THE TECH START-UP EMPOWERING IMAGES
forms, from social media monitoring to web analytics, has completely transformed their business model. Today, media titles know more about their audiences than ever before, and are able to refine their offering as a result.
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However, data isn’t useful unless you know how to make sense of it and can build a plan that allows you to monetise on this new information. This understanding is now vital, with each reader becoming a powerful asset if you are able to take advantage of innovative digital technologies that will allow you to refine your offering.
One such offering is London-based start-up Taggstar. Founded in 2010 by Fraser Robinson, once commercial director at
LastMinute.com, Taggstar brings website images to life by allowing publishers to add layers of content onto each picture, making them interactive and shareable. Taggstar also allows publishers to build features around their images, as well as include related links and multimedia content inviting readers to engage on a deeper level. Taggstar is already working with media partners such as MSN, Sky Living, The Telegraph, Hearst Magazines and The Independent so to find out more, I spoke to Fraser on his start-up story and future plans for the business.
12 entrepreneurcountry
ny publisher who has taken note of the digital revolution knows that
content analytics in all shapes and
Entrepreneur Country Speaks to
Fraser Robinson, Founder of Taggstar By Kelly Dolan
What were you doing before launching Taggstar?
I began my career as an Investment Banker for Morgan Stanley in the US working on M&A, which gave me my first taste of technology. I then founded my first start-up in the late nineties in the online government space and spent some time between that and working in Hong Kong for Sure Media, which is a content, finance and production business. I was distributing and producing film content for outer Asia, so there was a little bit of shifting gears. I was then given the opportunity to join
Lastminute.com, so the majority of my career has been a mix of big institutions and small start-ups.
What key lessons did you pick up during your time at Lastminute. com?
I think
Lastminute.com was probably one of the best digital experiences I’ve ever had. It was a large business with lots of people but with an entrepreneurial heart, which meant I was able to exist within a business that was performing, that was large, had revenue behind it as well as a quality team of fantastic technologists. It taught me the ways of e-commerce, the ins and the outs of digital marketing, how to drive data to better use and how to engage with customers online.
What then inspired you to launch
Taggstar? When the internet first began it was
a very low bandwidth environment which lent itself to very limited content distribution. So the internet
largely
grew up around text because text is low weight and you’re able to view text very easily. However, as images began to proliferate more online I realised that images are largely a dark spot on a web page with very little information being understood about a particular image. The irony of course is that images are typically the most engaging piece of content on a page, so I spotted this bizarre situation where the most interesting, most
valuable piece of content was also the least understood.
That to me was what inspired Taggstar, a business that has the aim of uncovering that hidden value in interpreting images, understanding them better and exploiting their value. What’s happened in the last 5 years is that the dynamic of the webpage has changed, pictures get bigger and there
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