The SIIA Information Industry Summit at Cipriani in New York City drew more than 420 attendees with a higher profile of industry executives than in previous years - and an air of confidence in the face of industry changes that have benefited many in attendance. Publishing and content technology companies are experiencing healthy growth, showing healthy margins and aggressive shifts towards electronic-first operations where some had lagged in these arenas. But with an uncertain economy on the horizon umbrellas were at least thoughts about future fashion accessories.
When I go to large trade shows I try to make it a point to troll through the less glamorous aisles of exhibitors to discover some of the up and coming companies and to hear their pitches. Some are obviously fully-grown small companies and others have potential that makes them look like puppies with big paws that are just waiting to turn into big dogs. The SIIA Previews event is a bit like that, with three sets of young companies trying to gain the attention of investors and publishers. The event drew more than a hundred people, which was pretty impressive given some of the competition for people's attention in a busy week of events. Companies presenting were limited to five minutes of pitch, followed by Q&A, not unlike Silicon Valley gathering of hopefuls. But this event was held in the offices of CIBC World Markets instead of some trendy Flatiron destination, appropriate given the crowd of serious investors and major publishers in attendance. Highlights:
Opening Panel: Deal Trends
The key moment for this segment was at the very end, when moderator Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring, asked the panelists if 2007 would be a better dealmaking year than last year. Only after a lot of coaxing did a single hand go up, and then a couple of others. Clearly we're at the end of a business cycle and we'll start to see the effects of this within the next six to ten months. There were some good investments described by the panel and some significant wins and new ideas afoot but they're mostly incremental ideas that will take a while to evolve at this point.
The key new players in media investment are hedge funds, as tech is starting to look "safe" with 20-25 percent internal rate of ownership, better than VC's typical 60 percent stakes. Joel foresees more than one hedge funds having difficulties making investments based on a limited understanding of today's markets. Joel noted 942 million in Web 2.0 plays, no exits, 4 acquisitions including YouTube, so where there's money there's hope. Key problem: Web companies are not large employers how do you grow an economy with so few workers. Joel sees the biggest plays in mobile content, for many people a phone is their first computer. In India there are 6 million new mobile phone users every month, 42 million internet users, many in cafes. "Club" (syndicated) deals are a huge trend, 10-35 billion deals made possible because of them - it will get messy at some point try to stay away from it easier to manage in the walls of your own firm
Will Porteus, RRE Ventures
Looking at weather, storm risk solutions - eg ski areas in East, resort owners can buy policy, trading markets emerging for weather volatility. Data center technology complexity going away, new products for mid-market and consumers, storage and networking technologies, easier to use. Debate on where we are in cycle in infrastructure and content, great investments are in riding on that plumbing.
Rene Benedetto, Principal Halyard Capital
Media and Communications Sectors 12 investments in IS, B2b, papers; Opportunities in under the radar companies, avoid out of control valuations. Looking at interactive marketing, lead generation, mass media no longer effective effective for marketing, companies looking at the ROI on cost of customer acquisition. Halyard focusing on lead generation and online directories for education. Transactions-driven content moving towards pay for performance, brand knows what they will pay to get a customer, this company has the data to help them reach them, direct mail, etc.
Lex Miron ED, Interactive Media, CIBC World Markets
CIBC has good platform for media, more interactive plays, more pure plays. Focuses on content, services built around content - content that's designed for the media, Web 2.0 makes old media relevant. Avoids "atoms" - physical-world content plays - looks for plays with barriers to entry, eBay - consumer doesn't want 100 eBays as long as one works well. Prefer A management team with B idea over A idea with a B management team.
Justin Sadrian MD, Warburg Pincus
Audiences migrating to online, ad dollars following, still big lag between online time and online spend, macro trend for years to come. Lead generation is a big focus, and in general people making a buying decision. Audience is key also - looking for destination sites, looking for URL that's been typed in, natural search more defensible.
Steve Fadem, AOL (Relegence)
Bills get paid a lot quicker now, more infrastructure, used to take 5 years to build out a server farm, now a whole team managing this. Came in after "C" round, summer 2001, focused on financial services, complex perferences for four VCs, did a recapitalization round, licensing discussion turned into exit. Worst moment? SF - managing 4vc, outside investors, time horizons.
Company Previews
Decision Tree Media creates private-label web guides that drive qualified leads to sales channels. Clever idea - interactive guides on personal finance strategies and products guide educate potential investors on investment options, creating highly qualified leads. Good use of content, focused, numerous syndication options.
Eurekster empowers communities to own and refine site-based web search. Not a new-new play, but still leading edge: use Wiki-like functionality to tune popular searches. Thousands of "swickis" already developed. Interesting collaborative to improving search results - a little ahead of its time, this one had potential as a feature, not clear that this translates into an effective business model.
