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Newstex President Larry Schwartz will speak at the upcoming Buying & Selling eContent Executive Conference (BSEC) to be held in Scottsdale, Arizona on April 5-7, 2009.Earlier this month, Larry spoke with Michelle Manafy of BSEC about Newstex and the content industry.  Following is a great excerpt from that interview.

Larry describes his company, Newstex, in an almost shocking way: “We have no employees and no physical assets.” The company uses the cloud for storage, and Larry says it would have cost a fortune to launch its Video on Demand service without this approach. His entire team is virtual; no one commutes anywhere for anything—much less to be walled in by cubicles. Yet they are highly collaborative, which is part (non) corporate culture and part a willingness to experiment with tools like Yammer, designed to make companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?” Larry describes it as Twitter for business, in which information is shared only among team members. He says, “It is our water cooler.”

Fittingly, at BSeC, Larry’s will present on the topic “The Virtual Content Company How to Operate in the Clouds,” though he emphasizes that the take away from his talk won’t only be applicable to new kids on the content block. “Years ago,” he says, “companies raised $5 million and spent $4 million on infrastructure and technology, now they raise $2m and only spend $50K on infrastructure, so they can spend the rest on the product and marketing.” Major content companies, according to Larry, might feel they have to spend $20K to make a “viral marketing video.” Instead, he suggests they consider the real audience for this type of marketing content and do it for a lot less. He puts his money (if very little of it) where his mouth is: Newstex used a free service, Animoto to create the video on its home page, which Larry says is currently the most popular feature on his site.

You can learn more about the conference on the BSEC website and view the complete article on the BSEC blog.

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