Robin Neidorf, General Manager of Free Pint, Limited, highlighted research into the buying habits based on a survey of FreePint subscribers fielded in mid-2009. About 49 percent of respondents had centralized information centers, with 32 percent having multiple locations throughout their organisations. Most respondents reported no increases in staffing, a third reported decreases, and about ten percent reported staffing increases. Increased staffs staffs were most common in companies with high-budget profiles. Many of the respondents were indicating that automation and technology solutions are key to filling staffing gaps and using content resources to fill staffing gaps, presumably in the automated and online services provided by content vendors. Some indicated budgets would be going up, but apparently free substitutes are increasing. "We've moved the cost of premium services to the end party," Robin noted. A la carte sales are becoming the order of the day in many instances. an opportunity for vendors to understand how to maximize their relationships with individual content consumers before, during and after purchases.

Labels: content, enterprise, purchasing, Research

Moderator: Jim Kollegger, CEO, Genesys Partners, Inc.
Panelists:
Mark Anderson, CEO, Strategic News Service
Andrew Lack, CEO Multimedia Group, Bloomberg LP
Dick Harrington, Chairman and General Partner, The Cue Ball Group
David Eun, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, YouTube

Labels: bloomberg, CEOs, content, enterprise, goodle, media, panel, Siia information industry summit 2010

Moderator: Gregory Brown, Senior Director, Strategic Development, DataStream Content Solutions (DSCS)
Panelists:
David Prichard, President & CEO, Ingram Content Group, Inc.
Matt Turner, Senior Consultant, Mark Logic Corporation
Steven Alperin, Entrepreneur in Residence, MyWire, Consultant ABC , MyWire, Week's Best

Labels: books, custom publishing, enterprise, magazines, marketing, media, online, print

Moderator: Fernando Pereira, Research Director, Google
Panelists:

Labels: discovery, enterprise, google, media, Peer39, queries, search, semantics, technology, wolfram alpha

DeepDyve's clients are typically non-traditional research users in small to medium businesses as well as non-institutional users, a market that DeepDyve CEO William Park sees as a $2-4 billion industry. Instead of chasing these users to "pirated" research content, non-institutional users and users in major institutions without access to specific collections can get a read-only view of scientific and technical research for 24 hours on a "rent-to-own" basis if it's premium content, or longer use models, including links for unlimited use and publication subscriptions. Revenues are split 50-50 with their partners, who see it mostly as found money, since it's going for a community not typically targeted by their institutional sales forces. "It's better to get half of something than all of nothing," a DeepDyve partner noted, the "something" in this case being about an 8 percent conversion rate into sales from initial exposure in search views via DeepDyve. This is a model that readily extended to content beyond the scientific, technical and medical community, of course, which is an opportunity that is likely to be a focus of DeepDyve moving forward. This is a good model for publishers that need to market their content effectively to Web-honed users not attached to enterprise subscriptions. I expect it to do well.

Labels: articles, content, deepdyve, ecommerce, enterprise, journals, licensing, search, STM

Elsevier Health Sciences CEO Michael Hansen laid out an argument for major enterprise publishers surviving and thriving in tough economic times by starting with a parable about Elsevier's roots as the publisher that helped Galileo to get his then-controversial scientific works in print. At a time when many of the status quo gatekeepers were dead set against Galileo's theories, a publisher helped to change the world as we know it today. Flash forward to today, in a world in which people are often paralyzed by the pace of change in scientific publishing and trying to understand where to bring their organizations to deliver both profits and growing markets. For Hansen, this means in the short term helping clients to cut costs by consolidating services through Elsevier's content integration capabilities, as well as being more bold in delivering services to clinical settings.

Labels: enterprise, hansen elsevier, publishing, Siia information industry summit 2010, STM

Moderator: Lee Greenhouse, President, Greenhouse Associates, Inc.

Panelists:
Diane Corrado, Vice President, Sales, Wolters Kluwer Health
Tom Brown, Vice President, Financial Services Solutions, LexisNexis Risk and Information Analytics Group
Joe Jaksha, Vice President of New Product Development, Thomson West

My former Quotron colleague Lee Greenhouse kicked off a panel of major enterprise information services providers from legal, credit and medical sectors. Lee's kickoff question: Michael Wolff said that the value of content is declining. Is that so?

