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Entity Entropy: Eliyon Changes the
Equation for Personal Content Suppliers |
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7 March 2005 |
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Eliyon is moving beyond the struggles of a scrappy startup
company to become a firm that has defined a strong niche
for personal content others were unwilling or unable to
exploit. By sticking to automated collection of personal
profiles extracted from Web pages, Eliyon has built over 24
million complete profiles of professionals, with much
information cached in its databases that's now disappeared
from the rapidly evolving Web. Add in the ability for
people profiled in their system to update their profiles
and for readers to suggest changes and you have both
powerful content and powerful editorial sources that
promise to make this a definitive online database of
personal information. We still "Google" people today, but
that's a noun-turned-verb that may change someday soon
under the influence of Eliyon. |
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The current
headquarters of personal information provider
Eliyon are
your typical rag-tag startup facility, a cramped mezzanine
space in a less than scenic office building on the back side of
Cambridge, Massachusetts. But not for long. Eliyon is preparing
to move out to the well-groomed corporate parks of nearby
suburban Waltham, a step up in professional space fostered by
Eliyon's continuing string of cash-positive quarters, strong
subscription renewals and an influx of cash from recent
additions to their
investment partners. Eliyon's basic premise is simple: use
leading content technologies to extract and package information
about individuals in professional roles available on public Web
pages. It's an idea that seemed intriguing to many a few years
ago when Eliyon started its efforts, but hardly something that
was going to change how people used personal information.
24 million complete personal profiles
later, the shape of a service that promises to do just that is
taking shape. Eliyon's content still faces stiff competition
from providers such as Dun & Bradstreet who have tracked
personal profiles electronically for decades, but by sticking
to its guns and continuing to build its database of detailed
personal profiles, Eliyon has built a content service that has
built momentum rapidly. For while traditional database services
focus on quality control culled from traditional content
sources with some boost from Web sources, Eliyon's focus on Web
content that comes and goes makes it one of the leading
archives for personal information that simply cannot be found
elsewhere. Many of the Web pages from which they sourced
information have passed into history with nary a trace, leaving
Eliyon with an asset that will be difficult for competitors to
replace easily in the short run. The myth that Web information
is commoditized goes only so far as the extent to which one
does nothing to make it otherwise.
So far Eliyon has based much of its
business on subscription-based corporate and personal access to
its sources. But increasingly Eliyon has been focusing on
leveraging the public's awareness and use of its core content,
both directly through its Web site and through online partners
such as HighBeam Research. This high profile in turn encourages
people with listings to update their core information in Eliyon,
a factor that helps Eliyon tackle the inaccuracies that
inevitably arise from automated collection of information from
the Web. Over time, then, the service becomes less a reflection
of the Web's content and more of a center of Web content, in
which its own content becomes the primary entity that is
enhanced by other extracted Web content. It's a subtle but
important shift that promises to accelerate Eliyon's
position as a default repository of public profiles.
This story of content technology focused
on specific market needs and opportunities has a few important
lessons for all publishers to consider:
- Sometimes pretty good can lead to
very good. The hit-or-miss quality of many Web sources
may be viewed by many as a detriment to content quality. But
in some ways going after openly available Web content
aggressively gives Eliyon a strong advantage over traditional
suppliers' sources and methods. Like Google's "pretty good"
search results, leveraging the huge range of information on
professionals made available on the Web to service a very
broad audience for that content allows Eliyon to be the
master of a content domain not limited to traditional
concepts of data collection and management. In many instances
having everything accessible to everyone 80 percent right
automatically is a better starting point than 100 percent of
less than everything accessible to just a few with
human-scaled updates. Add in updates from profiled people and
continual feedback from huge audiences filling in that 20
percent and the formula becomes only stronger for this "open
source" content.
- Sometimes who knows you is more
important than who you know. Social networking services
such as
LinkedIn are great at creating closed communities of
trusted peers, but they're not necessarily good for managing
a public persona. I'm glad that I can call upon my private
network of trusted contacts, but in the business world
there's a lot of important activity that requires people to
get to know one another in a public venue as quickly as
possible. With the deep and wide aggregation of content in
Eliyon there's the power to "Google" someone in the public
realm with a magnifying glass very efficiently. This can help
folks who are unfamiliar with people in a social network or
needing some updates on their status that may not be
reflected in a social network's database. Public information
can be a great complement to private social networks.
- Sometimes the unofficial story is
as important as the official story. Eliyon's automation
provides objectivity and efficiency that makes it a favorite
for many companies trying to find the inside story on people
that may not come through official channels. Major companies
increasingly turn to this source for background information
on job candidates and suppliers that may not necessarily pop
up in a resume or reference checks via "sanitized" records.
News organizations may also be surprised by the depth and
breadth of relationships that surface in Eliyon for people in
the public eye. With the ability to archive content that's
otherwise disposed of on the open Web, Eliyon can provide a
powerful view of people in the public eye that may provide
productivity in unexpected ways.
Through clever positioning of its
technology capabilities in the content marketplace, Eliyon has
moved far beyond many content tool providers who hesitated to
turn their efforts into a content play until rather late in the
game. At the same time its focus on Web-centric content quality
control is a paradigm that many traditional suppliers of
business content will have a hard time embracing. Call them a
niche player if you will, but it's a niche in which Eliyon has
been able to create a great deal of entropy in a fairly short
period of time with little direct competition. Perhaps that
move to Waltham will find them cramped again sooner than they
may imagine.
-
John Blossom
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