Om Malik interviews John Borthwick, founder and CEO, Betaworks.

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick’s advicefor the media industry: think about producing “information” — not “content.”

Why? “Content is very much about the package, very much about the container”, Borthwick said during a Q&A with GigaOM founder Om Malik at our recent paidContent 2012 conference.

The moment you start thinking about it as information, I think people start thinking about it differently, they think less about the container and the structure and a little bit more about the users.

That’s especially important as the concept of “container” changes with the increase in realtime data and sharing across platforms.

The pair also talked about how to use that data (Betaworks has started both Bitly and Chartbeat); how Facebook isn’t making the best use of its data for advertising and the need to break the CPM ad model; why Apple’s app store and Google Play don’t work; and a lot more packed into the embedded video below:

It’s a very exciting development for us, as ContentNext and GigaOM share so many of the same goals and have such similar cultures. We both believe fundamentally in the power of breaking news and smart, useful content across different platforms, and we both have a core conviction about practicing truth and fairness in our journalism. We also both happen to believe that you can build very profitable businesses if you can execute on those principles.

We have other things in common, too: Both companies’ founders — in our case, Rafat Ali, in GigaOM’s case, Om Malik — turned influential one-man blogs into vibrant media companies by being way ahead of the curve. (A side note: The two founders have also long been close friends.) The chance to work with Om is one that anyone would leap at. He is a true visionary with a unique understanding of technology and a gift for communicating that knowledge. He’s also stacked GigaOM with talented writers and editors who, like him, have a deep curiosity about the intersection of technology and business, particularly innovation. (You can read Om’s post on the sale.)

At a time when so many content companies are groping for sustainable business models, GigaOM has a dynamic approach to making money. Its multiple revenue streams extend from site advertising to conferences to subscription products and beyond; from its online audience of more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, to its leading events like GigaOM Structure and GigaOM Roadmap, to GigaOM Pro, which provides research on emerging technology markets from over 110 independent analysts. GigaOM has built a suite of products that can serve a variety audiences, all of which congregate under the GigaOM brand. And now that will expand to include our sites, newsletters and conferences.

For readers of ContentNext’s sites — paidContent, MocoNews, paidContent:UK and ContentSutra — there’s nothing not to like about this deal. You’ll still be able to attend our stellar conferences and enjoy our trenchant posts about the industries we cover. You’ll still be getting all the content you know from the writers that you’re used to getting it from. But now you’ll be getting something else, too: more smart voices on different and vital topics, and even more news and analysis.

Under the terms of the purchase, Guardian News & Media (GNM), which bought ContentNext Media in 2008, will take a minority stake in GigaOM. GNM joins existing GigaOM investors including Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. The sale is the culmination of a process that began back in the fall, with multiple bidders for ContentNext. The New York investment bank Coady Deimar Partners advised GNM on the deal.

“With our shared commitment to journalistic ethics, GigaOM and paidContent are a natural fit,” said Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM. “paidContent is the leading voice covering the evolution of media, an area that is very important to us. Integrating our teams will enrich our editorial coverage and expand our footprint immediately in two markets that are critical to our growth – New York City and the UK.” GigaOM, which was founded in 2006, is based in San Francisco. ContentNext, whose roots go back to 2002, is based in New York.

The sale ends ContentNext’s three-and-a-half-year run as part of Guardian News and Media. When GNM had bought ContentNext, part of the idea was that it could help the UK publisher gain mindshare in the U.S. as the Guardian expanded there. In recent months, GNM has been focusing its investment activity in the U.S. around the buildout of a new site. “paidContent has a fantastic presence in the tech/media space, and the match with GigaOM, itself a really smart and pioneering company, is a good one. We are delighted to become shareholders in GigaOM as part of the deal,” said Andrew Miller, CEO of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of GNM. “The Guardian’s focus in the U.S. is on building guardiannews.com, but we look forward to seeing paidContent thrive and grow in its new home and wish its staff all the very best for the future.”

We thank the Guardian for their stewardship, and can’t wait to start working with our new colleagues at GigaOM.

See GigaOM’sannouncement of the deal for additional details.

The $6 million new round, led by Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures with existing investors Alloy Ventures and True Ventures taking part, will go toward a major expansion of its subscription research business and events, along with building its editorial ranks.

It’s the fifth round for the tech media company founded in 2006 by Om Malik.

The GigaOM Pro Analyst network already claims “dozens of Fortune 500 enterprise account” but hasn’t broken out total subscribers, though total website users are up 30 percent annually.

