 |
|
Insights and headlines from Shore analysts on trends in enterprise and media content markets.
|
|
|
| Thursday, January 31, 2008 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:31 PM |
permanent link to this entry
 bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
1 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, January 30, 2008 |
  The seventh Information Industry Summit from the Software and Infomation Industry Association comes at a time of both great optimism and great worries for the digital publishing industry, Transformative technologies have made more content available from more people and organizations for more audiences than ever before and the ability to monetize content in more contexts than ever before is truly unprecedented. This is great news for publishers and technology companies that are a part of this transformation and quite a challenge to publishers and distributors who are locked into older cost structures and marketers who are slow to adapt to new opportunities to reach their markets online. With a soft economy it's not always easy to make the most of new opportunities. But with the ability to target buyers and sellers through contextual advertising services and to target users of high-value content services more effectively through easily accessed online services there's the hope that marketing can be so focused as to help both publishers and marketers weather leaner times more effectively than ever before. SIIA President Ken Wasch underscored this with a summary of an SIIA report that indicates a combined content and information industry that is continuing to grow in the face of the tougher 2008 economy. We'll be posting coverage of the Information Industry Summit throughout the event, with links to individual items posted here as the event unfolds. Our thanks to the SIIA and its fellow members on the planning committee for putting together a rich and engaging event. - Survey Research Results
- Opening Keynote - Tom Glocer, CEO, Reuters
- After the Froth - How the Financial Markets Will Affect Information Companies
- Interview - Caroline H. Little, CEO and Publisher, Washingtonpost, Newsweek Interactive
- Luncheon Keynote - Andrew Keen, Author, The Cult of the Amateur
- B2B Social Networking - Content Provider Strategies
- Search as an Editorial Tool - New Forms of High-Value Content Aggregation
- CEOs Outlook - The Tipping Point for Old and New Media
- Morning Keynote - Gordon Crovitz - Embracing Change in the Digital Age
- What's the Business Model for Video Aggregation and Distribution on the Internet?
- Fair Use or Foul? - William Patry, Sr. Copyright Counsel, Google Inc.
- Case Studies - Information Industry Innovators
- David Eun, VP Content Partnerships, Google, Inc.
Labels: events, siia information industry summit 2008
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 8:36 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
2 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 8:20 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, January 29, 2008 |
 This year's SIIA Information Industry Summit includes for the second year the " Previews" event, an opportunity for major publishers, technology companies and investors to take a look at the up-and-coming companies in the content industry. There were at least 63 applicants for appearing in the Previews event, of which ten were chosen, so the quality of the companies is quite high overall. I live-blogged most of this, so some of it is a bit rough, but I think that you'll get the flow of this very dynamic event - and some good insights into some of the best of new content plays. State of Startup Investment - PWC
Investment in venture plays remained strong 2007 according to David Silverman, Partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers' MoneyTree report, with a 10 percent CAGR boost over 2006 overall and USD 70 billion-plus across all quaters. Software investment is down as a catgegory, but with investment up strongly in the media and entertainment industries and in business processses, it's a strong sign that technology plays are working their way up the value chain into solutions that inevitably make them increasingly content plays. Valuations on established companies are down, pushing more investors into earlier stage companies. VCs were able to turn 86 IPOs in 2007, the highest since the dot-com crash and a hopeful sign for emerging investments. There's quite a but of money that's being raised, so as the economy softens smart investors will continue to look towards venture capital plays to help them weather the down markets by building new value. I will be providing short takes on a relatively live basis as the speakers provide their elevator pitches today, stay tuned for updates, when my batteries run out I'll post the rest this evening. The good news is that we got connectivity at the last minute for blogging. Larry Schwartz, President, Newstex - How did the Class of 2007 Do?Larry's quick update to last year's Preview event, apologies for scant details: Eurekster: 5.5 million in financing, averages 25 million queries versus 10 million in early 2007. Generate: 80 news customers, including Hearst Newspapers, Thomson Financial and Yahoo. Near-Time: Added Wiley, CareFirst, partnership with U.S. government for "green" initiatives. Inform Technologies: 15 million investment, 40 media clients Pando: 16 million application installs, powering online delivery for NBC. Attributor: Deals with AP, Reuters, speaking at IIS Cranium Softworks: New product launches, anticipating funding in 2008 iCopyright: added 500 publishers in 2007, 5,000 transactions a day Business & Investment Climate UpdateModerator: Bambi Francisco, CEO, Vator.tv Brian Hirsch, Managing Director, Greenhill SAVP Robert Levitan, CEO, Pando David Silverman, Partner, PricewatershouseCoopers LLP Ed Reitler, Parther, Reitler Brown & Rosenblatt LLC Levitan: Lots of support for early-stage companies, later stage companies lot of support for known business models. VCs like to do due diligence on known business models. Our S/W deployed as consumer app, from 2 mil to 16 mil installs, everyone understands "freemium," took software up a level to corporate customers, NBC using technology between media player and software delivery network. Figures out if/when content should be downloaded, eliminates 80 percent of delivery costs. People don't know how to price this yet, it;s enterprise sales, sits on desktop, but still feeling their way through business model. Bambi - rise of angel networks, lots of compa. nies that don't need VCs, just a few millions Lots of CEOs using blogging to reach out to both investors and clients. Silverman: VCs looking for established models, want to see revenues, profits when available. Might see more of a risk shift into earlier stages. Very vibrant market in NYC and beyond, downturn can happen but businesses are moving along. good opportunities for future. Reitler: Good healthy growth 2003-2005, in current slowdown vs. internet "winter" of 2002-2003, not the same problems with recapitalization, more sustainable growth, slight uptick in early stage companies, healthier capital base. Lots of funds were insured, by SBA before, this time around plug is pulled on insurance. But deal flow is still strong, venture funds aren't investing in highly leveraged deals, mostly pure equity deals. Cash-rich institutions are taking on compelling business plans, as long as revenues come in from advertising and lead generation, should be a strong environment. Hirsch: May be a recession, but doesn't really impact investment on innovation over past 30-40 years, many of the best companies were invented in the worst of times. But valuation is a factor, may have to give up more of your company or settle for less capital. Don't let economy stop you from starting a business if you have a good idea. Bambi: Where are funds being deployed? David: More of the same, biotech, med devices, in NYC internet ad companies, content creation companies, IAB/PWC quarterly report on interactive advertising, phenomenal growth, increased penetraion, more broadband, but need more technology. Bambi: Brian, where is your money