Today, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) announced the launch of its first mobile application for accessing social media content from SIIA and Authoritative Content from Newstex.

The application is available through the Apple iTunes Store for both iPhones and iPod touches (search for siia or newstex), and it will be available for Google Android-enabled phones in the future.

A free trial version is available, and SIIA Content Division members can request complimentary access to a limited number of licenses for premium content.

The new SIIA and Newstex iPhone app is an easy to use mobile resource that helps users access authoritative news and social media content, including blogs, Twitter and video content, at anytime.

In a press release from the SIIA, Newstex President Larry Schwartz said, “More and more people are tapping social media through applications that provide content from a handful of sources.  We believe this application creates significant marketing and revenue opportunities for publishers and aggregators, as well as associations of all types.”

You can read the complete SIIA press release here.

Twitter is by far the fastest growing social Web site in history, and it shows no signs of slowing down.  Everyday, people are tweeting about companies, brands and products.  The problem is that there is no perfect way to search Twitter for this kind of information.

Even Twitter’s Twitter 101 for Business guide offers only slightly helpful advice by telling businesses to conduct a site search to find conversations happening “right now” on Twitter.  That’s great, but what about conversations that happened a few days ago?  And what about finding all of the conversations happening on Twitter about your brand, company or products?  A Twitter site search is not an exact science and doesn’t always deliver all of the results you might be looking for nor does the search function always deliver relevant results.

Instead of searching Twitter everyday (Twitter searches only go back a few days so repeated searching is a necessary evil to stay on top of brand and business conversations), Newstex offers an easier way to find company, brand and product information through its NewsTwits Twitter feed syndication service.  The Newstex feed of authoritative Twitter users’ content provides a complete archive of tweets allowing users to categorize searches and find relevant and comprehensive results faster and more accurately than a simple Twitter site search can provide.

With NewsTwits from Newstex, content distributors get a full text archival feed of tweets, and end-user customers get an answer to a common problem – finding and tracking online conversations about their companies, brands and products.  Since NewsTwits search results appear alongside other information already found in their search results from Newstex’s authoritative news and blog publishers, no extra steps are necessary to stay on top of those powerful and fast-moving online conversations happening on the social Web.

Distributors can contact Newstex to learn more about adding Newstex NewsTwits from Newstex’s Blogs On Demand publishers to their current feeds and provide another valuable tool to their clients.

And if you’re a blogger or online content producer, you can syndicate your content through Newstex Blogs On Demand and your Twitter updates through NewsTwits.  Contact Newstex for details (new Newstex publisher inquiries — click here; current Newstex Blogs On Demand publishers who would like to syndicate their Twitter feeds through NewsTwits can click here).

It’s an exciting day for Newstex, our distributors, and our publishers.  Today, Newstex announced the official launch of our new Video On Demand product.

In simplest terms, Newstex Video On Demand licenses video content from content owners, and then aggregates it, adds complete transcripts with searchable keywords that tie directly to specific frames within the video (so users can easily skip around to find content of interest), and more.  The enhanced video content is sent as transcripts (each linked to its searchable video) to distributors as blog posts.

There is no other product like Video On Demand on the market.  Already, online influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.TV (follow the link to read more about Gary), Johnson & Johnson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and more are licensing their video content through Newstex Video On Demand. 

Stay tuned because Newstex plans to announce its first launch distributor partner this week!  In the meantime, you can follow the link to read the complete Video On Demand press release.

We use Twitter at Newstex and have noticed over the past four months a surge of activity on Twitter by many of the same bloggers whose blogs we syndicate.  Many of the "tweets" have become news, in some cases breaking news before it is posted to a blog. The limit of 140 characters makes for short headline oriented posting and the feel of an old fashion "newswire". 

Similar to our Blogs On Demand newsfeed, we have licensed "tweets" from Twitter authors and are grouping the "tweets" into useful real time newsfeeds – we call our product "Newstwits".

Below is the press release – let us know if you think this will be useful for your business.

GUILFORD, CT May 19, 2008 – At the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) NetGain Conference in San Francisco today, Newstex, the Content on Demand® company, announced NewsTwits™, a new product that delivers Twitter content as a newsfeed to information providers and enterprise customers.

Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a social networking and multi-platform messaging service that allows users to broadcast short-form updates known as "tweets" (text-based posts up to 140 characters) to their online colleagues in real time. Messages sent via Twitter are displayed on the sender’s profile page on the Twitter website and are instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

Updates can be sent via cell phone SMS, instant messaging or third-party applications, such as Twitterrific, Twhirl and Facebook. Recipients get their updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email and, now, through the NewsTwits newsfeed from Newstex.

Like its Blogs on Demand™ service, Newstex licenses full-text Twitter content directly from Twitter users and then uses its proprietary NewsRouter® technology to aggregate and deliver to distributors and enterprises in real time. The NewsTwits newsfeed from Newstex easily integrates as a headline feed into countless enterprise-grade applications that people use daily.

For bloggers, content creators and other media professionals, NewsTwits is a syndication model that tremendously increases their profile. Media organizations, financial firms, and government agencies that already use Newstex’s Content on Demand service for millions of their users are finding that NewsTwits makes accessing Twitter-based content a snap. Already, hundreds of syndicated bloggers from Newstex’s Blogs on Demand network have signed up for NewsTwits.

