsroom focus on creating high-quality content that acquires and retains subscribers, and build the business they want to become in the future.
- Four Kitchens builds websites and apps for organizations that depend on large-scale or unconventional content. They help organizations figure out their needs, build and migrate to new systems and maintain existing systems. They can be a full-service team or can augment an existing team.
- Headliner helps podcasters promote their podcasts via video on social media. They also happen be a free online social video maker. Headliner will be in the Start-Up Alley on Friday only.
- Hearken helps newsrooms open up their reporting processes to better listen to, serve and reflect the public. They do that through a combination of consulting and technology.
- Hindsight has created a new framework and delivery for native search for digital media companies to improve reader engagement and reader monetization. Their Smart-Tagging technology pre-identifies search terms in an article and attaches internal related content, further context on the topic and highly targeted advertising (native or video), all accessible to the reader with a single click (or hover) on the term. Hindsight will be in the Start-Up Alley on Thursday only.
- IRIS.TV offers video intelligence and programming solutions for broadcasters and publishers. Their AI-based video recommendation and data enablement technology allows news publishers to scale video creation, distribution and monetization.
- Logically uses cutting-edge AI models to enhance and improve user’s news consumption whilst fostering and promoting open, and civil public discourse. Logically also collaborates with other organisations to build tools for journalists and improve verification and fact-checking processes within the industry itself. Logically will be in the Start-Up Alley on Thursday only.
- LucidWeb is developing a SaaS platform for distributing immersive media, making the WebXR distribution standard more accessible to online publishers. LucidWeb will be in the Start-Up Alley on Friday only.
- Mapbox is the location data platform for mobile and web applications. They provide building blocks to add location features like maps, search and navigation into any experience you create.
- The News Project has created a world-class suite of technology and tailored services to address the critical need for sustainable business models in the news marketplace. Their mission is to empower journalists, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and investors to launch high-impact news properties rapidly and operate them successfully.
- Nordot runs a content sharing platform that enables publishers to share content, distribution channels, and revenue while saving cost. They are a cloud application service and offer our CMS, API, and data storage for free.
- PUBLIQ Foundation is a blockchain-distributed independent media ecosystem where content developers, publishers and advertisers join to create, own, govern and manage media, building and enjoying instant merit-based distribution of wealth. PUBLIQ Foundation will be in the Start-Up Alley on Friday only.
- Pico offers smart pop-ups and landing pages that allow publishers to manage email signups for newsletters and charge readers via subscription paywalls, paid newsletters, memberships, or donations. Tying it all together is their ARM (audience relationship management) platform: it’s one system that vertically integrates email signups, on-site analytics, and payments.
- Oovvuu connects video creators and publishers to bring the world’s premium video to newsrooms, using our proprietary AI to help journalists embed contextually-relevant video into news articles at the point of publication. Backed by IBM Watson, AWS and private equity, our mission is to put a video in every article, tell trusted news to a billion people and repatriate $20 billion from Facebook and Google back to the publishers and broadcasters who diligently and fearlessly report the world around us.
- Readefined is an audience engagement engine that helps power quality over quantity for online content. Their unique technology can better predict, measure, amplify, reward, and monetize quality audience engagement. Readefined will be in the Start-Up Alley on Thursday only.
- Trint‘s mission is to go beyond automated transcription by using AI to provide the world’s most innovative platform for searching, editing, collaborating and getting the most out of audio and video content. Trint automatically generates transcripts of recorded audio in just minutes. The Trint Editor marries a text editor to an audio/video player, making it fast and easy to search and polish transcripts to perfection.
- Triton accelerates subscription growth for B2C companies. Triton’s platform utilizes user behavior data to help publishers understand their end-user personas and to illustrate their unique subscription journeys. Our tools allow publishers to look past engagement by measuring and optimizing directly to subscription value across their product, marketing, and content functions.
- University of Florida recently awarded $1.25 million to launch Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology, an initiative that will address declining trust driven, in part by the manipulation of powerful new technology and social networks.
- Vubble helps media organizations introduce AI into their newsrooms by organizing their video data, offering an AI-powered platform as a service and building new distribution tools like chatbots, smart newsletters and more. Vubble is also creating new tools that explain to audiences how algorithms impacted the stories in their newsfeeds.
- Widespider provides technology and a platform for the real-time search, aggregation and personalization of news and related content. Their proprietary AI personalization technology enables enhanced features such as alerts, collections and patent-protected fine-tuning of personalization profiles. Widespider will be in the Start-Up Alley on Thursday only.
- Zephr (formerly known as Blaize) is a SaaS technology company that supports the subscription economy. Their product enables businesses to rapidly build, deploy and optimise personalised customer journeys that appeal to millions of people. Its first application is in the disruption of paywalls, where our market-leading capabilities have helped the likes of News Corporation, Which? and Dennis Publishing to implement fast, frictionless and flexible subscription offerings.