The Cole Papers, Picks35-50, June 2002

June 2002

41. QuickWire Labs: WebProofTear provides not only a full proof of the ad, but also run dates and the ad in place on the page.

44. The Software Construction Co.: SCC TearSheets gives the advertiser access to a variety of ad data including account name, publication date and even the ad order entry person's name.

48. Sysprise Technologies LLC: Using Microsoft Pocket PC technology, Pocket-Newswires and Pocket-Reporter give journalists access to wire services as well as news stories on the paper's editorial front-end.

35. NewsView Solutions: This division of the Salt Lake Tribune, which has been providing text and photo archive systems for more than a decade, plans to emphasize its GateKeeper and WebBuilder products. GateKeeper is a hosted turnkey application that allows publishers to insert a single line of code into a web page to control access, allowing free, paid or print subscribers varying degrees of access. WebBuilder is a dynamic web site delivery system that has been in use at the Tribune since the Olympics. The company will also show a Macintosh client for its PhotoView image archive. (801) 257-8810. e-mail: kimm@newsviewsolutions.com.

36. Polkadots Software Inc.: If you're looking for a display ad makeup management system that runs on Macintosh, this may be your salvation. The Montreal-based Polkadots (which we would have chosen to list for its name alone) has built a couple of versions of its PrePage-it product: PrePage-it JobManager classifies and organizes a client job on an AppleShare-compliant server, allowing for changing of priorities and sequences of jobs. PrePage-it Workflow allows users from any Macintosh or Windows application to RIP pages upfront and flag problems early in the process. It also handles compression, automation and imposition issues. (514) 595-6866, ext. 269, e-mail: r.mallandain@polkadots.ca.

37. Pongrass Newspaper Systems: This Australian supplier has traditionally been focused exclusively on advertising systems, but it has finally broken out of the box and has developed an editorial system, which it will debut in Orlando. Features include cross-platform capability, the sharing of a database with all other Pongrass products -- and low cost. The company will also show an integrated ad layout module for its advertising system and a product that monitors any process controlled by a Pongrass database, from sales to platemaking, via a web browser. (011) {61} 29369-3111, e-mail: shelley@pongrass.com.au.

38. PPI Media US Inc.: A January majority acquisition by MAN Roland Druckmaschinen AG positions PPI to have a solid relationship with at least one press maker. The German purveyor of automated production software has been trying to patiently explain to the North American marketplace that tracking and control over the production process increases efficiency and saves money, but it's been a tough sell. At NEXPO 2002, PPI Media, which has U.S. offices in suburban Chicago, will introduce DataShop, a reporting subsystem, demo its GlobalTrack page tracking software and show computer-to-conventional-plate output devices in an affiliated booth. Also new: PPI Pilot, a graphical application that provides central cockpit control of the full suite of PPI workflow applications. (630) 499-5554, e-mail, joerg.kruse@ppimedia-us.com.

39. PROTEC S.A.: Can a Spanish pre-press systems supplier find happiness on the shores of North America? It remains to be seen, but this particular Spanish company does have a full battery of advertising and editorial products, buttressed with a digital archive, a communications management system and PDF workflow. Protec promises object-oriented programming on standard databases (naming Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Informix), "operating system independence," standard tools (naming Quark's XPress, Macromedia's FreeHand and Dreamweaver, and Adobe's InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator), modularity to allow for gradual implementation of new systems and storage of the data in open, non-proprietary formats. Protec's Milenium Cross Media product is installed in more than 50 newspapers, including Marca, El Pais and El Mundo. (011) {34} 91-573-0808, e-mail: acheca@protec.es.

40. Publishing Business Systems Inc.: An interesting palette of new products and features from this Barrington, Ill.-based newspaper business software supplier includes MediaPlus Online Advertiser Access (document management for invoices, proofs, tearsheets and ad reordering), MediaPlus Online Subscription Services (web access for direct updating of subscriber information so that customers can handle customer service tasks without staff assistance), Business Intelligence Tools (driven by Cognos and an SQL server datamart with nightly incremental updating), an update to Financial Management (providing document imaging and workflow to allow managers to view scanned images of invoices on-line and approve or deny payment), and a Portable Digital Assistant (PDA) system that allows automatic synchronization to the advertising order entry system. (847) 381-9950, e-mail: marketing@pbs.com.

