Calvin Tang, co-founder of Newsvine, comes from a deep history in real estate development and property management. He has also worked on several overseas ventures involving the development and commercialization of products he invented. Calvin was responsible for jointly developing the concept of Newsvine.com, and laid the early groundwork for the formation of the company. As Chief Operating Officer, he manages the business matters of the company and also handles business development and user relations. Calvin holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from Seattle University. Visit his blog here.

What is Newsvine and what are its unique aspects and features?

Newsvine is a giant platform for the participatory news model of the future and emerging present. Aggregating and hosting news from established media outlets and combining it with individual contributions from thousands of users around the world, Newsvine blends the best features of traditional news sites with the social networking and collaboration features that are driving the growth of the participatory web.

At Newsvine, every piece of content on the site is a live discussion. Users can leave comments or chat live directly within articles themselves. The centuries-old model of news being a one-way push from publisher to consumer is extended by allowing consumers to increase the lifespan and usefulness of stories with their own contributions.

What do you see as the future of online and offline news?

Over 50 million adult Internet users in America get their news online every single day – representing a tripling since 2000 – and Newsvine plans to be a major part of that market as it continues to grow year over year.

A key advantage of Newsvine relative to other news sites is that it aggregates and presents as much news as almost all major news sites – sometimes even more – in an entirely automated fashion, resulting in operating costs that are a mere fraction of those burdening established media outfits. Newsvine’s proprietary content management system is not only tightly integrated with the consumer-facing website – it *is* the consumer-facing website. Authors can publish articles from any web browser, and e-mail/mobile integration is coming soon as well. Aside from basic publishing functions, the Newsvine CMS also offers the ability to moderate discussion threads, remove content, and administer user privileges all from the convenience of a web browser.

Although still in its infancy as a primary news destination on the web, Newsvine has already been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Red Herring Magazine, CBS News, and named one of Business 2.0’s “Top 25 Companies Reinventing the Web”.

What hardware and software did you choose to power your service, and why?

Since the Newsvine content management system has been built from the start with the intention of sharing and syndicating content, every piece of content on the site is readily available as RSS and other forms of XML. This makes it extraordinarily easy to strike cross-licensing deals with companies interested in both supplying Newsvine with content and/or using Newsvine content within their own systems. These opportunities include other web sites, newsreaders, mobile applications, and broadband opportunities.