Tue, 2017-04-04 03:32
Sam
Introducing 'Crunchbase News'
In Jan. 2016 Alex Wilhelm left a safe, good job at TechCrunch to build a news staff at Mattermark, a startup selling access to rich data on tech startups and investors. Alex is now at rival Crunchbase on a similar mission: infusing smart analysis with numbers that prove the case.
Want to upgrade to a subscription that includes SWMS news, research and consulting? Send e-mail to Christy for details.
eWeek last week redesigned its web site and launched new personalization features that allow readers to easily follow topics and authors. Coming soon: a content-sharing arrangement with Silicon Angle’s video brand, theCube, as well as a new approach to case studies broadly named “IT Science.”
TechCrunch has launched a new event series, Sessions, designed to dive deeply into a single tech topic. Sessions: Justice takes place Jun. 6 in San Francisco. The second, Sessions: Robotics, follows Jul. 17 in Boston. A Los Angeles-based event (AR/VR?) remains unannounced.
When Adam Lashinsky joined Fortune 15 years ago, the Dow was at 9,800, Enron had just collapsed and columnist Stewart Alsop was advising the reader to “say goodbye to your PDA.” Today Adam is Fortune’s newly promoted executive editor...
When you think of consumer tech edit for women, which brands come to mind? TheSkimm? Refinery 29? Make sure PureWow is top-of-mind. The seven-year-old, New York-based PureWow has 15 million monthly uniques visiting the web site and three million who opt in for its newsletters. Its Facebook page has more than 1.1 million likes.
Jennifer Jolly is a media star. She contributes weekly to USA Today and is a regular on NBC’s The Today Show. She also contributes to the New York Times though not so much lately. Jennifer is also an educator. Last month she launched Techish, her own tech site. Its mission: demystify technology for everyday people.
Axios debuts Login, a daily tech newsletter, on Monday. You’ll want to read it. Produced by chief technology correspondent Ina Fried, Login will cover tech for “a broad, sophisticated audience,” Ina says. An inspiration, she explains, is the Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter back when John Paczkowski (now at BuzzFeed) wrote it. 
A builder of IT software and IT community, Spiceworks is now in the IT media business, too. Former eWeek and ZDNet editor Matthew Rothenberg joined the Austin, Tex.-based company this week as executive editor.
Imagine you’re an EIC. How do you cover AI? The term means little in the rise of bots and agents, NLG, deep learning, robotics and the rest. No staff is big enough to understand it all, let alone own it. No wonder this recent AI primer from Forbes contributor Gil Press already has 200,000 views.
If the term “Yelp for IT” doesn’t ring a bell, it soon will. Sites such as TrustRadius, G2Crowd, Peer Insights and Software Advice allow IT pros to post reviews of the products and services they buy, just as Yelp lets consumers share their views of restaurants, nightlife and home services.
“Newsletters might be the new newspaper,” a subscriber wrote us recently. “They certainly are for me, I read a range of them ‘cover to cover’ every morning.” Newsletters also can be potent places to pitch. Which ones matter?
Are tech events on the wane? Quartz last month pulled the plug on The Next Billion, its three-year-old conference series with $1,500 ticket prices. The Bloomberg Technology Conference, historically held each June in San Francisco, is as yet unscheduled for 2017.
