CoverItLive, easily the most extensive tool one can use for liveblogging live events or other real-time stuff such as earnings calls, press conferences and the likes, has raised $1.2 million Canadian dollars (or approximately $1 million USD) more from its current investor and private equity fund Flagstone Capital and well-known investor and entrepreneur Paul Kedrosky.
CoverItLive has also quietly rolled out a money-making product dubbed CiL Enterprise that brings additional features to professional users, catering to publishers who cover live events with multiple writers in particular. The enterprise version is currently still free, but the company aims to start charging somewhere between $50/month to $500/month for CiL Enterprise within a couple of months, leaving an option for free usage in educational environments.

I am at the Mesh conference in Toronto right now sitting next to two guys liveblogging the event on ScribbleLive: Michael De Monte and Jonathan Keebler. They are the founders of ScribbleLive. Jonathan is typing notes while StumbleUpon founder (and semi-famous Canadian) Garrett Camp is being interviewed on stage, while Michael is adding links and photos. (Earlier in the morning they liveblogged Club Pengiuin co-founder Lane Merrifield’s keynote). The Ajax-based platform automatically updates the page as they add more content.
It is a pretty sweet platform for something they cobbled together in their spare time for $1,500 (Canadian). De Monte is the director of online production at CTV and Keebler is a technology manager there. I am just sitting here watching them liveblog and it is definitely an improvement over typing in Wordpress and constantly hitting save, and forcing readers to constantly hit the refresh button. For people watching the liveblog, it updates automatically without having to reload the page.
Since it is Ajax, you can watch liveblogs on your iPhone and it will just scroll. Another nifty feature: you can e-mail text or photos from your phone (or anywhere) and the content appears directly in the post. Also, readers who are logged in can reverse the order of the entries, so they can read the liveblog from the beginning, or see the most recent additions up top.
This is something I would want to use for liveblogging events, if only they offered an embeddable widget that I could put directly into a TechCrunch post. Right now, the posts exist on ScribbleLive’s Website. But De Monte whispers that an embeddable widget is something they are working on. Other features on the roadmap include the ability to post from Twitter and comment that will travel with each entry.
