The announcement of Adhere Solution's partnership with MuseGlobal to launch the "All Access Connector," a federated content integration solution for the Google Search Appliance, is one of those situations where an event is both obvious and profound in its potential impact on the marketplace. As enterprises today face an explosion of internal and external content sources that they need to integrate to create insightful content services there is a huge gap that has arisen between what most content platforms can do to unify that information and what enterprises really need. This is particularly true in enterprise search, where many search services fail to provide access to all of the sources that a person typically needs to access.

Federated search solutions have been one route to address this problem, querying interfaces to multiple searchable sources and assembling the results "on the fly" to yield a combined search result. Instead of trying to shoehorn all of the needed information into a single database or search index federated search enables content to live wherever it has to and to come together when needed via multiple queries into integrated search results. Some do this better than others, and some have been at it for longer than others. MuseGlobal falls into both camps pretty handily, having been providing federated content solutions for more than a decade which has allowed them to hammer out an infrastructure that will pull together thousands of different types of content sources together via federated queries.

All well and good, but the question is, how do you make this sing in the eyes of enterprise users? MuseGlobal's support of Adhere Solutions, a company that includes Googlephile Steven Arnold's son Erik Arnold as a Director, points towards a very powerful possible answer to that question: the Google Search Appliance. While the GSA is a popular search tool in many major enterprises it's not been deemed the "go-to" search interface when it somes to getting all the right content from the right places all in one place in many instances. Federated content capabilities from MuseGlobal united with the GSA seem to fill that gap very handily. Capable of searching any number of search engines, internal and subscription databases and feeds as well as harvesting content via its own site crawlers, the MuseGlobal platform turns GSA into a clearing house for all of the content sources than an enterprise user might want - all delivered on the highly popular Google interface that provides access to Web content as well.

Combine this with both Google's programming interfaces for applications development and MuseGlobal's own extensive library of content integration tools and all of a sudden the GSA looks like a lot more beefy competitor for expanded use within the enterprise. And since the MuseGlobal library of source connectors includes many interfaces to subscription content services as well it's a platform that can put subscription database providers on a new footing with their users as well. All of a suddent the GSA looks less like a user-friendly also-ran and a lot more like a growing hub for enterprise and online content resources.

We hear lots of talk about workflow as the key solution that's going to enable value-add enterprise content services to build new revenues, but the ability to pull together a comprehensive set of sources that their customers' users really need to do the job is a slow and laborious process oftentimes for many subscription database providers to accomplish. At the same time enterprise portal providers are stymied oftentimes by users who refuse to use their solutions to any great degree because they're used to getting the answers they want from the search engines they rely upon as ther real "go-to" workflow solutions. The All Access Connector solution offered by Access Solutions and MuseGlobal offer both camps a lot to think about as they ponder how best to ensure that they are delivering the content that their users want in the applications that drive their productivity the most. The era of The New Aggregation's ability to deliver more content value from more content sources more rapidly than ever is upon us in full, indeed.

Labels: access solutions, enterprise, federated content, federated search, Google, museglobal, search

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang adds to his signature in his weblog posts the moniker "Chief Yahoo," a label that seems to be more of an epithet in the mouths of some shareholders and dealmakers disappointed by Yahoo's recent and apparently final rejection of a potential Microsoft takeover. With Yahoo stock plummeting on the first market day after the deal fell through the sore attitudes towards Jerry Yang's rejection of Microsoft's offer claims of needing some Prozac seem to be at least tied with the claimed "high fives" amongst some Yahoo executives when news of the deal failure came through. Even Yang himself on Yahoo's corporate weblog claimed that "No one is celebrating about the outcome of these past three months… and no one should." It was a tough battle with bad blood generated both inside and outside of Yahoo in the process.

But there's no doubt in my mind that Yang made the right decision for Yahoo shareholders as well as for the company itself. While there were some important synergies that would have come out of a Microsoft deal, in general it would have been an acquisition by a company driven by old concepts of intellectual property value of a company that is starting to move far more aggressively into new concepts for realizing the value of intellectual property. CNET News notes that Yang is betting heavily that its more open approach to content integration using its own APIs as well as emerging APIs such as OpenSocial will increase significantly the exposure of Yahoo content to audiences in increasingly valuable contexts. Combine that with a completed deal to use Google's ad networks and to integrate in AOL's user base and you have the makings of a company that will shine in building highly engaged audiences using content from many sources. Think of Yahoo as an enormous warehouse of content, commerce and community that can be rejiggered into countless social media applications. Sounds like the man has a plan to me.

