Brandfeed was a startup that I worked on between 2011 and 2013. The company was dissolved in 2013, and the site was taken offline at the end of 2014.
The concept of Brandfeed was to enable journalists and bloggers to discover new stories, whilst providing brands with newsrooms to publish and distribute press releases and other media assets.
For the past few months I’ve been working on a start-up with my business partner Dan Leach.
Our goal with Brandfeed is to connect brands and the media more effectively. There are similar efforts on both sides of this fence, but our approach is to provide a centralised database of pressrooms with a journalists’ dashboard all under one roof. The idea as that our pressroom format will become familiar to journalists, so they always know where to go when the they need a media contact, logo asset, or hi-res photo of a CEO. Additionally we offer discovery and notification features so journalists can ‘follow’ the brands they’re interested in, receive content and suggestions in a low-noise environment that they control.
With Dan’s experience in brand communication strategy and my background in tech and creative, we think this is going to be pretty special.
We’re not ready to launch yet, but yesterday we went public. It’s great to be out; I no longer have to say “I’m working on this thing I can’t tell you about yet“. I’m a great believer in transparency and not keeping ideas to yourself, but that’s another blog post
We’ll be giving private previews of Brandfeed to industry friends very soon. After we iterate from that round of feedback we’ll be running a more public beta programme. If you’re a journalist, brand representative or PR you can register for the beta now.
Update – 06 Aug
We are now in a public beta phase.
Then this morning (when checking out ‘If this then that‘) I saw this:
So, in a rare moment of patriotism, I added this to the TwitBlock footer:
Today, I’ve been trying out the alpha version of Qwiki, which was unveiled at Techcrunch Disrupt on Sep 27th.
It’s ambitious technology. Their goal is to “improve the way people experience information” and [even more ambitiously] to “advance information technology to the point it acts human”. These two statements indicate somewhat separate challenges. That first point is largely a delivery problem, the latter keeps Nobel Prize winners awake at night.
I know plenty of developers, and plenty of designers. Apart from the obvious technical/creative divide, something else seems to separate the two. Developers seem far more likely to want to get involved in a project with no promises and no money. The idea of creating a product, totally unpaid, with the possibility of turning it into a business, seems to be much more appealing to developers than for designers. I know this sounds like a sweeping statement and there are exceptions, but on the whole this a common observation of mine.
