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Brown Bag Special:
Feasting on the Edge of Content and Technology Convergence |
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John Blossom
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4 August 2003 |
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The
SIIA Content Divsion's Brown Bag Lunch on content and
technology convergence threw LexisNexis, Yahoo!Finance, CCH
and a leading lawyer from Mintz Levin against the leading
issues of these merging disciplines. What emerged from the
panel was a clear picture that the content industry is
moving rapidly to meet many of the challenges and
opportunities that lie at the edge of this intersection.
However, when it comes down to the more scary issues, the
leading edge seems to be gaining speed on even the
strongest players in professionally-oriented content. The
answers may take more than a quick lunch break to figure
out. |
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If the
SIIA Content Divsion's Brown Bag Luncheon series of panel
discussions were a sandwich that someone had picked up at the
corner deli on the way to one of these meetings, it would be a
lean pastrami on a roll - meaty, flavorful, lots to chew on and
little fat. It's a perfect solution for execs who want to get
some of the insights on timely topics and valuable networking
that they usually spend major dollars and time to obtain at
day-plus offsite conferences, or alternatively at one-shot
seminars where inevitably someone has something to sell. Last
week's panel in New York lead by Ed Keating of Avantt
Consulting focused on "Taking Advantage of Software &
Information Convergence" and featured senior players with
intriguing insights on the issues surrounding convergence:
Peter Berkery, Jr., Associate Publisher for the Securities
Business and Finance Group of CCH Incorporated, Chet Ensign,
Senior Director of Architecture and Development Services for
LexisNexis, Nathan Richardson, General Manager of Yahoo!Finance
and attorney Ivan Wool, a Member of the firm Mintz Levin
specializing in Corporate Transactions and focusing on content
and technology companies.
What came through loud and clear from all
of these accomplished people is that although major providers
of business-oriented content are pushing hard to play at the
intersecting edges of content and technology, the convergence
still raises far more questions that it has answered,
especially in the areas of pricing and packaging content
profitably. The companies that these folks represent and serve
are feasting for the moment at the edge, but only by moving
very quickly can they hope to answer how they're going to keep
up with their meal tickets. Here are a few of the key questions
that the panel addressed - and avoided:
- Who's the winner: content or
technology? And the answer is...neither! The consensus of
the panel seemed to be that as much as enabling technologies
are helping content companies to reach audiences more
effectively, the rapid commoditization and standardization of
content technologies places an ever-increasing premium on
boiling things down to addressing the real human problems
that need to be solved. Yahoo!Finance junked five years worth
of platform development to bring their products into the XML/XSLT-based
content delivery environment that will allow them to focus on
the features that make a difference to their audiences.
LexisNexis, having "lost the opportunity to be the
Internet in the '70's and '80s", according to Chet Ensign,
has invested heavily in pursuing content delivery via Web
services and other advanced delivery agents to ensure
that their content will catch the next wave of human
relevance for highly specific audiences. CCH emphasizes
adapting content for specific sectors such as securities
compliance and imbedding human expertise into the technology
to present content in the most relevant workflow context
possible. In the end it is people who are the winners, as
they are gaining ever-increasing content value with
ever-increasing technology transparency.
- What is the future of fee-based
content aggregation in a Google-centric world? There was
a great deal of interesting and somewhat contradictory talk
about the place of search engines in today's content
marketplace. On the one hand, for example, Nathan Richardson
was dismissing search as a commoditized function, but on the
other hand making it clear that Yahoo! keeps abreast of
competitive search players. One particular item of
focus on the panel was Google's
new news gathering function, which aggregates news headlines
via search engine crawls of both free and limited premium
news and research sources, similar to the capabilities of
Moreover,
Yahoo!'s new partner in premium content search support.
Google does not facilitate turning on premium content
subscriptions via its capabilities, which is still required
to access items in whole, but clearly the whole nature of
content aggregation is tilting somewhat askew when the
world's most popular search engine moves towards making
timely free and fee-based content available. .As Peter
Berkery of CCH put it, "What can we do that free can't?"
Search is no longer synonymous with defining a valuable
content-gathering interface, as in the days of the Lexis "red
box", but it still remains the place where all such value
propositions begin.
- What are the real threats and
opportunities from individuals and institutions who can
publish and distribute content themselves? One of the
core premises of the panel discussion was to examine the
implications of products such as Microsoft Office 2003, which
make it very easy to imbed premium content into documents
that are created and published by individuals in various
settings. Jeff Cutler, Interim VP of the SIIA Content
Division, positioned the question raised by these
capabilities this way: "Who owns the customer?" In general
the panel felt that companies with specialized knowledge of
the needs of specific market sectors are far better
positioned than general technology companies such as
Microsoft to claim ownership. But they also acknowledged that
the increasing pervasiveness of these publishing capabilities
is creating an intellectual property nightmare that goes
largely unaddressed. The woes of the recording industry in
the wake of their slow acceptance of the impact of file
sharing networks and CD-ROM burners on their business served
as the panel's warning sign of things that may come to pass
if these issues are not addressed effectively. "Lawyers are
[oftentimes] oblivious to the business and technical aspects,
and it's fatal," noted Ivan Wool of Mintz Levin. Monetizing
professional content in this emerging omni-publishing
environment is not being addressed effectively yet, and it
shows.
Clearly the panelists all were taking
different approaches towards dealing with the merging worlds of
content and technology as effectively as most leading
organizations do today. It was heartening to see just how far
major publishers have come in such a short time to meet these
challenges, but a little scary to consider just how quickly the
challenges transform themselves overnight into ever-broader
challenges to the world of content. It may take more than a
quick deli sandwich to get to the bottom of all of this change,
but in the meantime there's plenty of food for thought.
-
John Blossom
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