In the meantime Microsoft is left licking its wounds from what was perhaps their last great opportunity to leverage their way into more secure online revenues in the face of stagnating income from its traditional product lines and modest growth from its online ventures. The Yahoo acquisition would have brought them some synergies but at the end of the day it was largely a cash flow fix and an attempt to buy an audience for Microsoft's online tools that may or may not have succeeded, given their history of coming in very strong and proprietary with such efforts. By the time they would have focused on Yahoo's existing efforts to open up their content and to focus on contextualization rather than IP ownership as the key to revenues it's not likely that they would have survived Microsoft's more traditional outlook on IP value generation.

In this parting of the ways Yang will face angry shareholders and some shell-shocked employees for some period of time and softened share prices as the new(er) Yahoo takes shape. It's unclear that he will survive this unsettled environment in his current position but hopefully his vision for a Yahoo more in tune with today's most valuable opportunities for content will continue to move on. In the meantime Microsoft needs to consider both new cash cows and new stars on its matrix of properties to help it make a transition to a future that is moving away steadily from proprietary software on proprietary platforms as the most certain long-term bet for steady and growing revenues.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, Microsoft, Yahoo

The first OnCopyright event from Copyright Clearance Center held in New York this week was a forum established to probe the value copyright in an era of electronic distribution and how to profit from it. Panels ranged from technology, legal and publishing issues across the board. You'll find below links to our events blog here as I complete entries and below that a summary analysis posted after the conference.

• Technology Confronting the Tools of Disruption
• Shifting Perceptions of How You Can Use Copyrighted Materials
• The Lawyers Probe the Enduring Search for Balance
  
• Remixes - Art, Creativity and Ownership

In sum it was an excellent event with really meaty panels, which, though a bit rambling at times, managed to delve deep into very important topics relating to copyright and intellectual property law. At the end of the day I had a chance to speak with Suzanne Vega for a few minutes to ask her about how her cooperation with remixers helped her to extend her brand. She said that it was very helpful, a point that did not come out in the panel and a point that it at the core of what copyright law seems to be missing in general: copyright is not building brand value for original works creators as effectively as it used to.

Ultimately it's not the distribution of copies that's at issue as much as the fact that we have a copyright system that still focuses on the right to distribution of a copy as the primary key for determining when and how the value of content is realized. With essentially free distribution to and from billions of points worldwide this concept no longer scales well as a relatively simple tool to manage content commerce given the traditional method for establishing licensing through contracts negotiated through legal departments.

This problem was underscored in a conversation at the conference with SLA CEO Janice LaChance. Janice defended her panel from the Buying and Selling eContent conference in which prominent corporate librarians bemoaned publishers doing little to address many key issues regarding their business models, especially how they related to copyright. Put simply, the publishing industry has enormous vested interests in managing copyright through traditional legal and business channels, preferring the intricacies of case-by-case dealmaking to the risk of distributing content to the wrong people under the wrong terms.

This emphasis on legal departments as key elements of publishers' fundamental revenue models and opportunistic lawsuits that argue for copyright enforcement on increasingly arbitrary grounds has created an utterly balkanized landscape of kludgey deals and half-considered rulings in dozens of courts that in essence has dismantled much of the value of the once common and simple concept of copyright.

In the meantime the online economy has prospered, not by corrupting copyright but by creating value out of content in legitimate derivative works and in new sources of original authorship which in sum dwarfs the output of traditional publishing outlets. Services such as those from the conference's sponsor Copyright Clearance Center are facilitating the ability of people to apply copyright effectively online in a far more automated fashion for specific items of content. Providing value in context is the true value of publishing, a concept that is conflicting more and more with the mass manufacturing model that drives the production of much of today's copyrighted content. Much of the value of online content for a given audience where infinite supply reigns is fleeting, highly contextual and oriented more towards executing business deals or building relationships.

The fundamental concept of copyright - that creating a temporary monopoly for a publisher based on the premise that control of distribution will sustain publishers - is becoming far more limited in its effectiveness to deliver value. The question is not whether someone should have a right to license their content for use under copyright but rather how they should license it. This is why I have suggested for several years that publishers focus on the concept of context rights rather than copyright. In other words, once content has been distributed, it finds its value most easily. The fleeting moments and contexts in which it becomes valuable are difficult to predict in advance in an online environment and the relationships that will result in those moments harder yet to predict.