going? Hirsch: Half of cos in marketing services, leadgen growth is accelerating, more measurable ROI, more value to marketers. Online ads, peel away Google and Yahoo still growing healthily, pure ad model challenging if you can't aggregate enough of an audience. Very careful at deploying dollars, west coast more aggressive in funding ad models. Not more risk-averse, like info-driven models, oppys for ad-driven models but pure ad-driven models can be developed via angel-backsed investments but for 30-50 million exits need to be highly efficient with capital and growth plans. Exits in social networknig are in 15-75 million exit range, not a lot of breakouts expected, cautious therefore for ad-driven. Silverman: Big deals with nice returns, big players picking up pieces. [COMMENT: This is key, good time to pick up feautres and content that can make you stronger.] Levitan: Video advertising is ripe for reinvention, will be nothing like pre-roll/post-roll markets today, complex algorithms will generate matches that will provide huge returns. Reitler: Quigo had great returns. Leadgen offers still a lot of room for growth, buy media low and sell leads high, like a securities exchange, leading sellers to buyers. E.g., driveway pavers, narrow niches can be matched very precisely. Bambi: Funding, what't it like raising funds today? Levitan: Most VCs like to see mature business models, I enjoy being somewhere else, but telling the story requires much more education, investors need familiar benchmarks. Bambi: Do they care if you have revenue? Levitan: depends what traffic is for. As entrepreneur, a lot more people know a lot more details about a lot more business models. Kids may not have the full picture at how business models can grow. VCs are so smart, angels look more interesting for people proving ideas out, may be able to avoid VCs altogether. Previously it was a badge of honor to have a VC, but now you don't need that endorsement as much. Some VC funds will have to adapt. QUICK TAKE: Funding is still healthy, private money has no where else to go right now, angels are more important than ever and there are plenty of people who may be able to make progress without going deep into VC money. Angels are getting more sophisticated, so the lines may be blurred to some degree. Presentations Round OneExpoTV: Video storytelling about products. 200K product reviews, unbiased, screened, coded, organized. Treat usergen more professionally, full rights to content and creative purchased but compensate contributors. Lots of metadata, more than in usergen platforms, leadgen revenues from ad inserts. No longer lonelygirl15, it's "lonely mom" as a consumer advocate. Syndicates to Yahoo! Shopping, Oxygen, Amazon, TimeWarner, Beliefnet, Planetfeedback. 8x video play growth, current views 2 million a month. Refer a friend program, most find it via the portal. Leadgen model is a winner, reviews are so highly targeted it should work very well. Also ad revenue. QUICK TAKE: This is a strong play, great combination of community, structuring unstructured content for sophistiaced retrieval, syndication strategy, building revenues and reputation for contributors. Fairly high barriers to entry already with solid deals and content maintenance. Health Monitoring Systems: Katrina hit, NOAA knew exactly what would happen, in contrast, no such event management, epidemics come but with no forecasting. Many events don't bloom into health crises, others do unexpectedly. Maps of disease patterns. 2006 Superbowl fans got sick on the way home and spread disease down I-80 in Ohio. Vision is to be national surveillance system for health. largest in U.S., 500-plus hospitals, customers in 10 states, looking fo expand data sources, provided by hospitals, they own analysis. States buy subscriptions. QUICK TAKE: Didn't present all that well, but it's a pretty good play, that is, if they can build momentum. The "get it" factor is pretty good, there's a real market need. Low barriers to cometitive entry overall, but its pioneering position can help them build deal flow. Down economy may slow adoption. However, also possible to cross-sell into law enforcement. LinkStorm: Pop-up content contextually related, focused on ecommerce, related products, 3x boost in click-through rates, equipped with graphics. Multi-level menu of options makes drill-down easy. Measure heavily user engagement, track click-throughs on a per-menu-item basis. Advertisers can act on insights and optimize menus real-time. GM, Overstock.com, Cisco, SAP, many majors. Estimating 100-200 million exit [COMMENT: well, with luck, never know]. "Roll Over" cue on screens demystifies use of technology, it's transparent, strictly OEM model. Take in feeds, will show all relevant products automatically, can sell sector data also. QUICK TAKE: Great to see this technology find a home in advertising, solid investors backing it who understand markets, Makes each click much more valuable, user self-qualifies for more specific products before they ever get to actually click. Some barriers to entry given Sidman's investments in technology from other efforts, but main barrier is deal flow, he's moved very quickly into small presences and needs to expand it quickly before it gets positioned more as a feature than a platform. Pretty good bet for future growth, Google others could acquire, so exits are probably plentiful.
TutorVista: 5-10 million hours of free tutoring to give away, VOIP with whiteboarding, scheduled in advance, 30 subjects, PowerPoint-enabled instructional tool. Ad-driven, CEO helps to optimize content. Big push in India, Bangalore-based, tesp prep centers, 120 million Indian students attend centers. Creating branded "private schools," Sequoia, LightSpeed on board. India has the largest below-19 population, huge market. Tutors compensated well, double what they would make at university or schools, low turnover. new, voice-based tutoring, not a chat, subscription-based but some ads. Goal is a million tutees in a couple of years. One-on-one personalized tutuoring. QUICK TAKE: Has competitors, but its focus on India's domestic market as well as international markets is key. Expect strong rapid growth, technology really isn't the issue, sounds fine overall, it's the VOIP that allows personal interaction that can make the difference. Solid, relatively quiet investment which is good for the investors as it's growing strong. FeeDisclosure: About 1/3 of fees for closing mortgages are junk fees, fees for Adobe's free Acrobat software, etc. Identified fifteen categories that make up a real estate transaction, brokers give data for reporting and can become featured members, similar to LendingTree. Data includes service provider ratings, professionals provide trust by providing full disclosure. Forcing market to become more transparent. Consumer can compare their closing costs to national averages, whether fees are common. Patent pending. Can break down data to zip codes, price, location closes to home. QUICK TAKE: Good basic argument, huge market, may become a trusted leader, in a tough lareal estate market this may be appealing for consumers, new legislation may force disclosure, pubic sentiment behind this. Could flip quickly, management seems professional, know their. market. Presentations Round Two
Vator.tv:A platform for young companies to be discovered. started with 250 companies, now 800-plus. Wants to be the place where startups grow up. Wants to provide services and features that helps them to do it. Distributes news from companies via Blinkx, AlwaysOn, YouTube, VentureBeat, Mashable, profile updates get picked up as blogs. Hoover's company profiles are static, Vator.tv profiles are dynamic, cover hiring needs, creating announcement in video, RSS feeds, constituents, can help audiences to find related companies. A resource for other sites writing about these companies. Looking to make 70 percent of content from community, 30 percent editorial [COMMENT: This is probably going to be close to the de facto industry standard]. 1.5 million total views, seeking $30 CPMs, potential value in archives, subscriptions to data cuts. Thinking about value-add from directories of angel investors, etc.
