A shoe drive, a neighborhood news story, a name remembered at the checkout. The Ventura agency built its pitch around the everyday places where local reputations take shape.

Giacomo Cambiaso is the co-founder and CEO of Public Technologies (PUBT, publicnow.com), a New York news-technology company that collects, organizes and distributes tens of thousands of press releases, company announcements and government statements every day in dozens of languages. A former newspaper journalist who spent about a decade reporting before turning to automation, he built and exited an earlier content-clipping venture and now focuses on making publicly disclosed information from companies, governments and economic organizations accessible to media outlets, information providers and financial institutions.