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Meltwater – Formerly known As Magenta News Is The World’s First Online Media Monitoring Business.

Meltwater (formerly known as Meltwater Group) is a publicly-traded company based in California, US. The company was originally founded in Oslo, Norway in 2001 as Magenta News. Today, the company has a worldwide business and employs more than 1,600 people. Meltwater mainly offers software as a service (SaaS) solutions and currently, it has more than 27,000 customers on a global scale spread across 120 countries. It has also built 50 offices in 20 countries in various parts of Europe, Africa, Asia Pacific, Australia, and North America. The company also has a non-profit division called The Meltwater Foundation and its project started in Accra, Ghana.

The Story Behind The Success

Meltwater was founded in 2001 by two legends, Jørn Lyseggen and Gard Haugen. They started the company as Magenta News and it was established in Oslo, Norway. When the two founders decided to open their business, all they had was a coffee machine and a capital of $15,000. Their first office was a very little space in a shipyard from where the team tried to create the first server farm. The company’s first target was to educate the Norwegian market to make their influence strong in the home country. The company educated its existing and potential audience regarding the value of tracking and monitoring online news. After struggling for a couple of years, the footprint of the company began growing in the mid-2000s.

Since Meltwater was the world’s first online media monitoring company, once it stabilized itself in the digital market it started growing rapidly. After establishing the company, it rolled out its first product which was a news clipping service. The product was capable of scanning 100,000 news sources at a single time for collecting keywords relevant to a business and its customers. In 2005, the company decided to shift its headquarters from Ohio to San Francisco and also changed the name of the company to Meltwater News.

Expansion

Amidst the rapid growth that the company was making, it decided to open a non-profit arm to offer business and educational support to the people of Africa. The Meltwater Foundation launched the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) to offer entrepreneurial training in Ghana. Within 2008, the company expanded to almost every continent and secured an impressive customer base in each one of them. In 2010, the company announced the release of Meltwater Press which was a web-based media contact database. The same year, Company acquired an Indian-based social media monitoring company, BuzzGain followed by a CRM software developer, JitterJam 2011. After these two successful acquisitions, Meltwater released an in-house social marketing and business intelligence tool called Buzz Engage. Meltwater made another acquisition in 2011 (IceRocket) to integrate its functionality with the Buzz Engage Platform.

In 2015, the company decided to launch a new media intelligence platform and named it Meltwater. For the next few years, Meltwater made several acquisitions and each of the company’s platforms was integrated with some of the existing Meltwater products to make them more flexible. In March 2016, the company acquired Encore Alert and in 2017 it acquired an Oxford University spin-out, Wrapidity. Later in 2017, Meltwater acquired a big data company called Klarity followed by Algo. In 2018 it acquired two companies, namely, Datasift and Sysomos. In 2020, Jørn Lyseggen stepped down as the CEO of the company and he was replaced by Niklas De Besche. But after a few months, he was made the COO of the company and John Box became the new CEO.

Jørn Lyseggen – Founder & Chairman of Meltwater

Jørn Lyseggen is a famous Norwegian entrepreneur who is currently the Executive Chairman of Meltwater and MEST. Lyseggen’s career started as a research scientist at the Norwegian Computing Center. Since he has a very entrepreneurial mindset, Lyseggen worked for different startups and also became the CEO of Mogul AS. The biggest highlight in his career was founding Magenta News (now known as Meltwater) and also a non-profit organization to boost the startup culture among Africans.

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Cision – A media software company that merged from a 154-year old Swedish press agency.

Cision is a public relations and media technology company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Its history roots back to 1867 when a Swedish press agency called Svenska Telegrambyrån was formed. Its headquarters is currently based in Chicago, Illinois and it provides worldwide services to customers. Cision currently has Abel Clark as its CEO who leads 6,300 employees of the company to achieve better PR and marketing strategies. Recently, Company has also won the Best Feature Set (Cision Communications Cloud) 2021 and Best Customer Support awards by TrustRadius.

About Cision

Though Cision is famous as a web-based PR and media software company, the company also owns other online publicity and media service brands. These include PRNewswire, Canada Newswire, Bulletin Intelligence, PRWeb, etc. Apart from its offices in Canada and US, the company also operates in Europe and Asia. The PR services that are provided to the clients are either through a cloud-based model or SaaS. The customers of Cision include commercial businesses, government bodies, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions.

Founding Story of Cision

Svenska Telegrambyrån, a Swedish press agency marks the founding date of Cision in 1867. After this press agency was founded, Henry Romeike in 1881 founded the first clipping bureau in London. In 1892, Svenska Telegrambyrån established its advertising department along with a press clipping service which became famous as Pressurklipp. Between 1932 and 1934, Bacon’s Clipping Bureau was founded for the production of media books and guides on public relations.

Bacon eventually started launching many new services that included a directory for the contact information of every editor and reporter and press release mailing services. In 1972, Bacon along with Romeike & Curtice Ltd collaborated and launched a joint enterprise called Bacon’s Information International. In 1995, K-III Communications acquired Bacon’s Information and later changed its name to Primedia Inc.

A couple of years after the acquisition, Bacon partnered with MediaMap and announced that the companies will combine their media databases and PR software. By this time a company called Sifo Group AB bought Pressurklip and also acquired Romeike Group to become the largest media monitoring company globally (1999). After acquiring Romeike Group, the company changed its name to Observer AB which after two years acquired Bacon’s Information.

After all the global leaders of media and PR came under the same brand name, it acquired a series of companies in the early 2000s. The companies include Chicago News, MediaPulse, Media Clips Inc, Multivision, and many more. In 2007, Observer AB and Bacon’s Information were rebranded as Cision and in the same year, their campaign management software was launched as CisionPoint.

Recent Days

After 2007, all the operations of Observer AB were carried out under the name Cision/Cision AB. In 2011, the company sold its Finish subsidiary, Oy Cision Finland AB to M-Brain Group. By this time every industry witnessed the growing popularity of digital marketing and how social platforms were used to grow. So, Cision acquired a social media analytics company called Visible Technologies in 2014. Later that year, Cision AB merged with another public relations company, Vocus and they agreed upon the deal that the joined entity will be known as Cision. After this merger, Company relocated its headquarters to Chicago.

In 2015, Company acquired a UK-based company called Gorkana that also offered monitoring and analysis services. Cision also acquired PRNewswire from UBM Plc in December 2015 for $841 million. In 2017, the company went public via a reverse merger but again in 2020, it became a private company when Platinum Equity acquired Cision for $2.7 billion. Latest, Compay acquired Brandwatch for $450 million in February 2021.

Abel Clark – CEO of Cision

Abel Clark joined Cision directly as the CEO of the company in 2020. He is a very experienced industrial person who served as the CEO and Chairman of TruSight before joining Cision. Abel also has past working experience with Thomson Reuters as the Global Managing Director. He has high experience in leading management teams, simplifying business, and providing strategic growth solutions. Abel has an engineering degree from the University of Southampton.

Annasha

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