Tom: For public records, applications built on them can quantify value. Maintaining a certain value proposition requires the ability to add to it constantly.
Diane: Clients say content is king, if the right data isn't there, then it's not worth it.
Lee: But they won't pay a king's ransom for it.
Diane: They don't want twelve million hits, they want one hit.
Joe: Raw aggregated content is less valuable, but you have to have that and layer on more value. Unfiltered, unannotated content is less valuable but clients expect it to be there.
Lee: How has West added value to content?
Tom: Classification of laws, the legal code, was the first step. Now focus on specific customers and wrap it in a package with sophisticated technologies and a services model (COMMENT: Again, it comes back to the Wall Street model. Lou Eccleston from S&P didn't come - again - but it would be nice for a financial person to nail this concept home). Adding value to the public record so that it's the authoritative record. Deploy analytics to make it more actionable in high-volume enterprise environments. In banking, help them to prevent money laundering, help them to know the individuals with whom they are doing business. Also focus on identity theft, will get worse as economy deteriorates and people from the inside help crime. Help customers evaluate companies that are not covered by the credit agencies, on terms that are acceptable to the consumer.
Diane: In legal and medical, years ago you had to bear a gift to get information from a corprorate librarian. Now it's in the hands and the pockets on portable devices of users. Books in a big room have to exist now on an iPod and be fast. Google is fast, but you don't want five million hits, you want the information that you're looking for, with as little librarian intervention as possible. Use contextual design process, work with clients in non-standard way. Usual client interviews give usual answers, contextual design watches how people actually do their work. (COMMENT: This is a key, key factor in product research, I've learned more in interviews just being quiet and watching how a subject responds to a phone call or works at their desk). Helps to reduce fatigue from information use - sometimes as much as 65 percent. We are a publisher, but also integrators, integrate from Thomson and other sources, new tools manage these sources side-by-side. Has revolutionized our industry (COMMENT: Again, done decades ago in finance, corprorate world is just starting to have the technology for more general content sources to catch up). We carry both peer reviewed content and clinical use information, so people can see both the theory and the practice side by side.

Joe: Focused on smaller information bites, could be just a piece of metadata that's monetizable, as a publisher you can take that same piece of information and present it in many different contexts. Contract attorneys get what they need at the point of need. Have to understand what target customers need.
Lee: Do you really get more money from customers or is it treading water?
Joe: Definitely a mix of the two, bigger part is making it a sustainable business model, contextual content changes how our clients do business, the "sticky, viral" way of doing business becomes part of what they do.
Tom: Depends on how much it's a pain point for customers, adding coverage, that's where the pain point is, clients are required to vett each client they do business with, if it's just redundant information, less valuable. Also new applications are key, in some ways we're in a nascent market sector, what we're doing is providing information about the "underbanked" to help people understand them.
Diane: It's also helping our customers' customers, our clients have to do more with less, if you have a relationship with their clients you can command higher prices, you can get a larger share that enhance client relationships, puts us in a unique position. Many are clinicians, scientists, drug manufacturers, defending legal cases, customer's customers could be doctors, consumers, product developers, important to prove value to them. Providing better materials that explain what the product does is valuable, getting the buyer to understand the value is key.
Tom: That's the essence of what we do, we try to be more relevant to the client.

Lee: What's the hard stuff?
Joe: Combining unique combinations of content that cannot be replicated by the next hot technology play. Customers are more and more specialized, means that where they get a question outside of their area of expertise, they need help. (COMMENT: Good point, and a very interesting one). People on the end of a phone line can help, too.

Lee: Lessons from failures?
Joe: Shoehorning content in a product or space where it doesn't belong, looks good on a drawing boards but doesn't work in real like. In contract law, we tested and re-tested things, but if you guess wrong with the customer, you may as well start over.
Tom: If you assume that the need is greater than it is, you can wind up over-engineering products.
Diane: We were working on a high-end product, someone released a similar thing as freeware that wasn't too bad. Have to make sure that it's a unique need.

A good panel, danced around some of the key challenges such as clients and third-party technology platforms eating up the same value proposition, but showed the typical best practices of today's enterprise publishing services.

Labels: credit, enterprise, events, legal, medical, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009, STM

Kristian J. Hammond, Co-Director, Intelligent Information Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University

You have incredibly valuable content but nobody can tell the difference between it and something that someone has hacked up and thrown on the Internet. People get what they can from it and go away, driving up the bounce rate. Why should anyone in the world get it for money? People can wait it out, and it will be free. NYT will say, "Just take it, at least show up some time."

