newsasset

A STORY OF IT INNOVATION

FOR MEDIA

Athens, July 2014

Athens Technology Center (ATC) has continuously invested

in Research and Development providing technology and

consulting services for the Media Sector, enabling News

Organizations to explore and apply the benefits from

technological innovations in order to increase the

efficiency of their activities.

10 Rizariou Str, 152 33 Halandri Athens, Greece,

Tel +30-210-6874300, www.atc.gr

About ATC S.A.

ATC S.A. with Headquarters in Athens and subsidiaries in London and Dubai, is an international

Software Company with extensive background, mainly in Media, Banking and eLearning,

operating since 1987.

ATC developed newsasset suite, an integrated, robust, all-in-one cross-media Publishing &

Distribution system for the new media generation, designed for publishers, media groups and

News Agencies, for collaborative production of optimized multimedia content and multichannel

publishing. It is available in two different editions, one for News Agencies and one for

Publishers.

About newsasset Publishing

newsasset Publishing, is our advanced Cross-Media Publishing solution, which changes the

rules of cross-channel publishing. It is the ideal solution for News Publishers and media groups

that want to modernize their editorial workflow, automate all business processes, boost

productivity, decrease operational costs and deploy new offerings by expanding the range of

services they offer.

newsasset Publishing,is a novel – single system approach to covering editorial and commercial

needs of a Media company. It is multilingual and can be easily adapted for any native language.

newsasset Publishing, incorporates all new industry trends, allowing you to focus more on your

most important job: creating news. This award winning Suite enables Media companies to

optimize their performance, through an integrated platform for all Newsrooms (traditional &

online), one centralized environment to managing, storing and multi-channel distribution

of multimedia content.

The innovation of newsasset Suite lies in the simplified publishing workflows and multi-channel

publishing capabilities with only one click.

About newsasset Agency

newsasset Agency Edition, an integrated solution purposely developed to cover all editorial

and commercial operations of a contemporary News Agency

newsasset Agency, today, is the only existing solution purely for News Agencies and consists

the backbone system of RIA Novosti News Agency in Russia, Polish Press Agency – PAP,

Portuguese News Agency - LUSA in Portugal, Athens News Agency – ANA in Athens and recently

the Tunisian News Agency - TAP

newsasset Agency is an innovative solution covering the overall planning, multimedia

production & workflow, archiving and cross channel distribution needs of its users. Dedicated

from its origin to a single system approach, it puts all tasks of an agency under one technological

umbrella, eliminating the need for integration of multiple systems.

Featuring a unique “event – driven” workflow with strong multimedia and multi-channel

distribution capabilities, built into an integrated newsroom automation engine, it enables news

agencies to deploy innovative new business models and strategies and gain significant

competitive advantage. It is crush-tested for robustness in an Olympic Games environment

10 Rizariou Str, 152 33 Halandri Athens, Greece,

Tel +30-210-6874300, www.atc.gr

Benefits deriving for a News Agency implementing newsasset Agency solution

Enhance and simplify operations, improve the flow of information

Minimize operating and production costs, reduce production time

Create new Services and reach new markets easily using new digital platforms

Increase subscriptions, services, advertising and revenues under total control

Enable managers have instant overview of production evolution at all times

Minimize the number of IT systems needed and reduce IT costs

Success Stories

Athens News Agency – ANA : newsasset Agency solution implemented just before the

2004 Athens Olympic Games, allowed the Agency to support unprecedented demand for

covering and delivering vast amounts of multimedia news

Portuguese News Agency –LUSA : newsasset Agency is a fundamental tool for LUSA. Its

implementation really improved the efficiency of the production and distribution

workflow.

