It's often bandied about that Wal-Mart constitutes the seventh largest global economy, so I suppose that it should come as no surprise that VNU has announced the launch of a subscription-only portal dedicated to assisting companies that are suppliers to the retail colossus. Dubbed Smart Supplier, the site provides exclusive insight into Wal-Mart's product category and operational strategies. Consumer product manufacturers and distributors will find information on what product categories are being introduced or expanded, which ones are being cut back or eliminated and so on, according to Modern Materials. It is interesting to see not only business intelligence packaged for a specific company but to see it packaged as an online title, a highly targeted strategic and tactical tool. While this is focused intelligence on a huge scale, it points the way towards what kinds of titles are likely to thrive in the future. Very purpose-driven content highly focused on very specific business or personal relationships that can leverage intelligence from a wide variety of sources is a winning ticket that may allow publishers to fill an aggregation role that was usually left to more scattered coverage across general titles in the past. It's a race between enterprise portals, aggregators and publishers to identify and fill these highly targeted needs; given the willingness of publishers to leverage advertising in this model to monetize highly contextual content we'll bet on the publishers winning this foot race for now. [NOTE: The Smart Supplier site seems to have some technical difficulties today.]