QUICK TAKE: Sounds like an idea bigger than its initial packaging, still too early to tell where this is going. With Bambi's reputation it's likely that she'll have the entrees to make this fly to some degree in the long run, and "build it and they will come" can work when you have a highly focused and monetizable community such as high tech/content startups. Watch this as a potential model for evolving trade media in new directions - long run looks lot betster than the short run.
LingoSpot: Monetizing links. Harder to interlink in large sites, can be expensive proposition. Automatic, dynamic document interlinking - zero effort from pubishers, natural language processing provides links to relevant information. Can embed related videos, Amazon content. Sees 12 billion addressable market. More time spent on pages, Monthly licensing fee, revenue share on advertising sometimes, for example on video pre-rolls. Launched in July 2007. Looking for 3-4 million.QUICK TAKE: Sphere-like but no big deals, more contextual analysis of keywords, like Sphere it can help people find more content in their own site more effectively. has potential but there's so much technology chasing these problems I worry about whether they'll be able to get significant deal flow and buzz to differentiate.
ArchieMD: Rich graphics for online service with deep content that can educate people on the body, diseases and injuries. High school students, military surgeons, internet health portals, general public, jury education - have 300 law firms as clients - with both generic animation and customized animation. Reed Elsevier partnershipfor health professions and higher education, looking for wider scope of distributio n for legal. A.D.A.M. is primary competitor but is more text oriented.
QUICK TAKE: This is a strong play, a good variety of audiences, monetization models, high-end value and mass audience value, Nobody really owns this, I think that main challenge is to make this a model that can interoperate with as many environments as possible. I can see markup with social media APIs something that could be quite appealing . A Google Health exit, perhaps?
Keibi: Control and measure user-generated content, adjacency is an issue for many publishers, moderation suite is key product. MySpace has tiers of moderators, small publishers have maybe one or two people, it doesn't scale either way. Content is ranked, scored, looks at other signals, prioritizes most likely offenders, keeps moderators productive. Hosted SaaS model, mostly subscription model with some CPM-based ad models. Has Bebo as client. Certification model, Keibi will provide a rating for a page of content (G/PG/R/X is general concept), ability to manage scores to be appropriate to specific advertisers has a filed patent.
QUICK TAKE: A highly useful service, SaaS model is fine, can be expanded, helps to decrease costs while growing UGC as rapidly as possible. This is a market that will grow significantly, has potential to become an industry standard, the need is clear, will only grow, competitive environment unclear, could wind up with too many solutions following a specific opportunity, but it seems to be a pretty clear field right now.
Courtroom Connect: Discovered more value in getting content out of courthouse than content into courthouse. Video will change practice of law, they capture the dramatic moments. Demo of Bill Gates testimony in antitrust suit, video side by side with exhibits of stamps, squirming as his testimony doesn't match exhibits. Cost MSFT 100 million on that case alone. Networks installed in 50 courtrooms in major markets, developing data bank, makes money on big hits but long tail is strong, 15-plus years of reuse. All major legal firms, legal outlets, can help lawyers be much more efficient. Universities want content in curricula. Review videotapes of opposition, helps them to prepare against lawyers and expert witnesses. Interactive focus groups, exhibit & document sharing, YouTube professional commentary. Revenues growing 50-100 percent per year. Existing television networks look only at sensational stuff, these are money-oriented trials.
QUICK TAKE: Wow. What a great application of public informaiton to a high-end and media product, well-placed, building up huge expertise, winning bids against telcos who see only the infrastructure opportunity, text transcripts are pricey, they have video and multimedia, more efficient. Oftentimes network installations are exclusive deals, like Wayport in hotels, so you have an exclusive service channel with deep content. Strong, strong, strong.
Closing Keynote: Kevin Ryan, Co-Chairman and Co-Founder, Alley Corp
Growth of Doubleclick was like 40 years in 9 years, dot-com crunch as "less fun," 70 percent of clients went bankrupt. Panther Express doing well, other key deals, ShopWiki, User-Generated Nation, SampleSales Online - needless to say a deep and successful portfolio.
Traditional media companies - it's going badly, but it will get much worse, "It's a disaster." Time-Warner has lost 80 percent of value in 18 months. Market Cap of TimeWarner now smaller than Google. Yahoo wouldn't budge off of one billion to buy Google [oops]. Google is even more powerful than people realize, sucking all the air out of the room. Numbers staggering. New York community is incredibly well positioned for startups, compared to ten years ago it's night and day. In 1950s, TV didn't wipe out movies, but movie consumption went down 90 percent, fundamental trends can change industry dynamics. Internet not as bad as that because human nature hasn't changed that much. But same people may not make the same amount of money. Profit margins were related to distribution monopolies. CapCities/ABC deal, how could ESPN be worth more than ABC, saw the 10x growth of value of ESPN. Structural problems, distribution, cost structures "just ridiculous." Doubleclick now worth 3 billion, Warner Music 3 billion, 10 people at WM with more than a million in compensation. Is that inherent in the model? $120/sq/ft offices is a choice. EMI was buying expensive "flowers" hand over fist, turned out to be hookers and drugs. [Sheesh]
"Traditional media companies have not been able to create new value in the online media space." They said "Wait 'till the big boys get in there," now not a single one of the top companies online was created by a traditional media company. People from startups have created more market capitalization than existing media companies from their infrastructure plays. Media companies are making better acquisitions, About.com, MarketWatch, MySpace, but cannot create internal DNA to be more competitive. On fundamental issues it will get worse, if I had a Kindle-like device to read my New York Times I would, not far away, about three years.