Indicative Customer List

newsasset Agency

ANA-MPA Athens News Agency

LUSA -Portuguese News Agency

PAP-Polish News Agency

RIA Novosti -News Agency Russia

TAP-Tunisian News Agency

newsasset Broadcast

Antenna TV / RADIO

newsasset Publishing

TA NEA Daily Newspaper

TO BHMA Weekly Newspaper & Online Portal

LabrakisPress the largest publishing group in Greece (more than 30 titles)

NAFTEMPORIKI–Financial Business Daily Newspaper

KERDOSFinancial Daily Newspaper

REAL NEWS –Real.grNewspaper Web Portal

ATHENS NEWS Weekly Newspaper

PELOPONNISOS–Newspaper Patras

MACEDONIA-Daily Newspaper

DIAS PUBLISHING HOUSE -Cyprus

FILELEFTHEROS Newspaper –Cyprus

NOVINE Newspaper –Montenegro

ESPRESSO–Tabloid Newspaper

NEA KRITI–Newspaper Crete

RETHIMNIOTIKA NEA–NewspaperCrete

EMPROS–Newspaper Lesvos

POLITIS–Newspaper Chios

Daily Newspapers Journalists Assoc. Of Macedonia–Thrace

Technical University of Patras–Department of Information Technology & Media

10 Rizariou Str, 152 33 Halandri Athens, Greece,

Tel +30-210-6874300, www.atc.gr

Case Study Portuguese News Agency-LUSA

PROJECT DURATION: Q3 2006 – Q2 2007

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: LUSA –Portuguese News Agency selected ATC’s NewsAsset Agency

Edition as its system solution for the production, management, & distribution of news in order to

replace 8 systems (texts, photos, archives, portals etc)

LUSA is the biggest News Agency for the Portuguese language. The reliability and the speed in

the transmission of news are the characteristics of the Agency as it disposes a delegation of

correspondents in the main cities of Portugal and the main world capitals. LUSA spreads its news

to thousands of clients all over the world including Brazil and African countries.

The system offers a complete and secure electronic environment for storage, management and

delivery of sensitive information in the news production environment and handles large volumes

of information in various forms (i.e. text, images, graphics, audio, video, stories, etc).

The system has been implemented with features specifically designed to support advanced

functionality such as receiving, writing, editing approval and management of individual News

Items, stories and document folders (role-based work areas, build-in RTF text editor, spell

checking, Various formats , multimedia stories etc), Event Agenda and Scheduling, powerful

Archive functionality, enhanced Subscribers and Services Management, powerful distribution

and reception through automated distribution services to multiple channels, Web Input Module

(for external users and for customers) as well as a Dynamic Agency Portal accessible

through www.lusa.pt.

Key factors for LUSA to select NewsAsset Agency Edition from ATC stated as follows:

1. System proved and robust

2. Integration of the several modules/areas, including multimedia management

3. System simplicity and completeness

4. Reasonable duration of the implementation

5. Capacity of ATC to successfully implement, in time and functionalities planned

6. Knowledge of ATC about the media business

7. Natural evolution of the product, adapting to the market future development

8. Level of satisfaction of Athens News Agency with solution and supplier, both business

and technical teams

9. Reasonable Total Cost of Ownership

KEY PROJECT DATA:

200 internal users & 100 external correspondents

Production of 500 text, 100 photo-news, 45 videos, 1 infographics, 50 audios, 50

multimedia stories daily + daily / monthly / thematic / regional event agendas

Incoming 2,000 text news and 800 photo-news per day

Total: 8,000,000 news produced and archived

Portal – concurrent users: 800 (1500 in peak time)

Active Services: 300 / Active Subscribers: 1300

GO LIVE Date: May 2007 / Upgrade to newsasset Version 3: May 2010

10 Rizariou Str, 152 33 Halandri Athens, Greece,

Tel +30-210-6874300, www.atc.gr

ATC ROLE: System implementation, customization, roll-out and maintenance

MODULES INSTALLED:

newsasset Agency Edition Core module,

newsasset Events Management - Agenda,

Subscribers and Services Manager,

newsasset Receiver,

newsasset Sender (full distribution),

newsasset Web Input,

Dynamic Agency Portal PT, UK, Lusophono (Public & Subscribers)

10 Rizariou Str, 152 33 Halandri Athens, Greece,

Tel +30-210-6874300, www.atc.gr

Key R&D Projects in Media and Content

ATC has long and substantial experience in the (public services) area of managing news and

diffusing the relevant information to the society. ATC owns both a technological infrastructure

and the necessary experience in state-of-the-art modules that can be combined in a news

content aggregation and distribution platform that could be the basis of an information diffusion

public service.

