Quintype, a media technology company based in Bangalore, was founded in September 2014 by Amit Rathore. Quintype provides digital publishing tools as SaaS platform model. The products offered by the company are Bold, Ahead, Metype and Accesstype.
Explaining Quintype, Vineet Panjabi, vice president of sales, Quintype, said, “We have a suite of digital publishing products for large and mid-size digital media organizations. Our core product is a hosted headless content management system called Bold with a front-end framework called Ahead. Typically, traditional hosted platforms like WordPress or Drupal help you start your website and publish content using third party plugins and themes. But as publishers grow, certain challenges come up with that model, one of them being a continuous investment in technology, you need to have a team of web developers and IT professionals in the house who are consistently working on those plugins to ensure that site is running.”
He further said that since these plugins are the third party, WordPress doesn’t take responsibility for these plugins working with each other. Additionally, traditional systems are unable to adapt to newer forms of content distribution on screen-less and audio devices without additional programming.
Quintype’s Bold is a headless CMS that acts as a content repository. The content can be rendered on any front-end device using an API (Application Programming Interface) framework. The API is like a bridge that can be used to send the content across to wherever the user wants such as social media, mobile devices, tablets, laptops, or to bring out eMail newsletters. From the back end of the system, the content can be triggered to go on social media channels or can be integrated with mail-chain accounts to bring out newsletters. Similarly, when integrated with a push notification provider, push notifications can be created by a single command. The complete process is automated.
“You can set it and forget it. You can decide your editorial workflow – whether you want to publish as you create the content or schedule it for later – and set up the system accordingly. There are features for SEO and keywords as well. After the system is integrated with the distribution channels, the system takes care of the distribution of content,” Panjabi added.
The software allows the user to automatically publish content on aggregator platforms such as Apple News, Google News, and Dailyhunt. In the case of sourcing content from a third party, the syndicated content can be directly collected in the repository and is passed and managed through the regular workflow.
“Quintype’s strength is based on three pillars – content, engagement and distribution, and monetization . . . . It all depends on how easily you can create content and how quickly you wish to publish it. We focus on the ease and speed of publishing.
“Secondly, there is an omnichannel distribution system for engagement with the audience and distribution of content on different platforms. Thirdly, the publisher needs to decide their monetization strategy including subscriptions, Google ads, native advertising and we integrate the system to automate the process or make it easier. For example, to advertise on Facebook, you will have to buy their ad scheme and we can help you technically connect to Facebook with your data to publish your ad without having to log in to Facebook,” Panjabi said.
The software becomes the backbone of the publishing. Multiple users can work on it and users are provided with secure hosting, unlimited server space, and a global CDN to ensure that a website can be loaded on a mobile phone within seconds globally. The product offers security and functional updates regularly.
Under the Quintype umbrella, the company provides four products – Bold, Metype, Accesstype, and Ahead.
Bold is Quintype’s content management system. The software works on making content creation more user friendly by adding references, quotes, videos, and other formats, engaging the audience when reporting live events with images, videos, and tweets, making the content noticeable for reporting it first, adaptable focus image for different devices, scheduling stories, push notifications and enabling social distribution, and enhancing a story with tappable, full-screen content.
“Bold takes care of little challenges faced by publishers on an everyday basis. Publishers using traditional CMSs upload multiple pictures for every story for different screen sizes of different devices. But we only ask for a single photo in the best size you have and resize it so you don’t lose the essence of the photo and it will resize itself dynamically according to the screen. We break the structure of a story in cards. You can visualize a story in the stack of cards in terms of headline, tagline, summary, social media links. You can use elements to build it further and make the user experience better and easier. It also makes it easier for search engine algorithms to pick the elements. Your content is automatically ranked much higher and is easier to integrate with AI,” Panjabi explained.
Quintype’s second product Ahead is the front-end framework for the headless CMS Bold. It helps with organizing, monetizing and distribution of content for emerging publishers. It provides several story formats, a layout designer tool for websites, connects with industry-standard analytics and data measurement tools for accurate data collection and data aggregation, integrates with popular traffic sources including PWA, AMP, Instant Articles, Google News, Push Notifications, e-mails and more; and for monetization of content through ad networks, subscriptions and metered paywalls, as well as new integrations and layouts.
Metype provides an audience engagement platform. A widget for commenting and user-generated content management, Metype allows comment moderation on a website and has auto spam detection and sensitive keywords to control the kind of language being used. It allows one to ‘softblock’ users on the website. The ‘softblocked’ users would not know that they are blocked and their comments would be hidden from everyone apart from them.
“It also allows you to increase user engagement through comments. You can also create customized recommendations for other stories and articles based on the comments. We can also get analytics out of comments unlike other platforms,” Panjabi added. Metype also allows third party content management by integrating with Bold, thereby providing a centralized system to review, approve, and publish it.
The entire workflow is on the cloud. Its data can be accessed from anywhere and on any device. On request by publishers, the company can integrate its print CMSs Like 4C Plus and ppi Media.
Accesstype by Quintype is a tool for monetization of content. It helps a user by creating and managing subscriptions through metered paywalls, pay per article, recurring payments, custom paid plans, generating coupon codes, gift subscriptions, fundraising, discounts and management of invoice and taxes.
Quintype is used by more than 45 publishers globally including Bloomberg, Fortune India, National Herald, The Quint and Swaraja magazines. The software supports 150 languages.
“When you invest in technology, you don’t do it based on what serves you today but you do it based on how it can serve you for the next five years. You have to keep innovating to stay ahead. Today content has to fit the screen sizes. And sometimes, there is no screen at all, statistics say that 30% of all content is going to be consumed without screen through voice assistance. You have to look at the technology that is compatible with newer forms of storytelling. And that is what Quintype is built for,” Panjabi concluded.