The Pro network numbers more than 100 independent analysts. The funding will grow that pool, and will go toward building a new technology platform for distributing the research itself. GigaOM says it will also start scheduling conferences in new areas and cities, including New York. GigaOM contributor Bobbie Johnson is going aboard full-time to build out the publisher in Europe.

“We have demonstrated that paid content (not paywalls) can work, as long as you can provide value to your community,” Malik writes. ” Just as we never positioned GigaOM to compete with traditional media outlets, I believe we are charting our own course with our GigaOM Pro research service. “And it is working. It is working so well that we really need to put more gas in the engine to grow it even faster.”

For GigaOM, this may have been an alternative to a straight sale. It brings in cash to grow the business further, with a B2B publishing investor on board.

The investment comes as the market for buying growing content sites hots up (well, at least for AOL). But, unlike TechCrunch, which has more of a mass-consumer slant, GigaOM is clearly ploughing a burrow as a business/professional publisher.

Reed Elsevier general partner Kevin Brown: “We only invest in media companies with the potential to become hugely profitable global companies, and GigaOM … is firmly in that camp.”

The plan for a paid subscription service took shape three years ago, Om wrote, the company was embarking on a funding round. Even in 2006, when online advertising was growing at substantial double digits, Om said he realized that ad-support alone wouldn’t cut it. Since then, it has expanded into the conference business and several events. The service is using WordPress

– Wireless and wireline networks aren’t in sync: “New technologies, like mobile WiMax and LTE are so important. It transforms it into a pipe in the sky and a mobile Internet experience that you can afford to provide users with greater bandwidth, lower latencies and still make money. You are seeing problems with iPhone. When you deploy it on a 3G network, everyone has a poorer experience. Is that a flaw of the network or the iPhone? No, it’s a synchronization problem.”

– Limited bandwidth: He said there’s companies like Verizon (NYSE: VZ), which is building a landline high-bandwidth FiOS network, and SprintNextel, which is building a high-bandwidth wireless network, which will provide the big pipes developers will need to deliver a lot of content. “We aren’t ten years away from it, we are one or two years away from it, so now is the time to recognize and put the pieces in place, so people have interesting things to do with these networks.”

– 4G opportunities for developers: The bottom line is as we move to this [4G] model, where there’s an IP transport connection, which will be like the Internet in the cloud, we start to see the opportunity to layer on applications. As we start to get to that model it becomes much easier for the operator to let them [high-bandwidth applications] exist because it won’t break the network. It’s very hard to do that today in the 2G and 3G world. It’s a catalyst for new ecosystems to be formed.” On the killer app for 4G: “My answer is simple. The killer applicaiton in the 4G world is now that you are able to take every killer application that’s been popular in wireline and then make it mobile.”

– Nortel backing away from LTE?: “We’ve been very clear from day one that 4G cannot be successful if the ecosystem and structure is exactly like the 3G networks. There’s too many competitors doing too much in a vertical fashion…We have to be careful about creating a new business model, or replicating the systems in the past. We have to go into a world where there’s collaboration, and co-competition. The structure doesn’t work, and we have to look at Internet structure rather than the cellular structure for it to work. A lot of people interpreted that as us saying we are backing away.”

Read more at The Apple Blog and on GigaOM.

- Om Malik: The GigaOm blog founder admitted: “I definitely want to make it a little bit tougher for (fellow panelists from CNET (NSDQ: CNET), IDG and TechTarget) in the future, (but) I don’t think we compete with them – we are an adjunct. What we do is more attuned to today’s times … in today’s life, the biggest shortcoming is time … people want information easily packages and that can be reviewed in 20 minutes. That’s what the blogging format is all about. These guys are the entree and we are the fast food of information – there’s nothing wrong with that because, last I checked, fast food was much bigger than the whole packaged food business.”

- CNET: Picking up the analogy, CEO Neil Ashe cautioned: “Fast food is blamed for the deteriorating health of America.” But Ashe’s publisher is noticeably in a different kind of space. His focus is on publishing “at scale”. On non-tech site launched, he said: “We wanted to scale horizontally and we’ve repeated that success whether it’s in games or parenting or food.” … “For us to be successful, we have to continue to voraciously acquire those users and we have to have multiple streams of revenue to make those users profitable in our models.”

- IDG: IDG president Bob Carrigan sees value in multiple approaches, too, and acknowledges the threat from upstart blogs like Malik’s: “Sure they’re competition. At first, we try to get them to join our network. To be a good publisher, you have to provide, in a contextual way, vendor content, original content, reviews, blogs — our editorial folks go out (to blogs) and find relevant comment and they’re part of that mix that we present on our site.”