O'Reilly Media Launches Interactive Publishing Pilot on Near-Time

Business Wire, Feb 12, 2008

Online community enables readers to have accelerated access to prepress content and interaction with authors

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. & SEBASTOPOL, Calif. -- Near-Time and O'Reilly Media today announced the prepress launch of Software Craftsmanship on the Near-Time platform. The site (http://softwarecraftsmanship.oreilly.com) features the entire book contents and includes interactive components powered by Near-Time.

Software Craftsmanship: Apprentice to Journeyman is a forthcoming title from O'Reilly Media, authored by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. The corresponding site is designed to enrich the content by encouraging reader participation through forums, commenting, and other interactive features. Reader feedback and updates to the content will drive content development before the book goes to print.

"Needless to say, O'Reilly gets the future of publishing. It's about customer interaction, accelerating time to market and expanding the product lifecycle. It's a new game and we are excited to help define it with O'Reilly," said Reid Conrad, Near-Time CEO.

Near-Time is a leading interactive publishing and collaboration platform. Near-Time combines wikis, weblogs, forums, and other advanced web technologies, along with built-in monetization options, giving publishers a wealth of options to build on-demand interactive publishing sites. Publishers are leveraging this powerful platform to add value to their projects throughout the content lifecycle - Prepress, Frontlist and Backlist. Near-Time's ease of adoption and community building features deliver high-margin revenue and power direct relationships with readers.

"O'Reilly has been on the forefront of collaborative development experiments for some time," said Allen Noren, Director of Online Marketing and Digital Initiatives at O'Reilly Media. "Those have required the cobbling together of multiple tools that don't always work well together. What the Near-Time system does is integrate those tools--an authoring platform, blog, a forum, a robust permission system, as well as a for-pay and subscription gateway--in one integrated platform. I'm very interested to see how our readers respond to this."

About Near-Time

Near-Time is an award winning, on-demand enterprise 2.0 platform for cross organization collaboration. Business professionals can quickly create rich interaction with their prospects, customers, partners and suppliers. Near-Time integrates wikis, weblogs and forums to enable groups to work together more effectively in a secure, hosted environment. Near-Time users can securely share information, files and create group calendars. Near-Time is in use in over 40 nations by thousands of businesses, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations, to maximize internal and external collaboration. Near-Time patent pending Premium service leverages the Near-Time platform to enable organizations to monetize their communities and content. For more information, go to www.near-time.com.

About O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.