Tizra Closes on Financing Deal with Rhode Island’s Slater Technology Fund
Technology company specializing in packaging, selling and delivering online content solutions raises $500,000
Providence, RI, May 1, 2007 —Tizra, Inc. announced today that it has closed on an investment made by the Slater Technology Fund, a venture development fund based in Rhode Island, in the amount of $500,000 to finish development and commercialize its technology for its online publishing and delivery solutions.
Tizra’s lead product, AgilePublisher™ is a hosted online publishing service that allows publishers and businesses to quickly and affordably webify, market, and sell their existing content as new product, through their own website and without software development or data conversion.
The hosted service assists any publisher or other business with Portable Format Documents (PDF) that needs to distribute and sell that information on the internet via a usable, high quality web site.
According to Adobe, Adobe flash player and reader software combined are installed on more than 700 million connected PC’s worldwide, and that there are over 250 million PDF files that exist on the web (Source: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pdfs/fastfacts.pdf).
Tizra’s technology platform bridges the gap for institutions, both large and small, that have significant online content to manage, package, deliver and sell,” stated David Durand, CEO, Tizra, Inc. “We created AgilePublisher™ to give institutions a fast and flexible way to manage how they present their published works as well as how they market and sell them. AgilePublisher’s user-friendly interface removes technical obstacles to keeping the online channel up to date.
Simba Information, a leading authority for market intelligence and forecasts in the media industry, has estimated the U.S. professional publishing marketplace was projected $17 billion in 2006 (Source: Simba Information, Publishing for Professional Markets 2006-2007). The college publishing industry alone is estimated at $34 billion (source: Simba Information, College Publishing Market Forecast 2007-2008).
“I believe Tizra’s next-generation, web application technology has a chance to scale with the size of the opportunity, and really open the floodgates for book-based content from thousands of publishers,” said Thorne Sparkman, managing director, Slater Technology Fund. “The Tizra team has a lot of their own creativity, time and capital invested in this venture already, and I’m delighted that the Slater Technology Fund can provide the additional support they need to help them reach critical mass.”
Tizra’s team has a strong track record with custom solutions in the online publishing arena. Members of the team have developed sophisticated web publishing solutions for such institutions as The American Medical Association, McGraw-Hill and the World Bank.
Tizra is currently working with numerous institutions in piloting its AgilePublisher technology platform. “AgilePublisher presents a unique opportunity to organizations who are managing and publishing significant amounts of online content” said Cliff Wulfman, technical director of the Modernist Journals Project (MJP). “AgilePublisher makes sure that our content is found from the major search engines. And now that our content has expanded to include larger files that cannot be downloaded easily by our audience, we are excited by the prospect of being able to break our documents apart at the page level if required, and present exactly what each of our varied constituencies needs, including beautifully rendered images and artwork, previously hidden from our target audience.”
About Tizra, Inc.
Tizra is developing new approaches for publishers, corporations, government, education, and information-heavy organizations to more effectively manage and sell their online content assets to targeted markets. The company is headquartered in Providence, RI.
For More Information
Andy Cutler
Cutler & Company
andy@cutlerandcompany.com
401-743-7842
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