After a day or so of tweaking, software downloading and restoring files from my JungleDisk network backup drive, Ariel has come to life in full. The fourth of a series of Dell Latitude laptop PCs that I have used (we'll forget that Compaq that I had for a corporate job), Ariel is the third unit I've owned named after archangels, a small but welcome comfort when I have need of a machine that can deliver some assurance to a hard-working road warrior. The processing power of this ES6400 model and its solid-state RAM drive certainly help Ariel to deliver those assurances. Having been out of the PC purchasing loop for several years, now, though, I must say that Ariel is representative of a new place in the content hierarchy for PCs than former units that I have owned, more a waystation than a destination in the stream of real-time content going and coming from a myriad of inputs and outputs.

Labels: Bloomberg, Business Information, Business Intelligence, centrino, dell, dual processor, e6400, financial information, latitude, pc, real-time, thomson reuters, video

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.

Labels: austin ventures, Business Information, Business Intelligence, Deals Partnerships and Sales

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.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, Dow Jones, Generate, market data

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.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, Dow Jones, Generate, insideview, Social Media, socialprise

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.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Dow Jones, Generate

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.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, sales and marketing, trueadvantage

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.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, DEMO07, embedding, Generate, Infocommerce

Inxight has provided content organization and visualization tools for many years and picked up federated search tools along the way to provide more content value to enterprise and publishing clients. But like many content technology companies Inxight has had a very difficult time differentiating its capabilities from a broad pack of similar services aimed at similar clients. So after several reorgs and repositionings it's probably a good thing that Business Objects has announced its acquisition of Inxight to round out its broad portfolio of enterprise business information services. As enterprises focus more on solutions that deliver measurable results for specific business functions they have had to view unstructured content assets from inside and outside their own organization as key inputs for their business intelligence efforts. Inxight's ability to process and organize unstructured content adds enables Business Objects to compete more effectively with business information vendors focused on building insights from news, social media and other unstructured content.

Coming on the heels of Reuters' acquisition of ClearForest this signals a ramp-up of the battle between content technology providers and traditional publishers and aggregators for the lead in providing value to enterprise accounts. The content side of this equation prides itself in understanding the business objectives of their clients more clearly, but if the history of financial content vendors is at all instructive it's the enterprises equipped with the technology tools to give them proprietary advantages in market insight that will win the majority of budgets spent on content services. Will content vendors become more adept at delivering technology solutions more quickly than technology companies will become more aware of how those solutions add value to business information? This is going to be a race to the finish - with enterprises wanting to get more value for their content investments the clear winners.

The only losers will be publishers and technology providers that fail to see that their futures depend on them putting on both content and technology hats to deliver high-value solutions to their clients. The era of stand-alone technology features and stand-alone content services is coming to a close rather quickly as businesses try to leapfrog over the inefficiencies of both traditional I.T. solutions and traditional subscription database solutions to gain insight from wherever it's available.

Labels: Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Deals Partnerships and Sales, Inxight, search, Technology

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.

Labels: Business Information, Business Intelligence, Deals Partnerships and Sales, First Research, Hoover's