What the copyright industry needs to adapt to is a different view of what technology will help rights holders to make the most of content that benefits most from unfettered distribution. I believe that this will lead towards is a new style of licensing that is more fully automated and which uses a variety of predefined models to compensate content creators for their works. The rewards may be smaller overall in many instances in terms of money exchanged, but offering more exploitable brand value over time as people discover not only the value of a particular work but the value of a relationship with the creator of the work.

I applaud Copyright Clearance Center loudly for the courage that they exhibited in assembing this event. It brought together many important players with very intelligent thoughts about copyright and the challenges that it faces. An institution such as CCC needs to embrace the future of licensing content boldly at this juncture to ensure both its own future and the future of compensation mechanisms that can encourage and reward the creation of value through publishing.

Labels: copyright, Copyright Clearance Center, intellectual property, oncopyright

There's been quite a rumble in the publishing community in the wake of this week's ruling by the U.S. District Court in Arizona in favor of Pamela and Jeffery Howell, defendants against a lawsuit raised by the Atlantic Recording Corporation for their alleged role in copyright infringement. Atlantic, with RIAA backing, was seeking a summary judgment against the Howells claiming that they had put music files on the KaZaa file sharing service, and by doing so violated Atlantic's rights to distribution under copyright law. That word "distribution" turns out to have become the pivotal point in a key decision that puts copyright law in its true perspective.

The key finding by U.S. District Judge Neil Wake is a simple but fairly profound observation. Wake notes that although statues and court precedents state clearly that a distribution of content is a publication, not all publications are distributions. Specific to file sharing, the defendants claim that they did not put any music in the KaZaa file folder designated for file sharing - and that the record company's claim that more than 4,000 files had been designated by them for download was due to a glitch in the KaZaa software that made their music files, present in a folder not designated for sharing, identifiable by others in the KaZaa network. So although these songs were made to look as if they were available for distribution by KaZaa, they were not by any intent of the defendants. The Howells also pointed out that their computer was accessible by others who could have made their files exposed to the KaZaa network.

The judgment reasserts that copyright is really not about the right to make copies but rather about the right to distribute copies of protected works for use by others. Implicit in that position is that individuals or institutions making copies for purposes other than distribution are not subject to copyright law. In other words, if you're using copies for your own licensed purpose, you're not a distributor: distribution is when you willingly make a work available for distribution and it's actually distributed. In the instance of the Howells, the judge perceived that through whatever happenstance an index saying that copies were available for distribution was not the same as saying that any specific person was actually distributing copies.

Though there is already a growing body of legal decisions that seem to be weighing against RIAA efforts to discourage individual consumers from copying content, the Howell decision is notable in that the judge went to particular pains to delve into the technological "hows" of file sharing as well as into legal precedents. In doing so, Judge Wake has challenged publishers pursuing such suits to recognize that the more that they go into these suits the more that they create a wide portfolio of rulings that begin to flesh out the full reality of electronic content use - a portfolio that over time has weakened rather than strengthened their claims to inhibit content copying. Put simply, the more that these suits continued, the more circumscribed their claims become and the more that their presumption of complete power over copying will weaken.

Already many in the music industry have recognized that trying to inhibit copying per se is counterproductive, as it weakens their ability to build brand value with consumers swapping from one platform to another at will to consume content. If your customer gets a new mobile phone, do you really want to hassle digital rights management issues when they try to transfer their music files to the new phone or do you want them to still be able to love the artists that you have in your stable? Increasingly being able to sustain passion for a brand is winning out over the absolute right to prevent copying. Distribution enables a relationship with a content brand: once that relationship is established, the relationship becomes more marketable than the content itself over time.

Music publishers are beginning to get a far stronger sense of building marketable relationships with audiences as the key to their future profits. Digital watermarking techniques are one key element of moving away from fortress-like content packaging and towards being able to understand the value of the relationships being formed with content as it moves from one context to another. If a CD is copied but nobody cares about it, that's probably a bigger problem in the long run than someone copying a CD and discovering that people care about it very much - and will give you opportunities for revenue that spring from that distribution. Managing copyright via asserting distribution rights is still a very key mechanism for enabling revenues, but the future is in recognizing that you're far better off in the long run taking advantage of free distribution to get content into the hands of people who are likely to be your most valuable customers. Once it's there, have your content packaging ready and able to start the value conversation.