People think that they can defeat Google on its own turf with search. Like a new soda trying to go head-to-head with Coca-Cola. Unless there is a serious cultural change, the last battle that you fought is going to be fought over and over again. There's an arms race going on, someone out there is trying to bust into your information. We'll crawl the Web and have a parallel information repository to make "one-stop" shopping for our vertical. Nice idea, but still head-to-head with Google. Or, make a deal with Google, but that's just getting your information out more efficiently, doesn't address monetization.

"We suggest leapfrogging the problems altogether..." In cellular telephony, adoption in developing nations surged where land lines were mediocre at best. Leapfrogged rather than trying to make technology work in old environments. We work on frictionless information systems, or intelligent information systems. "Whatever you're thinking, we'll get to your heart's desire." We want to get rid of the search box, so that you don't interact with it directly. Need information systems that are aware of the context of your behavior. Knowing your customer at this second and using it as a driver of information. We're a lab, we don't care where information comes from.

Examples: the desktop relevance engine and "beyond broadcast," for online video, and "make my page," for machine-generated content. Pulls information on the Web based on the document being read (COMMENT: not really so different from "more like this" feature or training data for semantic searches). Really on-point, finds docs first on own Web site, then other sites. Also pulls up discussions, experts, methods, learning, Web and desktop collections. (COMMENT: good idea. Not done often enough). Integrated with desktop activity (COMMENT: like Watson, kind of), can pull from any searchable source. Kind of like doing enterprise portal services for the world).

Then looked at server-side versions of this. Chicago Sun-Times example, other blogs, videos, Web, other S-T news, S-T blogs (COMMENT: This is a lot like Sphere in a sense, all fine and good, but Sphere is not really helping publishers to generate engagement or revenues to any significant degree). In video, main context is watching television. Build a small piece of code for TiVo box, "beyond broadcast," watches television with you, notices what channel you're on, look at closed caption text, feed that information to server, hijack a TiVo remote button, would build a microsite based on the content and the context. Different for cooking show, how-to show, dramas, etc. (COMMENT: This has strong potential as a concept, contextual content and ads for television). Were elated with this, people will come to us, but then YouTube happened and convergence happened anyway without television. Took same system, moved it online. Works pretty much the same, change banner ads based on what' being discussed in the video.

Looked at a few examples, "good eats" on the Food Network, links to Wikipedia entry on corn dogs. Look at other version of recipes, etc. (COMMENT: Again, not much new on one level, but doing it in real-time is a fantastic tool, equivalent to AdWords on Google search). Give them everything that they might be interested in (COMMENT: But do publishers really want more distractions from their content? I agree with the "real-time portal" based on content of interest, but again, Sphere experience raises questions).

"Make my page" function, pulls together new document, primarily links to other document, open to social media editing. Highly relevant, will percolate up to the top and stay there. (COMMENT: Now, that works better. Make the associations of content more enduring, even when they are assembled in real-time. If the aggregation works for one person, it may work for others, and it will be improved for others. Similar to my old concept of distributable objects that grow in value as they are passed from person to person contextually). "We will get you to your heart's desire."

Great stuff, I like the idea of the persistent contextual objects that grow over time, that's the real winning ingredient. Many of the other ideas have been done before, but if you can create content that becomes more popular over time automatically as it expands and transforms over time through contextual use, it will be self-optimizing for engagement.

Labels: enterprise, media, publishing, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

Moderator: Dan Duncan, Senior Director, Government Affairs, The McGraw-Hill Companies

Panel:
Ed Collaran, Senior Director, International Relations, Copyright Clearance Center
Dominic Young, Director of Group Publishing Services, News International
Caitlin Grusauskas, 3rd year student, Columbia University School of Law
Mindy Pennington, Manager, External Content, Library Services, Pfizer Global Research and Development

Duncan: Apple taking DRM block off of music, France suits, law would have mandated taking off DRM, effort was abandoned. Apple got together with industry, no restrictions on reuse at a higher price. Today, new users all the time, new solutions as well. What works?

Caitlin: People have expectations that it's all going to be free, quick answers from things like Google Toolbar. The idea of copyright is foreign, you assume that you can share it, has serious implications for content owners.

Pennington: People want to make it easier to share, things like CCC Rightsphere work but take time to set up, content is desired on mobile devices, how or whether it works can be problematic, as is who you can share it with. Taking something from your digital library and giving it to partners is a problem, need for more flexible relationships.

Colleran: From the user's standpoint, they're busy people, make it easy as possible, but offering broader rights is key. Pharma industry initiative to broaden contract terms, looking to share content that they license as a key contract factor.