Generate, Inc. provides real-time vertical search (from 41 million domains), directories, and social networking services for media and publishing companies interested in generating incremental page views, subscriptions, and user value. Create complex and deep business information from content mining focused at specific business verticals. Promises to do for business information what trading systems did for Wall Street to create enterprise-ready tailored services. Keep an eye on it.
Near-Time integrates a group weblog with wiki pages, team events and shared files in a hosted and secure collaborative environment. Content can be kept private in a group or exposed in part or in whole to the public. Subscription module in the works to allow users to charge access to some or all of a site's content. Early days using Ruby on Rails development but very strong already.
Content Delivery Companies
Dragonfly provides a multi-media content delivery network that builds revenue through engagement, retention and advanced metrics. Nice technology, getting popular amongst enterprises who are swamped with videos when they least expected. A crowded space, but easy to deploy, could get a fair amount of play.
Inform Technologies LLC metatags publisher's existing content and editorial assets to deliver an enriched, personalized online experience, dramatically increasing page views, visitor loyalty and revenues. Already pretty popular amongst publishers, a good tool, not sure that it's worthy of all of the buzz that it's generated, but the stuff does what Moreover should have done.
Pando Networks offers a free, simple to use application with an unprecedented underlying network architecture for rich-media content delivery. Pando solves a simple problem with excellence and extensibility. This is a puppy with huge, huge paws - watch their growth and their potential transformation into a default repository for content of all kinds - including copyrighted entertainment materials.
RealTimeMatrix has pioneered break-through technology that enables anyone to get relevant content from the Web the instant it is published. A filtering mechanism for the "firehose" of Web feeds and other sources, good technology but needing more focus on specific problems to be solved.
Keynote Presentation: Fred Wilson, Managing Partner at Flatiron Partners & Union Square Ventures
How many times do we have to hear the "content wants to be free" speech? VCs seem to want to invest in endless streams of ad-supported plays, never acknowledging that downdrafts in advertising can kill these optimistic rubrics easily. Feeds and ads are important, but I think that Near-Time is right on message in acknowledging that for smaller readership and communities subscription social media will have strong appeal. People are always ready to pay for exclusivity if it buys them some advantages.
Content Protectors
Attributor is creating a platform that provides transparency and accountability in online content use and licensing for the rapidly growing content economy. This is pretty hot - insert a token into an original copy of a file and the Attributor crawl will ferret out copies and tell a publisher which one is which. Has far broader potential than its current uses, but interesting in its own right.
Cranium Softworks, Inc. helps streamline the publishing and content delivery process and protects online intellectual property. Good idea - track logins and figure out who's abusing single-user logins. Good negotiating tool. Needs to be implemented with controls that warn people gently to do the right thing.
iCopyright, Inc. specializes in developing technology for digital content marketing and licensing. Well-known to SIIA members, not a new tool in the strictest sense but with its settlement of legal issues and new ad-based redistribution technologies iCopyright is just starting to make waves. It's relatively gentle approach to IP management places an emphasis on effective content remarketing opportunities.
So there you have it, nary a mangy mongrel in the lot. For a first-shot event this came off extremely well, with good attendance by important players in the content industry. Kudos to Ed Keating of the SIIA and Newstex CEO Larry Schwartz for pulling this off on relatively short notice to high expectations.
The buzz this week is about Google's plans to offer eBook downloads for PCs and mobile devices. Great news, but will this allow the book industry to wrestle out of the stranglehold of a mass of conflicting delivery technologies and DRM strategies? That's not likely any time soon - especially given the tentative relationship between Google and wary book publishers. Yet the future of book publishing is hanging on the willingness of publishers to move aggressively into an environment that will allow eBooks to move into the contexts in which users value them most. Are book publishers ready to move past promises of eBook development to aggressive new strategies?
The announcement cites the relaunched AviationWeek portal as "evidence of AVIATION WEEK's ongoing commitment to digital transformation." It's certainly evident from the redesign that AW is going "online first" in a bigger way, but it's also evidence of the need to keep bridges open to your print-based community. Example: here's the online page for AW's Business and Commercial Aviation print publication, with content parallelling the current print edition and here's the Business Aviation Channel for the portal. The "channel" has content that's building during the days between weekly editions, while the weekly edition content is presumably static once it's on the site. The channels appear in the main site navigation, whereas the print edition is offered in a subnavigation bar under "publications," so the distinction is clear enough - as is the primacy of the digital channel.