On Google side, "Google will be the first trillion-dollar company," takes percentages of other markets' ad shares consistently. Take out the Google numbers from internet spend, growth is in teens, not 30 percent. Will probably dissipate, number ten-priority products will suffer, but leading products have 80 percent-plus margins.
New York companies - why still in NYC was a question in old days, couldn't get a lawyer in 1996 that had worked on an Internet IPO. Changed completely - ten to twelve ex-Doubleclickers have developed their own companies. Two thirds of people in a recent Meetup for online people were already on their second startup. Infrastructure is here, will benefit from recession, relative value of VCs versus private equity will increase. Investment banks have no deals to talk about. Fundamental trends are not going away. 5 billion of acquisitions of New York-based media, more than Silicon Valley, don't hear about it, tech community "has a chip on its shoulder." Ladders is huge, don't hear about it. Digital media is a big growth area, New York is logical space, fashion is here, advertisers are here. Look at how much you spend per person in real estate, just use less per person. 6,000 per person on real estate, 3-4,000 in Pittsburgh, not as compelling as getting the right people. Oursourcing makes some functions more cost-effective for NYC work. Need better VC infrastructure, Boston firms are all working in NYC every week. Biotech still in Boston, but more pure technology companies like Doubleclick appearing in NYC. Lots of people being "freed up" from Wall Street this year, will learn that the Street is not as secure as they thought.
All of this creates opportunities. Social media is hot, but risk-reward is not always there. Look at taking areas worth billions and seeing if there are all the products that you need in the space. TheLadders was targeted at 100K+ jobs, those people don't use Monster, return will be huge. Re-segment markets - five windsurfing magazines in France, always opportunities. "If you spend more than five minutes online trying to find something, there's an opportunity." Hotel niches, retail niches. Video serving costs dropping rapidly, down to levels where advertising can support access. Magaines, radio are ugly, TV is not as bad, harder for a startup to do from scratch. Music labels are worth almost nothing, devastated.
QUICK TAKE: Not all new news, but a very compelling present on the online content markets that I've seen in a while. I'd agree that some of the Silicon Valley narcissism may have reached some sort of threshold, and I agree that NYC offers strong opportunities for startups picking off the bones of larger media companies and the ready pool of advertisers, but I'd suggest that the footprint is broader, more of a Bos-Wash Corridor community. That's where the West Coast iations a little more advantageous in some ways - a more concentrated community. The key factor is that there is not that much happening that's fundamentally new in consumer media technology lately. Apple's iPhone's advantages are based mostly on their largely failed exclusive deal with AT&T, for example. So we'll see whether there's any shift to the East Coast this year, I'll have to think about it but I'm still betting on a lot of trips to SFO this year.
Hope that you enjoyed this, more tomorrow on the Information Industry Summit
Labels: 2008, investment, SIIA Previews, startups, venture capital
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:07 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
3 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
 Major book pubishers have not been known in years past for their innovation in adapting to online audiences, but after years of investing modestly in the future of online content many print publishers are stepping up their efforts to capture a new generation of audiences who grew up with online content as a given. Elsevier is one major scientific publisher that seems to have picked up their pace of online innovation significantly as of late, Their announcement last week of 10 major reference works being made available online this year was trumped today by the announcement of a new Wiki-based platform that will enable practicing physicians to update evidence-based medical information online. In both instances Elsevier is betting that some titles will do best as online-only reference materials. Having seen a major response to its making chapters of its Major Reference Works availableonline Elsevier is indicating that two reference titles - the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience and the second edition of Encyclopedia of Ocean Science - are to become online-only references. Elsevier indicates that other reference titles will be available in print for some period of time, but clearly the trend is to move towards online access that's likely to move people into recurring revenues rather than chancing the publication of expensive reference materials. Knovel showed the way years ago to Sci-Tech publishers with its Knovel Library of online reference content, but now the major scientific publishers are beginning to see that electronic additions are going to become the core of their revenues moving forward it's not just a game for aggressive startups. Today's announcement of WiserWiki underscores not only the awareness that Sci-Tech publishers have for the value of online reference but also how best to make use of social media technologies to make it valuable to specific audiences. WiserWiki is seeded with The Textbook of Primary Care Medicine, a reference book covering problems, conditions and diseases encountered in the practices of primary care physicians. No longer in print, what better way to keep this grass-roots information about the real world of medicine than to let the physicians encountering these phenomena to update it themselves? This is a great online product strategy, combining authoritative content from peer professionals as a core that can help to build an online community rapidly. Just as Wikipedia did not spring from thin air - it took more than 100,000 articles from an earlier project to get it going - Wikis built for specialized online communities will work best when there's a core of content to help people feel that they don't have to wait for their contributions to be part of something that has collective merit. Print titles are going to be with us for quite some time to come, but as printing, shipping and stocking expenses fall prey to rising energy and raw materials prices the need for better margins with less risk is pushing book publishers of reference materials inexorably towards "digital native" audiences who have become used to search engines as primary tools for accessing reference content. Obviously other types of titles benefit from this move but for reference works the move is essential if publishers are to keep these products growing and profitable. In the end scientific publishers have much to gain from tranforming their business from one of delivering tomes to delivering content in higly valuable contexts that can drive scientific research and applications forward more rapidly. Labels: books, elsevier, reference, Social Media, STM, Wikis
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:02 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