41. QuickWire Labs: Those cool Canadians just keep the products coming. New this year is an electronic tearsheet system (WebProofTearsheet), a Windows client for the company's ad tracking system (QuickTrac) and a thin client for QuickWire's namesake wire collection system, not to mention plug-ins for Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word. (905) 526-3217, e-mail: bmuir@quickwire.com.

42. SAXoTECH Inc.: Coming off the sale of Publicus Online Publishing Systems to 13 of the New York Times Regional Newspapers, the Danish company with U.S. offices in Rockville, Md., doesn't want you to forget that it also has a "content management system" in its SAXoPress system. Release Six of both products -- due out in early 2003 -- includes such features as Macintosh OS X and Windows XP clients, a new unified user interface, Oracle 9i, media-neutral formatting, a Publicus web browser client for SAXoPress, Linux and Apache support for Publicus. (301) 294-0805, e-mail: rlaszlo@saxotech.com.

43. Shoom Inc.: Most of the original competitors to the AP AdSEND product died, but Ad Express quietly continued to deliver movie display advertising to newspapers. Now, the company (which last year became a division of Los Angeles-based Shoom) has introduced an electronic tearsheet system, iTearsheets (slogan: "No more dirty fingers"). The system, developed by company Chief Executive Dan Cole (no relation), captures the ad at the RIP, transmits it to the Shoom processing center, validates it, processes it and posts it to an on-line database that is archived. Advertisers are alerted via an e-mail, which includes a web link to a page that summarizes the ad order and ad's size, and displays an image of the page on which it ran. (800) 446-6658, e-mail: info@shoom.com.

44. The Software Construction Co.: From its humble beginnings providing newspaper photographers with a utility to attach the IPTC header to digital photographs, Software Construction Co. has branched out far and wide. SCC will be showing two new modules for MediaServer and one new MediaFactory module. The SCC MediaServer Tear Sheets Module pretty much speaks for itself. The SCC MediaServer Commerce Module integrates the Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 with MediaServer to allow publishers to offer anything that can be stored in the MediaServer -- text, photos, graphics, video -- for sale on the Web. The new AlterCast Channel for MediaFactory drives the Adobe AlterCast server, which automates raster and vector image manipulation (to put it another way -- an automated Photoshop and Illustrator server). (770) 205-5756, e-mail: sales@swcc.com.

45. Software Consulting Services LLC: While this will be the second year that SCS has sold the Scoop editorial front-end and pagination system in the United States, we didn't tell you about it last year because, well, nobody gave us the scoop on Scoop and the announcement came too late to make our pages. That said, the cross-platform Scoop product (developed in Sweden by Wilkenson Scoop AB) has always taken my fancy. It obviously was a hit at Village Voice Media because the entire company has standardized on Scoop. Nazareth, Pa.-based SCS will also show its products for ad order entry, workflow tracking and ad layout (the venerable Layout-8000). It also will point out that the company is truly nonpartisan: Linux, UNIX, Macintosh, Windows -- SCS does 'em all. (610) 746-7700, e-mail: sales@nscs.fast.net.

46. SPSS Inc.: As the press release said, "Although the word 'analytics' -- meaning statistics, data mining, text mining -- may be a bit intimidating to many, these tools can do some cool stuff. ..." Chicago-based Spss has been the undisputed leader in statistical analysis software for more than a decade; now the company is beginning to focus specifically on the newspaper industry. Products to be demonstrated include Clementine, a data mining "workbench"; LexiQuest Mine, a text mining tool, and LexiQuest Categorize, an information retrieval tool that automatically organizes documents into logical groups. There will also be a series of presentations highlighting publisher case studies, including the Miami Herald. (312) 651-3000, e-mail: sales@spss.com.