With newspapers and magazines folding virtually every week now in the face of a global economic crisis Clay Shirky is comparing the scope of change being experienced by the rise of online publishing's challenge to newspapers to the tumultuous change sparked by the rise of printing presses nearly five hundred years ago. From my perspective I think that the scope is actually far broader than that. As I outline in the Content Nation book, the scope of change fomented by the rise of online publishing is likely historical on an even broader scale, a scale perhaps never seen since the rise of centralized publishing by the world's first recorded civilizations thousands of years ago.
Whatever the ultimate breadth of the challenges facing traditional publishers, one thing is for certain: timidity in addressing the challenges presented by online publishing has not served them well. This timidity reflects not just in the online portals offered by most traditional media companies but as well in their print strategies. You'd think that some of the lessons learned from online publishing would have worked their way into print offerings a long time ago. Yet more than two years after Wired Magazine offered its users the ability to put their own photo on a customized cover of their magazine (part of a promotion by Xerox), the mass customization of print remains largely a novelty in the eyes of most mass media publishers. But there are glimmers of hopeful signs that publishers may be getting ready to push further on into print customization.
One recent sign of hope for mass customization is a new offering from Time, Inc.'s consumer media group called MINE, a service that allows people to build their own custom magazines from articles found in eight of their leading consumer publications. The actual customization seems to be quite limited at this point - you may specify your address, your age, up to five Time-owned magazines that you'd like to have content from and provide answers to four questions that indicate your presumed tastes (Like sushi or pizza? Sing in the shower? Would you like to learn juggling or celebrity impersonation? Would you like to have dinner with Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates?). From these choices Time will pop out articles tailored to your profile in five issues of your MINE magazine print or digital form, all for free (Lexus appears to be the major sponsor for this effort).
On the scale of today's print offerings this is a fairly bold experiment, enabling Time brands normally built up separately through their various flagship publications to comingle in a common publication. It echoes in some ways the use of The Wall Street Journal's branded business content in some local newspaper editions, but with a level of customization not seen heretofore the editorial side of a magazine cover. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki notes tongue in cheek in a recent Twitter message that perhaps it's even a copy of his Alltop's "online magazine rack" of popular topics concept. While I wouldn't discount that self-flattering comparison of Guy's entirely, I think that it's far more likely that Time has finally started to consider a broader range of lessons from online publications - albeit a bit late in the game - and how they may apply to their traditional strengths as direct marketing mavens.
The truth is that Time has been customizing both editorial and ad copy for years based on zip codes and other key demographic groupings. It may not be apparent to the typical person flipping through Sports Illustrated or whatever, but oftentimes they're highly tailored publications. With the technology in place already to do this type of customization on a per-title basis, it's a relatively small step to stage content on a more granular level from multiple titles into MINE issues. So in most respects MINE is an evolutionary step towards enabling multi-branded content in one delivery package. In a way MINE is akin to a "my [name of portal]" type of customization that has been part of online offerings for more than a decade - not only just evolutionary from a print perspective but old, old news from an online perspective.
So while MINE is a positive development, why is it that it is taking traditional publishers so long to develop business models that make more efficient use of print technology as a content delivery system? I for one don't believe that print is at all a dead medium: it's just a horribly neglected medium that has been allowed to die in the hands of very inefficient business models as all of the publishing efficiencies flow to online venues. Reprint services demonstrate every day that print can be a highly effective and profitable targeted communications medium. Yet most publishers derive single percentage digits of their revenues from custom printing. Hmm, tiny slivers of highly profitable printing versus huge swaths of increasingly unprofitable printing...what's wrong with this picture?
It's great that Time is trying out the market for custom aggregations of its own content, but let's he honest - publishers need to be far, far more aggressive in packaging their content in personalized publications tailored for individuals. Unfortunately for some publishers, the greatest opportunities in custom printing lie with those who are willing to let other business models drive the aggregation technologies that make that possible. Some of those business models may yet wind up in the hands of major publishers, but it's far more likely that after years of whining and wrestling, newspaper and magazine publishers will finally surrender to the notion that enabling their content to be licensed through whatever print or print-like electronic vehicle services their audience most effectively is going to be the most profitable and effective way for their print-formatted content to gain exposure. Applying the lessons of the Web to print must be a priority for print publications to survive and to thrive.
While I agree with Clay Shirky that the triviality of making electronic copies of content has changed the economics of the publishing business fundamentally, until some electronic medium has the simplicity, ease and readability of print publications there will be a highly exploitable market for print. In many instances people love to curl up in a time of relaxation to catch up with a print publication, oftentimes on a weekend or during travel. It's a luxury to spend time reading "unplugged" content - a luxury that will only be spent on a handful of print publications. Why not enable people to put whatever content will be of interest to them into that luxury experience? Branded portals for publishers are becoming less and less of a driver for building online revenues: why shouldn't publishers become more aggressive in putting their audiences in the driver's seat for aggregating the content that's of interest to them in print as well?
So kudos for Time testing the waters for their MINE publication, but I do hope that major publishers will finally begin to see the light and start enabling the printing of massively customized print and print-formatted publications that aggregate content from whatever sources interest their audiences the most. The result will be far higher ad rates, far higher returns on investment and a much more healthy print publishing business in the long run. Let's stop allowing printing presses to go dark in major cities just because the one publishing company running them cannot build a business model to support them. Let those printing presses role with whatever content will command the highest interest from audiences from whatever sources produce it, and the money will follow with due haste.
Building on Wednesday's launch of free individual and bulk company data from Jigsaw there's an announcement from business information provider Hoover's on its addition of more than a million new contacts for mid-level executives in major companies from an unnamed third party source (but given which service is focused on harvesting mid-level contacts from sales professionals it's not too hard to figure out). Pull up the record for GE, for example, and Hoover's provides access to more than 4,500 employees, now including employees from subsidiaries as well. That helps to cut down on the "which of those doggone divisions is he/she in?" conundrum that can slow down the search for appropriate contacts. With company records becoming increasingly commoditized this emphasis on contacts data integrated in with its Hoover's Connect social media feature is a key component of Hoover's future.
The other neat function is the ability to add one's own profile into the Hoover's business information database, somewhat along the lines of what ECNext is doing with company information on their Manta platform targeted at small to medium sized enterprises. Add in your bio, education, memberships in associations, add an option to receive contact via the Hoover's platform and it's off to their editors for final review and posting. You have to go looking for the feature way down on a company page, but it's there and is a start towards enabling the gathering of the kinds of valuable information that LinkedIn and other business-oriented social media services are enabling.
Overall Hoover's continues its efforts on reviving the once-flagging brand that had been turned into a cash cow by D&B just about the time that it needed serious new investment. The need to turn the cow into a star again is now clear at D&B and many of the efforts are starting to pay off. Long a leader in pressing the envelope for online workflow design, The Hoover's interface manages to present a ton of information and a wealth of features in a highly usable form. The real question seems to be, though, when and how often people will visit the Hoover's portal - or any heavy-duty business information portal.
Business information tools like Zoominfo beckon with a Google-esque simplicity to its ad-supported design and fairly rich features, if with less in-depth content, from its subscription-level service. The growth of Zoominfo in particular seems to be putting a damper on both established business information services and up-and-comers as it aggregates content harvested from with web with licensed content supplements. Part of Hoover's response to this "stickiness" issue is to highlight their editorial staff via topic-oriented business blogs that are featured prominently on the ad-supported front page and elsewhere within the site. It's an innovative move, but one that seems to be still looking for a big payoff in improved site traffic.
The main problem that Hoover's and other business information services face is that it's hard to keep on heaping on great portal features and expect to get commensurate returns on the investment in those features every single time. With a wide range of contexts in which people want business information on a personal and professional basis the ability to integrate content in contexts far beyond one's portal becomes a key factor for building the brand value of business information. At the same time there are more opportunities to use the value of contexts in a portal such as Hoover's to gain more lucrative positioning of ad-supported content. Instead of having some mass-market ad show up when someone with a known business profile is looking at a company's information, isn't that the perfect opportunity for that company to tout itself or to have related B2B products and services crop up from a ThomasNet network or such? The ad value of business information is still very underappreciated and under-exploited.
So overall the Hoover's portal continues to make healthy strides forward but it must continue to build innovation in a year in which the economy makes "pretty good" free or more targeted substitutes more popular than ever. Both the short-run and long-run track for Hoover's continues to offer challenges that they must battle, but at least their sword is getting sharper in order to take them on.
Hats off to Jim Fowler, who has to be one of the gutsiest startup CEOs out there. Taking on the heart of the business information industry with his Jigsaw collaborative community that collects business contact and company information is one thing: personally announcing the launch of their new Open Data Initiative in a YouTube video shot on some of the more funky streets of San Francisco is quite another. It sets the scene for a very interesting move into promoting the use of Jigsaw as a service that can enable people to get high-quality contact data by giving people free access to company information.
Jigsaw has built up a base of about 450,000 people who give and take business contact information and challenge one another's submissions via the Jigsaw portal. Think of Jigsaw as Wikipedia for business contacts with far better rules and to boot a premium content model. It's a "give-to-get" model that allows people to earn credits towards getting business contact information for free if they provide enough quality information themselves but which will also charge people to see contact information if they have maxed out their quota for free contact views. On the back end of this database Jigsaw has built a tidy little business selling the information collected via their portals to enterprises and other services that need up-to-date contact and company information in their internal databases and sales automation services.
It's a good business, but the hard part has been scaling the online community to the point where Jigsaw becomes a must-visit destination that will enable them to build up information beyond the 2 million businesses and 8 million contacts already tracked in their database. Making the basic company name and address information available for free - it comes along anyway on the business contact information that people input on Jigsaw - creates a powerful endorsement for membership in Jigsaw that's likely to push its positioning as a default destination for inputting business contact information. In doing so Jigsaw may have taken a huge step forward in accelerating the growth of their database, helped along by the many key sales automation platforms that are already positioned to use content from the Open Data Initiative.
Company information is available for free elsewhere online, of course, through services such as Hoover's, ECNext's Manta portal and Zoominfo, so to some degree Jigsaw's Open Data Initiative is playing catch-up with the online positioning of other business information services. However, with the Open Data Initiative Jigsaw is making this information available in bulk form as well. That's a huge step forward in neutralizing some of the power of other services that have been building their bread and butter on filtered company lists -and a strong incentive to make Jigsaw a default plan "B" feed for company information, if not their plan "A". Major business information services, please take note: those low margins on your list services just got a bit of a challenge.