This is clear enough, and it's convenient to have a link that allows someone to look at exactly the content that's in a print edition to allow you look up something online that you've seen in print. Try that on many of today's dynamic newspaper Web sites - easier said than done. So kudos from that standpoint as a convenience option for making the most of both the online and print experience. But it's also an indication that bridging to print effectively in a digital environment is still kind of an awkward compromise for those focusing on getting content management systems to do all things for all content producers and all audiences. The online print edition looks kind of "blah", fairly indistinguishable from the "channel" version of the same content.
If print is a premium product appealing to a premium audience part of the trick to bridging to online audiences would seem to be to create a more elite look and feel for that audience - even while getting born-online content to do what it does best. I think that this will get to be a little more intuitive divide as executive -oriented publications start to use print more as a personal concierge-like service. Executives should be able to carve out their own weekly editions out of the online content that matters most to them - and then have access to those selected sets as either an online set of "bookmarks" or in an actual printed publication. This would allow for far more high-value targeted advertising for print editions, and send up rates considerably. Instead of guessing which articles would be of interest to someone in print you'll know that every article had some level of interest for your target audience.
This is where B2B media will be headed over the next five or so years, but we're nowhere near that just now. In the meantime Aviation Week's new portal at least sets the groundwork for keeping the doors open to a print-oriented audience while focusing on becoming cost-effective online publishers first and foremost.
When we reflected on the "Star Wars Kid" phenomenon four years ago we may have seemed a little far-sighted to be talking about average people becoming content producers who could create global hits virally through social media. I noticed a clip in YouTube today coming up next to one that a friend had sent me that underscores just how powerful the trend towards everyday people cutting their own channels to fame and fortune has become. What I found in that list of links was the new hit song and video "My Box in a Box", dreamed up by some folks in Philadelphia, PA in response to a Saturday Night Live parody (explicit lyrics).
MBIAB marries pop music with a video lip-synced by someone who happened to be available for video production. The video hit YouTube about a month ago and has had over 1.3 million downloads. It sells over at Music Freedom for 79 cents, where it became the number one song sold through the download service. There's a MBIAB weblog, of course, as well as a MySpace page a Wikipedia entry and a Second Life avatar. In the works: a book? The actual box used in the video was sold on eBay for $1,500, with proceeds donated to charities. Radio stations are playing the song and guest appearances on MSNBC have not hurt the phenomenon's popularity:
Compared to the millions that media companies are making off of their own stable of stars MBIAB is a tiny thing, but it's these kinds of phenomena that will add up over time and define the core of the content industry as a whole. While music companies and other content licensors are wringing their hands over DRM and other "how to we keep the old model working" concerns all of the infrastructure to create, distribute, popularize, monetize and merchandise media through online content services are all in place and working quite well - albeit with a very different definition of success.
It's not as if these things haven't been done reasonably well in the past: looking at the heyday of an earlier generation of pop stars such as Buddy Holly and Loretta Lynn the entertainment industry has strayed far from its ability to develop "long tail" content into major hits. Instead mass media has evolved into a hyper-tuned model for squeezing out every last drop of revenues and public interest from the most narrow of hits vehicles - call it top four instead of top 40. With so many different channels and contexts through which to develop the value of content most media companies are spinning their wheels trying to build walled gardens of pampered stars whose endearing qualities are oftentimes about the same as anyone else's, even if their lifestyles aren't. Thanks, MBIAB crew, for showing the way to effective monetization models - and thanks ever so much for putting your box in a box.
The New York Times reports on the realization dawning in the minds of music publishers that they may have already lost the battle for chokehold DRM controls built into music downloads. Online music download revenues were up 80 percent last year over 2005 income, but slowing from 2005's growth and not closing the gap in dimming CD sales. Independent labels are thriving with non-DRMed content, a factor also as online audiences begin to develop new allegiances based on accessibility to music within a community: if you can't get your friends excited about something, why bother? Music companies need to face the fact that they have lost the battle for distribution control of over-priced archives and bow to the realities of a marketplace that places a different kind of value on content in social contexts. Music has always been a social medium, and needs to return to its roots as something that's completed by the participation of an audience.
Meanwhile, over in video-land Ars Technica highlights a new lightweight system for "watermarking" video downloads that doesn't use heavy DRM lock-out controls but simply makes it possible to identify who's really paid for content. This "do the right thing" approach parallels efforts by Copyright Clearance Center and iCopyright with text-based content to alert users as to when copyright needs to be respected and to provide copyright holders with options as to how content can be monetized on its way from one person to another without getting too intrusive.
Content relicensing is the huge missed opportunity in the entertainment industry,which still insists that classic spoke-and-hub marketing campaigns are the way to build interest in content. Print publishers have seen these opportunities for some time but are only beginning to look at them more seriously as primary revenue opportunities as subscription and ad revenues become more challenged. As context rights become more important than pure copyright perhaps more publishers of all kinds will take a look at the opportunities that exist from allowing users to be active agents in content licensing.
