Its been 10 days since we started rolling out our alpha and we’ve got news for you!
New Functionality
- Spread the word tools – We’ve added tools for you to tell the world about your assignment using Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, blogger and email.
This option is available while you post a new assignments or while you edit the assignment details.
- RSS feeds – Stay updated about new assignments using your RSS feed reader or start page. Look for the RSS icon on our newsroom.
- New notification options – We created a notification center that will help you control which notification you’ll get from iamnews. We’ve also created a notification that will be sent to you when someone posts new content in your assignment. To configure this go to you inbox and look for the “Notification Settings” link
Thats it for now. Let us know what you think about iamnews in our feedback forum here:
1. Its been 3 hectic days since we released our alpha version – Concentrating on fixing small bugs and getting feedback from our new users. We have released dozens of invites and expecting to release more in a few days.
2. Few small fixes and addons that we are planning to release ASAP are
- The abilty to delete assignments
- The ability to shout out easily about assignments using twitter/ blogger/emails
- Getting an alert when new content was added to my assignment
3. We looked around and noticed many of our journalist friends are looking for new opportunities. We want to help by designning a new “PRO” profile pages for them so they can easily be found, recognized and hired by publishers from around the world. If you want to help us with that contact us here.
It’s been a while now since we wrote here. Mostly because we are working hard on the small and important things at iamnews. We are planning to release some invite keys next week and start another session of getting your feedbacks and optimizing iamnews for your needs.
iamnews won the people choice award at TC50. We want to thank all of our voters and to Techcrunch for the opportunity. Here is a video of Nir Ofir, the founder on stage. Click on the picture to go to the video.
Finally we have the time to write about our TC50 expirience. IAMNEWS was selected to be one of the demopit companies. We spend the last 2 day around our small round table. We have got the opportunity to demo our product to hundreds of International geeks and geek wannabes (like us and got hundreds of request to be a part of our private alpha launch.
We had great conversations with great people like JD, Chris O’brian, Cathy Brooks, Ouriel Ohayun, Roi Carthy and other thought leaders about Networked Journalism, Blogging and what is the role of our platform in the future of new media.
Unfortunately we didn’t had much time to watch the TCTO demos but we’ll use our free time today to do so.
The platform enables everyone to be a part of an open global newsroom and to invite reporters from around the world to participate in the creation of a news. Was founded by Nir Ofir and funded by Dr. Yossi Vardi.
Three years ago, Nir Ofir, an Israeli web entrepreneur, began writing a science fiction novel. In this novel, (which had been put on hold), Nir imagined a reality in which the average citizen could be part of an innovative news network called iamnews; a network whose reporters participate in the creation of news. While describing the adventures of these reporters and their sophisticated means of transmitting their information, Nir realized that this was not the world of science fiction, but something which could be done with today’s technology.
Few months ago Nir left his job and founded IAMNEWS. A service that enables anyone to create a news assignment, invite reporters to participate and submit reports, and then edit and publish the story.
This is how it works:
The Web is the Newsroom
Nir: ”I believe that the Internet of today is already a global newsroom, and we all take part in it. Video sharing, photos, blogs, and social network platforms are our tools for creating news. The most current example of this were the recent reports of the earthquake in China; reports that were communicated by means of a platform such as “Twitter”. These reports preceded formal TV news reporting by the traditional mass media.”
However, there is problem with this global newsroom. The content and sharing tools which are available today, (such as we could only dream of three or four years ago)are not sufficiently adequate. The main reason for this is the excess of information. There is so much incoming information that the news networks are unable to screen the material, or select the preferred topics. There is also no current solution for quickly investigating the reliability of this material, or the reputation of its sources. There is simply no way in which to gather the information from so many sources, or effect the collaboration of these sources for the purpose of creating reliable news. Even if this were possible, there would still be no way to compensate the participants for their contributions.
Nir goal is the creation of a news platform which will solve all of these problems. He got his seed money for founding the company from Yossi Vardi.
Why is an Alternative Necessary?
The Media as we know it today is complex and de-centralized. Along with the media magnates and those who monopolize the various sectors of the media, there are groups and individuals who influence the way consumers experience the media. Until a few years ago, we were staunch consumers of the main news channels, but today, there are so many news sources and each targets a specific, individual need. Until recently, we were media consumers. Now we are participating in its creation.
The alternative, called iamnews changes things. It blurs the line between the media provider and the media consumer. With iamnews, the cooperation between the networked journalists is a powerful resource. We individuals are, in fact, the main source of information, and the implementation of our knowledge and findings can create a global newsroom, just as I had imagined.
LAUNCHING IAMNEWS
iamnews was selected to be one of the Demo pit companies in the techcrunch50 conference. We are launching a private alpha version of our platform while there.
Company fact sheet:
Name: IAMNEWS Ltd.
URL: http://www.iamnews.com
Location: Tel Aviv
Founder: Nir Ofir Contact: nir.ofir@iamnews.com Mobile: +972-547767737 (intl)
No’ of employees: 3
Funding: Seed round – Yossi Vardi, Starting Round A funding now
After some hair pulling days we finally got a message from the Techcrunch 50 crew that said that we made it! we are one of the companies that are granted with the opportunity (that eats our budget) to show our stuff and launch our product in the demo pit. Oh, and they also told us that we didn’t made it to the 50. (an insider whispered to us that if this was a TC60 conference we were in).
Anyway, since we are not Ashton Kutcher we had to keep it as a secret until now.
So here are the details:
We will be in the Demo pit Today (Sept for the entire day. Visit us there!
We will hang around TC50 on Monday and Wednesday too and you can reach us by email (nir.ofir at gmail dot com) or follow our twitter feed at http://www.twitter.com//nirofir
Here is our contact form and our skype ID is nir.ofir
Its been a while now since we started working on IAMNEWS – The open news room platform. After the first two weeks of deep thinking about what is the exact dent that we want to put on the face of the earth we started to “projectize” it. We also started to talk about it with the media (social/new/old) folks out there that where enthusiastic about the concept.
Days over days of talking about the IMANEWS concept with potential users/partners/ among the dev team taught us that not only the experience that we are about to offer the users must be simple but, our entire offering. In other words – Nobody care about the big picture, especially if the do not get it in the first 60 seconds (in a personal meeting) and 15 seconds (when they first visit your site).
Once we noticed that, we went to TEA PARTY STUDIO – A group of 3 amazing illustrators based in Tel Aviv and asked them to solve our problem. This is the result. What do you think? is this simple or what?
An old and wise Chinese monk that we invented right in this minute said once:
“To revolutionize the way news are being made,
you will need more than a business card and cool vinyl laptop stickers”
So after 3 months of development we are about to launch a private alpha version of iamnews.com (You’re invited to apply). We also thought this was the appropriate time to follow the lesson we learned from the Chinese wise man. Introducing our cards/swag:
About
iamnews is an open newsroom platform. We empower publishers and reporters by giving them powerful, easy to use tools for co-creation of news in real time.
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for the entire day. Visit us there!