What's most interesting about the Jigsaw Open Data Initiative is its potential to increase the likelihood that Jigsaw can become a more timely source of updates for accurate business contact information both from online sources and from the many enterprise services through which Jigsaw information can be consumed, and, in theory, updated. The opportunity to make desktop and mobile sales automation and email services input points for real-time business contact updates works already in a limited fashion for services like Plaxo, but with a more serious footprint in the love-to-update-those-contacts culture of today's mobile sales forces Jigsaw may have found the accelerator that they've been looking for as they've continued to refine their offerings.
In the meantime traditional business information providers continue to be challenged on all sides by nimble competitors such as Jigsaw who are willing to view their audience as knowledgeable participants in the gathering of business information. Enterprises still move cautiously towards these new services, but as they discover that interactivity with users enables them to get more accurate content more quickly there is a tipping point approaching rapidly beyond which the Dun & Bradstreets of the world must worry mightily about the ability of their organizations and their business models to survive. There is still a powerful marketplace for quality business information, but Jigsaw challenges traditional suppliers to consider how the real-time collection capabilities of today's publishing-enabled audiences can accelerate the value of those services rapidly.
paidContent.org notes the USD 50 million that Austin Ventures has announced that it is pumping into its CEOs-in-residence fund to back Razorfish ex-CEO Jeff Dachis as he explores B2B opportunities for social media. While social media backing for consumer ventures seems to have cooled somewhat there appears to be a rising tide of private equity beginning to back social media plays for business services. Details are highly vague, just the promise of a Software-as-a-Service suite that would be positioned against LinkedIn, Generate, VisualPath, and others already in the social media business information space, according to PCDO.
And there you have it - a quick 50 million infused into a trusted ex-CEO and before you know it there will be another choice in the rapidly expanding market for B2B social media. While it's far from clear where Dachis will take this venture what's already clear is that business information aggregators are going to have more points of potential disintermediation for their services as new forms of content aggregation begin to arise in the space between media, enterprise and personal content services that is neglected oftentimes by traditional database licensors. All this in a year in which many subscription content services are going to be challenged in their renewal cycles as the ROI arguments for their services come under increasing scrutiny.
While some business information services are fairly young and already very promising, I would caution those beginning to put their investment dollars into this space that while there's lots of money to be made in the space there are only so many good tools for managing business conversations that are going to take hold in any particular market sector or for any particular role. This is in part because those services that are already out there have been building a few years' worth of content quality from mined content and socially collected content that is not going to be reproducable from the Web or brand-new social networks - no matter how good one's technology is. This will mean a) licensing content from existing distributors, b) taking more time to build up one's own unique content assets and likely c) needing to position one's services carefully so that they are not trying to reinvent already extant wheels.
So invest on, courageous private equity people, there are indeed great opportunities to create valuable business information services using social media. But be prepared for a lot more careful analysis of what it takes to succeed with business information using social media tools.
I had the pleasure to speak recently on an analyst call with Dow Jones' Darr Aley, incoming VP of Marketing and BD for their new Business & Relationship Intelligence unit being formed from their acquisition of Generate, along with Simon Bradstock, VP of Corporate Products. After congratulations to all for a great acquisition we went through some of the ins and outs of how Dow Jones will be using Generate's assets to generate new market opportunities and to accelerate their existing deal flow. While many of the details that we went over parallel closely my earlier post on this acquisition, we explored also the ways in which Generate assets will help Dow Jones to penetrate both global markets and other specific market sectors. Certainly, as I discussed earlier, the potential for WSJ.com assets to benefit from this new relationship will loom large, as will integration with Factiva content and platform assets, but in looking at the other assets of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, including its news wires, one can see more than just a few extra sources for an already robust business intelligence platform.
What the Dow Jones-Generate acquisition deal represents in its broader context is a dawning era in business information in which new methods of rapid content aggregation and analysis from any potential source are creating a powerful new real-time economy with a high potential payoff for both enterprises and publishers. Much is still made about having leverage through licensable content. When the content's truly unique that's still a reasonable premise, but too often aggregators rely on commoditized content that doesn't enable businesses to get real execution advantages in business over their competitors.
By providing semantic analysis of freshly harvested information from the Web and other sources and mapping it to the relationships that an individual or an enterprise have that can respond to that analysis the combined capabilities of Dow Jones and Generate create powerful new real-time opportunities for creating value from those insights with specific business partners and clients. It's not so unlike what happened in financial markets as they provided more real-time harvesting and analysis of market data and news, but now business information sources from a far wider array of souces can provide similarly valuable and executable insights for a far broader array of business professsionals. If personal relationships drive the highest margins in business, then tools such as Dow Jones' new stable of business intelligence tools from Generate are going to be a key factor in helping professionals to harvest value from those relationships when they're the ripest for the picking.
Dow Jones is not completely alone in this, of course: I reviewed recently Yellowbrix's very intriguing value-add semantic analytics that map trends in news to financial markets and InsideView's semantics-driven sales tools driven by online news sources, subscription databases and relationship management tools are recent examples of how broader real-time insights into events affecting companies and people are driving the value in today's publishing. Much of this value comes not from externally licensed content from from the added value provided by the real-time analysis of this content regardless of its source. Over time the time series data built up through these kinds of services will provide other aspects of unique value for licensing, but these will be secondary to the ability to provide real-time context that can lead to deals at the most important point in time. It's like watching the financial market data business being reborn for the entire range of opportunities for executing business in a wide variety of business sectors. The future of business information is taking shape today - and it's very interesting and high-value stuff. Here's to very interesting times ahead indeed.
I was a bit nonplused to read an article in ZDNet today about InsideView's newly launched SalesView platform that just didn't seem to "get" what business information services are all about - much less what they are now starting to accomplish within some of the leading sales force automation platforms. Kind of strange, given the power found in the particular application that InsideView has launched.
InsideView has dubbed the mapping of business contact relationships to filtered content from Web harvesting and premium content sources inside collaborative software as "socialprise," a good label that describes how business information is gaining value in key contexts through aggregation and value-add services.
SalesView accomplishes this with content from the Web, from social networking services such as LinkedIn and Facebook and, at premium levels, major subscription databases such as Hoover's, D&B, Jigsaw and Reuters. Similar in general concept to Dow Jones's new Generate acquisition but more oriented towards existing Sales Force Automation platforms, SalesView filters incoming content to determine if it represents actionable triggers in a sales and marketing relationship with existing and potential clients and partners and maps it to relationships harvested from personal networks from both online services and SFA services.
The headline in the ZDNet article asks, "SalesView from InsideView: feature or product?" Apparently they weren't too tied in to how different the mission of most SFA platform providers is compared to most business information providers today. The data that most companies load from their internal databases or third party service into a sales force automation platform is just a starting point for people trying to figure out what they should be concentrating on in their sales, business development and marketing efforts.
Think of SFA contact records as the file cards onto which much be attached the prioritization of these targets and the intelligence that can help people understand who's really ready to move on business today. SFA tools don't provide those kinds of capabilities at all. It takes rich content, filtered through tools that will tell a person who's likely to be in a place where a call would be productive, to tell someone whether it's worth using that contact information in the SFA tool. Yes, from a platform standpoint this may look like a "feature," but if it's a feature that drives the key activities needed to generate revenues, then what's really important, the content "feature" or the software "product"?
SalesView takes a different approach from Generate's G2 platform, focusing more on aggregating a wider potential array of sources and social networks into a number of popular SFA platforms, as opposed to G2's focus on its own standalone application and enterprise API. Both approaches have their advantages, but the SalesView platform is nice in that it offers people hooks into a number of the business information services that they're already probably using to manage business social networks and to acquire information about businesses - all filtered through their sales trigger analysis software.
Generate may have gone down the road further in terms of building its own high-quality company and person information from Web-harvested sources, but SalesView enables people to leverage their own personal networking content very effectively for those who are already making use of social media services, while still being able to leverage intelligence from both online sources and subscription databases very effectively. For those companies that fit this usage profile, it looks to be that SalesView can give them a very cost-effective leg up on integrated real-time business intelligence that can yield greatly enhanced productivity. Sure sounds like a content product to me.
I was chatting with someone from Dow Jones' Enteprise Media Group at Buying and Selling eContent exhorting them to get more into virtual aggregation products while noting that folks from Generate were saying that a deal announcement with someone was eminent. This morning the deal news broke - with Dow Jones coming out the victor in a range of financing and exit options that Generate was considering. The Generate team will form the core of a new business unit at Dow Jones to be called Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence, to be headed by Generate President and CEO Tom Aley in a SVP slot with Darr Aley, his twin brother and EVP of Marketing for Generate, taking on a VP of Marketing role in this new business unit.
With a softening economy challenging Generate's value-add strategy for short-term growth, this is one of those win-win deals that you hope for and are glad to see when they come about. Dow Jones' Factiva business unit, the business information backbone for their Enterprise Media Group, has done well enough but had seemed mired in its efforts to move its business intelligence capabilities beyond traditional aggregation of licensed content for most of its clients. The acquisition of Generate provides Dow Jones three critical springboards into a much more robust future based on The New Aggregation concepts that we've advanced here at Shore for many years.
The first springboard is the virtual aggregation capabilities that Generate's web harvesting provides. Generate, unlike some other Web harvesting tools for business information, has focused very heavily on ensuring that harvested data is cleansed and de-duplicated before releasing it into its databases. This doesn't make their data perfect, but with more and more institutions making their own Web publishing the "golden source" for publishing business information it does give them a distinct advantage in both update cycles and overall breadth of content quality that will accrue as more and more data gets released into the Generate/DJ databases. Now Dow Jones has an engine to build an independent and powerful source of business information that will not have to rely as heavily on licensed content sources.
The second springboard is a very robust intelligence front-end in Generate's G2 platform, which combines semantic analysis of incoming content for events that may trigger specific types of deal-oriented activities with a very rich and well-designed business intelligence application and API toolkit that has enabled Generate to build a market very quickly for its high-end business intelligence services. G2's integration of watch lists for both companies and people combined with real-time triggers will give Dow Jones a real-time business intelligence service far more powerful than what is currently in their quiver - with Factiva content helping to add value rapidly to the application.
The third springboard into making virtual aggregation a reality for Dow Jones is Generate's gClick tool, which enables content on people and companies served up from Generate's database to appear in a pop-up window or other Web display with a click of a browser-embedded icon or a Web page link. An entire page or a highlighted section of content can be analyzed by gClick to determine which companies and people are present and a customized dossier is prepared and displayed automatically. While the media applications of this tool have proven to be useful for some of Generate's clients, expect this to be particularly useful in enterprises where it's easier to manage features like this on a standardized basis. With many enterprise Web portals and search engines failing because they don't provide the right content in the right context this capability can help to build a foundation for many virtual aggregation services within the enterprise.
