NetPost Secures $8M Investment

Content management and cross-media publishing solutions provider NetPost Inc. today announced it has secured $8 million in its first major round of venture capital funding, led by renowned venture capitalists Bay Partners and Israeli-based Koor Corporate Venture Capital.

NetPost’s TrueView is a Java- and XML-based platform that enables content providers to publish information assets across multiple media such as the web, television, Internet appliances, mobile phones and print.

“Our mission is to take rich content and deliver it to the consumer — wherever the consumer is,” Amatzia Ben-Artzi, president, CEO and co-founder of NetPost, told ASP News.

TrueView works by first normalizing all data as XML in their database, Ben-Artzi said. This data could be images, word-processing or desktop publishing documents, news feeds, or yellow page directories, for example. The key to TrueView is the meta-data that is saved with the content in the database, delivered to the end-user, and interpreted as necessary by a Java applet on the client device, he said. “It’s not just the content, but also the instructions to rebuild the content,” Ben-Artzi said.

This method of delivery allows each device to represent the data in the best way possible for that device, such as only sending text messages to a cell phone, or rendering an image at the correct resolution for a PC monitor vs. a television set, Ben-Artzi said.

And TrueView could also support advertising or e-commerce, he said. “They may see a book and want to order more chapters, see a catalog and want to order the item, see an ad and make an appointment to learn more,” Ben-Artzi said. “Consumers will want to respond.”

The technology behind TrueView has been in development for several years, and its predecessor, targeted toward the print media, is widely used in Israel, Ben-Artzi said. NetPost has created translators for news feeds, directory publishing formats, QuarkXPress and Adobe PDF files.

The typical NetPost customer will be large content owners and aggregators, such as phone directory companies, catalogs and newspapers, according to Ben-Artzi. “We’re not a service company, but an infrastructure enabling company,” he said.

There are currently “about a dozen” customers in various stages of a pilot program, Ben-Artzi said. NetPost will formally announce its product in the coming weeks, he said.

NetPost is headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded in 1998 by Ben-Artzi, co-founder of NetManage and alumnus of Synoptics and 3Com, and Israeli publishing veteran Menachem Livni. Bay Partners, Koor Industries Ltd. and private investors fund the privately held company.