Inform Announces Six New Publisher Services Customers

Business Wire, Nov 6, 2006

VIBE, Star, Computerworld, Savannah Morning News, Answers.com and WallSt.net Fuel Consumer Interaction With Online News

NEW YORK -- Inform Technologies LLC today announced six new Publisher Services customers ranging from enthusiast magazines to local newspapers and popular Internet services. The diverse set of customers includes VIBE magazine, the leading magazine on hip hop and urban culture, Star magazine, the most accurate, compelling and entertaining reporter of celebrity news, Computerworld, the voice of IT management, the Savannah Morning News, member of media company Morris Communication, Answers.com (NASDAQ:ANSW), leading content-based reference site, and WallSt.net, a leading provider of financial news and tools subsidiary of Financial Media Group (OTCBB:FNGP).

"By providing up-to-the-minute news and relevant links to all of our current articles and 13 years of archives - Inform's technology has become a strong driver for increasing our page views on the Web," said Eric Gertler, CEO of VIBE Magazine Group. "Search, find and obtain is what VIBE's audience - young urban trendsetters - expect from VIBE on the Web, and it's the value proposition that Inform enables us to meet."

Also today, users can see Inform's technology live on WashingtonPost.com, NYSun.com, NewsOK.com, Answers.com and VIBE, where readers can dig deeper into every story through embedded links, related stories, and enhanced search.

"Since implementing Inform we've seen a consistent 20-25% increase in two important metrics: number of page views per visit, and the length of time reader stay at our site," said August Fields, general manager and vice president of the New York Sun.

The Inform platform precisely and automatically repurposes and re-circulates branded and Web-based content. Inform's technology will enable these publishers to further establish themselves as a news destination, rather than being relegated to a search result. Inform helps publishers drive more traffic and keep readers engaged longer.

"As one of the premier news brands in the country, we have extremely high standards for precision and accuracy, and Inform was able to meet our criteria," said Caroline Little, CEO of Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive. "By putting the news in context, and driving deeper reader engagement, Inform is expanding the audience for our content and with it, our advertising potential."

Inform's Web-based engine ingests and translates all Internet content into its common semantic elements through the use of advanced algorithms. Through this process, Inform systematically tags and scores every component of each article, identifying every topic, industry, organization, person, place and product mentioned throughout the entire article. In technical terms, this process is called meta-tagging, and the promise of consistent, automatic meta-tagging has been heralded by publishers as the "Holy Grail" for online information retrieval. The Inform system can ingest and relate enormous amounts of content in less than a day, entire editorial ecosystems in several days, and decades of editorial archives in less than a week.

"With close to four million topics, we were thrilled to find a technology partner with a similar passion and deep understanding of taxonomy," said Bob Rosenschein, CEO of Answers.com. "Since our users are already telling us their interests, giving them dynamic, relevant, recent news on a topic-by-topic basis was the next logical step."

Publisher Services

Users will no longer read articles on news sites only to click away to do further research and topic-based surfing on search engines. With Inform's services, readers can find related articles from within each publisher's site, from its family of affiliate brands, its archives, or from articles, videos, podcasts and blog entries from across the Web in a seamless and fully integrated manner. Inform Publisher Services drives incremental page views and strengthens brand loyalty by capturing readers' interests and holds them by providing a deeper, richer online news-reading experience.

About Inform

Inform is a technology company that is in the business of organizing, or structuring, massive amounts of unstructured data. Founded in 2004, Inform has developed a web-based platform that processes and translates web-based content into its common semantic elements. The resulting mathematically describable index enables a wholly different user experience on the web - fast and precise searching and simple navigation. The company is privately held and has approximately 60 employees, including programmers, linguists, taxonomists, library scientists, mathematicians and other professionals based in New York and India.

About VIBE

Through the prism of Urban Music, VIBE chronicles the celebrities, sounds, fashion, lifestyle, new media, and business born from this art form. With an authoritative voice, VIBE creates trends as much as it records them. VIBE covers music, educates its readers, and gives back to the community. VIBE serves as a portal to a growing, young, trend-setting, multicultural audience. By being excellent journalists and innovative marketers, we are champions of urban music and culture.