It was great to sit-down with Matt Hartley and the Financial Post newspaper and talk a little about “live news” and where we see the real-time publishing market going. We were previously in the FP in November after our appearance on Dragon’s Den. Our interview is featured in the Financial Post newspaper today. Here’s a segment of the interview.
Every Apple announcement gets more and more busy around here, and today wasn’t any exception. The fun all started at 1pm EST as thousands of Apple fanboys and fangirls started hitting our dozens of liveblogs to see what Steve Jobs was going to announce. We had everybody from TechCrunch to Reuters liveblogging from the event.
At our peak we were serving thousands of hits per second across our three CDN providers and Amazon cloud-based infrastructure. For the first time, we had hundreds of people following along through ScribbleLive Mobile on their iPhone as well as online.
Thank you to everyone who joined us today and happy liveblogging!
Jonathan Keebler
CTO/Founder
With the launch of our new mobile app, we’re doing more and more with the geospatial data we receive. For example, here’s a heatmap of where all the posts came from on ScribbleLive during Apple iPad Launch today. Really great to see all the international traffic! Look for a range of new geo-aware features coming down the road 
ScribbleLive in the Financial Post today – “Tech Pitch With A Payout”
Our Dragons’ Den segment is now online for anyone who missed it. It’s the last pitch in this video: http://tinyurl.com/ybl5bap
Our Dragon’s Den episode airs on Nov 4th on CBC at 8pm EST! Can’t wait to finally see it.
Remember those ‘Simpsons’ beatniks (I believe it was Ned Flanders’ parents) who said, “You gotta help us, Doc. We’ve tried nothin’ and we’re all out of ideas?” I always think that’s a very true statement in Internet business for 2 reasons: you have to try things and you cannot run out of ideas. If you do, you might as well shut down your servers and walk away.
In yesterday’s issue of the Financial Post there was an article titled “Acclaim is not bankable” (later re-titled “The challenge of success: CoverItLive ponders its next step”) about our direct competitors in the liveblogging software space, CoverItLive. The premise of the article was, despite CoverItLive’s claims of being widely successful, it is simply impossible for them to get paying customers. In the past, CoverItLive’s founder has even blamed the fundamentals of how the web works: “It’s too challenging to come out with a completely new way of doing things and expect people to adapt it quickly and pay for it” (source).
I started my career as a web-developer. The first thing I learned when writing code was that bugs are unavoidable. They happen every day. You have two options when your program unexpectedly crashes: blame the computer it’s running on, or blame your code. Computer systems aren’t flawless (ask Windows ME), but if you’ve just added a new branch of code, and when you run it for the first time your program crashes, it’s pretty obvious that the code is the problem.
CoverItLive, I believe, may have made the same mistake every first-year programming student makes and blamed their machine: the economic system their business is trying to run on. Either they have invented a piece of software that is fundamentally unmonetizable, or they might be running out of ideas. On the web, running out of ideas is the point where often companies start blindly slapping ads on their products and hope to start making enough money to keep them going.
The irony is, CoverItLive only has to look a few blocks from their office in Toronto for an example of how to monetize the liveblogging space: ScribbleLive. Over the last year we have steadily grown our customer base of media companies paying fees to use our liveblogging platform. Many of them are ex- CoverItLive users that went from using their free widget, to paying for our platform.
Why would one of these media companies pay real money for a liveblogging service? The answer is simple: we create real value, and that value makes them money. ScribbleLive was built from the ground-up to be a seamless part of a company’s online strategy. We create real branded webpages that can be found by Google and increase page-tonnage (and SEO) on our customers’ URLs with our customers’ ads. By building our infrastructure in the Amazon Cloud, we’re able to provide our services at a fraction of the cost of CoverItLive, while scaling bigger and faster around large liveblogging events. By having real customers with real business requirements, we have a direct line to what those customers want which keeps our feature pipeline full and extremely targeted. In the past year we have produced over 3 times as many features as CoverItLive (with ScribbleLive even having a smaller staff), which will culminate this winter with the extension of our technology into a completely new space.
Over the next months, we will see diverging business models from our two companies, as we at ScribbleLive continue to develop our product and our company as a valuable partner to some of the world’s largest media companies. Through the next quarters, the market will shake out whose model is better. But at the end of the day, the proof is in the customers where we are a generation ahead of the fledgling business model of CoverItLive.
We have something we say at ScribbleLive all the time: every customer makes us better. The diversity in the marketplace constantly pushes us to evolve, and moulds us into an even better product. And if something doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. But at the end of the day, we will always blame our own code first.
Jonathan Keebler
CTO/Founder, ScribbleLive
In the last week we have rolled out a considerable amount of improvements to the Twitter integration portion of our live blogging tool. We’ve decreased the amount of time it takes to pull in tweets to mere seconds.
Earlier this week we added the ability to tweet a post from ScribbleLive out to your Twitter account. This is a much better way for you to share a live event with your friends instead of “live tweeting” and inundating your followers with updates to an event they might not care about. Instead, you can tweet just the really great points right from your live blog. We are the only ones to offer this useful feature in the live blogging space.
To continue to be the best live blogging tool available, now we have added the ability to follow a search term, @reply or #hashtag in real-time…and we mean real-time! In fact, it works so well that we have to limit the number of posts it absorbs to 15/min so your live blog is not flooded with so many tweets you can’t keep up (This is more than enough for most events. In our Enterprise solution we increase this cap). We also automatically filter out RT (re-tweets) and we do our best to prevent spammers from appearing in your stream.
Look for even cooler features around our Twitter integration in the coming weeks. These are just the tip of the iceberg as we continue to add even more great features to ScribbleLive this summer. Happy live blogging! 
P.S. Here’s a video walkthrough of how to use Auto Posting:
P.P.S. As always we cannot be responsible for the uptime of Twitter and the availability of its API or OAuth login. One of the reasons we suggest that ScribbleLive is a better real-time platform for live blogging
Live blogging is a lot more fun with images to match. That’s why we have made the ingestion of images into your event as easy as it comes. No asset manager to complicate things; just some great logic.
To begin with, if you paste a URL to an image into the writer post box, it will automatically grab that image and post it into your live blog. This works with many standard file formats.
Next, if you are using our Twitter integration to follow users or to scan for keywords, once you post or approve a tweet that contains an image URL like twitpic.com, yfrog.com, or flic.kr, we post the image (not just a link to it). This is a useful way to show the complete story around an exciting event. Imagine, at the end of the day you will have an archive of all the content, comments, tweets and images all in one place.
If you were an enterprise client, all this would be wrapped inside a fully branded site where all the content could be found by search engines and you could monetize the page views. Trying doing that on Twitter or with other live blogging competitive tools!
If that’s still not enough, why not link a Flickr account to your live event? It’s simple to do! Under the “Post to this Event” you will find the Flickr setup. Just choose the account you want to monitor (make sure you have permission though cuz it’s not cool to steal someone’s photo stream) and presto, your Flickr photos will start streaming into your live blog. Happy Live Blogging!
In respose to our live blogging power users, we are rolling out a great new feature we’re calling the Advanced Moderator Screen. It splits our default two column writer interface into four columns with your live blog on the left, followed by an entire column for your comments in moderation, followed by an entire column of twitter search results, followed by the usual sidebar on the right. You can view up to 1000 comments in moderation and tweets coming in in real-time. That’s a huge amount of information just waiting to be added to your live blog instantly.
Access the new Advanced Moderator Screen by clicking “Moderator View” in the “Advanced View” section in the side bar.