Whatever Yahoo may or may not be it has certainly become the master of generating topic-specific portals that put most online consumer magazines to shame. The latest is Yahoo! Personal Finance, a well-designed amalgam of news, expert and user opinions, how-to-guides, calculators, glossary terms and data to support focusing on personal banking, budgeting, real estate and retirement planning. It's mostly content repositioned from other tabs in the Yahoo! Finance portal, but with enough of a specific focus on personal finance topics to draw a different find of audience. There's plenty of content from third parties but also a notable layer of Yahoo-specific content - including user-generated questions and answers from the Yahoo! Answers community relating to personal finance. Yahoo! Answers has become the social media "glue" for a number of Yahoo properties, well-integrated into the Personal Finance pages.
As with other Yahoo properties of this kind, the filtering of content is a little suspect. Some Answers topics are spot on but others such as "What's the best answer in a job interview when they ask 'What is your greatest weakness'?" seem kind of off-topic. And does a personal investor really care about a news story on "Berkeley Design Automation Opens Subsidiary in Japan?" Sometimes filler for "freshness" defeats the purpose of a portal's focus. Nonetheless Yahoo does this kind of topic-centric consumer media aggregation very well indeed. As major portals such as Yahoo aggregate not only third party content but unique user-generated content and their own editorial offerings it will become increasingly hard for traditional consumer publications to build up enough editorial "oomph" to compete with online offerings that can be sliced and diced dozens of different ways with minimal investment.
The Wall Street Journal (subscription) and others provide details on the Tribune Company's efforts to sell off their media holdings - and they aren't pretty. The bidding power The Chandler family and Los Angeles businessmen Ron Burkle and Eli Broad have bids that are little more than current market value, well below expectations, while The Carlyle Group seems to be focusing on their television holdings. This is hardly a rousing endorsement for the value of Tribune properties, but more importantly seems to point towards the end of the line for the recent round of "musical chairs" of newspaper M&A. With a Democratic Congress expected to look at media outlet holding rules afresh, recent moves towards "synergies" in markets may face fresh scrutiny - and further demotivate investors looking for scale to overcome the limits of collapsing traditional media markets.
In the meantime the bloodletting at major media companies steams on as they try to come up with margins that seem reasonable to their investors. Ann Moore let go 289 from Time Inc. worldwide to focus more resources on online operations, even as other print-oriented news outlets pursue cutbacks. At some point the question has to be asked: how much of this is pushing talent away from major media companies altogether to create new competitors? Some layoff strategies seem to be focused on the older hands who, in addition to being pricier, were squeakier wheels regarding the quality of editorial output suffering in the transition to multiplatform content delivery.
Many of these sacked writers and production hands may have had skill sets less attuned to multiplatform content generation, but some who were truly interested in good editorial quality are likely to resurface in their own Weblogs or via new startups. It's a bit like the Tsar in World War I sending the serfs out to the front lines of the battle with rifles, only to discover that at the end of the war these discharged veterans turning on them in full armament to foment the Russian revolution. In the push to make the numbers work for deals and impatient investors, media organizations are forgetting that "surplus" talent can fuel the production of competitive content inventories far easier than in the past. It's no longer a closed-system game, a factor that will be one of 2007's major reality checks. Deal-making is not likely to come to a screeching halt this year, but expect a lot more scrutiny as to whether media companies pushed hard enough early enough to make a graceful transition to more profitable and well-placed online operations.
This doesn't seem to have hit the news wires yet but it's public on the Thomson Business Intelligence site (link) . Key sections:
After carefully analyzing our product portfolio, we have decided to realign specific services within Business Intelligence Services. Our goal is to best align our products and resources to the markets and customers we serve...We have determined that our Broker Research and Insite services are best aligned with Thomson Financial, the Thomson business unit that is a recognized leader in financial information and business intelligence....We are selling Market Research (Profound(R)) and NewsEdge. We are currently in discussions with potential buyers and will keep you apprised of our progress.
This seems to parallel the realignment of Thomson assets in the education sector, pushing some assets back towards financial, legal and STM verticals where they're best used and ceding the rest to more effectively positioned business information competitors. Unfortunately Thomson Business Intelligence never quite coalesced into the integrated offerings for market verticals and functional verticals that other business information offerings have formed over the past few years. Instead the individual cultures and architectures of each of the product offerings under the umbrella were never put aside in full and wound up being an "old" Thomson division of standalone offerings under a common sales umbrella.
