Hidden under the bonnet of Reuters' international news operation is a secret weapon in the battle for innovation, new technology and product development; a four-person technical team called Reuters Labs, which regularly turns over a host of intriguing web and mobile projects.
Headed up by Nic Fulton, chief scientist for Reuters Media, the four-person team acts like something halfway between an acquisitions team and an in-house development squad. They work on four projects at a time, and these have included article tagging, Facebook applications and the mobile journalism initiative that we covered recently. Right now they are working on an automated transcription service that would help with video search,
There are also ideas for a news detection system that would monitor keywords and phrases on blogs and instant message tools like Twitter for clues to breaking news events; people writing about tremors and quakes could flag up an earthquake, for example. That same system could also track links to Reuters' stories to track for "buzz", as the marketers say, but Fulton says the point is more about showing users what's being talked about rather than trying to influence the news agenda according to the most-trafficked stories.
Innovating: "Overfunding stifles risk-taking and creativity"
Fulton joined Reuters 13 years ago to set up a project called the 'Neural Networks', which attempted - and failed - to predict performance of the world's financial markets. His efforts since then have been noticeably more successful, but Fulton says the strength of the development culture at Reuters is that projects are allowed to fail. That in turn allows for more risk-taking and more experimentation.
"Businesses can quash innovation by not allowing people to fail," said Fulton.
"We want to help extend the eyes and ears of writers outwards."
Part of the success of the Labs has been because it tries to innovate in start-up style with that "beg, borrow or steal" attitude.
"I try to keep out process - process and experimentation just don't mix. I think if projects are overfunded they can become very conservative, bogged down in over-analysis of a potential market rather than just having a go."
Nic Fulton, chief scientist at Reuters Media
How about the cliche of struggling entrepreneurs? Why is there, generally, more innovation in the start-up sector than in big business?
"People who are attracted to struggle are creative people who are attracted to struggling because they enjoy the challenge. It's like the people that climb mountains just because they are there."
Reuters Labs punches above its weight partly because, despite a steering group led by some of Reuters' great and the good, Fulton has enough agency to follow his own instinct on projects.
In the past few weeks, the team has worked with students at New York University and Stanford on what Fulton describes as the "ultra long tail" of ideas, though Reuters Labs are already on the radar of many new start-ups and developers.
Viewdle: "Many advertisers want to be seen with an innovator"
One of its most interesting partnerships with the video labelling technology Viewdle began through a chance encounter between its Ukrainian founders and Leon Shklar, Reuters' executive vice president of media technology. We flagged up Viewdle back in September at TechCrunch40.
The tool sits on top of six of Reuters video feed, scanning frames for faces. It relates the ratios of face shapes, dimensions, skin tone and hair to a database of faces until it "recognises" someone. At this stage, labels are also checked by hand and anyone "unknown" is added to the database. The potential; for this kind of indexing is massive, as is the potential for related advertising revenue.
"It's a young company and they are still working out how to monetise the technology, but it would probably be a revenue share and advertising deal," said Fulton.
"Many advertisers want to be seen to be advertising with an innovator. We try and experiment without thinking too much about revenue but sometimes you just never know what will become big. It's not always obvious.
"There's a potential for advertising to be targeted with Viewdle, so if someone searches for an actor you could assume they might be interested in knowing about their latest movie."
The project is still in trial but when it does roll out to the whole site, it will probably be incorporated into the Reuters' search engine, and "powered by Viewdle".
Second Life: "If there's business in there, we need to be covering it"
And Reuters was also one of the first news organisations to experiment with Second Life, installing reporter Adam Pasick as a full-time in-world reporter - though it has to be said that a lot of corporate projects within Second Life have been dismissed as virtual worlds hype.
Fulton says the jury is still out on Second Life; certainly the debate over the summer was more about the real users numbers than anything else, and maybe more like 25-30,000 regular users than the 5 million that has been claimed. The interesting development, he says, will be when each of them "open a back door" that links together different virtual worlds, something that would encourage the "network effect of the web".
As for why Reuters joined Second Life, Fulton is quite clear.
"If there are businesses in there spending money, then it's something we need to cover. It started with an economy the size of Kiribasi and within five years could be a major part of the economy of China. And we've had very positive resonance about our brand from within Second Life."
Next, Reuters Labs have been releasing its API in-house - a "back door feed" of news, images and text that is being used to build new applications in-house. And Reuters is also in close contact with the tech venture firms - the guys bankrolling many of the new start-ups. So there's plenty more where this came from.
Update: Graham Holliday flagged up this piece on Reuters journalist Peter Apps, who has returned to work with an array of technical back up 13 months after a horrific car accident.
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