Saturday, May 30, 2009

Morris Publishing Group Uses Caspio to Drive High Traffic, Interactive Applications and Widgets on Florida Times-Union and Other News Sites

Morris Publishing Group Uses Caspio to Drive High Traffic, Interactive Applications and Widgets on Florida Times-Union and Other News Sites

Morris Harnesses the Power of Web 2.0 Through Caspio's Do-it-Yourself Database and Web Application Capabilities to Attract Millions of Interested Readers

New York, NY (PRWEB) September 17, 2008

Caspio, Inc. (www. caspio. com), provider of the leading do-it-yourself database platform for creating web applications, announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo that the Morris Publishing Group has utilized the Caspio Bridge platform to power dozens of popular, high traffic applications on seven of its major news sites, including the Florida Times-Union. Since the beginning of this year, Morris's Jacksonville. com site has driven more than 2 million incremental page views on viewer searches powered by easy-to-build Caspio applications.

Morris selected and has expanded its use of the Caspio Bridge platform based on the ability to create and deploy searchable databases and applications in minutes that otherwise would take days or weeks to put together. For example, just 20 minutes after the state released scores from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), the Florida Times-Union was able to post a searchable database of school ratings by county, school and grade. And in another 20 minutes, the site used Caspio to post 10 years of historical data for comparison. The data generated more than 40,000 page views on the first day of posting.

"Caspio gives us the speed to punch out database information onto the site a lot faster than any other development platforms would," said Joe Allen-Black, Digital Media News Editor and avid user of Caspio at the Florida Times-Union. "As a result, we are able to post in minutes lots of searchable, interactive applications and useful widgets that you can't find anywhere else in this region." 

The Jacksonville newspaper site currently features more than two dozen customized searchable databases and applications built on Caspio, including a restaurant guide with a widget to check for health inspection reports; searchable crime and sex offender information for specific neighborhoods; school and voter applications; summer camp finders; and event information such as the annual Gate River Run, the largest 15K race in the nation in which runners split times and finishes are published in near real-time on Jacksonville. com website.

The Caspio Bridge platform reduces the load on Morris' servers by hosting the database information and handling the viewer traffic that results. Morris uses Caspio across six other media sites in the U. S. and is in the process of rolling out Caspio to its remaining websites.

"Morris Publishing Group has really embraced the power of Caspio to boost viewership and resulting advertising and business opportunities," said David A. Milliron, Vice President of Media Services for Caspio. "From the vast array of database-driven applications to the proliferation of useful widgets, the work Morris has done epitomizes a leadership role in driving Web 2.0 interactivity to its expanding reader base."

Today, Caspio powers web applications for hundreds of media sites and more than 70 percent of the Top 100 American newspapers, along with thousands of companies of all sizes in its array of nearly 150,000 customer web applications built to date.

At booth #1434 at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York this week, Caspio is showcasing the newly released version 6.0 of its Caspio Bridge platform, along with a sampling of its customer applications at work.

About Morris Publishing Group
Morris Publishing Group, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Morris Communications Company, LLC, a privately held media company based in Augusta, Ga. Morris Publishing currently owns and operates 13 daily newspapers as well as nondaily newspapers, city magazines and free community publications in the Southeast, Midwest, Southwest and Alaska. For more information, visit our Web site, morris. com.

About Caspio Media Services
Caspio Media Services, a division of Caspio, Inc., offers strategic products and services tailored to meet the needs of newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and other online media. Solutions include the Caspio Bridge wizard-driven framework for rapid database publishing, custom application development, rich community-based applications, third-party integrations such as mapping and data feeds, syndicated databases, reverse-publishing tools, and training services that empower non-developers to quickly capture, publish and manage data online.

About Caspio, Inc.
Caspio Inc. (www. caspio. com) is the world's leading on-demand do-it-yourself web application creation platform. The company's philosophy is to empower business users to create and deploy web databases, forms, and applications easily and without programming. Caspio's on-demand platform replaces coding with intuitive point-and-click wizards, enabling users to rapidly produce web database components for capturing, publishing, and managing data online. Caspio shrinks development time from weeks to hours and from thousands of dollars to a small monthly fee. Caspio's customers range from one-person entrepreneurs to Fortune-500 corporations, digital media giants, government agencies, and educational institutions.

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