Innovation in Digital Journalism – a report from the second year of FP7-MICO

The blog post summaries the work done in the context of the EU project FP7-MICO in the area of digital journalism.

This last December we attended in Cairo one of the most exciting events in the Middle East and North Africa region on Entrepreneurship and Hi-Tech startups: RiseUp Summit 2015. We engaged with the overwhelming crowd of startuppers and geeks on our HelixWare booth and in a separated Meetup organised at the Greek Campus.

We had the opportunity, during these two hectic days, to share the research work done in MICO for extending the publishing workflows of independent news organizations with cross-media analysis, natural language processing and linked data querying tools.

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RiseUp15 The World Came to Cairo…A Vibrant Entrepreneurial Ecosystem is Emerging

Rise Up Summit:

RiseUp 15 2

Riseup summit is Egypt’s largest entrepreneurship summit to be held for the 3rd year This year RiseUp15 took place on the 12th & 13th of December 2015 and it’s slogan was the summit’s slogan is “The world is coming to Cairo”it was a great success and it took place this year on at the heart of Cairo “American University Greek Campus, Les Freres Bab El Louk School and Falaki Building located in Tahrir Square” combining business owners and young ideas in one place, to provide opportunities for startups and linking entrepreneurs with investors.

How RiseUp is Flourishing the Middle East startups

#RiseUp15 – The facts and figures

riseup attendees

Event highlights: 

Speakers from Google, Facebook, Uber, Microsoft, Aramex, Techcrunch and many more discussed Egypt and the MENA region’s ecosystem and the prospect of investments in startups.

Busy day.jpg

Startups showcased their projects, aiming to catch the attention of investors and professionals to attain the funding needed to bring their ideas to life. They had the opportunity to network, discuss and listen to Keynote speakers sharing their success stories also participants had the opportunity to join professional workshops.

helixbooth 3

How Startups Drive Local Economy Growth:

Startups are refuelling hundreds of cities worldwide

Small business owners are locals. They live locally, shop locally, and use local resources. They employ local manpower, local freelancers…they come up with more revolutionary technology and innovative ideas

When these startups grew, they will directly impact growth of their cities

Small businesses plays a very important role to develop and boost Local economy in the future

How InsideOut Today was of assistance for RiseUp15

InisdeOut Today at RiseUp

Live Streaming the event to the world:

InsideOut Today proudly provided for the 3rd consecutive year the live streaming service for the RiseUp Summit broadcasting the event to the world over the internet to multiple devices, using our video streaming platform, the HelixWare.

streaming - ahmed

This year was more challenging to us as the event grew bigger with many tracks and many interesting sessions, workshops, keynote speeches and fireside chats to be live streamed! Thanks to the Riseup team who assisted us in spotting the most important spots to stream. As usual, we have provided one live-streaming portable station that included the capturing devices, encoders, professional services and finally the HelixWare streaming servers over the cloud.

Social Media Monitoring:

General overview

We are also glad that we supported RiseUp team in understanding the traction happening about the event over social media. We provided a full detailed report about the Online Social interaction across multiple networks, before during and after the event. the report included the total number of mentions, location of users and source of traffic, the top influencers, top contributors and top mentioned users, languages used and top hashtags associated with RiseUp15

 Personal Branding Workshop:

personal branding workshop

InsideOut Today CEO Fady Ramzy conducted a very interesting workshop about Personal Branding and it was the most booming workshop in Riseup15 which was overbooked with double the number of attendees in other workshops during the two days.The room was packed with very energetic youth eager to learn about Personal Branding.Following the workshop Fady had Side Chats with some of the workshop attendees for sharing Knowledge, opinions and experience and it was a really interesting discussions! Here is the Simple steps how to build your personal brand online 

HelixBooth

Also Gladly this year we had our own booth at #RiseUp15 to showcase our very own product HelixWare Online Video Platform which was a great opportunity to introduce HelixWare to the Mena Region

Here is HelixWare Journey at RiseUp15

 

The Interaction on the hashtag #riseup15 generated a great engagement as people were posting pictures and feedback during and after the event and we collected some of the best advices by those who made it big here and also we collected some lovely pictures from #riseup15 on our flicker account

Was such a great journey to be operating Social and covering the event; we enjoy being part of the community and supporting entrepreneurship in all fields. Looking forward for RiseUp16

 

Introducing WordLift new Vocabulary

When we first started WordLift, we envisioned a simple way for people to structure their content using Semantic Fingerprinting and named entities. Over the last few weeks we’ve seen the Vocabulary as the central place to manage all named entities on a website. Moreover we’ve started to see named entities playing an important role in making the site more visibile to both humans and bots (mainly search engines at this stage).

Here is an overview on the numbers of weekly organic search visits from Google on this blog (while numbers are still small we’ve a 110% growth).

google

To help editors increase the quality of their entity pages, today, we are launching our new Vocabulary along with version 3.3.

wordlift-vocabolary

The Vocabulary can be used as a directory for entities. Entities can now be filtered using the “Who“, “Where“, “When” and “What” categories and most importantly entities have a rating and a traffic light to quickly see where to start improving.

Until now it was hard to have a clear overview (thumbnails have been also introduced); it was also hard to see what was missing and..where. The principles for creating successful entity pages can be summarised as follow: 

  1. Every entity should be linked to one or more related posts. Every entity has a corresponding web page. This web page acts as a content hub (here is what we have to say about AI on this blog for example) – this means that we shall always have articles linked to our entities. This is not a strict rule though as we might also use the entity pages to build our website (rather than to organise our blog posts).
  2. Every entity should have its own description. And this description shall express the editor’s own vision on a given topic. 
  3. Every entity should link to other entities. When we chose other entities to enrich the description of an entity we create relationships within our knowledge graph and these relationships are precious and can be used in many different ways (the entity on AI on this blog is connected for instance with the entity John McCarthy who was the first to coin the term in 1955)
  4. Entities, just like any post in WordPress, can be kept as draft. Only when we publish them they become available in the analysis and we can use them to classify our contents.
  5. Images are worth thousand words as someone used to say. When we add a featured image to an entity we’re also adding the schema-org:image attribute to the entity.
  6. Every entity (unless you’re creating something completely new) should be interlinked with the same entity on at least one other dataset. This is called data interlinking and can be done by adding a link to the equivalent entity using the sameAs attribute (here we have for instance the same John McCarthy in the Yago Knowledge Base).
  7. Every entity has a type (i.e. Person, Place, Organization, …) and every type has its own set of properties. When we complete all the properties of an entity we increase its visibility.  

Happy blogging!