Future of Content returns in face-to-face mode

Milan, Italy. July 13, 2022

“It was a delight to spend quality time with our customers and partners after such a long absence,” said Massimo Barsotti, Eidosmedia Chief Marketing Officer. “A big thanks to everyone for attending and especially to those guests whose stimulating presentations made the event such a success.”

This was the first face-to-face edition of the Future of Content after a three-year hiatus due to the pandemic. Held in a seventeenth-century palazzo in the historic heart of Milan, it brought together customers and partners from Eidosmedia’s worldwide user base.

“We had a lot to talk about, “said Massimo. “I can’t remember a meeting with such intense curiosity and inspiring discussions. We all learned a lot.”

Customer stories

Among the contributions from Eidosmedia users, were two case studies from Germany. Max Holscher from Nordwest Zeitung described how moving to a topic-driven, channel-neutral workflow enabled the paper to break significantly more digital stories during the day, increasing readership and subscription signups.

Gregor Zoller from German regional publishers SWMH, described an ongoing replatforming project which is bringing a dozen regional dailies onto a single Méthode platform. The creation of common page designs allows extensive sharing of stories and entire pages, while allowing each title to maintain its individual brand identity.

In the financial services sector the first Swing-based SaaS deployment of Méthode in the sector has recently been rolled out by a US-based independent ratings agency.

Speed and simplicity of execution are key to the agency’s business model and the firm’s representatives described how the flexibility of cloud deployment and the quality of the Swing UX has enabled them to reduce the burden on their analysts and deliver their research faster and in more formats.

They also mentioned their appreciation of the support received during the rollout of the solution: “Kudos to the Eidos management team and the resources here - they’ve really done a good job for us.”

Print page automation

Among the Eidosmedia developments presented was the eagerly awaited first live demo of an automated print pagination tool created in partnership with Sophi.io. The tool uses machine-learning to paginate an entire print edition with the stories and images to be published, in a fraction of the time needed for manual layout. The demo was enthusiastically received and was the starting point for several conversations with users keen to be among the first to integrate this productivity booster into their print operations.

Partner stories

Text-to-speech transformations are allowing publishers to add another channel to their news delivery. Patrick O’Flaherty from Eidosmedia partners Beyond Words presented the impressive performance – including ‘voice cloning’ - of the advanced Audio UX tool that has been integrated into the Eidosmedia editorial workflow.

Cobalt and Swing - the evolution continues

Eidosmedia’s content-delivery platform Cobalt continues its development as a pure headless solution, providing several options for its deployment in digital-first workflows, including the addition of support for popular delivery technologies such as Next.js.

The continuing adoption of mobile workspace Swing is driving the development of high-end editorial tools such as the new Picture Desk, with powerful image management functions for authors and editors in remote mode.

“A big thanks to all our customers and partners for their interest and energy,” said Massimo. “We look forward to seeing them at our next event – hopefully still in the same face-to-face format!”