This is all for the best in the long run, but especially in the instance of NewsEdge you have to wonder what could have been done if product politics had been put aside and it would have been positioned as key infrastructure to make Thomson's licensed content assets more accessible to a wider corporate audience. As it is too much time was lost, so it's up to someone else to consider what to do with NewsEdge's infrastructure in an era in which news monitoring is shifting to online services and more specialized and powerful enterprise business intelligence services. There will be takers, but probably not at premium prices. Best of luck to everyone in this deal, in the end better things are bound to happen as a result of this move.
TechCrunch notes the debut of Wikiseek, billed in its salesmark as "A better way to search Wikipedia," but positioned for much more. Wikiseek searches return a tag cloud of topic categories related to search terms, followed by summaries of key matching articles from Wikipedia on the left and sponsored links on the right. But below the key articles are other possible links of interest, including content on the Web to which Wikipedia articles link. From that perspective Wikisearch is perhaps a baby step towards the vision provided for Jimbo Wales' Search Wikia concept, also known as "Wikisaria," which would power a more Web-centric search engine using human intelligence gleaned from Wiki technology.
Wikisaria sounds like a very interesting project, but in the meantime Wikiseek is at least a better tool for searching Wikipedia - kind of. In searching for the term "content" on Wikiseek the page for this topic in Wikipedia did not appear in the first three pages of search results: by contrast a search on Google for "content" returns the Wikipedia page for "content" in its first five results. Wikisearch's failure to list this term may be due in part to it being a "disambiguation" page, which provides links to a number of possible articles that relate to this word. Still, for a quick lookup it's not a very satisfying conclusion. But many searches on Wikisearch do provide useful results - and less frustration than Wikipedia's hit-or-miss native search feature.
Given Wikipedia's primary role as a standalone reference source it's not clear that it will ever have the breadth of links out to the Web to make this a completely satisfying place to start a Web search. But at least it does provide a view on Web content that is heavily filtered by people who care about specific topics who don't have any particular revenue strategy in mind. Compare and contrast this to a service like About.com, which provides articles written by compensated docents who focus on creating content with outgoing links that's more advertising bait than definitive reference content - and no on-site search tool to cruise those outgoing links.
There's a lot more potential for people to use Wiki technology to provide a guide to interesting Web content on specific topics, but I am a little skeptical that Wiki technology will have any fewer limits in this regard than social bookmarking systems or other services that can be harvested for understanding what's important to users on the Web. The opportunity to scam and pollute a social media service with bogus or inferior links is difficult to control in general and likely even more difficult for a user-edited reference system that's trying to scale for picking out the best of everything on the Web.
What you will wind up with in all likelihood is a search tool that is, like most social media tools, reasonably thick in a few specific topic areas and very thin in the majority of topics. I am not sure how that scales into a competitor against Google, which already uses algorithms to take into account trustworthy link recommendations. But it may not have to: providing a unique filtering experience for the Web is just as important as providing a "me too" alternative source in the competitive battle for better search tools. We'll be seeing more of social media tools being leveraged to power search this year, but expect an evolutionary step at best towards more interesting search paradigms.
News that the New York Stock Exchange may cut a deal to bring real-time trading information to Google Finance is bound to cause quite a stir, but the fact of the matter is that NYSE and other sources of real-time information are late to the Web game. While Wall Street huddled down and focused on ensuring sub-millisecond delays in trade tickers the rest of the world was out building news and other business-ready content on the Web that's in real-time feeds as soon as it's posted online. New services are sprouting up to take advantage of this phenomenon, a trend that's likely to shape many enterprise-ready information services.
Many years ago I was involved in developing some of the first feeds of stock ticker data to crawl across the bottom of news television broadcasts. They worked well enough, but the stations that we worked with were supposed to put a message at the bottom of the screen saying that the data in the feeds was delayed fifteen minutes. The message was there...kind of. It got squeezed off the bottom of most television screens, by "accident." And most viewers were probably none the wiser.
Today most individual investors tracking their stocks know very well what "real-time" data means and they demand it whenever they can - for a price. Now Google has announced a pending deal to bring real-time market data from the New York Stock Exchange to its Google Finance online financial information service at no charge to its users. Google Finance has been maturing quite a bit since its rather spartan introductory days, providing a rich array of statistics, feeds, analytics and portfolio tracking tools to help investors sift through investment management decisions. But providing a real difference that would budge users from other long-established financial portals has proved to be elusive.
If the SEC approves the deal it could be a very compelling push to move those investors over to Google. With news sources proliferating on the Web there's much more market-moving information available to the typical online user that's available to them at the same time as financial professionals receive this information, so moving NYSE markets in line with this expanding array of news sources would seem to give them an advantage with online investors as it tries to shore up its position as a premier global marketplace for securities.
