December 2019: Press Release

Business News

For immediate release:

4th December 2019

Interconnect IT Ltd announces big investment in Amazon publishing channels

Liverpool – 2019 — Today, interconnect/it announced the first outcome of their £70k investment in Amazon publishing channels in 2019. Starting with the general availability of their Standfirst for Kindle platform, followed by their Alexa Flash Briefings platform ready for launch early in 2020.

“After years of being leaders in helping publishers to grow their potential on the web, we realised that publishers need easy ways to feed more channels,” said David Coveney, Director at interconnect/it. “Currently, most publishers stick with paper and the web, but there are ways to attract new audiences or better serve existing ones. However, high costs have often prevented publishers from seeking these out. We’ve now invested in creating easy to use tools for the Kindle e-ink and Alexa voice platforms. These tools make outputting content to these digital channels almost trivially easy.”

Positive Customer Impact

Existing customers such as The Spectator and New Statesman have already been using the Kindle e-ink platform to deliver periodicals. Amazon’s Kindle e-ink magazine and newspaper subscription service is especially well suited to frequent travellers, who often don’t have access to cheap or usable internet, but still want to read their favourite periodical. Standfirst for Kindle allows a publisher to easily re-use their content from almost any content management system. This keeps total production time down to less than one hour per issue. Not only that, but every Kindle periodical feature, including a detailed contents menu, is fully supported.

Now that the product is officially on general release, any publisher who either wishes to improve their Kindle e-ink service, or who is setting out to find new subscribers on the Kindle, can easily do so. Standfirst for Kindle is priced from just £95 per month for the bulk of UK publishers, and has a maximum price of £995 per month for the biggest daily newspapers requiring a 24/7 support service.

The added investment means that in Spring 2020 we will make available our Standfirst for Alexa Flash Briefings service. This will allow any customer to create Alexa content easily and quickly.

Finally, our investment in training and research means we will also be offering full Alexa Skills product development services to our customers.

Product Availability

Standfirst for Kindle is driven by our research into what publishers need to do to increase revenues in a difficult marketplace and reflects interconnect/it’s commitment to supporting the publishing industry with low cost, high return products and services. Full Standfirst for Kindle information is available at here.

Company Background

Founded in 1996 by David Coveney and a group of journalists working together, Interconnect IT Ltd, trading as interconnect/it, is a UK leader in digital publishing solutions. The company’s original purpose was to publish digital content on the nascent worldwide web. However, at the time this proved a difficult area for a company with limited resources and the firm transitioned to being a software development company from 1997 onwards. In 2006 the company decided to re-enter the publishing world as a supplier rather than as a content producer.

Standfirst is an EU registered trademark of Interconnect IT Ltd.

For more information, press only:

PR Contact: David Coveney
Phone number: +44 (0)207 193 6420
Email: [email protected]

For more information on Standfirst for Kindle:

Standfirst for Kindle