Put these three capabilities together and you have a huge leap forward in Dow Jones' ability to add value through business intelligence services beyond its traditional base of users. While they had been making some new inroads with their Factiva SalesWorks tools into the line managers who need more value from business information the data sets that Factiva alone could provide were not particularly better than any other set - with Web content left to the side in raw form. With its Generate acquisition Dow Jones has set the stage for a new era of growth in business information services based on the real-time, all-the-time world of Web content combined with sophisticated analysis that can transform this information into highly actionable business insights quickly and effectively. My congratulations to all involved: business information just got a lot more fun again.
UPDATE: A couple of extra thoughts that have been rattling around in my head today. The gClick feature will be a very nice proprietary advantage for the WSJ.com site in time, although it's likely that they'll still market the feature to non-competitive media outlets. Also, if you think of how the G2 platform has done well in financial markets to date it makes a wonderful complement to other DJ products in this sector - providing a new real-time oriented service that need not mess with stock exchange market data to make an impact on the markets. Neat.
Agricultural market information providers have been key innovators for many years in trying to bring buyers and sellers together into highly efficient global markets for agricultural products. But while many information vendors have tried to service these markets well with quotes, news, analysis and weather forecasting oftentimes the upside for these traditionally expensive services have not been big moneymakers in the lean-and-mean farm belts of the U.S. and Canada. At the same time online financial information services such as Yahoo! Finance and other major portals do a great job at covering major stock markets but leave agricultural futures in the lurch for the most part.
I find it interesting, then, that Interactive Data Corporation has teamed with agribusiness giant Cargill to announce a new portal providing free financial futures markets information on the Web. Aimed primarily towards people in agricultural markets who sell commodities to Cargill, The portal is on one level a fairly straightforward presentation of quotes in day and electronic markets for major grains, livestock and energy products along with market news, weather forecasts and market commentary from Cargill market experts. A nice little twist is that the content can be tailored by postal code to enable someone to get a sense of the market conditions for facilities where they can actuall sell their commodities to Cargill (nope, no grain elevators near Westport, CT).
But the other aspect of the portal is that it is captive, purely a Cargill platform that's being used to disseminate basic market information wrapped in marketing messages both obvious and subtle. Why mess with other marketing messages when people an turn to you for data and see nothing but your brand every day? The point is also underscored a little more subtly with the provision of market commentary from Cargill: it's professionally done and insightful, to be sure, but it's Cargill's take on the markets without having to wait for the media to show up and ask for their opinion. This is a great way for people to get rich data from IDC, a trusted source of market information, while enabling Cargill to build relationships with suppliers and build brand value. IDC benefits not only by getting its content into yet another online portal, to be sure, but also increases their experience in using corporate marketing dollars to sponsor their information.
While good news for IDC and Cargill it's yet another example of how B2B marketers are able to create their own relationships with markets through content without having to rely on traditional B2B media outlets. That's not going to stop farmers from pickup up other sources of agricultural news necessarily but it's a good example of how more and more marketing dollars that used to support those publications are paying for more captive audiences who can engage their brands inside their everyday workflow. It's also yet another example of how business information services can partner with corporations with marketing goals in ways previously reserved for trade publishers. B2B media producers need to think more like IDC and consider how they move more aggressively to help marketers build their brands wherever they want them built with their publishing expertise.
The rumbles of Hoover's initiative with enterprise social networking tools provider Visible Path began more than a year ago, but the partnership did not roll out its final production version of Hoover's Connect that uses Visible Path technology until last week - an announcement that also included the news that Hoover's was acquiring Visible Path. The reaction to this deal and product rollout has been somewhat mixed from content industry professionals, some clucking about customers wanting more security built into the product that resulted in slow testing and others doubting that enterprises will adopt an enterprise-based tool for navigating relationship networks that relies on email as its primary content source.
While there may be more than a grain of truth in these criticisms, it appears that Hoover's has taken an important step towards shifting its position with major enterprises from one of a supplier of a business information database aimed primarily at small to medium-sized businesses to one which offers a "hook" into enterprise operations that can help organizations to use Hoover's to leverage their own business information more effectively. Hoover's Connect enables individuals or enterprises to link to contacts identified in Hoover's content to contacts found in personal and enterprise content sources such as email and calendaring services that may lead to a stronger relationship with sales and business development prospects. Controls in Hoover's Connect enable individuals to control just how much information about their trusted business contacts that they share with colleagues, which may limit the quality of information available to them. But this flexibility enables people to give to the system as much as they feel comfortable doing - and to realize over time that in a give-to-get exchange of information with colleagues sometimes giving is a needed behavior.
All well and good, but will Visible Path help the perceived value of core Hoover's content? Inevitably the answer has to be yes, but with some important caveats. Visible Path tools in Hoovers Connect enable people to move quickly from business profile information in Hoover's content to navigating their personal and enterprise relationship "degrees of separation." This enhances the core value of using Hoover's content as a point from which to initiate the researching of potential business contacts through trustworthy information. You can also connect your own networks of contacts to other networks on an opt-in basis, enabling you to collaborate on specific business opportunities with other organizations or individuals in an environment that enables you to expose just the right amount of contact information to partners. That's a smart way to manage this content that parallels how people expose business contact information in the real world.
But as much as this is useful in and of itself, it would be more useful if the Hoover's content could be integrated into enterprise applications more effectively via Visible Path capabilities. As it is, the corporate profiles found in Hoover's database service seem to benefit only indirectly from this integration, and vice versa: there's not a sense that either desperately needs the other to be complete. One would hope that metadata from both services would benefit each other more directly, for example. But this may change over time as the capabilities of Hoovers connect open up more integration opportunities for Hoover's in larger institutions. For smaller businesses and organizations this "good enough" integration of business information with networked contacts may be sufficient for many to continue to leverage Hoover's core databases while enhancing the usefulness of their internal business contacts data.
Hoover's is moving to rebuild momentum as both an enterprise-oriented brand and an online brand that can both fend off newer competition for the attention of business audiences and to take on some of the more established brands in larger enterprises. This is no small feat to pull off, given the rapid rise of services like Generate, Zoominfo and other services that mine Web content and other sources to provide services that can pick away at Hoover's market share even as they try to pick away at Factiva, OneSource and other larger business information brands. Sometimes being the middle brand in a rapidly changing market is not much fun.
With its Visible Path acquisition Hoover's may be signaling a period in which they choose to add muscle to their capabilities that can push out into areas behind the corporate firewalls where other business information providers have feared to tread heavily thus far. It may take several more go-arounds of content development and major enterprise adoption for this move to pay off fully, but for now it's a very positive step for Hoover's to take towards being a trustworthy business information brand in an era in which individuals and institutions are calling the shots on what really constitutes quality content.
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.
paidContent.org is clucking a bit at the USD 55 million price tag for Dun & Bradstreet's recent acquisition of AllBusiness.com, noting that it's well off the mark of deals from just a few months ago for business media properties. There's certainly a lot of bloom off the rose for online plays trying to find traditional media partners, with the whistling-past-the-graveyard optimism of M&A specialists of this spring giving away to a more sober view of where advertising revenues are headed in the short term. But I think that this negativity tends to bypass the fact that Dun & Bradstreet has found a media outlet that complements its other holdings very well - and promises to help transform them sooner rather than later.
The key issue that D&B needs to address is the declining media audience for its Hoover's business information product, a platform that single-handedly defined the Web business information market a decade ago but which has lost much of its media mojo as it focused on building a stronger presence in enterprise subscription sales. Hoover's online strategy helped it to get a strong base of small and medium sized businesses that it continues to mine. But with an increasing range of online business services gaining audience attention, including business media companies seeking to increase audience engagement through business information services, getting the attention of SMBs is a tougher game.
AllBusiness.com is a good match for helping D&B to address many of these problems. It's a nuts-and-bolts "how to" portal that is designed especially to appeal to the SMB crowd needing practical advice and input on the key challenges facing business professionals. AllBusiness.com also has a core of blog content from leading business experts that helps to give the portal a conversational tone. That's in line with research from Shore and other outlets which shows that business professionals are likely to respond to advice from peers as a key source of business information. Combining this content with Hoover's core business information and analysis tools is likely to increase the engagement of SMB professionals who want both easy-to-use business information and peer advice to solve business problems - engagement which in turn should lead to more successful marketing of their subscription products.
The real question, though, is whether this combination will giveDun & Bradstreet enough online engagement to counter increasingly strong business information media competitors. With Zoominfo growing as a media presence far more rapidly than either Hoover's or AllBusiness.com and traditional business media outlets like Forbes improving its audience share is it enough to marry high quality business information with high quality media content? Perhaps not, but the marriage is nevertheless essential for Dun and Bradstreet to build strong long-term engagement with SMB markets. But the Zoominfo model reminds us that business professionals have come to trust the Web as a key source of business content and look strongly towards companies that can help them to organize unstructured sources of information as data in more useful formats.
I think that we can expect to see many deals that parallel the D&B/AllBusiness paradigm in 2008 but I think that we'll also be on the lookout for transformative plays like Zoominfo that challenge traditional business information suppliers to make sense of the Web as a business information resource. Marrying business information and business media is a hot ticket these days, but make sure that you're looking at its hotness through the perspective of audiences who are more likely to embrace Web-based sources of content as a source of business insight along with traditional information and media content.
Was it any small surprise that Gordon Crovitz, President of Dow Jones Consumer Media and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, would be leaving along with Zannino?
Hardly.
With a changing of the guard at the top of News Corp expected and Murdoch itchy to start transforming his new property to compete with other quickly moving global news outlets it only makes sense for Richard and Gordon to move on ASAP. This is of course no reflection on their ability to guide one of the world's premium business content brands into a highly profitable stance in the business media marketplace. This duo has to be credited with managing to maintain both an institution and a highly profitable and growing audience through some of the most challenging times in publishing history. But the new boss in town rivals New York Yankees baseball "Boss" George Steinbrenner for his fixation on goals and results. Lip service to tradition, yes, but hitting your mark comes first.
The goal: build the most sophisticated and recognized global brand of business news that can be wrapped around leading executives' decision-making processes in whatever context matters most to them and to monetize it in whatever way hits the bottom line best. Pride in subscription online portals and "the value of real journalism" be damned, it's the first to crack this converging marketplace that wins the gold. And Murdoch is not alone. With Reuters teaming up with The New York Times' International Herald Tribune to deliver business news in IHT's global daily news outlet and Bloomberg, LP choosing a media investments specialist for its top spot the marketplace for business media and information is shaping up to be increasingly complex. Add on The New York Times' stellar traffic growth since dropping its subscription firewall and it's anyone's game to build a new dominant position in business news and information services.