But the real reason why this seems palatable to NYSE at this point is that the "real-time" stock trading information that users will experience on Google is not the same real-time experience that professional traders in global investment banks have at their disposal. With mere sub-millisecond delays in the information from exchanges received at major financial institutions - and their ability to execute trades on that information via extremely powerful automated trading facilities - even marginal advantages in delivery speed are enough to ensure significant profits for the inside players. So moving to "real-time" information for consumer investors - at some presumed price to Google - still ensures an inside market while encouraging individual investors to feel that they're more on top of the latest market data. It's a win-win for NYSE and the major banks - and a potential coup for Google. Opening bell, here we come...
The announcement of Dow Jones' reorganization of their Enterprise Media Group may seem a little superficial at first - basically it's Dow Jones Newswires and their licensing and reprints business coming under the same banner as Factiva, other Enterprise Media properties are essentially unchanged - but in concept it's a pretty powerful statement as to where major aggregators are heading these days. The resources now combined as Dow Jones Content Technology Solutions enable Dow Jones to focus on adding value through content technology products and services across all of their native and licensed content offerings both behind enterprise firewalls and in the increasingly heavy-duty "Business Web" of online content services supporting enterprise markets.
In this new mix it's probably safe to say that the push is going to be more on the open Web side of things than into pure enterprise sales. Dow Jones isn't likely to be pushing more news tickers or DJ licensed content into enterprise accounts: this is all about trying to create more effective redeployment of content assets in online venues away from WSJ.com and other Dow Jones online properties. Two factors have to be prominent in senior minds at Dow Jones to prompt this move.
First and foremost the Reuters online media business is running at full steam through selective but savvy online content licensing in addition to its rapidly growing Reuters.com portal. Compare and contrast this with downright timid licensing of Dow Jones content into other online venues and the overshadowing of the Dow Jones brand in online venues by the Reuters "bug". When users pick the contexts that they want their news in you have to move with the flow. This has become easier since core content in the Wall Street Journal is moving away from commodity news and towards high-end analysis.
But the other key factor has to be Reed Business Information's small but significant steps towards positioning third party news content from its LexisNexis database online, as noted in our earlier post. Why have a licensing division puttering around with just one news wire when you can put them to work on repositioning licensed content from Factiva's database in a wide variety of new online and enterprise venues? Factiva has made some gains in revenues through its content integration strategies but it will take a far broader array of outlets and integration partners for them to gain a significant boost to their top and bottom lines. Factiva content licensors will also benefit from Dow Jones licensing teams streamlining portal deals and going toe-to-toe with long-time online value-add syndicators such as Yellowbrix.
Dow Jones has a lot of catch-up ball to play in online business information offerings but Rich Zannino and Clare Hart seem to be moving Dow Jones Enterprise Media into a much more effective position on the court. Expect a lot of interesting presentations from these two execs over the next few months as they start outlining their evolving visions of the "Business Web." Stay tuned here for further details...
While all eyes are on the CES show this week for the latest in consumer gear the big content news so far is coming from the Macworld Expo. Read/Write Web covers the debut of Apple's new iPhone, a Zune-sized gizmo running a version of Apple's OS X that combines phone, iPod and Web functionality into one slick package. There are any number of typical nifty features on the phone - built-in camera, video-capable touch-screen interface, easy PC or Mac syncing - but the key factor is Apple's Safari Web browser that comes along with the heavy-duty OS X underpinnings. It's the first time that a fully-featured Web browser has appeared on a mobile phone to render native HTML Web pages. While Australian IT notes that the iPhone's preview iteration is equipped with older and slower phone communications technology it's likely that it will get performance upgrades that will make iPhone a powerful mobile Web content delivery device - capable of upstaging many of the made-for-mobile content services launched over the past few years.
I've been mentioning for a while that mobile content deals are short-term gambles at best, and iPhone's full Web browsing capabilities only cements this factor in my mind. Hooked up to high-speed broadband, the iPhone promises to usher in an era in which people can move their electronic lives into a phone-ready device with minimal angst. Certainly Microsoft is out there also with scads of Windows Mobile-enabled phone devices, but they pull punches on Web functionality with a wimpy Internet Explorer Mobile browser - a gap that they can fill easily enough in time, but for now it's a handicap, especially since those same devices lack entertainment options.
For the moment iPhone swings the buzz - and music downloads - away from Microsoft and begs big-time one huge question: with the Web the music delivery medium of choice for young content consumers, why on earth didn't Microsoft put a phone and a decent Web browser into the Zune instead of a dumb old-media radio tuner? If I am going to tote around a relatively bulky device I want to be able to eliminate the need for other hardware whenever possible. Expect these issues to be rectified soon enough by Microsoft - and for the mobile Web to become largely just another place to consume what people have been getting via their PCs for years. In the process of doing so, expect geo-based contextual marketing and and localized publishing via the Web to take yet another great leap forward.
