Etalia (a name coming from ancient latin, et alia – and the others) is a startup with Italian DNA, but headquarters in Switzerland, where the founders team meet technological support and raised a first round, series A of 2.2 M euro. Another round, series B in scheduled, in development plans, for February / March. Nothing has been said officially about investors, probably angel groups and entrepreneurs very confident in the ambitious bet that Etalia is going to play in the market from April 2012, time for this innovative online publishing platform to go live.
Yesterday in Milan, in Santa Teresa Mediateca (a cool place in Milan for happenings and conferences), during their first press conference, the young Etalia President Nicholas Tateo officially unveiled the initiative, proposing a kind of revolution in the distribution of editorial content that will invest first italian market and from here the rest of the world, focusing on the U.S. market.
In SOPA atmosphere of these days, a platform that could satisfy both internet users and professional content producers, independent producers, distributors, is a kind of fantastic mirage.
Etalia is a web app, a news aggregator, similar to Paper.li, where a registered user is allowed to create his own newspaper , aggregating someone else’s content, both independent or professional content (as online newspapers, blogs , fb, twitter, etc.), and which consists a new channel for content distribution and share.
In terms of technology, Etalia seems to be more sophisticated, than Paper.li: it introduces the concept of “molecular newspaper”, it measures the reliability of sources with filters and weights assigned by the user during the customization of the newspaper; offers advanced tools for sharing, uses more intelligent semantic analisys for indexing of contents, which takes into account correlations, sentiments, geolocation; it also provides flexible interfaces.
But the most innovative step Etalia will take is in the business model, which will provide profits for the entire value chain, from the original publisher of a content til the user of the service who redistributes this content through his “Mr.Smith Daily News”. Win-win-win strategy, publisher-Etalia-users.
As it was explained during the conference, some important italian publishers has been involved in the development stages of this project, in order to take advantage from their point of view since the very beginning of the story.
That is to say, that in Etalia plans, big publishers should not look to the platform as their next enemy, but rather as a partner, capable to distribute their contents to some targets that they never achieved (younger, digital natives) or the ones their are heavily loosing (hyperconnected business users).
Remunaration for everyone comes primarily through revenue share on advertising, thanks to a much more pervasive advertising placement, able to cover a long, long tail.
The service will be free: users only pay premium content.
The Italian market calculated by the company is between the 8.4 million unique users (those who daily uses at least one web news service) and 16 million internet users that are likely to find useful a service like Etalia. In Us, the launch will be probably next summer.
It is obvious that the real test will be the go-live of the platform and the response of Italian users.
www.etalia.net
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