The odd leg out in this discussion so far, though, is Dow Jones Enterprise Media, AKA Factiva plus the remnants of Dow Jones' enterprise feeds business. The opportunity is for News Corp to enable a more aggressive melding of enterprise and media services as the differences between today's business media outlets and today's enterprise portals begin to narrow. No word yet as to whether Clare Hart is expected to move on, but with relatively little expertise within News Corp in managing subscription business information database services she may wind up being a well-positioned player - that is, if some of the industry's other merging interests don't tantalize her more than playing NewsCorp Survivor. With an established global base of clients Factiva is likely to become an important fulcrum as NewsCorp tries to leverage its way further into global business information circles.
There's a lot yet to unfold in this fascinating merger, but already we can see that promises of journalistic integrity in Murdoch's world view are not synonymous with the status quo for journalists in any sense of the word. In may ways this may turn out to be a great plus, as Dow Jones journalists get to play out their careers in an increasingly sophisticated global marketplace. In the meantime it's time for U.S. business journalists of all stripes to recognize that as much as they have been biting the hand that's fed them pretty well all these recent years this hand has been mightily slow in creating better long-term career options for them. Certainly not everyone will be happy with these impending changes at Dow Jones and some "old guard" insight is surely going to be lost along with this increased global nimbleness but there's no time to waste if NewsCorp is to make the most of the Dow Jones family of content brands. In this landscape the purity of outdated methods can be no match for the purity of mastering new ones.
I heard from a colleague yesterday who mentioned that TrueAdvantage, one of the early leaders in advanced sales lead generation tools, is in the process of being dissolved. No callback yet from TrueAdvantage or one of its key investors, but it sounds as if this is probably one that's for real. If so then it's not good news for the dozens of content and technology companies that have been focused on providing value-add tools for sales and marketing automation. TrueAdvantage's focus seemed to be spot-on: analysis of a wide variety of published and enterprise content sources to identify companies that are highly likely prospects for very specific types of products and services. With nearly seven years of refinement you'd think that this would be a strong winning formula for a subscription service.
But there are two factors that may have been putting extra pressure on TrueAdvantage: rapidly evolving content technologies and an increasingly crowded marketplace for value-add sales and marketing tools. Tools such as Generate are providing a higher level of semantic analysis of content to not only filter general characteristics of companies and products but as well specific analysis of content to identify where a company is in the overall acquisition process. At the same time there is a widening array of major business information vendors that are building far more sophisticated filtering tools themselves: what was a sophisticated, advanced tool for business information a few years ago is becoming an expected filtering feature for standard business information databases.
Which brings us back to an all-too-familiar theme for many content technology companies: if what your company is building is a feature in search of a marketplace you're in a deadly race against the clock to turn that feature into a real product. Many patient private investors hope that through careful cultivation they can build their sales base to the point where a feature can survive on its own as a product but without raising the fundamental question of whether there is a broad enough business problem being solved to justify this optimism. Content technology companies need to think more like electronic publishers from the start and to look beyond their software expertise to the business problems that need to be solved first and foremost. At the same time, though, publishers need to foster the entrepreneurial spirit of new content technology companies and learn how to experiment with new capabilities that might indicate an opportunity for new products and services.
But even with all of the right buttons being pushed we may be reaching a saturation point for value-add sales and marketing tools. Return-on-investment arguments premised on sales efficiency don't always add up collectively: that is, if you have ten solutions that promise a 25 percent improvement in sales efficiency, purchasing all ten of them is not likely to improve your sales efficiency 250 percent! Content technology companies need to focus more on 10x-scale solutions that will change dramatically to make any sort of major impact in a market for sales productivity tools that's facing a softening economy. Good solutions will continue to do well in this environment, but investors should be prepared to challenge the speed with which deals can be closed and expect pilot programs to play out longer as customers try to milk advanced technologies for as long as they can on the cheap before considering full-blown commitments.
Given that LinkedIn's professional social network content has been available through SalesForce.com's AppExchange service for nearly six months is it really a big deal that there's now a Facebook interface as well? As seen in Programmable Web's flash demo it's a fairly rudimentary integration: if you add a contact you can select their Facebook profile for inclusion in your SFDC desktop and use many of Facebook's functions and applications to communicate with people in their social networks. That's hardly rocket science but it's an excellent indication of the strengths that can be gained from using a social networking content service as a drop-in module in a software-as-a-service desktop environment.
Most importantly, though, it's an indication of how quickly two content services can benefit from one another's mutual presence in SaaS very rapidly with virtually no integration requirements. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with social networking SalesForce.com enables its clients to tap into the networks that matter most to their sales efforts. With Facebook's more multi-dimensional view of people's personal and professional lives it's possible that sales professionals will get a different kind of introduction than one might get from a LinkedIn referral. LinkedIn provides excellent professionally-oriented networking tools but there's something about telling someone, "Hey, I saw your profile on Facebook, I see that you're into sailing" that's a little more personal and conversational. Moreover it's a window through Facebook's programming interface into functionality that they have on their own platform that in essence gives one embedded applications within an application that's embedded in a SaaS platform. That's powerful content integration that can work to extend the value of both the hosting platform and the embedded platform as valuable contexts for content very rapidly.
While Facebook is having its ups and downs in terms of traffic, personal content exposure issues and integration complaints the growth of its use in professional circles over the past several months has been extraordinary. Although it's mostly a few brave people that venture beyond the basics of Facebooking, professionals are becoming much more used to the idea that their professional lives count increasingly on their ability to project their value and depth as a multi-dimensional person, rather than just a set of skills that can be marketed as useful but disposable labor. The old adage "it's not what you know but who you know" is taking on a new twist as online networking creates a new hook into effective business relationships.
At the same time most business information companies are standing still in comparison to companies like Salesforce.com and Facebook when it comes to encouraging on-the-fly content integration with their products. With a strong focus on traditional integration of content into structured databases the opportunity to provide a looser level of integration into a workflow-centric platform. There are strong opportunities for such integration in major market verticals, so expect this to happen over time. But with Salesforce.com pushing its Force.com initiative to provide "platforms as a service" for various corporate functions the time to move on such initiatives is now, not later. We may not be seeing Facebook as a networking tool on Bloombergs any time soon but there are plenty of markets where such rapid content integrations will benefit companies trying to put content in the most valuable context possible.
The investment research marketplace is one of the most intensively cultivated business information sectors, with major investment banks, buy-side fund managers, ratings companies, publishers, media companies and independent research firms all putting their finger in the pie to try to pull out the plum of valued insights and recommendations. With such a daunting field of players you have to give credit to Wikinvest for even thinking about trying something new.
Wikinvest enables contributors to build up profiles of companies similar to what one gets in a typical stock profile report, with a neutral "just the facts" default tab for each company complemented by tabs that give indications as to what the bullish and bearish sentiments are on the investment. While these reports leverage mostly bog-standard MediaWiki technology they are attractive and readable for most purposes. They also have a nifty graphing package similar to that used in Google Finance that contributors can use to create annotations that correlate market movement to events affecting the company's stock.
Wikinvest company reports are complemented by topical concept reports, which lay out the details of major trends and investment methodologies. Like company reports each concept report also includes an area in which "bulls" and "bears" can add their own take on the impact of sub-prime loans on markets. There are also nice features such as the ability to add user-specific bookmarks on each page's sidebar and the ability to type in partial company names or concepts instead of ticker codes into their type-ahead search box to get some meaningful content. Top contributors to Wikinvest get titles akin to Wall Street professional titles - "Senior Director" is the label for the top grade of Wikinvest contributors.
For a just-out-of-the-box tool Wikinvest is already populated with a fair amount of content - 100,000 contributions are claimed - but it's content coming mostly from young enthusiasts rather than from seasoned investment analysts. Don't let the "Senior Director" label fool you - look at the bios of these leading contributors and you'll find many folks who have not yet made it out of school. That said, when one thinks of all of the off-shore operations cranking out stock reports these days, this is perhaps not the worst thing in a world of 80/20-rule online content. The concepts reports - basically a topical financial encyclopedia - have potential and are generally pretty well-written but it needs far more reports, as well as support for basic industry terms such as "uptick rule" found in sites such as Investopedia or Wikipedia.
This is a very day-one effort at an investment-oriented Wiki, and for day one it seems to have done a lot of the right things. The 100,000 articles is about the scale of the original Wikipedia, so there's reason to think that it will attract quality contributions over time that will flesh out content in this market sector. The use of a neutral/bull/bear model to gather content is also useful, helping to channel opinions to places where they're useful and hopefully helping to avoid opinion turning into facts too often. It's a model for Wiki content collection that others should consider to address topics that draw a lot of segmented opinions. The ability to define new concept articles on the fly also allows Wikinvest to be a fresh and topical source of content that will draw people on a regular basis, giving the potential for building audience loyalty as a must-stop bookmark.
Will Wikinvest really fly? I think the real question is rather how does any sector-specific Wiki project manage to build authoritative content that will attract an audience and quality contributions. From this perspective I think that Wikinvest is a pretty good roadmap into how Wiki technology can be used to build communities of interest around professional-grade topics that can become a strong media source over time. I expect that Wikinvest will have relatively slow and steady growth over the next few months and then either be snatched up by a major portal (is the similarity to Google Finance charting a hint as to their exit strategy?) or outclassed by a startup with deeper pockets and more of an ability to attract higher-grade contributors. But then again, with a little more cash to accelerate content growth, Wikinvest could wind up being that better-financed startup themselves - and find themselves in a very interesting spot in the online content world.
One of the key product introductions that raised some dust at this year's Infocommerce conference was Generate's new gClick service, which was also introduced simultaneously at the DEMO07 conference by Generate CEO Tom Aley. gClick on one level is a prety simple content contextualization tool: click on a gClick link embedded in a page or Browser bar and Generate's gClick service will extract events, people and company names from a displayed page and return in a popup page content from Generate's business information database that relates to those extracted entities. gClick content includes not only straight profiles but also hooks into Generate's opt-in relationship mapping service to accelerate introductions to key figures.
Tom indicated that Generate is going to launch an enterprise version of the tool next week, but he already had his media-flavor pitch down pretty pat: generate high-value page inventory on demand, brand the link tool privately or co-brand it - a good amount of curb appeal to those with business-oriented content, including Generate's announced gClick partners Hearst's magazines and newspapers, Bizjournals, Media News Group and Philly.com.