“Blog content has become a ‘must-have’ for millions of researchers and enterprise professionals,” said Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex. “Recently, Newstex has added hundreds of top newspaper blogs to the thousands of full-text, premium blogs that we license and deliver. Now, we are thrilled to be first in licensing and distributing the best user-generated Twitter content via NewsTwits on an editorially-selected, full-text basis for enterprise use throughout the world.”

About Newstex
Newstex offers Content on Demand® and Blogs on Demand™, which includes tailored, real-time news and commentary from thousands of branded newswires, newspapers, magazines, financial and business sources, official government feeds and blogs. Newstex collects full-text digital news and commentary feeds, standardizes the content format, adds stock ticker symbols, indexes stories using PeopleTickering® and topical categories, and instantly delivers the result via easy-to-integrate XML or RSS newsfeeds. In 2007, Newstex was selected for the EContent 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry, while Blogs on Demand was voted “Top New Technology” in Information Today’s People’s Choice Awards. For more information, please visit the Newstex site www.newstex.com and the Newstex blog www.newstexblog.com.

This week we are in dry San Francisco (as opposed to the soggy wet east coast) for the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) Content Forum which also includes the Codie Award presentation. We hope to blog more about that on Wednesday (fingers crossed as we are nominated in two categories).

Today, in partnership with MuseGlobal, we announced BlogAlertsâ„¢, a new product that delivers blog content to information providers and enterprise customers beyond our Blogs On Demand full text product.

The Newstex BlogAlerts™ product involves two steps. 1) Enterprise customers specify topics of interest, from which Newstex in turn generates personalized alerts drawn from the content of millions of scanned blogs. 2) The resulting blog content matches are further refined by the Newstex NewsRouter® system, which in real-time automatically tags each blog post with key company names, stock tickers, notable executives and government officials, as well as categorizes each post by topics using a high-precision, relevance-based processing engine. Newstex then delivers the resulting feed of refined blog content in easy-to-integrate NewsML format to downstream redistributors and enterprise customers for use in their respective content offerings.

BlogAlerts provides links to the blog post versus the Blogs On Demand product provides the full text of each blog post.  We believe both products complement each other in the ever expanding blog universe.

View BlogAlerts Press Release

We are very excited to announce an alliance to deliver Newstex Content On Demand and Newstex Blogs On Demand  through FPinformart, CanWest MediaWorks’ industry leading news and business information service in Canada.

FPinformart.ca will be offering our full-text blog content from our premier Weblogs in a wide variety of categories alongside the more than 275 Canadian news sources. FPinfomart users will be able to search the blog postings by keyword, category or by company stock ticker.

View the Press Release.

We are very excited about the recent announcement from ECNext that MANTA now includes news from Newstex.

View Manta Press Release

We have been working with ECNext on this project for the past six months and are impressed with how the Manta site has evolved.  Newstex is providing business news articles, company press releases and a news archives covering the past three years. In total we are sending Manta about 5 Million archived news articles to populate the site and continually adding new stories.

MANTA provides basic company profile information for over 45 million global companies and free detailed company profiles for over 13 million companies when users register for free with the site. Give it a try!

Update:
John Blossom, Shore Communications adds some comments

Local, Local, Local.  Our customers have been telling us for the past months that they want more local news.  When we met with Paul and Keith from SmallTownPapers, Inc. we became very excited, they are solving the "last mile" of local cotent.

Today they official launched their SmallTownPapers News Service (STPNS). You can read the press release or read what Editor and Publisher had to say. 

Their goal is to provide local newspaper content from over 300 small town markets, we have integrated about 40 newspapers from 20 states into the Newstex Content On Demand Newsfeeds. 

We’ll keep you updated as we work with STPNS to add more local content and close the gap on the "last mile" of local content.

This morning Newstex made two announcements which together offer important proof points in the development of blogs as enterprise ready content:

Newstex will now deliver hundreds of blogs from Corante (the first blog media company) and Gawker Media (including popular blogs like Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, and others) through Newstex Blogs on Demand.

LexisNexis will now deliver full-text Newstex Blogs On Demand content to enterprise customers.

As you know, Newstex Blogs On Demand is focused on distributing important blogs to enterprise customers as a licensed, full-text feed ready to be integrated into the applications (such as LexisNexis) that employees use every day.

Press Releases:
Blog Content from Gawker Media and Corante Available Via Newstex Blogs
On Demand: Full-text blog feed from Newstex delivers full-text,
licensed blogs to content distributors and enterprise customer

LexisNexis Delivers Blog Content via Newstex Blogs On Demand: Full-text blog feed from Newstex now available to LexisNexis customers

We’re thrilled to be distributing the premium content from Reed Business Information (RBI) via Content On Demand to our Newstex subscribers.

RBI publishes the "bibles" for many industries including highly-regarded trade publications for the construction, retail, hospitality, publishing and other sectors.  Some of RBI’s branded publications include Publishers Weekly, Electronic Business, Restaurants & Institutions, Building Design & Construction, Wireless Week, TWICE, and Furniture Today. Newstex now carries nearly 100 RBI publications in one feed.

Read more about this exciting content here.