Boardroom Insiders' Principal and Founder's Sharon Gillenwater, highlighted this new service that is a database of corporate boardroom biographies and backgrounds, built around people who are not your typical high-profile CEOs. What these people do, however, is publish content on the Web, and Boardroom Insiders goes through social media sources and other sources to glean information about who they are personally and professionally. There are about 100,000 records in teh Boardroom Insiders database, and with a lot of human input to make these more than inch-deep records it will limit the overall scope of this product. She sees the competition not as Hoover's, Jigsaw and other online information providers but the people who are trying to find this information on their own via the Web. Sales are both on the per-profile and enterprise basis, so it's a good mix of revenues to support this specialized service. This seems like a potential strong offering, similar to the original Reuters business of closing a telegraph line gap with carrier pigeons carrying messages. Human input and insight can apply semantics for hard-to-mine information very well at this scale, but it will be an ongoing race to apply those resources ahead of improving semantic technologies and social media services. The response will be, hopefully, that Boardroom Insiders keeps ahead of that curve continually by incorporating these types of capabilities.

Labels: b2b, Boardroom Insiders, business information, corporate governance, harvesting