The option to do a page-embedded include link to gClick similar to Sphere or Stumbleupon as well as the ability to use a browser toolbar is a smart move, enabling partners to move on a relationship without having to figure out screen real estate issues. This is one of the downside of widgets for many publishers: there's only so much screen real estate, all of it precious, and since most embeddable content can't be analyzed by search engines it's not content that will help crawlers to sense the added depth in a page. So the lighter the footprint, the easier it is to move quickly, as evidenced by Sphere's rapid propagation. None of this is rocket science, but it's science that's finally beginning to move markets for contextual content at an astounding pace.
Just as Google has snatched up valuable context for content via its search results, mapping tools and mashing technologies Generate is making a first-mover claim for on-demand contextual business information that may help it to move rapidly past traditional aggregators used to building context around business information using licensed content in their own databases. Instead of relying on taxonomies or other semantic tools the gClick approach enables any page of content to provide the semantics necessary to contextualize business information on demand. It's a clever move, one that can highlight the strengths of Generate's business information wherever audiences are focusing automatically.
This "searchless search" capability with near-zero setup allows virtual aggregation of all kinds of content - and therefore opportunities for all kinds of database providers to consider how to partner with media and enterprise companies to gain a foothold for high-value content in places where traditional licensing deals can no longer make swift headway. The proof of this play will be in the quality of the content as much as the context, but for now consider the dealmaking of Generate combined with a clever use of its text mining capabilities a nifty little coup that's well-timed for a publishing market in search of more value in publishing with as little direct investment as possible.
ECNext has been developing its Manta business information site for a few years now, a conglomeration of ad-supported and pay-per-view premium content that's designed for both people not normally subscribing to business information databases and people who you'd think by all rights would be. The announcement of a major upgrade to Manta doesn't necessarily change that basic marketing profile, but it sure broadens its appeal to this profile significantly.
Manta gives you access not only to a smidgen of free company profile information but as well a well-designed tabbed interface with access to mostly premium content covering detailed corporate profiles and reports from D&B and Hoover's, executive contacts from SGA, by-the-article stories from major trade magazines and journals, credit reports from D&B and Moody's, market sector reports and press releases. Except for the press releases and basic company profiles this is strictly a pay-as-you go menu, with the least expensive items - trade magazine articles - typically going for $19.95.
$19.95 for a magazine article? Well, if you're not willing to pop for a Factiva or Nexis subscription and you want to toss it in with reports ranging $150 and up, think of that magazine article as the candy next to the checkout stand. Can't hurt, might help - and certainly helps ECNext's revenues. This is merchandizing for business information, something that a standalone a la carte news service such as LexisNexis' cannot offer by trying to eke out news articles for $3 a shot. Even if LexisNexis offers a far broader range of articles, sometimes convenient shopping and understanding the value of the opportunity to the shopper is everything.
To call the new Manta a mashup would be a stretch, but like many of today's mashups Manta builds in some interactivity for its users to add value via contributions to corporate profiles. Usually this will turn out to be the companies themselves trying to keep their online information fresh and accurate but it's more than any other business information provider is doing for corporate profiles. Great for small companies that want to get more visibility, which also happens to be the type of company that many Manta users are seeking out.
Manta has been building up traffic steadily over the past couple of years to the point that it's become a solid online presence with impressive audiences compared to other online business information sources. Of course the familiar subscription brands make major revenues off of highly sophisticated enterprise services and deep databases of licensed content, so it's hardly an apples-to-apples comparison. But think of this widened Manta premium supermart as an interesting middle level brand between I'll-take-what-I-get Google search results or the relatively limited number of companies covered by a Yahoo! Finance on the low end and we-do-everything-perfectly-for everyone brands on the higher end of the market.
Manta's also a middle ground for premium business information providers not willing or able to concoct an online offering that appeals to situational premium buyers with very specific focuses who want more than just a report shopping cart. With a comprehensive range of information categories and filtering tools for professionals focusing on sales and marketing, strategic planning and business development Manta makes is easy for someone with high-value business goals to find that they're looking for.
The depth of information and features in Manta may not be everything that subscription database services offer but it's enough to build a brand that promises to appeal to independent content searchers with an expense account - and that may be enough in time to expand the brand with these high-end buyers. In the meantime Manta gives business information buyers a good starting point for getting that extra little boost in decision-making that the open Web cannot offer.
IT Week offers an article by Tim Buckley Owen of Information World Review that is a bit of a hatchet job on LexisNexis, Thomson and other business information providers. Owen quotes anonymous sources who paint a picture of subscription database services providers defending pricey offerings against users more adept at finding their own sources online. The criticisms are not so different from what we at Shore have heard in our private research but it is interesting to see some of these in print for the world at large to consider.
Some of the key quotes include:
“Although the sector boasts a lot about listening to customers, this is largely not so,” says one independent business information consultant. “Customer consultation is often just going through the motions because it’s expected or it looks good.”
"Even the shortfalls in the content would not be so unpalatable if we were informed about them in advance, understood the rationale or had clearer information on what the content includes," a librarian at a leading law firm adds.
LexisNexis adds that it does face competitive pressures: "Content that was previously impossible to access without a premium subscription is now often available for free on the web. New open solutions have been developed and consumer expectations have risen dramatically."
While this is hardly stuff that should shock the typical business information company executive it's indicative of the frankness that many of their customers are expressing to them - and of their own recognition that the business information industry is changing rapidly. Where a few years ago some usability enhancements on a search interface and a few new subscription sources could be touted as major enhancements by subscription database providers today these same improvements ring rather hollow in the ears of enterprise customers learning how to leverage Web technologies to get smarter faster than ever before. It's not even a matter of the bloom being off the rose: the rose of business information services is in danger of being uprooted altogether by enterprises in search of competitive advantages.
This is not all bad news for business information providers. In many instances companies like LexisNexis and Thomson are already all over this trend and moving aggressively into software services that can help to enable productivity and revenue generation for their clients. But the greater truth revealed by this rantish article and our own research is that the efficiencies of relational databases are being overcome quickly by the dominance of I.T. cultures in business information companies built around inflexible relational database technologies and the equally inflexible product design and support that results from these technologies. The result is cultures ill adapted to shed antiquated product concepts and to work more flexibly in Web-centric environment to deliver the products that users really want to use in ways that they want to use them.
You can do all the user interviews, surveys and focus groups that you want but if you're applying those insights to an outdated platform your ability to leverage those insights is not going to pay back the dividends that they should. Business information providers will continue to leverage existing relational databases profitably for some time to come, but at some point in the not too distant future they're likely to face the same crises faced by information giants such as Reuters as they realized that their allegiance to profitable but outdated platforms meant costly catch-ups in both product design and corporate culture in order to survive. It's time for business information companies to embrace user-driven content aggregation and generation technologies and to start enabling productivity benefits that may have little to do with how existing platforms are configured. There are many interesting trends in business information that hold out promise that this is going to happen, but timing will be everything.
Mercifully the carnival that has been the negotiations for News Corporation's acquisition of Dow Jones appears to have pulled out of town, with factions of the Bancroft family finally wrestled into line with the financial and managerial realities of the deal. One shudders to think as to whether any right-thinking corporation would have considered an acquisition of Dow Jones any time soon after these machinations, so from at least that perspective the shareholders of Dow Jones should consider themselves very lucky indeed. But now that the glow of the spotlight is beginning to die down from this fracas, what's really going to happen with Murdoch's new acquisition?
As we said more than two months ago the benefits of having a global media company as a parent that has strengths in markets where Dow Jones needs to become stronger are the key to the real value in this deal. Murdoch's desire to have a major U.S. gem like Dow Jones in his crown will be overshadowed ultimately by his use of Dow Jones as an international brand that will allow him to become a more dominant player in influencing world markets. This will be especially important in U.K. Asian and Australian markets, where the online expertise and editorial strengths of Dow Jones can be used to build an English language global business media brand more able to dominate regional brands and Pearson's struggling Financial Times. But it's also likely that the Dow Jones brand will be able to find footholds in other markets over times with Murdoch's leverage.
The missing piece from this empire is a strong presence in real-time trading markets. But given the cutthroat nature of those technology-driven markets that are not easily adapted to the managerial strengths of the Dow Jones organization this may be an omission worth skipping for the time being. As financial markets split into highly automated trading venues and opportunities driven by high-end market analysis tools the opportunity for Dow Jones to make better use of its strengths is not likely to solidify for some time in the wake of Thomson's pending deal for Reuters. A conjectural bid for Bloomberg is not really even worth considering at this point, though in two years' time it might be a reasonable play for NewsCorp if Murdoch's focus on succession takes his portfolio into more diversified channels.
While there is doubtless a fair amount of sadness in some hearts at Dow Jones as a proudly American brand passes to offshore ownership it's also an opportunity to reflect on the need for American business media in general to become more adept at managing international footprints. A weak dollar makes this a difficult time to buy in to those markets, so the wave of international acquisitions of U.S. targets this year at favorable exchange rates makes it that much harder for U.S. B2B media companies to make progress in overseas markets. But times will change - if B2B media companies take on a Murdoch-like view of the world that goes beyond the local golf courses and into more international circles of power. In the meantime congratulations to everyone involved in the Dow Jones deal - I hope that you get a few days off to forget about it all.
The announcement of Factiva's deployment of improved integration capabilities via browser-based Web applications is being heralded as a major leveraging of Web 2.0 technologies to improve Factiva content delivery. The new tools allow Factiva SalesWorks content to be integrated into enterprise portal applications via user-embeddable widgets into Web 2.0 platforms using technologies that eliminate having to deal with feeds into back-end server applications. This is an important step forward into allowing both enterprise users and development teams to use SalesWorks content where it matters most to them, without having to rely on expensive and time-consuming custom integration efforts. SalesWorks offers a good range of content, but as enterprises turn to a wide range of CRM applications, Wikis and other platforms as their "go-to" business information platforms services such as Factiva have to move quickly and effectively to make their content a part of those user-centric environments.
While these new integration capabilities are hardly revolutionary by overall industry standards they do represent an important step forward by a major enterprise content aggregator to move further away from its own platform to offer customers the ability to put their content where they will find it to be most useful. Much of the focus on enterprise workflow integration by aggregators has been on creating comprehensive tools to solve specific information retrieval problems. By moving to browser-based content embedding technologies aggregators can move more quickly to bring their content to users via the applications that matter in their workflows already on a day-to-day basis.
This is a sword that cuts both ways, of course: in ceding the complete workflow to other applications integrators trade off more complete integration for more quick market penetration. As penetration is the key to both retaining subscription bases and expanding opportunities for add-on marketing efforts it pays to go the embeddable route - a picture that will become more clear to more aggregators in time. Aggregation is no longer such a rarefied game - both Factiva and other content aggregators will face increasing competition from technology-oriented companies that know how to provide value-add functionality on top of many different types of business information content sets. It's a race of sorts to see how providers of licensed content sets can switch to a strategy that will get embedded in desktops securely before these other providers gain the upper hand. In the meantime Factiva has made a strong move to claim their place in the new widget-oriented enterprise desktop as quickly as possible.
