At the start of this week, I linked to a pair of posts written by my consulting colleague, Ava Seave, who had covered Kobo for her Forbes.com column. Seave started posting there earlier this year, as part of the site's "Media & Entertainment" channel.
Seave kicked off September with a profile of a technology company, Friend2Friend, that has partnered with publishers to collect, process and evaluate user-generated content (UGC). The firm worked with Outside magazine to gather information for its "best places to live" issue.
Seave calls this partnership "media as a service" (MaaS), paralleling the widely-used "software as a service" term used to describe cloud-based, a la carte models for providing computing and productivity benefits. In her telling, Friend2Friend's MaaS offer is "bringing innovation to editorial content".
I agree with Seave's perspective here, particularly at a time when mobile is becoming the dominant platform for accessing and consuming web-based content. Her work reminded me of "The seven deadly myths of mobile", a talk given by Josh Clark of Global Moxie that I dubbed "content as a service". We're all in the API business now.
Acknowledging that Seave is a colleague (and a friend), I do recommend that you consider following her Forbes.com posts. She takes a focused approach ("the bloody details") to the companies she profiles, and along the way she offers insights you won't see anywhere else. You have to like that.
