Collaboration will Empower News Producers with Unique, Powerful Tools to Help Them Reconnect with Their Communities
VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA (December 10, 2019) – Pressland (pressland.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of Codebase Ventures Inc. ("Codebase" or the "Company") (CSE: CODE - FSE: C5B – OTCQB: BKLLF), today announced a partnership with Showcase (https://showcase.to) a new digital platform that helps brands, celebrities, artists, creators and producers connect more meaningfully with their communities. The companies will work together to build audience-engagement tools for news organizations, independent media and freelance journalists.
“Pressland’s technology will fight fake news and misinformation, and this will help rebuild the public’s trust in media,” said Jeff Koyen, Pressland’s CEO and founder. “At the same time, everyone in the news business, whether they’re a global brand or an individual reporter, must actively re-engage with their audiences. Showcase will help them do this more deeply and effectively.” Koyen also serves as Codebase’s Chief Strategy Officer.
Using artificial intelligence and natural language processing, Pressland’s proprietary platform collects, analyzes and indexes the news media’s around-the-clock production data. When commercial services debut in 2020, this data will be offered as a SaaS product to social networks, search engines and news distributors. Pressland-affiliated publishers, newsrooms and journalists will be offered value-adds that include preferential access to Showcase’s unique audience engagement tools.
Showcase invites brands, celebrities, influencers and other content creators to create unique “badges” that drive community engagement; every project must feature a social-good component. Fans can collect and trade these badges on the Showcase platform. These badges are built on the ERC-721 protocol, a Solidity-based standard for creating collectible tokens.
Similar tokens have been used extensively in the gaming industry to create in-game collectibles. Showcase is the first platform of its kind to use this technology specifically for brands, celebrities and other creators.
“Driving engagement through social good is one of Showcase’s founding mandates,” said Reed Korach, Showcase’s CEO and co-founder. “Considering Pressland’s mission to restore public trust in media, this partnership was an easy fit. We look forward to exchanging resources, expertise and insights that will benefit our companies as well as our communities.”
The partnership includes a talent exchange: Koyen will join Showcase’s advisory board as their news media expert and Korach sits on Pressland’s advisory board as blockchain architect.
Previously announced partners include the Independent Media Institute; online writing community Study Hall; ethical tech pioneers All Tech Is Human; developer of publisher automation tools, OutVoice; hyper-personal technology company, iO; and geolocative photo-sharing app, Membit.
Brooklyn-based Pressland is led by Koyen, an award-winning journalist, technology entrepreneur and veteran media executive. He has worked for Wired, The New York Times, Forbes, Digiday and many other news organizations. Pressland also publishes News-to-Table (newstotable.com), a digital magazine dedicated to issues of media trust and transparency.