 There are some basic patterns that seem to repeat themselves through the publishing industry, one of them being the relative attractiveness of subscriptions in a down economy and the relative attractiveness of ad-supported publishing in an up economy. With the global economic cycle already beginning to cut into online advertising money and that money spread across more high-quality online inventory than ever, it's not really a surprise that there's some reaffirmation of subscription models at Dow Jones. As noted in The Wall Street Journal, News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch underscored in comments at the Davos World Economic Forum that Dow Jones would be continuing a subscription component to the WSJ's online offering, even as it expands its free offering to a far broader online audience. Dow Jones has little to lose and quite a bit to gain by trying this "guns and butter" approach to online monetization. With about two million affluents and influential online subscribers, WSJ offers strong demographics to advertisers who would otherwise be left to compare only WSJ's open Web assets with other quality online content. WSJ will hold its own with those competitive products, to be sure, but why toss out higher ad rates if you don't have to? By expanding both search engine exposure to much of WSJ's online content and continuing to build an online club for elites there's reason to think that the Journal is headed towards a comparatively robust year of growth. The main question is, what will keep the subscribers coming back for more? We've mentioned in earlier posts that the subscription component could be used to leverage WSJ's upscale demographics in any number of social media-oriented efforts, as well as to offer financial analysis tools that would one-up offerings made available by Yahoo! Finance as well as premium offerings from Morningstar and other online suppliers. Whatever the changes they need to be oriented more towards a younger generation's needs if they are to use subscription revenues for anything more than the temporary bulwark that the TimesSelect premium experiment turned out to be. Any way you look at it it's not clear that there's a core of traditional editorial content from any news publisher that's likely to sustain growth in online subscriptions in the long run. The tricky job that Dow Jones has on its hands is to project the value of its brand more globally via ad-only content whilst maintaining some sense of value in its exclusive subscription product. Dow Jones has much to gain in retaining its subscription model as it expands ad-only content, but they will be challenged to keep the value of the Wall Street Journal brand high unless there are new styles of content that can build on the existing brand's loyalty. Labels: advertising, Dow Jones, Monetization, Murdoch, subscription
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:38 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, January 25, 2008 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 9:31 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, January 23, 2008 |
 Sramana Mitra at GigaOM tries to makes sense of the recent reorgs, cutbacks and general malaise at Yahoo. Mind you it's sometimes hard to figure out how people can cluck about a company that has over 500 million unique audience members, but clearly a USD 20 billion loss in market capitalization since its peak is bound to bring soul-searching in many major company. Sramana's suggestion is for Yahoo to focus more on excellence in specific vertical markets rather than to get lost in trying to out-everyone everyone else. Oddly Sramana gives as one suggested change the addition of photo processing service Shutterfly to Yahoo's Flickr photo community, even though Flickr has had the QOOP photo printing service for some time now. This points out a major problem that many content aggregators face: it's almost impossible for an all-singing, all-dancing content vendor to buy enough good content to compete cost-effectively with specialists in any one market vertical. Yahoo could buy its way into a more dominant position in verticals such as travel, jobs and real estate classifieds by purchasing market leaders and then position management that wouldn't stop until they had dominant positions, but there are only so many verticals in which one can dot this effectively and still manage to maintain both rapid responses to market needs and the advantages of scale. Thomson has discovered this to a large degree as it has chosen to divest itself of market verticals in which it was both not possible to dominate effectively and to take advantage of common infrastructure for legal, scientific and financial markets more deeply. The main problem Yahoo faces is that its brand does not resonate effectively with many of its holdings as well as many of its core offerings. In terms of breadth of content that it licenses or manages there's no single provider larger than Yahoo in online markets. That's a fine position to be in if you're a Google with a brand that is functionally oriented more than vertically oriented, but when you're more about destination content it's hard to get a broad encompassing brand to work for both functionality and destination content - even when there's comparable functionality or content available. People gravitate to Google for search over Yahoo as much for branding reasons as they do for its technology: that is, Google is a "techie" brand, so it's viewed more as a tool for solving specific problems. Yahoo has great content, but with a handful of exceptions it's not really seen as a tech tool intuitively. Strangely Yahoo's focus on well-designed user interfaces only seems to exacerbate this branding issue. By looking more user-friendly and idiot-proof than Google and other tech-oriented brands it continues to send signals that it's a company focused more on destination content than leading-edge content technology. I'd hesitate to call Yahoo a dying brand, for it has a wealth of assets that are hard to beat in many arenas. But it is a brand in search of its soul, captive in large part to an earlier generation of the Web when aggregating content from existing media brands seemed to be a lot more powerful business concept than it is today. Google's more agnostic approach to content aggregation and more askance perspective on marketing alliances with established content brands has enabled to keep its content acquisition costs relatively low and its ability to focus resources on transformative technologies and approaches to markets relatively high. In an era in which a brand creates trust moment by moment Google's more contextual and flexible approach to brand management carries with it inherent advantages, as do many social media brands focused on transformative technologies. Yahoo need not become another Google from a branding perspective, but it does need to think about the positioning of its brand far more carefully before it tries to focus on improving existing product lines that may not be well aligned with a repositioned Yahoo brand. I remain optimistic that this can happen over the next few years, but I don't expect a short-term turnaround. Labels: aggregation, portals, vertical search, Yahoo
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:12 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
Trends Sector Snap: Online Content Dives - AP via CNN Money
A bad day for Answers.com and other public online publishers. An easy target for panicked investors.
Hundreds of Layoffs Expected at Yahoo - New York Times
Expected cutbacks, WSJ reports also that Yahoo Worlds brand effort has been cut, Yahoo! Answers to be managed by Europe. Yahoo, Please Put Up A Fight - GigaOM
Om Malik rants about Yahoo's loss of USD 20 billion in market capitalization and points to its need to dominate more market segment verticals. I don't know that this is possible in a highly horizontal brand like Yahoo's built around traditional media aggregation. More later on ContentBlogger.
Editor Fires Parting Shot at His Chain - New York TimesDeparting editor thinks that quality has suffered with newsroom cuts. Not a "get rewrite" insight, but he's right in that newspapers are losing their ability to attract top-quality writers.
CNET Board Fights Takeover - Trading Markets|
While public media stocks get dumped, private holdings are still very much in play.
Revisiting Googlezon: The Future of the News Media - Portfolio.com
The creators of the famous EPIC video in 2004 that predicted the fall of major media outlets reflect on how they got some things right, but underestimated the role of social media in democratizing content.
Proposal to extend Euro copyright dies - Boing Boing
European copyright will not be extended to U.S. standards. A good thing, encourages publishers to innovate and to create more valuable new content.
IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says - Washington Post
The EU. muddies the waters on privacy issues.
HBO launches Web service in 2 markets - ContentAgenda.com
More than 375 movies on demand via the broadband Web. HBO's preparing for the death of the cable format.
The Digg Story Doesn’t Sell Anymore - Jeffro2pt0.com
Social bookmarking sites are having problems, there's not enough community policing and editorial control in most to ensure quality. Better to stick with your real-world friends' bookmarks in Facebook oftentimes.
Tribune reporters, now on Facebook - Reuters MediaFile
"The dangers of YouTube and Facebook." Man, what a gap in consciousness.
LinkedIn chairman hints at IPO in 2009 - ValleyWag
An acquisition is ruled out for now. Seems counterintuitive, but with LinkedIn's extraordinary growth as of late perhaps it's not altogether unthinkable to go IPO next year.
