VentureBeat launches mobile site, powered by new Zemanta Streams product

VentureBeat is proud to unveil a new version of our mobile site.

If you’re reading this on a smartphone, you’ll already see the new look. If you’re not on a smartphone, get on over there!

The homepage looks about the same. Where the magic starts is in individual articles. We’ve got a bolder, more readable layout for each story, with larger images and bigger fonts.

But the biggest change is that additional, related articles appear right at the bottom of the article you’re reading. At first, each one will appear as a big image plus a headline. If you tap on an article, though, it will expand, right in line — no need to load a whole new page.

In effect, each article is now part of a continuous stream of news.

Yes, we’re hoping this will encourage you to stick around longer and read more articles on VentureBeat. But we also believe this will help bring you more relevant stories related to the ones you’re already reading, giving you more context and background.

To provide the new mobile site, we’ve partnered with Zemanta, whose new Zemanta Streams product is powering our mobile site.

In fact, this is the launch of Zemanta Streams — VentureBeat is the company’s premiere partner for this product.

“Zemanta helps publishers and marketers reach their total potential audience by intelligently promoting content across the web. Today VentureBeat is helping us launch Zemanta Streams, which dynamically turns any content page into a mobile-optimized dynamic stream of content powered by Zemanta’s proprietary semantic recommendation engine,” said Todd Sawicki, the president of Zemanta.

Zemanta Streams presents highly relevant, related content to readers in a mobile-optimized format.

We think mobile is fundamentally different than desktop and needs a fundamentally new way to present related content to optimize total potential audience as well as engagement and revenue.

With this site, we’re turning article pages into infinite streams of content, perfectly suited for the mobile touch environment.

“Eighty-five percent of visits are directly to content pages, thus skipping the home page, for publishers across the Zemanta network of publishers,” Sawicki said. (That aligns pretty closely with what we see on VentureBeat.com as well.) “So we built a product that takes advantage of this trend for publishers by turning any article or content page into an infinite stream of related content from the publisher, its partners, and content marketers in Zemanta’s network.”

A couple iterations of VentureBeat’s mobile site are coming in the future, which will incorporate our new VBProfiles company data cards as well as reader comments and our own sponsored posts. We’ll also be adding advertisements, and we’re excited about the opportunities for high levels of engagement that we’ll be able to offer advertisers in our mobile environment.

Behind the scenes, our writers and editors are also using Zemanta’s Editorial Assistant product, which helps us select related stories to embed in the bottom of stories we publish. (It’s a WordPress plugin.) These related links will appear on the desktop site, not the mobile version, for now. These related links, like the new mobile site, should help increase engagement by providing more relevant content for you to read.

The new mobile site should work very well on iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. But if you experience any problems, don’t hesitate to let us know by emailing webmaster@venturebeat.com. We’ll do our best to fix them and respond to you as fast as possible.