Young: Part of ACAP, news initiative for managing access. To actually manage and control it without licensing is needed in some way, licensing not well adapted for all circumstances, ACAP allows end-users to take control more easily when it's legal and reasonable to do so.

Duncan: Many users don't look at terms and conditions, if they do access it they don't access it or understand it. From the perspective of users, where do they fit in today?

Young: Doing it in a way that's highly automated is key, tools don't exist to do that, so people do things because there's no reasonable alternative. Business models aren't there, either (COMMENT: Micropayments is underutilized, technologies are there that COULD support it, but there is resistance. That resistance is a key factor in today's media revenue gap.)

Pennington: We get questions about usage even with Rightsphere, most people are aware of what they're allowed to do, internal news stories and other communications about what's allowed.

Duncan: Pfizer has its own valuable intellectual property as well. Caitlin, in your experience, are students aware of terms and conditions?

Caitlin: In law school it's different, they rely on Westlaw and LexisNexis, people understand that there are terms and conditions with their accounts. In the broader university community, I can access materials from the university library seamlessly. In some ways there's a problem because there's so much out there.

Pennington: In the last couple of years new programs provide text mining, automated systems may pull thousands of articles in a couple of hours, users may notice first when content is blocked. Work with publishers, understand what's allowed, text mining system will be programmed to obey terms. (COMMENT: But what if an agreement could be executed automatically? Huge under-explored opportunities, let people get a taste for free, when throttles are reached then an ecommerce opportunity can be activated, either through online human agents or an auto-execution micropayment system. Works for mobile carriers, folks, it's not rocket science).

Young: Search engine access works well for some publishers, not for others, ACAP helps search engines to discover terms and conditions. Can be done machine to machine. But scaling up the capability of the network is a challenge. (COMMENT: ACAP still has potential, but, no offense to my European friends, it's being pursued in a lethargic manner, needs to go open source, with multiple serving agents, akin to DNS services).

Collaeran: With social media tools, publishers find it to be an incredible branding tool, FT gives first five articles away, then second five with registration, then you have to pay. Don't have to pay for each article.

Duncan: Caitlin, what's your reaction?

Caitlin: Depends how easy it is to use, didn't sign up for NYT premium, but if price is right, it's worth it. Some kids want to "stick it to the man," but if it's pretty easy to do the right thing, then they comply. HuLu, good quality, people want it fast and quick, people will pay.

Pennington: A lot easier for people not to worry about it when the corproation licenses it, but more flexible arrangement for doing the right thing would be important. When the physician sees the advertising and is measurable, that's important. So, why not make a version of the online product that looks like the magazine? Why won't publishers make another version? We have devices like Kindle now. With copiers sharing was harder, would be nice to have technology advances for today's needs.

Caitlin: People doing online research are used to putting in all sorts of search terms to see what pops up. Topical search would be nice, to see what pops up, more like an index than a traditional book (COMMENT: Works on relatively discrete content sets with tools such as taxonomies).

Young: Things like ACAP are a step in the right direction, we have gloom and doom about old business models, innovation can help. In a world that's well functioning, rewards will be linked to access.

Colleran: Not just about text content, any type of media could be involved, need to license those different kinds of content. Not just publishers, authors are taking a far more prominent role with self-publishing.

Duncan: How will authors be paid for content, major publishing companies have marketing department, sells into an area where the customer understands the value.

Collaran: Creative Commons-style authors may want some content out there for free, but others may want payment (COMMENT: CC does have hooks in its licensing for payment, early days still, remarkably, on activating that capability.)

Pennington: Make licensing more relevant for the specific people using content, critical going forward, especially as organizations divide into global business units, granular licensing needed.

Caitlin: People may use terms and conditions, the ability to share music is there, but I haven't tried it, don't want to be restricted by DRM. Rhapsody is one model, could work for other types of content.

Colleran: Ease of use and compliance are key "microscripts" coming out of this. Education is not sexy but it can help. Users need to be educated what they can and cannot do with copyrighted content.

Young: Micropayments would be wonderful, need the best innovators to help the best content to win out, that may be authors as well.

Pennington: People are willing to pay for what they need.

Question: Agreement between Gatehouse Media and NYT on Boston.com?

Duncan: Not that familiar with it, but not settled law. IP community on the publishing side were happy, but also scratching heads.

Great panel, excellent moderation, Dan.