Best PracticesSearch, Content Processing, and the Great Database Controversy - Beyond Search
Stephen Arnold contemplates the future of the database in an era in which the world is a database.
The Only Way For Journalists To Understand The Web Is To Use It - Publishing 2.0
Good compare-and-contrast of journalism styles between blog-oriented publishing and traditional print-oriented publishing.
How Free And Paid Approaches Do Complement Each Other - Robin Good
"Freemium" debate from a fresh angle - good take.
Streaming Ads Driving Users Away From Content: Report - paidContent.org
Younger people are more tolerant, but don't recall much of them.
YouTube Community Council Provides Update - WebProNews
More social media portals are opening up to user groups that provide input on both features and policies.
Handpicked Video - RobinGood.TV
Robin Good TV has changed his focus to aggregating video clips from sources not normally highlighted in online news. Good model that should be incorporated into other social media aggregation services.
Cool Tools Orchestr8 Widgetizes Content with New Clipping Tool - Mashable
This looks to be very, very interesting on the surface - in essence turn any Web page into a platform for a personal or shared mashup. Will explore.
Pownce goes live - Download Squad
A Web-only alternative to Twitter. Kind of an oxymoron, but interesting nevertheless.
New Cell Phone Boasts Unique 'Foldaway' Screen - CityNews:A very cool idea - a phone with a screen larger than an iPhone that folds into a tiny phone. Deals, Partnerships and Sales Publicis, Google reveal digital ad collaboration - Reuters via CNET News.com
Google eyes French ad partner. ProQuest acquires RefWorks
Good acquisition to help ProQuest build a more effective social network of collaborative researchers.
B2B Newsletter Firm FierceMarkets Bought By Questex Media - paidContent.org
Sounds like a pretty good match, FierceMarkets will provide good infrastructure for events marketing. Alfresco Secures $9 Million in Series C Funding Led by SAP Ventures - PR Newswire
More than USD 19 million now backing this open source content management startup.
Products Plaxo Pulse Optimized for 4 Million iPhones - Mashable
Plaxo pushes platform integration. Socialware is supplanting hardware as the common denominator for communication.
Alacra Launches Premium Content Ad Network - PR Web
Clever use of online ad technology to put premium content in context, sharing revenues from purchased research with advertisers. Pay-per-action with a twist. Good stuff. - post by jblossom Pitt's university press to test demand for digital publishing - AP
Be still, o my heart. How daring.
Labels: headlines
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:05 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
3 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, January 22, 2008 |
 Steven Arnold writes a thoughtful post on his Beyond Search blog about the inadequacy of traditional databases and search engines to deal with organizing and delivering content when the Web and many private content collections measure in petabytes and exabytes of information. Steve hints at a "next generation" database management system that can start to leapfrog over these problems, but the greater question is perhaps unasked in his article. Namely, as the problems that people need to solve with content technologies become increasingly complex and increasingly fleeting, why is it that we really need permanent unified databases to solve those problems? There is an important need for data normalization, but if normalization can be achieved "on the fly," as leading content federation services can provide, do people need a database or instead data objects that solve specific problems in the moment? When data normalization was associated with creating massive databases that would be used for repeated functions such as payroll management or publishing functions such as newspapers or directories permanently structured databases made a lot of sense. But as market advantages gained through content publishing fall increasingly to those who can mine unstructured content, aggregate content from disparate sources and enable people normally confined to consuming content to create it and organize it, the traditional database is being relegated to one of many silos from which advanced content services can develop on-demand content solutions. Search engines, which rely on databases that can be queried in a standard format to provide standard answers, are beginning to fall into this same role of specialized answer tools. If you look at the typical search results page today from major providers you're looking at federated content from multiple sources, logically related to a greater whole but residing in separate storage environments and coming together in the moment as the answer to a specific question or need. In short, what we have called a database is no longer a storage and indexing device. Rather, the database is now, the content sets that we assemble in a given moment to solve the moment's problem. Its structure is consistent thanks to XML standards, data dictionaries and data mining normalization tools, it can be stored as needed for time series analysis or corporate compliance, it can be shared with others to develop collaboration services or new forms of content and analysis. But in the next moment our needs may shift, sources may change structure or become unavailable or be replaced by different sources. Market advantages tend to flow from institutions who can take advantage of content most effectively, and in the markets we can see how this concept already impacts business in a large way. In financial markets profits are shifting from public securities exchanges, whose transactions are built around highly normalized databases and data formats, to private transactions on highly complex financial instruments, whose underlying complex calculations on financial risk and return may apply to only a single transaction at a time. There is structure in such transactions, yes, and lots of normalized data, but the uniqueness of the content's structure at the moment that a deal is executed is far more important than its standard components. Search engine providers such as Google understand this paradox explicitly and work hard to provide value-add interfaces that enable people to use search engine content as one of many feeds that can power "mashup" consumer and enterprise content applications. The Google search engine may be one of the world's largest databases but if other content in a form that's more usable in a specific context can come along and complement it in the moment, it becomes rather moot beyond a certain point whether or not it's in Google's index or another index. This federated approach to content value becomes at least as important as the quality of the individual sources. In a "the database is now" world, quality is as quality does - and it may mean something else a moment from now. The implications of this concept for content publishers is enormous. Long used to building their standardized databases, the long-promised New Aggregation is on the verge of becoming the value leader for both enterprise and media publishers. Through the on-demand federation of content sources into aggregated content solutions the uniqueness of insights for small audiences is becoming a much more important method for creating value in aggregation than the pervasiveness of standardized insights. Make no mistake, we'll be using today's search engines and databases for a long time as building blocks for federated content services, but we'll be less fixated on owning databases and more focused on owning the contexts in which they provide solutions. This is likely to change the pricing structure of content aggregation services significantly and to force traditional publishers into becoming on-the-fly aggregation services pulling in content agnostically from many sources that may not be under their direct control for more than a few moments. Subscription databases will yield, sometimes gradually and sometimes very rapidly, to subscription contexts, services that can assemble content from anywhere consistently and reliably for workflow and lifestyle applications. Yesterday's email inbox is becoming today's content inbox via feeds and social media: tomorrow's federated inboxes will be even more rich and complex through databases that live in the moment. Social media and enterprise content federation services have already pressed many of these changes forward, but expect 2008 to be the year in which more than one company will begin to recognize the value of databases in the moment. The database is now - and so is the opportunity for publishers and enterprises to move beyond isolated content solutions. Labels: Best Practices, content federation, search, steven arnold
