Newstex President Larry Schwartz spoke at the SIIA NetGain Conference this week about cloud computing and how Newstex leverages the cloud to support its business model.  He also took time to do a video interview after his presentation at the conference. 

Think you don’t understand cloud computing?  Check out the interview below where Larry sums up the key benefits of cloud computing in less than 90 seconds!

Congratualtions to Aura and Thomas Novembre on the birth of their second daughter -Stella Arisa Novembre, on Thursday, May 24, 2007. Stella made her debut at 8:32 am, weighing in at 7 ilbs. and 21 inches long. Mother and family are doing great!

We are pleased to welcome Rick Smith to the Newstex team as Director of Client Services.  Rick joins Michael Airhart, as the Director of Publisher Services.

We found Rick in New York City, where he has served in a wide variety of high profile roles for both startup companies and established organizations including Reuters, Multex, Market Guide, TD Waterhouse, and a venture that later became About.com.

We knew Rick was a good fit for our "virtual company" when he told us he was born and raised on a reservation in Montana and is a ‘great great grand nephew’ of Sitting Bull. He wanted to move back to Montana, but stay in the content business.  We were happy to help.

Rick now resides in Bozeman, Montana (pictured above).

Photo by Jim Harris

Alacra, a Newstex customer, recently launched a series of publisher/content provider interviews on the Alacablog. Although, we were not the first company interviewed, we were very happy to be the second company in the series

Special thanks to Steve Goldstein for thinking of Newstex, but now we are reshooting Larry’s headshot. (Steve could you have made it any bigger!)

Alacrablog inteview with Larry Schwartz

The management team at Newstex has been sharing around this terrific, wide ranging article from the MIT Technology Review. The article provides thoughts and ideas about where technology is today and what early adopters (people like Newstex President Larry Schwartz) are doing with information, particularly with wireless and other technologies.

Everyone here at Newstex is thrilled that Doug Richardson has joined as as our vice president of sales. You can read the press release here.

Doug knows a great deal about the global information market. He’s been a highly successful executive at news and data companies such as Reuters, NewsEdge and EDGAR Online.

We’re confident that our clients and friends will enjoy working with Doug and we’re glad that he’s here.

Today I had one of our first demos of the backoffice admin system that NewsEngin has been building for us.

I used GoToMeeting instead of Webex to facilitate the demo.  GotoMeeting is from the makers of GotoMyPC which I’ve used before.  The advantage of GoToMeeting over Webex is the cost – GoToMeeting is $40/month unlimited use for up to 10 people at a time and includes a dial-in meet me number at no additional charge.  Perfect for small demos like this.

I would give this demo a "5" – as we didn’t have a separate demo space, they saw a lot of testing data which does not make for a very convincing demo.  High on my list is now is creating a separate demo space with "clean" data.

One of our challenges is how to demonstrate a Newsfeed product as we don’t have an application.  Next week, we will launch a Secure RSS Newsfeed to demonstration our products.  This will be a big help to show potential clients our products without having to work through the IT departments to setup an FTP or VPN feed.

The client seem to be intrigued by our photos in-line, breath of publishers, and people tickering.  We’ll see how this goes over the next few weeks. They will be one of the first to get our Secure RSS Newsfeed to demo the products.

Angus Robertson agreed to join our Board of Advisors.  I’ll post his bio soon on the website and share it here on the Blog.  Angus has been involved in several very interesting consulting projects recently and prior to that he was Executive Vice President of News and Media for Bridge Information Systems.