Today's Entrepreneur is Melinda Wittstock, CEO and founder of NewsiT. NewsiT is a mobile ‘big data’ platform for real-time algorithmic validation of original crowd-sourced content for brands, campaigns, media seeking to attract and retain committed consumers. People connect around interests they share and people they trust to get more relevant and accurate information – and valuable conversations with other users.
According to her VEQ, Melinda is a thought leader and is good at sales execution and product management.
NewsiT is competing in the Splash SF startup competition. Check out who's competing, and vote for your favorite or enter to compete.
Vator’s community is the home to entrepreneurs who embrace their passion and follow their dreams. Our profiles allow members to express themselves by sharing their interests, lessons learned, as well as bits and pieces of their roller-coaster journey.
These profiles give entrepreneurs an opportunity to showcase themselves and tell their story. So if you are an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur, or even an aspiring entrepreneur, we'd like to hear from you.
I am a(n):
Entrepreneur
Companies I've founded or co-founded:
NewsiT, Capitol News Connection, Montreal Mirror
Startups I worked for:
NewsiT, Capitol News Connection, Montreal Mirror
If you are an entrepreneur, why?
I want to change the world.
My favorite startups:
Airbnb, LinkedIn, Evernote, Pandora, Instagram
What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?
Reward and frustration are two sides of the same coin. No one ever said being an entrepreneur and pioneer was easy. I love being able to put my prescience and vision into practice, and being ahead of the curve is empowering if at times a little lonely. You need superhuman strength from within, the stamina to stay the course and humility to know when to change course. I love iterating to create a product people want to use - something that can improve lives. And working to build the great team of 'A' people you need to succeed.
What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs make?
Either surrounding themselves with 'yes-men' and b-listers, or failing to identify and plan for the 'what if's'.
What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?
1. There are things you cannot control, and success is measured by how you respond and learn from challenges. (Or, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger".
2. The team is everything. Bring in people smarter with different perspectives and expertise. Hire A people.
3. Don't expect to raise money until you have a great product people are using and paying for.
What do people misunderstand about being an entrepreneur?
They think it is easy and glamorous.
What investors, angels, VCs, do you most admire and why?
At NewsiT we see our investors as partners in growing an exciting, scalable and game changing business. We admire angels and VCs who work with management to grow valuable businesses. These are investors - not speculators!
(Want to be profiled? Just fill out your Vator profile and we'll find you! Or you can email newsroom@vator.tv)
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NewsiT’s mobile and social platform verifies original crowd-sourced content in real time to help media, campaigns and brands attract targeted and committed consumers.
End-users get more relevant and accurate real time information – and valuable conversations with other users. People connect around interests they have in common to create, verify and share original content. NewsiT’s mobile, tablet and web crowd-sourcing apps enable anyone to report and share key story elements in text, video and photos. NewsiT algorithms, rating and reputation scoring systems and fact-checkers interact with smart NewsiT communities to guarantee veracity, quality, relevance and influence.
NewsiT drives early and recurring revenue by licensing its technology, processes and crowd-sourcing software to media, campaigns and brands to help them retain and attract highly-targeted and committed consumers. A ‘plug & play’ mobile SDK and web API provides NewsiT partners with a crowd-reporting user interface customizable by topic, location, and style – powered by sophisticated algorithms and processes to vet, validate and reward both original contributions and raw content mined from Twitter, YouTube and other sources. Partners bring their existing users into NewsiT communities, while attracting new users via the NewsiT platform. NewsiT scales by enabling self-propelling communities worldwide, monetized by targeted contextual advertising and sponsorship.
Who wins? Consumers - and the brands, businesses, media, affinity groups and others that want to reach them 24/7.
NewsiT is a distributed solution that scales across multiple verticals worldwide with two primary sources of revenue:
— Step 1 - Platform Licensing Fees: Media, brands, affinity groups, agencies and businesses license our technology (algorithms, business processes, consumer-facing mobile/tablet/web APIs and analytics) to get quality content, reduce costs, grow, retain and reward users, and open new revenue streams as consumers move mobile.
— Step 2 – Sponsorship & Advertising: Partners bring their own pre-existing online networks and marketing to help NewsiT scale self-propelling communities aggregated by shared interest, creating a an efficient and effective market for sponsors and advertisers to target specific users cross-platform around valuable verticals.
NewsiT has the right team to deliver on a strong plan: CEO and founder Melinda Wittstock is a proven entrepreneur, results driver, social media expert and award-winning journalist. From the Times of London, BBC, CNBC to Capitol News Connection and NewsiT, she's driven traffic, revenue and ratings, built teams and businesses, sold licensing deals and advertising, and sweated many a payroll. Her team includes talented engineers across iOS, Ruby and Big Data, including CTO Craig Zingerline,and proven revenue drivers like Matt Prohaska, former SVP of Digital Advertising at AOL, who has sold or managed teams selling $2.5BN of advertising in 12 years. Advisers include Duncan Work, former Chief Scientist of LinkedIn, and Kevin Survance, former CTO of MapQuest.
NewsiT is on track to close licensing deals Q1 2013 worth $100,000 in the quarter – with a substantial pipeline of committed media, affinity and other customers.
Market trends heavily favor NewsiT prospects as social becomes ‘interest’ and ‘trust’ focused, and a $100BN annual US news advertising spend (and other vertical ad budgets addressed by NewsiT’s focus on consumer, health, small business, politics, environment, etc)– moves online/mobile. Mobile represents a $20BN+ opportunity in the US (KPCB). More than 107m Americans have smart-phones and 55m+ own tablets, with 25% getting news via mobile.
Consumers are migrating away from traditional media and creating their own content and relationships focused on what interests them. But much of this content is unreliable, irrelevant and repetitive and media, brands, and affinity groups lack efficient means to verify user-generated content made ubiquitous by social networks. Media groups are unable to sustain quality or respond quickly to the mobile migration of consumers given cost pressures. NewsiT provides an ‘end-to-end’ integrated solution that enables partners to grow/retain users, cut costs and boost revenue.
No other company has found an automated and scalable way to create and validate user-generated content of trust and personal relevance in real time at low cost. NewsiT is differentiated from other user-generated sites (NowPublic, AllVoices, Newsvine, CNN iReport, Reddit), social curating platforms (Flipboard, Instapaper, Storify, Flud), aggregators (Feedly, Prismatic, Google News, Pulse) and destination sites, by being first to:
— Deploy pattern recognition, predictive, natural language and other algorithms to real-time validation of raw content and source reputation
— Incentivize and reward user posts via reputation scoring, rating, game layer & recognition
— Create network effects around content creation and systems for trusted reciprocal conversation
— Cut through ‘information overload’ to unearth nuggets of valuable information ‘gold’
NewsiT is raising $3mm in Series A. Proceeds will be used primarily for Go to Market Execution (hiring and support for key sales/BD, engagement and revenue generating personnel) and Platform Enhancement (‘Next Gen’ Algorithms & Processes, iPad and Android SDK, ongoing UX improvements and implementation of 'reputation scoring' systems).
Joined Vator on
My grandmother told me I was 'disruptive' when at 5 I launched my first business. I'm an entrepreneur and award winning journalist who's driven traffic and revenue across TV, radio, print and web.