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:14 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
5 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Monday, January 21, 2008 |
 The capabilities of XML server capabilities from Mark Logic are unleashed oftentimes on large-scale content solutions for enterprises and publishers, but that's not to say that XML servers are only about such major projects. Mark Logic's David Amusin decided see if he could use their technology to make sense of the hundreds of contacts that he had amassed on Facebook, a sidebar project that took only a few weeks of tinkering to get whipped into a good demo. The problem that David faced with making sense of his Facebook contacts is a common one: too much information about too much people. When he had a couple of extra tickets for a concert recently, that spurred him to create Kick It, which uses Mark Logic technology to power a Facebook application to filter on multiple user profile attributes. So, for example, Kick It could help David find how many of his Facebook contacts in Los Angeles liked the Dave Matthews Band very quickly. Problem solved. The current iteration of Kick It enables you to traverse your Facebook contacts by category - activities, interests, companies and so on - to search by logical combinations of attributes and to get surprised by a "did you know that" random display that shows you interesting combinations of attributes (for example, three of my contacts participate in tennis. Hmm. Maybe I should dust off that racket after all). Kick It is a simple and yet powerful example of how analysis of social media content can yield a treasure trove of potentially useful associations that can fuel both personal and professional contacts in unexpected ways. Take these associations and layer on additional content from other content sources and you can begin to get a sense of why embedding your own publication's content in social media portals such as Facebook can be so valuable. Mark Logic's technology is not unique in being able to do this, so the fact that it was able to develop Kick It as an interesting demonstration of its integration capabilities with social media using very limited efforts should spur on other content technology providers and publishers to consider just how easy it can be to make a big impression of their own. In the meantime kudos to Mark Logic for seeing an important opportunity to demonstrate how content integration technologies can make it easy for publishers to extend their value beyond their own portals into social media outlets. Labels: content technology, facebook, kick it, mark logic
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 10:40 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
4 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, January 18, 2008 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 8:30 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
1 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, January 16, 2008 |
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 11:30 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
2 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
 The buzz is increasing on a potential acquisition of the Plaxo contacts-oriented social networking service by Facebook, as noted by VentureBeat and others, and there are good reasons to think that this would be a good marriage if one can overlook the personality conflicts in the potential deal. Plaxo's new Pulse social networking service is going strong and helping to extend the value of its core contacts synchronization service, but ultimately Pulse is yet another social media login to maintain with features and functionality not terribly different from Facebook itself. At the same time Facebook is becoming an increasingly popular spot for professionals to congregate for networking of both a personal and professional nature, but it lacks gravitas for people trying to keep abreast of changes in people's professional profiles. Backing in Plaxo data and desktop synchronization capabilities into Facebook's infrastructure may offer an interesting marriage of capabilities that may give Facebook a more competitive posture with professionals as LinkedIn continues to gain mojo as a "social inbox" for the professional set. Rumor squashers are quick to point out historical conflicts between management in these two companies that might squelch such a deal before it's out of the blocks. But with investors from Sequoia who have fingers in both LinkedIn and Plaxo perhaps there's reason to think that there's a priority being placed on getting Plaxo's potential up to speed as soon as possible in comparison to other assets in their portfolio. With reasonably healthy growth there's not an immediate need for Plaxo to pull the string on a deal just yet, but knowing that venture capital may be harder to come by for subsequent funding rounds in 2008 this might be a good point for Plaxo to exit into the hands of a player such as Facebook as it continues to attract professionals rapidly into its multi-faceted social networking portal. Expect an increasing round of high-profile deals for companies such as Plaxo as social media plays begin to consolidate to grow more effectively in a market that is scrambling for revenue-generating capabilities in a softening economy. Labels: Business Information, Deals Partnerships and Sales, facebook, plaxo, Social Media
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:21 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Tuesday, January 15, 2008 |
We're going to be trying a new format for headlines this year, your feedback as we experiment with this new style will be greatly appreciated. We have quite a few in today's batch, expect fewer headlines with more commentary as we move forward. Facebook buying Plaxo?: VentureBeat - Earlier rumors seem to be solidifying, more on ContentBlogger in a bit. It's a logical match.
FCC Approves Google For Wireless Auction: WebProNews - The event that just might change everything that we've assumed about both Web content and telecommunications.
AP Sues AHN Media For Copyright Infringement: paidContent.org 2008 - The rise of social media 'super advocates': Netimperative Candidates Rethink Web Strategy: AdWeek Trying to fine-tune Yahoo: NYTimes via CNET News Bloggers Bring in Ad Revenue: WSJ Online (subscription) - It's not just weblogs, just about anyone with a little motivation can build valuable content that can generate ad revenues. Publishers need to look at aggregating social media more effectively.
Thomson-Reuters Deal to Complete in Q2: AP via Topix - The U.S. regulators are pushing to complete in the same timeframe as the EU. A done deal, but in a rapidly decaying financial marketplace will the deal turn out to be a longer-term investment than anticipated originally?
Samsung trademarks "SyncPaper" -- e-book reader on the way?: Engadget - The name has the concept right, at least. The eBook battle is far from over.
American Marketing Association releases new definition of marketing: BtoB Magazine - “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Sounds an awful lot like our definition of content...
ProQuest Announces Aggregated Full-Text Database for Libraries: Information Today - ProQuest solidifes its position as the all-purpose default licensed content sources for the library set.
Open access publishing takes off in India: Indian Muslims - Given India's level of innovation growth, the potential for open access publications powering that growth is a potentially ominous sign for traditional publishers.
The flow of information at the Googleplex: Official Google Blog - Interesting demo of how Google's prediction technology can work. Is Google headed towards analysing many different kinds of trends with this technology - including financial markets?
Macworld2008 - Steve Jobs keynote speech leaked?: Pocket-lint.co.uk - Wikipedia has been an increasingly important force in breaking news, but now news leaks enter the fray. Appropriate when you come to think of it, it's a free-for-all in terms of publishing and the editing community can verify at will. A handy thing for the person wanting to leak anonymously when the essential content is valid but unconfirmable.