R&D experience can be transferred from the recent projects briefly outlined below:

Sensing User Generated Input for Improved Media Discovery and

Experience

http://ilab.atc.gr/projects/socialsencor

Novel framework for mining and aggregating massive amounts of media from

multiple dynamic and quickly evolving social sources.

Intelligent extraction of objects and events from the social Web

Personalized access and presentation of content

Concrete and real integration of the social dimension of the current

Web.

ATC Role: Integrator

REVEALing hidden concepts in social media

http://ilab.atc.gr/projects/reveal

Novel framework for discovering higher level concepts hidden within

information based on the following three pillars, which we refer to as the 3

C’s.

Contributor: What can we find out about the source of information?

Content: Does the posted content look reliable?

Context: Does the 'what', 'when' and 'where’ stick together?

ATC Role: Technical manager, Integrator

Synergetic Content Creation and Communication (http://www.sync3.eu)

SYNC3 takes media monitoring to another level by comparing the latest news

from traditional media sources and the blogosphere, enabling users to track

their evolution and share favourite stories. Furthermore, through the use of

graphs and maps on an interactive and intuitive user interface, SYNC3

presents a mine of information to the system users, allowing them to update

such information individually or collaboratively.

ATC Role : Project Coordinator, Integrator

10 Rizariou Str, 152 33 Halandri Athens, Greece,

Tel +30-210-6874300, www.atc.gr

Computer-Aided Semantic Annotation of Multimedia (http://www.casam-

project.eu)

CASAM introduces the concept of computer-aided semantic annotation to

accelerate the adoption of semiautomatic multimedia annotation in the

industry. The project is unique in that it facilitates the synergy of human and

machine intelligence to significantly speed up the task of human-produced

semantic annotation of multimedia content. The proposed approach is

motivated by the limitations of current efforts to fully automate multimedia

content annotation, i.e. the immature machine-only annotation and the cost-

prohibitive manual annotation.

ATC Role : Dissemination leader & Technology Provider

Cultural and historical digital libraries dynamically mined from news

archives (http://www.ict-papyrus.eu)

PAPYRUS will be a dynamic digital library which will understand user queries

in the context of a specific discipline, look for content in a domain alien to

that discipline and return the results presented in a comprehensive way to

the user. PAPYRUS will showcase this approach with a specific pair of

disciplines and illustrate the recovery of history from news digital content.

ATC Role : Coordinator, Integrator

Retrieval of mUltimedia Semantic units for enHanced rEuSability

(http://www.rushes-project.eu)The overall aim of RUSHES was to design,

implement, validate, and trial a system for delivery of and access to raw

media material (rushes), as well as its reuse in the production of new

multimedia assets. RUSHES targets indexing, search and retrieval of rushes

archives, to ease in-house postproduction and reuse in a professional

environment, while also providing raw content to end users.

ATC Role : Integrator

Multimedia Semantic Syndication for Enhanced News Services

(www.mesh-ip.eu)

MESH was a wide research project around the creation of multimedia content

brokers acting on behalf of users to acquire, process, create and present

multimedia information personalised (to users) and adapted (to usage

environments). These functions were exhibited in the application area of

news, by creation of a platform that can unify news organizations through the

online retrieval, editing, authoring, sharing and publishing of news items.

ATC Role : Integrator, Technical director