Labels: enterprise, events, media, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009

George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates conducted a conversation with Cindy Hill, focusing on how to approach the convergence of media and enterprise content markets and to manage the acceptance of content from premium services with ads in the services. Cindy points out there that there's a huge "what's in it for me" from users but also a willingness to consider ads from subscription services if it doesn't impede access to content. Print-based journal providers are getting pushback on budgets not only on the basis of price but also on the basis of budget for storage, so migration to more ad-based content aimed at institutions into electronic media is going to be crucial. George points out that at the Amsterdam SIIA conference Claudia Juech, VP of Central Information Services at Deutsche Bank, was definitely open to the concept, so there was some anecdotal evidence for ads in enterprise-oriented content having support.

But Cindy point out that you do need eyeballs for content to make this work. Cindy and George have been doing research as to what the real receptivity is for ads. George points out that Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, has done some experimentation with premium ads. Outsell research highlighted by George indicates that people in professional roles do respond to ads, so there is also some broader evidence for this response factor. Cindy underscores the need for ethical standards as a key factor for moving ads into enterprise-oriented content. Her research with George indicates that they would consider convergence pricing, but that they expect faster access to more essential informaiton in the process. So instead of having ads as sidebars direct embedding with useful information would be key. [COMMENT: We've been suggesting this for years, monetize context does not necessarily equate to traditional advertising.] But not everyone is in favor of ads in enterprise content - interestingly coming from individuals who were of the opinion that they were already able to negotiate pricing effectively and from those who are concerned about objectivity. So although that there is promise for this concept more insights and experimentation is required. Metrics are highly important, Cindy indicated that if a journal is not used at least one hundred times it's cancelled - a relatively low threshold of usage. Ads could help to offset the cost in these kinds of instances. There may be a number of solutions to be worked out for this, especially given earlier models for sponsored content in the financial industry.

In Q&A it came out that Alacra has done research and received strong push-back in their markets, Dow Jones is working on an enterprise-based product for financial information and news, BLR has added ads to some of their business and legal content with no pushback from subscribers.

Selling context in enterprise products can be tricky - interrupting workflow is a huge issue, but that's subject to interpretation. People are going to Google and other search engines as a part of their workflow any way, to implicitly there is a strong degree of acceptance for ads in business information anyway. The key factor to focus on is the value of context - content in context could be an ad, it could be objective content with sponsorship, it could be a database that has some content distributed on a licensed basis and other content on an ad basis, it could be the customer themselves offering that context for content that could be useful for their purposes.

Labels: advertising, business information, business models, enterprise, media, SIIA Content Forum 2007

George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates conducted a conversation with Cindy Hill, focusing on how to approach the convergence of media and enterprise content markets and to manage the acceptance of content from premium services with ads in the services. Cindy points out there that there's a huge "what's in it for me" from users but also a willingness to consider ads from subscription services if it doesn't impede access to content. Print-based journal providers are getting pushback on budgets not only on the basis of price but also on the basis of budget for storage, so migration to more ad-based content aimed at institutions into electronic media is going to be crucial. George points out that at the Amsterdam SIIA conference Claudia Juech, VP of Central Information Services at Deutsche Bank, was definitely open to the concept, so there was some anecdotal evidence for ads in enterprise-oriented content having support.

But Cindy point out that you do need eyeballs for content to make this work. Cindy and George have been doing research as to what the real receptivity is for ads. George points out that Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, has done some experimentation with premium ads. Outsell research highlighted by George indicates that people in professional roles do respond to ads, so there is also some broader evidence for this response factor. Cindy underscores the need for ethical standards as a key factor for moving ads into enterprise-oriented content. Her research with George indicates that they would consider convergence pricing, but that they expect faster access to more essential informaiton in the process. So instead of having ads as sidebars direct embedding with useful information would be key. [COMMENT: We've been suggesting this for years, monetize context does not necessarily equate to traditional advertising.] But not everyone is in favor of ads in enterprise content - interestingly coming from individuals who were of the opinion that they were already able to negotiate pricing effectively and from those who are concerned about objectivity. So although that there is promise for this concept more insights and experimentation is required. Metrics are highly important, Cindy indicated that if a journal is not used at least one hundred times it's cancelled - a relatively low threshold of usage. Ads could help to offset the cost in these kinds of instances. There may be a number of solutions to be worked out for this, especially given earlier models for sponsored content in the financial industry. Great insights, would have loved to have heard more.

Labels: advertising, business information, business models, enterprise, media, SIIA Content Forum 2007