The announced USD 630 million deal for Incisive Media to acquire ALM is unquestionably the strongest acquisition move in the B2B media space in a year of largely aimless portfolio shuffling. Incisive is biting off a huge piece in the process of doing so - they have about USD 280 million in annual revenues - but this is far from your typical "let's balance the portfolio and combine content management systems" deal. In acquiring ALM Incisive walks away with one of the most effectively integrated range of legal publications for an industry vertical that has strong print revenues but also a remarkably strong and progressive online presence.
In addition to ALM's wide range of traditional ad-supported editorial content they have been very active in integrating leading weblogs into their ad network and have gone way deep into their own vertical user-generated content via VerdictSearch, a portal that allows legal professionals to input details on cases and settlements into a database that can be searched or mined by ALM's editorial staff for hot legal stories. Toss on a strong relationship with Thomson West for enterprise integration and a strong events presence and you get a profile that most business information companies would have to work very hard to top.
And that's before you get to the management team. Bill Pollak has assembled a top-notch staff at ALM to help it transition very profitably into the electronic age, holding out some promise that in the merger of these two companies it will be more than your typical "puff and slough" weed-out of mergee managers. Hopefully Incisive keeps much of ALM's team in place to help them assemble more effectively integrated marketing in vertical segments. Incisive's portfolio includes a wide range of titles largely aimed at financial markets that do very well online in many instances, but they have not leveraged new models of engagement for their audiences as effectively as ALM in many instances while some strong Incisive titles seem to be shoehorned in together rather oddly (do ClickZ and Search Engine Watch really belong in the same group as Inside Market Data?).
Conquering both legal and financial markets in one portfolio is a very shrewd move, with the deal flow in these two segments oftentimes creating very complementary editorial and data flows. While the size of this deal may tie up Incisive's cash for a while it would be nice to think about how some further database acquisitions or alliances might help to create some very interesting synergies for dealmaking business information. But in the meantime there's also the complementary presence of Incisive's UK-oriented legal publications and other globally-oriented publications that will be strengthened by ALM's largely US-oriented marketing.
While doubtless there will be some gnashing of the gears as new interests are merged and some cleaning out of questionable rabbit warrens this is a powerful move that draws into focus the increasingly merging worlds of legal and financial interests that will benefit from the combined coverage offered in these two teams. Hopefully this merger benefits the ALM team as much as it appears that it will benefit Incisive. Time will tell.
It was a great SIFMA show in many ways, but also one which took me back to its roots. I remember when it was in much smaller quarters at New York's Sheraton Hotel, instead of its current footprint across three floors of the New York Hilton. Back in those days content technology advances offered relatively few trading advantages to individual organizations on the desktop - it was more a matter of making sure that you had the right specialized equipment in the back rooms feeding the trading floor. Years later we seem to be back where we started. The drive to reduce the cost of trading transactions in the face of disappearing trading profits in public markets has made the SIFMA show a gathering with relatively few high-profile desktop trading solutions being touted to an ever-decreasing population of decision-makers purchasing them. Traffic was reasonable but clearly down from earlier years. It's a flat world out there in finance - except in niches such as hedge funds where information innovation still drives profitable trading strategies.
There were a few key themes that I saw taking shape at this year's show:
Everything old is new again. I enjoyed a few minutes chatting with Jeffery Wells, now VP of Product Management at Exegy, a provider of infrastructure for ultra-low latency market data feed processing. For several years the solution touted by Wall Street firms was to shove huge banks of standardized blade servers at trade tickers to be able to keep up with information surges. But with the cost of energy increasing rapidly greater single-platform efficiencies are beginning to look more attractive. Shades of the "minicomputer" revolution of the 1970s and 1980s - custom computing platforms are coming back, thanks to new economics in trading.
ASP financial content services are becoming a reality. While financial trading partners have long used private networks to communicate with one another the push for cost controls is leading to some interesting developments in networked services. Collabnet is a service that enables customers that include investment banks to collaborate on software development with outsourcing partners in Asia and elsewhere. What's interesting is that Collabnet provides this as an ASP-based service instead of installing it in-house on private servers and networks. Nothing new in the greater world of business but remarkable when you consider how reluctant investment banks have been to open their operations up to ASP services before. Also demoing at the show was Salesforce.com, an ASP-based sales force automation tool with financial modules integrated via its AppExchange service. Is Wall Street ready for a wider range of ASP-based content services? The push for economic operations seems to be pushing secure ASP content solutions to the forefront. Don't rule them out from your own product plans, but be ready to have your answers in hand for how you manage security.
Rapid development of executable trading strategies is powering low-latency data feeds. Automated trading based on high-speed data feeds has been around for years, but these days "real time" feeds need to have sub-millisecond delays for trading strategies to be effective. But equally important is the ability to tune trading strategies as rapidly as possible to take advantage of the speed of these feeds. Vendors such as Progress Software were demonstrating capabilities that allow new trading strategies for low-latency feeds to be turned around in a few hours. As important as the speed of feeds can be the ability to translate your knowledge of market conditions into automated decision-making seems to be fueling many boutique solutions.
Mining the Web and other sources is helping banks to build their own custom content. One of the more exciting types of tools highlighted at the show were packages that made it easier to mine and aggregate content from both traditional and non-traditional sources in interesting ways. FirstRain was demonstrating highly personalized research services that enable its clients to get information from many major published sources and internal sources tailored to their exact needs. Connotate was demonstrating Web mining capabilities that enable investment banks and other institutions to quickly develop custom research and data from any number of online and proprietary sources. While getting high-quality subscription databases is still an important part of the research equation for finance tools such as Connotate and FirstRain are allowing institutions to define custom sources of content that are feeding decision-making processes with unique insights that may give financial institutions an advantage in the marketplace. With the ability to define structured content dynamically these types of services are accelerating the ability of institutions to gain insights from any potentially valuable content source.
What happened to the graphs? For years you could walk down the aisles of this exhibit hall and be overwhelmed by the number of charting packages made available by content and software vendors. While charts were certainly a part of the mix, the emphasis on automated execution via low-latency feeds has placed more of the analysis investment for real-time content into algorithmic trading packages. However, a retail-oriented analytics package from Blocks combined a drag-and-drop financial modeling package with a charting package to enable retail investors to develop sophisticated trading strategies and to trigger them off of charted real-time data events. A nifty combination that would have been the envy of many a trader not so many years ago and now available for you and me. Graphing is still an important analysis tool for financial content but it's far from the cutting edge for most financial services these days.
Lots and lots of small companies. While SIFMA has always had its fair share of up-and-coming companies in its mix the show was notably heavy with startups and small innovators this year. Certainly Reuters, Thomson, Sungard, IBM and others had significant footprints this year but there were many more small companies working their way into main-floor and mid-floor footprints that would have been relegated to upper-floor boonies in past years. While not necessarily a good sign for the short run I take this as a good sign for the years ahead. Hopefully we're witnessing a new wave of innovation for the financial content industry that will begin to drive new products and services away from traditional data delivery platforms and towards more innovative forms of collaboration and execution. This is an industry starved for really fresh ideas right now, but with so many fundamental infrastructure issues sussed out in recent years expect financial institutions to begin to invest anew in fresh looks at the world of financial content.
So yet another SIFMA show sails into history. Let's hope that next year's addition features a little more buzz and excitement in the hall generated by something other than Sopranos stars, slot cars and scantily clad young ladies.
While Nexis tinkers with the edges of its market footprint Dow Jones's Factiva unit is pushing forward with two key enhancements that are designed to change the scope of what business information users are likely to expect from their suppliers. Dow Jones' upgrades to its Synaptica taxonomy management services enable different taxonomies for different user groups - an essential tool for adapting business information into departmental functions - and enhanced semantic support for RDF, SKOS and OWL semantic standards that will enable Dow Jones clients to process and interpret a wider range of content types more effectively - including multimedia content. No small surprise, then, that the other announcement from Dow Jones is a deal with EveryZing (recently renamed from PodZinger) to integrate audio and video content from major suppliers such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, BBC Radio and other major suppliers. EveryZing's already heavily categorized video content includes news from around the world in several major languages, making it a natural for integration into the Factiva set of general news and research content, enhanced all the more by the increased semantic prowess of their semantic tools.
Video is certainly all the rage on the Web and gaining steam within the enterprise as network backbones and security infrastructures are tuned to deal with more pervasive video consumption. Dow Jones' aggressive positioning of its integration capabilities combined with timely multimedia content will position them well as a supplier of both content and integration tools as enterprises think more seriously about how to integrate business-ready video into their portals and collaborative tools. In a sense this gives Dow Jones additional leverage against the increasing penetration of services such as Google's enterprise search appliances that enable both enterprise content and content from the Web that will be backed by their "Universal Search" capability to make its way into corporate Webs.
But the "catch-up" nature of the EveryZing deal underscores the degree to which Google is developing business-ready content sets far broader than Dow Jones and other business information suppliers. Dow Jones, Nexis and others hope to continue to pull trumps on Google with more select licensed sources at their disposal tuned to very specific enterprise audiences. And with sales and support staffs that have been knee-deep in enterprise needs and solutions for years folks like Dow Jones have some important edges in being able to integrate content effectively into enterprise platforms. Yet one wonders how much longer search-oriented business information suppliers such as Dow Jones are going to be able to leverage their licensed content sets to stave off more direct competition from Web-oriented integration specialists such as Google. Is Dow Jones' Factiva unit a search and taxonomy company with licensed content or a subscription database service with some nifty integration tools? Neither answer may be sufficient as stronger competitors enter the stage with better generic answers to these questions and others with more sector-specific answers. But for now, kudos to Dow Jones for keeping Factiva fresh and relevant.
The native language of Hawaii has given us words like "aloha" that have slipped into general use as well as more other terms like "wiki" that have been appropriated for new uses. Add to that list of appropriations the Hawaiian word "mahalo," which means "Thank you" in everyday conversations and now refers also to Mahalo, the new user-driven search portal under development by Jason Calacanis. "Mahalo's goal is to hand-write the top 10,000 search terms," goes the boilerplate on its page templates, an objective that's being lead by ex-Anchors from Netscape and like-skilled guides. Visitors to Mahalo can suggest links for inclusion in the service. How does this all work? As an alpha-level product you have to give Jason some slack but in truth it's not something that you're going to figure out as a user in a few seconds. Thank goodness for the FAQ.