Labels: copyright, distribution, legal, RIAA, suit

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

Yahoo joined the list of online companies reporting rosy quarterly earnings, with earnings stronger than anticipated and profits nearly tripling based in part on earnings from new Chinese acquisitions. In the meantime Valleywag notes that Amazon's 1Q sales were up 37 percent over last year's 1Q results and earnings up 29 percent. Meanwhile Google reported revenues up 42 percent over last year's 1Q and net income was up 31 pcercent, powered in large part by continuing strength in U.S. markets and rising strength in overseas operations.

For those who invested in the future of publishing and ecommerce, the payoff has been handsome indeed. For some the growth of Web services in overseas markets in which they invested heavily is a key factor but in the instance of Amazon it's a combination of people who have time and money to shop online and less of a motive given high gasoline prices to sally forth to the mall. In both of these instances there's the continuing emergence of self-service for goods and content. the tendency for people to what what they want where they want it and to favor those who are best at doing this. "Find a need and fill it" was the succinct definition of marketing given to me years ago, one that online services have done well indeed.

In the meantime over at the Web 2.0 conference there are the usual nods of the head towards Tim O'Reilly and other gurus of social media, but at least according to one report the conference is as revealing for its emerging political correctness as it is for a meaningful exchange of ideas. As now-traditional online properties come up rosy in earnings, is Silicon Valley getting bored with social media's long-term promise but short-term question marks? Perhaps so, given a toughening economy and a lack of fully effective monetization tools: just as the dot-com crash came before contextual ads made monetizing search and non-mainstream media profitable, we're sure to see a short-term fall-off in new social media investments as quick exits begin to seem less likely and the over-saturation of the market with publishing tools fragments opportunities for both marketers and publishers alike to reach scale effectively. This, too, is reminiscent of earlier dot-com days, when many publishers adopted a "wait and see" attitude - and eventually lost major market share and brand value.

What's likely to light up the charts over the next few months for new investments is "social knowledge," a loose label that combines the ability of analytics software and aggregation services to divine patterns from social media and online expert services such as WikiAnswers that build repositories of how-tos from topic experts. Whatever the particular play, being able to get more definitive insights from social media seems to be where the money is being spent.

Missing in this mix so far is a huge push by traditional publishers to counter these trends. Most social media investments by major publishers are still largely incremental, moving at a pace that's not likely to lead to strong offsetting revenues any time soon. For enterprise-oriented publishers this is probably not a major concern right away, as traditional publishing methods for scientific papers, while under great scrutiny, are not likely to hit a breaking point this year due to social media. But we're starting to see more signs of services such as content federation and software as a service creating new competitors for enterprise publishers that are going to be worrisome as service renewals begin to come up against budgets in any long-term economic slowdown. Toss in a slow start to developing social media services and we could be in a relatively brief period in which traditional database services have an opportunity to catch a new uptick in their value proposition.

This all adds up to a pattern that is clear and unmistakable: good content will find good markets, but building good brands for good content requires more new contexts than ever before. The biggest mistake that dot-com naysayers made was disputing the value of those "eyeballs" in the long run. Those fettered to quarterly returns may have felt differently about that in the short run, but once effective monetization and contextualization tools took off, the revenues and the profits followed surely. Monetizing contexts will continue to be a hot spot, and those with the tools to monetize them - not necessarily synonymous with those who own the content being contextualized - are going to do just fine for years to come. More to the point, social media is drawing us to a time when microcontexualization will increase the value of these types of venues for monetization, enabling higher-value transactions to be monetized more effectively than ever before.

So yes, it's a gloomy time for the global economy as a whole, especially for those services that depend on people walking through a doorway that might cost a fiver or so just to get there. Great for the carriage trade, but not so good for mass market sales. This will put more pressure on social media services to provide not just interesting chats but interesting opportunities to survive and thrive - as I am outlining in Content Nation. It may turn out that the greatest motivating factor for social media will be not Silicon Valley greed but worldwide need to build a more effective economy. Anyhow, congratulations around to all those who enjoyed glowing earnings reports, let's not forget that it was less then a decade ago when your revenues were mere blips on the corporate charts.

Labels: amazon, earnings, Google, Social Media, Web 2.0 Expo, Yahoo

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