Camayak Ltd. is delighted to announce a new partnership with Daniel O’Connor, the creator of BeatStrap: a new live-blogging tool for Twitter users. O’Connor, a computer science major at Binghamton University, has a track record of launching innovative web-based apps and was responsible last year for Pipe Dream – Binghamton’s student-run newspaper – developing its own responsive WordPress theme.
O’Connor came up with the idea for a social media-curation platform after seeing the newsroom at Pipe Dream grapple with covering live events. ‘We looked at CoverItLive and a few other platforms, but I wanted a much cleaner, more intuitive way for editors to curate a flow of live content and cut out the distracting posts that crowd the updates you actually want to read’ O’Connor says. Counting Tweetdeck, Spundge and Storify as examples of effective social media management tools, O’Connor developed a prototype version of his idea for the staff at the newspaper, which proved a success. ‘That’s when I realized the idea had real potential’, he says.
Camayak approached O’Connor while he was working at Binghamton’s Pipe Dream. ‘I was impressed by Camayak’s ambition to help design more efficient, digitally-adept newsrooms and their approach is spot-on’, says O’Connor. ‘It was obvious from the start that we shared very similar visions of how editorial teams could keep improving their collaboration processes and it didn’t take long for us to see how Camayak and BeatStrap could be of immense value to one another’.
Roman Heindorff, Camayak’s CEO, says BeatStrap offers publishers a novel way of promoting information and expects it to support new forms of organizing and leveraging real-time content flows. ‘Daniel is targeting a neglected part of the evolving editorial process’ says Heindorff. ‘BeatStrap offers tremendous opportunities for publishers to curate more high-quality information, which fits perfectly with our goals and the way we see Camayak evolving as a collaboration platform. Our early adopters are coming up with dozens of really solid use-cases, which bodes well for the service both as a stand-alone product and a power feature within Camayak’.
For more information on BeatStrap, sign up for a free beta account here or email roman@camayak.com for press and technical requests.