On one level Mahalo is quite simple: type in a search term, get either a page of information and links that's been largely edited by a Mahalo guide or something that's been generated automatically for terms that they haven't populated as of yet. Being day two there are lots more pages that are misses than hits, but a listing of the top 20 searches appears on each search results page to give Mahalo visitors a sense of who's looking at what. You can also enter questions in a natural language style, which will provide results that look a bit like an amateur's version of Answers.com (partnership, anyone?). An example of a topic page more fully populated by Mahalo guides is Apple, which lists a "Mahalo Top 7" links for the term, disambiguation (Did you mean: "Apple, the fruit? Apple, the Beatles' record label?"), financial information, products, news, blogs and fansites, information and reviews, upgrades and support, photos and videos, competitors, and "culture". Items that Mahalo guides really dig get a little icon. In theory users can make comments on Mahalo pages, but in my short tour I haven't seen any yet.
Well, this is certainly...innovative. Or utterly derivative, depending on your point of view. I know from personal experience that there is one huge brain between Jason's ears and it seems as if every idea he ever had or absorbed about the content industry exploded all at once from his noggin onto the pages of Mahalo. From one angle what we have here is About.com with user input: docents put together some light content that surrounds links. Okay,we know that works. Kind of. From another angle we have a dot-com era version of Hoovers, a light assemblage of business and product info to guide the initially curious. Interesting, but who is this aimed at? From yet another angle we have Wikipedia, a catch-all encyclopedia format that tries to catch a wide variety of facets about a given topic. Digg and other social bookmarking services enter into the picture with Mahalo Top 7 bookmarks, but there's not a strong sense of how useful the first seven results will be: social bookmarking services don't rank relevance all that well. And of course there's the analogy to Answers.com, one-stop answers to questions from the best sources available. Except we really have to trust someone called a "guide" as to his or her judgment on sources.
Finally, there's the question of when I will know when to go to Mahalo. Will it be when I have a question that's one of the top 10,000 search terms? Oooh, is what I want to find maybe number 15,000? I dunno. Try "most popular," Jason, people will be able to get their heads around that more easily. Do I go there to get the latest news? Hmm, they have news feeds from Fox and other partners but but why would I get them here rather than other places - and why aren't the guides lending a hand with filtering and updating the news? While Wikipedia may be in the hands of "those darn users" I have a fairly high level of confidence that information on almost any popular topic will be updated within minutes, if not seconds, of something happening in the real world across a huge array of topics. I also know that Google will insert hot news at the top of my search results and that user-generated sites will help me to find the really cool news pretty quickly. I don't know how true that's going to be of any well-intended editorial staff covering tens of thousands of topics every day - even with help from users. Will I go there for shopping? Probably not, services like eBay and Google will scrape together the information that I need more effectively. Will I go there for reference information? Maybe, but with such a generic approach to content organization I'd probably prefer to type in a term on Google and branch off to Wikipedia, Answers.com, Hoovers or other key sources that it finds so easily. Will I go there to browse their taxonomy? Probably not, I've gotten too used to getting information on any topic level with one phrase and a click.
So, when DO I go to Mahalo? That's something that Jason needs to work on a little more. There are a lot of very interesting individual features and there's definitely a need out there for something between algorithmic search engines and the chaos of social bookmarking, but I am wondering whether this is more about a product vision or more about what to do with all of those ex-Netscapers who were inspired by Jason. If it's more the latter then it's not clear that a fairly limited and relatively anonymous editorial staff is going to have the horsepower or the respect within a given topic arena to build relevance creds. It gives Jason the control over writers that he desires, but in specific topic domains it may take more editorial talent to pull this off than he can afford.
There are so many ideas forming at once in Mahalo that it's far too early to write it off as a mish-mosh of interesting concepts - especially since people are growing tired of the "gaming" of search results. Calacanis could put initial feedback to good use, form more useful partnerships and come up with a tool that really stands out for an increasingly sophisticated online audience. But at this point my bet's against it. With Google's "Universal Search" capabilities beginning to phase in and more pure user-generated content plays becoming more disciplined and deep it's not clear that the features in Mahalo will ever mature to the point where they'll gel into a useful product in comparison to more established search and reference plays. At the same time there's far too little a sense of online community in Mahalo to make people passionate about online content feel that this product is really "theirs" in any strong way. In between these approaches there's probably room for a product that combines the best of search, editorial skills and user input to create marketable context for popular topics. But for now I don't think that people will be saying "thank you" to Mahala for its attempts at filling that need.
On one level the news from WaPo and others that Salesforce.com is discussing an alliance with Google to integrate Google's office applications, messaging and other key components into their offerings has to be welcomed at business information providers' offices. Many business information services companies are already taking advantage of Salesforce.com's AppExchange service to integrate their content and functional capabilities into SF.com's increasingly popular sales and marketing platform, so SF.com's success will help to enhance their successes as well through on-demand content services sales. But this development must be absorbed along with the announcement of SF.com's launch of a venture funding network to accelerate the development of business information services through their platform. Put the two of these together and you can see a perfect storm brewing for business information providers that have assumed that their investments in enterprise software to drive content sales will flourish indefinitely.
Why be worried about SF.com and Google? The key factor is that bit by bit the enterprise's information base is being absorbed into proprietary Web databases. That's likely to turn out to be a good thing for many enterprises trying to compete in a cost-conscious global environment: the "pretty good" infrastructure of SF.com is increasingly more than just adequate to perform crucial tasks, especially when extended by third party services through SF.com's AppExchange services. Add in the "pretty good" Google office automation services and you can envision a day not too far down the road when many enterprise users will be using the combination of Google and SF.com services for 80 percent or more of their day-to-day business information generation and use. Throw in Google's Web and enterprise search services along with their robust and open development APIs and you can imagine more than a few of those SF.com venture dollars funding business information solutions that will make solutions like Factiva's SalesWorks look fairly limp by comparison.
While a stronger SF.com is in the interest of business information providers who want fast inroads into sales, marketing and management teams in enterprises this ally is beginning to recognize the gravitas that its platform-independent approach to business solutions has to provide leverage over these same vendors. As publishers thirsty for new revenue channels open up more to enabling access to premium content through Google search interfaces the combination of SF.com and Google could spell trouble for traditional licensed database services over the next few years. If SF.com and Google own the development and marketing environment and publishers no longer require traditional subscription services to leverage their content into enterprise applications then it is going to be a far more competitive environment for business information services providers who count on aggregated subscription services for their revenues.
There will be more good news than bad news for a while out of this impending alliance but business information services will be well-advised to sharpen up their strategies as to how to preserve and accelerate revenues through this alliance. Nimble competitors are likely to do quite well if they adjust quickly - but odds are strong that more than a few business information providers will stumble along the way.
On one level Google's announcement of the impending unveiling of a new search interface that unifies many of its key content assets is just a catchy filler for its analyst briefings: since when does improved navigation make for real headlines? But when you delve into the details Google's "Universal Search" is going to reset the bar of audience expectations for content search services yet again. In a nutshell, Google is working on new technology that will intuit when content from the dozens of Google properties - Scholar, News, Book Search, YouTube, you name it - is appropriate to a given query and assemble results in a combined search results display. Yes, it's federated search, but with relevance capabilities that promise to make results far more useful than ever before. In addition to information and media that will make its way into the main search results the navigation options that are displayed in a search results page will change according to the search terms. For example, searches for information about programming languages will display links to Google Code, Google Groups, Google Books and other sources that may have relevant content. Hello, faceted navigation.
This level of integration of content from Web pages, news sources, video, books and other sources such as public records and Google Base content will be challenge enough for open Web content vendors. But think also of the impact as both Web search results and results integrated with enterprise content via the Google Search Appliance make their way into the corporate realm. For nearly a decade business information services such as LexisNexis, Factiva, Hoover's and OneSource have seen responding gingerly to user expectations set by Google searches: what happens when those expectations now include by default sources such as video, books, public records, data and other rich content that can solve business problems? Add Google's APIs into the mix along with some clever developers and publishers eager to reach business audiences in more profitable arrangements and business information services must ponder again what to do with Google's increasingly universal content aggregation capabilities.
To some degree all subscription business information services rely on inertia in their market segments to power their sales: if your customer had a content budget last year chances are they're going to have it next year as well. And certainly sector-specific and role-specific premium content services will continue to warrant strong ROI arguments for many vendors. But as more and more content types are made available via Google in a neatly integrated form via a largely free-to-users business model the aggregation model for business information will be challenged by a far wider array of content sources than most will be ready to integrate as cost-effectively as Google. Expect these changes to be subtle at first, then increasingly obvious, then completely evident about the time that it's too late for traditional licensors to react effectively. Kind of like what's happened with everything else Google has done.
The Wall Street Journal reports on NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch's attempts to have conversations with the Bancroft family and other majority shareholders of Dow Jones - efforts that seem to have been spurned so far in spite of promises of editorial independence and limited control over hiring and firing. The article cites a Bancroft family member who saw Murdoch's offer as "the usual stuff" (one wonders what other "usual stuff" has been offered to Dow Jones in recent months). It's understandable that a company with the heritage of Dow Jones would balk at an offer that looks more like a hunt for a trophy wife on the surface than a well-planned merger, but in the details of Murdoch's offer is plenty of evidence that there may be some strong vision at work here.
Specifically of interest is Murdoch's willingness to invest in political and global economic coverage that would make The Wall Street Journal a more attractive international journal of record for business-minded people. In an increasingly global economy Murdoch sees no doubt in Dow Jones the core of an editorial and production team that has the ability to muscle into a more pronounced global leadership role in business media through localized print and online content. WSJ's readership is broad but not broad enough to allow Dow Jones to invest in a major global push effectively. It would be hard to imagine someone other than Murdoch who would have the cash, the influence and the market presence that would allow Dow Jones' brands to thrive in international markets to the extent that his tutelage would allow.
It's understandable that a proudly American brand like Dow Jones would resist Murdoch's advances but the sad fact of the matter is that U.S.-based business media services aimed at mass markets are not going to thrive in the years ahead unless they're more effective on a global scale. U.S. markets for business information are becoming far more data-intensive than overseas markets thanks to both the U.S. regulatory environment and the automated trading capabilities fed by that data. The in-depth journalism that is the specialty of Dow Jones will be focused more effectively on more opaque markets where insights beyond the reach of fair disclosure are needed more urgently. Other offers that are beyond this "usual stuff" may come along at some point but one wonders whether Dow Jones will have the market leverage at such an undetermined point in time to leverage its brand's strength as effectively as it can today. They may not like the suitor but Murdoch is leading with a strong suit that should be considered with a hard-nosed look at the spreadsheets as well as with a journalist's gut.