The announcement of ContentAgenda, a new Beta-version online publication from Reed Business Information, is perhaps not ground-breaking in the general scheme of online publications, but it is a very impressive stab by a major B2B media company providing coverage that probes deep into the style and substance of many of today's leading weblog news sources using a variety of mainstream sources and site-specific weblogs.
Shocker number one: News content is being sourced from a wide variety of non-RBI mainstream news outlets provided via Reed's LexisNexis division. Shocker number two: this third party content from LexisNexis is being provided with both banner and scraper ads and ads from Google's AdSense program. Semi-shocker number three: unlike most business-oriented news sites from major B2B media companies the design is genuinely good and appealing within its parameters, with excellent navigation throughout and a relatively uncluttered look and feel. Non-shockers: no comments on news articles - only on blogs, feeds are headlines-only, in testing thus far weblog content that's part of the native LexisNexis set via Newstex is not included.
There are a number of bloggers already providing content and bloggers are being actively invited to find a home at ContentAgenda, specifically those focused on "the new entertainment industry." ContentAgenda is clearly a shot at weblogs such as paidContent.org, which has built up both a strong core following for its primarily entertainment-oriented online media coverage via an expanding network of journalists supporting the ContentNext family of weblogs. With the successful string of ContentNext mixers recently the now-proven ability of this and other weblogs to develop their own events revenues must also be an appealing proposition to RBI and other B2B publishers looking to focus in on elbowing out competition for new revenue streams.
ContentAgenda is an interesting mix of mainstream news supplemented with weblog opinion that brings LexisNexis news content into a whole new repurposed editorial light focused on very specific industry topics. The news is timely and focused on three main categories - discs and downloads, policy and IP, content and commerce - and the weblogs seem to be fairly decent. Pulling mainstream news from across a wide range of publications is a huge plus, providing a relatively agnostic approach to news aggregation in an ad-supported environment that takes this kind of aggregation beyond search engines such as Topix that are good in their own right but lack human-powered editorial focus.
This is about as good a job at this sort of new-style online trade publication as you're likely to see out of a B2B media company. It's leveraging internal subscription database assets for a focused media publication in a whole new way that's exciting to see from the both the perspective of LexisNexis and from the news organizations that support it. It's in a way turning the LexisNexis database into an asset that can be positioned in a way similar to wire services such as AP that may provide news licensors new ways to position their content for very focused audiences and ad revenues that would be more difficult to attain through individual licensing deals.
The potential weak spot in this new concept is the division between blogs and mainstream news sources. There's a stubborn strain in mainstream journalism which seems to say that weblogs and other social media are fine for random rants and insights but not good vehicles for providing breaking news. This insistence on separating "real news sources" from weblogs is probably necessary in the short run to gain the confidence and comfort of the sources supporting a product such as this but in the long run it may tend to reinforce an artificial separation that could keep publications like ContentAgenda from finding an authentic voice that appeals to a very focused community. This is where publications like paidContent.org, which are built around a very person-to-person editorial style and a strong community spirit that drives editorial content through comments, may continue to hold a significant advantage.
For an early stab at a publication of this kind ContentAgenda provides an interesting mix of content and many very useful and polished features that should have a strong appeal to an online audience. For users frustrated with the limitations of search engines - including this user - a well-focused collection of news and commentary from the widest range of sources possible can be worth its weight in gold. But as an alternative to well-focused weblog properties with strong professional communities tapping into them the going may be a little tougher for a while. Congratulations to Reed Business Information for taking a bold new stab in a very interesting new direction. We'll see how well it pans out, but for now I am reasonably optimistic about its prospects.
Mashable! covers the debut of LinkedIn Answers, a knockoff of similar products from Yahoo! and Amazon that leverages the LinkedIn contact network of professionals to focus on key business issues. Questions focus in general on topics of interest to key executives and can be placed in categories such as Administration, Business Operations, Career and Education and so on. As with its consumer-oriented brethren many of the questions and answers turn out to be kind of vapid or vague - for example,"Do anyone would like to increase is network?" or "What issues does your team need to continually address in order to be an effective team?," but on the other hand a question like "What is the key success factor for global operating companies?" from a student working on a doctorate degree has already yielded 23 very intelligent answers from a wide variety of executives. Now THAT's a powerful business research tool.
2007 is going to see answers systems such as this as the new darlings of social media, providing the ability for people to form social networks based on areas of common interest and to contribute highly valuable content on an ad-hoc basis that addresses key concerns that are burning in people's minds right now. While answers communities have a pretty high ratio of misses to hits for content quality the hits tend to be very powerful - not unlike social bookmarking communities, where just a few key topics are likely to draw any real discussion threads. In essence each question becomes a little bulletin board topic in and of itself, without having to worry about sustaining any particular topic area over the long haul.