EU launches new Microsoft probes: BBC News - Old battle, new chapter - coming at a very bad time for Redmond. You'd think that Microsoft would have detached IE from its OS a long time ago, but unfortunately Vista is the by-product of a strategy that may no longer fit the realities of what Microsoft needs to accomplish to service the content industry effectively.
myExperiment: "myExperiment makes it really easy to find, use and share scientific workflows and other research objects, and to build communities." - A really interesting social media workflow tool, will be investigating this further.
Thomson Scientific Launches Journal Citation Forum Dedicated to Discussion About Citation-Based Research Evaluation: BusinessWire Nature Publishing Group and Sermo Partner to Help Physicians Access, Interpret, and Contribute to Current Medical Research: Business Wire Labels: headlines
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 7:40 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
1 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Friday, January 11, 2008 |
 Sometimes two distressful situations can combine to create relief, rare though that might be. Such seems to be the lucky break that both Microsoft and FAST Search and Transfer caught in the recent acquisition of FAST by Microsoft. FAST needed fast relief from crippling cash flow problems generated in part from a sales strategy that reached beyond their ability to deliver on ambitious promises. Microsoft on the other hand had failed to create any significant sales momentum behind its own enterprise search efforts, with players such as Google beginning to breathe down their necks more warmly with each passing day. So a mere USD 1.2 billion in cash works quite nicely to bring together two impressive partners that promise to dominate enterprise platforms for some time to come. FAST's rapid growth over the past few years into an increasingly dominant position in enterprise search markets is just the ticket that Microsoft needs to position itself in increasingly competitive enterprise platform markets. With ever more content being consumed in enterprises via non-Microsoft platforms, domination requires a more agnostic approach to assembling on-demand content than Microsoft has been able to manage recently. FAST offers both solid enterprise search technology and an installed base of global corporate clients that Microsoft can leverage very effectively with the combination of FAST search capabilities to gather content and Microsoft's Sharepoint servers to store and aggregate content. This last point is especially important for Microsoft's future revenues. With its Vista operating system rendered a ho-hum at best by most enterprise users and panned widely in consumer markets Microsoft needs to shift the center of its profits to platforms sy uch as search engines that are more central to what drives internal publishing in today's enterprises. Each page of search results can become in effect a purpose-built portal: in effect, the database is now, the content that's required to solve immediate business problems. Search technology such as that offered by FAST holds out the promise of search engines becoming the focal point for Microsoft's enterprise publishing strategy, offering Microsoft more opportunity to have offerings that scale effectively to both global and mid-sized corporations. That $1.2 billlion make look like relative pocket change today, but in terms of the market share secured and the future market positioning that will be required to counter slowing sales on its aging operating systems it's a major investment in securing Microsoft's future cash flow. Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, enterprise, FAST Search and Transfer, Microsoft, search
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 2:24 AM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
0 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
| Wednesday, January 09, 2008 |
 It didn't start out to be a vacation from blogging, but all of a sudden I began to realize that I had been doing ContentBlogger for nearly five years without a break. A few days off turned into a few weeks off as holiday time slipped by. I cannot say that I was under the palm tree sipping cool drinks for my time away, but it I was definitely enjoying a change of pace - and now I am looking forward to resuming the pace. I hope that you had a good holiday season and that you will all have a happy and prosperous New Year - and enjoy another great year of industry insights from ContentBlogger. Labels: ContentBlogger
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 1:20 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
1 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
 When I signed up to speak at the Infovision 2007 conference in Mumbai last month I found myself back in touch with S. Swaminathan, the CEO and founder of IRIS, one of the leading Indian technology services providers supporting the global content industry. I have come to know Swaminathan fairly well through our business discussions at major conferences in the past few years, so I was more than grateful when he offered me a driver for my short but memorable tour of Mumbai. After several hours of puttering around some of the local sites I met up with Swaminathan for lunch at the historic Taj Mahal Hotel down by the Gateway to India waterfront arch. Swaminathan cuts the prototypical figure of content entrepreneurs in today's India: energetically brilliant, eloquent, well-versed in the ways of European and American markets and cultures yet thoroughly Indian. He is keenly aware of how far India has come through global outsourcing but also aware of its potential to become a global leader in content services innovation in its own right. This is reflected somewhat in IRIS' own market footprint. Long known for quality outsourcing services supporting the financial information industry, IRIS is also very active in developing key information delivery services for India's stock markets. Where in the U.S. institutions are just beginning to tinker with delivering corporate financial reports to the government in the XBRL industry standard format IRIS has been instrumental in getting XBRL adopted and implemented as a financial reporting standard throughout India. It is this combination of global markets awareness in combination with the rapid transformation of their domestic content markets that is most intriguing to me about India today. Certainly there have been some Indian companies which have broken out of the outsourcing profile to bring full-blown content technology products to global markets, but many of these did so in part because there were so few opportunities at the time to develop significant product offerings domestically. As India's media and business information markets begin to take off in their own right, there is a growing surge of home-grown content services which are maturing quite rapidly from the relatively primitive efforts of just a couple of years ago - though still with rough edges at times. The Rediff portal is an interesting example of the limits and potential of India's broadening online culture. Reasonably up to date in its feature set compared to Western media portals, things get interesting when you turn to its search engine, which offers searching in both English and a number of India's more than 100 languages and dialects. This confluence of global awareness, innovation, media savvy and multilingual domestic culture that is perhaps India's strongest suit for becoming a leader in global content markets. Certainly search engines such as in China's Baidu portal offer more overall sophistication than Rediff at this point and Europeans have been able to develop multilingual services with an English language overlay but in neither of these instances do you have an outlook on one's own nation as such a stew of multilingual multiculturalism powered by such a strong technology presence. If India can get its own content services thoroughly up to snuff while at the same time developing expertise on global markets via outsourcing, how far are we from the day when it becomes a global leader via its own content services? Things do not always move swiftly and according to plan in this highly complex nation, but I can see the outlines of a new source of global content entrepreneurship emerging from India over the next few years that is likely to raise more than a few eyebrows in the content industry. My thanks again to Swaminathan for being such a gracious host, it was such a pleasure to experience Indian hospitality through his sincere courtesy. Labels: financial information, india, iris, mumbai, swamithan, xbrl
|
|
By John Blossom - posted at 12:57 PM |
|
permanent link to this entry
bookmark this entry:
|
|
|
|
1 comments (click to view or to add your own)
|
To top of page  |
|
|
|
|
|