The McGraw-Hill family of publications is no stranger to mixing enterprise and media content, having developed many successful mergings for aviation and construction but with relatively limited media play for enterprise content from its Standard and Poor's division. That's changing now with the announcement of the new Company Insight Center being launched under McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek brand. The Company Insight Center provides corporate data, news, financials, charts transactions, executive salaries and other key data from the Standard and Poor's Capital IQ database for public companies. A profile on the new BW service compares favorably with a similar one from popular services like Yahoo! Finance, with more details on analysis of executives and less emphasis on real-time information. It's a good tool that's been well integrated into the BW portal, with lots of thought given to usability and information design.
But is it enough to ease the slow slide of BW as a destination for business information seekers? Rich data is touted as a solution to add depth and "stickiness" to business media sites, but unlike other market sectors such as aviation and construction rich financial content has been available from a wide variety of sources online for more than a decade. BusinessWeek provides excellent content, thoughtful in-depth analysis and a widening set of weblogs and podcasts, so the enhanced rich data from Capital IQ will certainly be an effective complement to their core content. However, the style of BW online is still somewhat reflective compared to sites such as Forbes that have positioned their content to appeal to a younger, blog-centric audience more aggressively than BW. It's not necessarily that BW misses beats so much as they sometimes miss the pulse of what makes today's real-time oriented online users tick. So although rich data can be a welcome addition to a business information Web site it's important to make sure that it's data that will help to expand an audience as much as maintain relationships with existing loyal site visitors. Build up your rich data assets, to be sure, but make sure that you understand how they're going to add depth and breadth to your audience for advertisers as well.
One of the ongoing debates in business information is how to deliver high-quality content to enterprise marketers and sales forces. Traditionally this discussion revolves around how to cleanse contact information through traditional methods such as phone interviewing and more advanced methods such as Web data mining. But what sales and marketing professionals really want to know is who of these contacts will turn out to be good targets for marketing campaigns. Acxiom is taking on this challenge with the announcement of a service that will allow marketers to filter contact lists quickly through a predictive modeling system. The system will allow them to determine quickly which of their prospects is likely to respond to a given marketing offer, making it easier for marketers to select lists with appropriate demographics to maximize the effectiveness of a campaign.
Large-scale marketers have been able to afford such technologies but with the introduction of Acxiom On-Demand Targeting it's a capability that small and medium businesses can take advantage of as needed - and that larger businesses can use without having to resort to custom analysis and coding. It's a reminder that "data quality" is a relative factor in determining which premium content service is going to yield the most return from an investment. We're going to see more analysis tools making their way into business information services that move past contact accuracy and further into giving marketers accurate knowledge of intents. Statistical analysis based on deep data knowledge is one path to this insight, but there will be qualitative paths to understanding human behavior as well. In both cases quality content that leads to quality transactions will be the key to premium business information value.
ZDNet reports on Salesforce.com's recent acquisition of Koral, a small content management company that focuses on bringing together unstructured content from enterprises into Salesforce.com's ASP-based sales management platform. Koral makes it easy for people to leverage SF.com's content synchronization capabilities to simplify the storage, sharing, searching and synchronization of office documents and emails - the very type of content that enterprise search engines and business information vendors are coveting increasingly for their own product plans. While SF.com enjoys support from many business information providers integrating subscription database content via its AppExchange online services store unstructured content offers another level of content value generation that trumps both I.T.-oriented office automation and search engine plays and publishers trying to define their own frameworks to organize user content as a business resource.
Business Information 3.0 is about creating value out of whatever content is available wherever it is made available - and creating more value in moments of fresh content discovered in time to make a difference to the top line of today's enterprises. Like Google Salesforce.com is approaching the content business from the perspective of a software-as-a-service vendor that make every business information resource accessible in a framework that makes an immediate and tangible difference to people's lives. Many publishers don't quite grasp the concept that any content that helps to move business processes forward is business information worthy of their attention - leaving huge opportunities for content technology vendors to define the framework in which they develop their services.
Today we see many vendors such as Hoover's, OneSource and Factiva integrating their business information into SF.com via AppExchange. With the Koral acquisition SF.com is laying down the gauntlet that challenges both publishers and I.T. companies to provide more combined content value than their highly cost-effective sales automation services. Increasingly this means mining content value from non-traditional sources such as corporate Web sites and delivering it as real-time updates to business information users. In the battle for business information desktops sometimes perhaps it pays to leave the desktop behind altogether...
BtoB Online covers the launch of the refreshed ZoomInfo business information portal, equipped with a much more usable interface and improved content quality. The home page features three main tabs: company searches by keyword or company name, people searches and job searches via content from Zoominfo's content partner Indeed. Company content and most of the other site content is ad-supported, while searches for people by keywords and company name are part of a premium package that includes more powerful search tools. An interesting addition to the home page is a tag cloud representing popular keywords used for searches on ZoomInfo - some of which seem to show left-over preferences from testing but which in the long run should give users a sense of the "buzz" being generated by business information users.
It's interesting that the default search for Zoominfo is now keywords rather than company name, implying that the tool is useful for people trying to locate companies that offer specific products and services. A search for "flushometers" yields eight companies that seem to fit nicely, each with a summary of their strengths. One can refine their search with further clustered subcategorizations - in this instance "flushometer manufacturing"and "flushometer tank"are available - as well as by geography or annual revenues. A quick click of an icon next to the results adds the company profile into a Zoominfo "QuickList" at the bottom of the browser window; a user can define multiple QuickList folders for reference. Company profiles include revenues, number of employees, industrial classifications, Web site thumbshot and contact data - most of which is gleaned directly from Zoominfo's Web mining operations. A search results listing of competitors can be displayed by clicking on a link on the profile page; a competitive search for Sloan Valve Corporation yielded 29 potential competitors, most of which seemed to be very much in the thick of their competitive space.
Ad-supported visitors can get access to personal profiles built from Web content, which provides a Web-derived employment history, references to key Web pages covering the person's activities and the opportunity to build social network contacts with the individual. Registrants can maintain this profile information if they would like it to provide more accurate information. A search for Factiva's Clare Hart yielded one seemingly accurate profile but other people with a more complicated professional life still challenge Zoominfo's improved semantic processing. A search on Presidential advisor Karl Rove, for example, yields a robust list of alter egos defined for Rove in the online press, including a number of epithets.
Searching people by keywords or company names and titles yields an anonymous list of matches for ad-supported visitors, which can be converted into a listing with names associated with titles for premium PowerSearch subscribers. The shift to PowerSearch from free results gives somewhat different information, but with the additional filtering tools available in PowerSearch you can zero in on key contacts very quickly and get a list of probable phone numbers and email addresses. Gliding over a given contact name in the search results in PowerSearch mode pops up a summary of the person's profile page. Job searches work similarly overall, with filters for proximity, job types, job sources and company revenues.
While the improved technologies in ZoomInfo seem to yield improved results in many instances, the notable improvement in this release is the professional-grade design of the interface. Functions are easy to navigate and are organized consistently from one function to another: there's little guesswork involved. It's easier to normalize company information online than personal profiles, so this edition of ZoomInfo rightfully emphasizes this capability. In doing so ZoomInfo is positioned as a very useful multi-purpose company mining tool that can help both purchasers and sales and marketing professionals zoom in on the right targets for their efforts very quickly. The more problematic personal profile information is only going to be as good as the Web itself in most instances but that in and of itself can make ZoomInfo a very useful tool for accelerated "Googling" of people in professional roles. And once one gets into the PowerSearch tools the information can help to accelerate prospecting with ZoomInfo's frequent update cycles.
As we noted in our earlier news analysis on Zoominfo and Generate born-on-the-Web content is becoming the default "golden source" for corporate information, giving tools such as ZoomInfo a strong leg up as a structured reporter of how companies have positioned themselves in the marketplace. This shows up especially when one takes advantage of the on-the-fly clustering of company profiles: pop in a term like "Wiki" that's not in any industrial classification system and you get a relevant listing of companies that provide Wiki software and services. More traditional business information tools offer more sopisticated services and broader data sets to mine, but this edition of Zoominfo serves as a reminder that Web-first business information services are becoming a key resource for today's professionals.
Two major conferences focusing on business information services point towards two very different approaches to creating revenues and profits from today's enterprise and media markets. Yet both database publishers and media companies are circling around many of the same opportunities to develop value for business information markets. The battle for the future of business information has just begun in earnest, with no clear winners in sight but with many "old guard" attitudes from both camps in dire need of ejection from the scene.
From the wilds of Scottsdale, Arizona back to the right coast via the redeye brings me to ABM's Digital Velocity event, drawing more than 230 people to learn the best practices for accelerating digital revenue growth in B2B media. The room is totally packed. Full disclosure: Shore is a member of the ABM Digital Media Council, so I have my bias as to the quality of this program, having served on the program planning committee. I think that the committee worked very hard to put together a very meaty event, and the level of attendance seems to reflect its anticipated value. I am not going to live-blog every panel, but I will be posting through the event in our events weblog and posting links here.
Companies such as Zoominfo and Generate are using born-on-the-Web content and technologies to create business information services that are several notches above previous efforts to glean quality information from Web sites and other key sources. With an emphasis on analytics and semantic processing and business plans that are targeted towards the meat of traditional business information markets you could say that Business Information 3.0 has been born. Are traditional vendors ready to take on these well-funded BI 3.0 challengers?
Business information services are thriving as they gain sophisticated features to add value to their databases but they also face increasing competition on all fronts from web-sourced content and more specialized service providers. Chalk up a good score by Hoover's to fend off commoditization in its announced acquisition of First Research, a business intelligence service that serves up industry and state profiles aimed at sales professionals. First Research Call Prep Sheets are industry briefings designed to arm sales professionals with the right industry talking points before they walk out the door to accounts. State Profiles provide quarterly coverage of local issues impacting businesses in U.S. states for sales pros on the go across broad geographies.
All of this helps Hoover's to add a new layer of value-add content aimed at the sales professionals who are increasingly the core audience for many business information services. With more corporations providing an abundance of information online that can be mined easily by any number of services mere company profiles and sales contacts are not going to be sufficient for a business information provider to give their clients an industry edge. By focusing on the real-world situational needs of sales professionals via its First Research acquisition Hoover's is positioning itself more as a business intelligence solutions service that can provide complete briefings for sales professionals who need to know about not just individual accounts but as well the environment in which they play. Expect more plays like this from business information services providers - and more vendors positioning both technology and publishing services against business intelligence services in general.
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