Paul Dawalibi here! One year ago, Praized Media was launching its first iteration and what a ride it has been! I rarely contribute to the Praized Product blog but on this occasion, I wanted to tell everyone what progress we’ve made in a short period of time, thank all the people who have made this possible and bring forth my perspective as to why I think Praized has developed core technologies that will support usage and revenue growth at local media publishers worldwide in the next couple of years.
Even though I only joined the company as CEO in January of this year, I was part of the team at Garage Technology Ventures Canada (now St-Lawrence Capital) that was behind the $1M seed round Praized Media received in September 2007. From the get go, I was really impressed by the depth of knowledge and talent of the whole Praized team.
Praized’s founders foresaw the arrival of social media as a game-changing opportunity for local media publishers. As most of us are realizing, people are now discussing, sharing and recommending to each other news to read and places to visit on Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed. Millions of word-of-mouth conversations about local places are occurring every day on the Web, yet they are not happening on major media portals. We now live in a real-time world and the rise of social media has created a new user paradigm in the local media space. Content is now discovered through real-time activity streams and real-time search. Real-time conversations are happening between consumers and companies.
Helping media companies tap into the growing potential of online word-of-mouth and social media has been Praized’s mission since the beginning. This is now accomplished through its Real-Time Search & Activity Stream, Real-Time Conversation, Answers and Social Yellow Pages modules. Praized is basically addressing the new user paradigm developed by social media sites and applying it to local media firms.
A few of the major milestones in the last 12 months:
- July 2008: launch of our prototype consumer product on www.praized.com along with our free API, plug-ins and Facebook application
- August 2008: finalist in Red Herring’s Canada’s Top 50 Private Technology Company
- September 2008: participants in the Techcrunch 50 Demopit in 2008
- October 2008: launch of our prototype consumer activity stream product
- November 2008: launch of our prototype consumer Answers product
- December 2008: company receives special jury prize at the Boomerang Interactive Awards in 2008
- January 2009: launch of our enterprise sales initiative
- February 2009: signature of first enterprise customer, Yellow Pages Group in Canada
- April 2009: pre-launch of answers.yellowpages.ca with Yellow Pages Group
- May 2009: official launch of answers.yellowpages.ca
- May 2009: Sebastien writes his “big vision” blog post “I have seen the future of local media” and sends ripples through the Yellow Pages industry, creating enormous buzz around our company and products
- May 2009: first prototype of enterprise activity stream and real-time search
The Praized platform toolkit now includes:
- Real-time search & activity stream modules
- Real-time conversation module
- Answers module
- Social Yellow Pages module (ratings/reviews platform)
- Editorial module (structure and connect existing local editorial content around places)
- Affiliate program module (API, Wordpress/Movable Type blog plug-ins)
- Social media applications (Facebook, iPhone, OpenSocial, etc.)
All of Praized core modules are fully search engine optimized, allowing discovery of social local media content through search engines. In addition, the whole Praized platform is built on an API to leverage the distributed nature of the Internet. Given the platform’s distributed nature, we measure success based on API calls growth. The following graph shows you our growth since our launch:
In addition to its current customers, Praized currently has signed letters of intent with three large media companies. It is also currently negotiating agreements with a couple of others and has generated strong interest from a dozen other important local media players. The very high interest comes from the fact that Praized has found very creative ways for local media publishers to monetize social media. Ping me at paul AT praizedmedia.com if you want to know more…). Don’t forget that one of Praized Media’s co-founders, Sebastien Provencher, has a proven track record of creating highly profitable online products in a local media environment (DirectoryPlus at Yellow Pages Group) . From an investor point of view, I have to mention that recent investments and M&A activities indicate high interest from media companies in the local social space.
So, I want to take this moment to thank all our platform customers. Thank you to all users who’ve been using the various iterations of our core modules and who have provided invaluable feedback throughout the year. Thank you to our development team, one of the best I’ve had the chance to work with, and to all the freelancers who have contributed to our success. Montreal is an amazing place to build a startup with its very talented technical people, a great location halfway between Europe and the US, great R&D tax credits, and a relatively low cost of living.
So, what’s next? More enterprise customers and more innovative product modules and features. We’re already talking about reputation management, social media lead generation, tracking conversations happening around small merchants and structuring/aggregating those conversations. The Company’s goal is to become the most innovative and valuable supplier of social media and real-time technologies to local media publishers worldwide and we’re well on our way there!
Paul Dawalibi
CEO & President
Praized Media Inc.