These types of services should be of particular interest to trade magazines: if you execute your community features properly you can in effect let a community interview itself - and pick off the best of the threads for editorial polishing into finished stories. I was pretty skeptical about Yahoo! Answers at first as a reference tool, but I can see more clearly now that answers communities are less about ongoing reference content and more about engaging people in "water cooler" conversations focusing on specific topics that help to hold a community together. From this perspective an answers community is a perfect tool for LinkedIn, helping to draw together the intellectual power of its well-networked executives into mini-conference panels at the drop of a hat. Yet again we see the evolution of media into a tool that is more powerful when it steps back and stops trying to mediate between people looking for answers and people with the answers.
I had the good fortune of speaking at BookExpo in Washington, DC last year on the same program with Don Tapscott, who gave a great presentation summarizing his evolving views of shifting corporate realities and their influence on publishing. Don's insights have been influencing major corporations for decades, leading to his new work called Wikinomics, a book and complementary online resources developed with his partner Anthony Williams with USD 9 million in research to back up their insights. Wikinomics looks into the pervasive effects of collaborative and peer-driven publishing technologies on business.
The opening chapter of Wikinomics gives a compelling and pithy example of a gold mining company that had to come up with answers quickly as to the size and potential of deposits in their mine property. Inspired by the story of Linus Torvalds developing Linux as an open source computer operating system their CEO decided to take a new approach to this problem. With about USD 500,000 in prize money as the carrot and full access to the company's usually highly confidential data over a thousand contributors from around the world doubled the identified potential gold deposits, 80 percent of which produced substantial gold. Open access and collaborative publishing had become, quite literally, a gold mine.
Don and Anthony note in the book that "as a growing number of firms see the benefits of mass collaboration, this new way of organizing will eventually displace the traditional corporate structures as the economy’s primary engine of wealth creation." This is heady stuff, nearly on a par with the socialist visions of the 19th-century economist Karl Marx. Yet unlike Marx's rather bleak assessment of the human condition and the remedies he sought to address the suffering found in the industrial revolution Wikinomics paints a positively glowing vision of a business utopia that is to be gained through collaborative and peer-driven information sharing and development. Mind you it's a business book that has to appeal to busy executives, so you'd expect a "how-to" message of this sort, but I think that Don and Anthony have hit the nail on the head.
The fundamentally open and flat nature of Internet-based communications allows intellectual talent to assemble from virtually any source to solve virtually any human problem - as long as people are open as to how they participate in the rewards for their efforts. In essence, then, the Internet has enabled humans to organize themselves without hierarchical control. This is in marked contrast to the corporate vision spelled out in Peter Drucker's 1946 classic Concept of the Corporation, which laid out the case for the military-like structure of postwar General Motors, with its hierarchical command-and-control divisions, as the paradigm of business efficiency. Business, we were told in effect, is war, with the victor claiming the spoils and enslaving the losers. At the time this made sense, as the ability to wage war had been the central source of power for nations since the beginning of civilizations. Corporations would extend that model and become nation-states of their own in effect.
But in today's economy it is not clear that the ability to wage war provides the most power in organized societies. No major power has clearly "won" a war that resulted in substantial material gain for that nation since World War II. Instead, guerrilla warfare, with loosely developed networks of upstarts committed to an idea or cause, has trumped hierarchical political structures time and again. Now in the business world the "troops" that a company assembles under its corporate umbrella may be right for today's battles and entirely inappropriate for tomorrow's. The advantage of holding "territory" such as intellectual property in such an environment such as this becomes more limited. It becomes more important to get that property to its most valuable context, where its value can be nurtured most effectively.
In its furthest extension, then, the Wikinomics concept is really about returning human society to the pre-historic era of nomadic hunting tribes, which could shift their location and resources as needed to respond to rapidly changing environments without the need to have external hierarchies protecting land through wars. Given the issues of our physical environment that are unfolding before our eyes the timing of the development of Internet-based collaborative and peer-based publishing may turn out to be quite fortuitous. But the world of today's publishing is certainly not ready for the most part to accept the depth of this kind of change in their own structures. We're still in the era of publishers trying to turn wild animals of content that we chase in a hunting culture into the domesticated animals of an agricultural culture, through which we can gather the herds into the barns for milking every quarter.
I think that this is the fundamental reason why digital rights management has not worked terribly well to date. There is this inherent disbelief in the minds of most content companies that they will be able to benefit from letting their content "go wild." They just cannot picture in their minds the "hunt" that will benefit them as their content travels from context to context, fattening itself along the way, as they harvest its worth through value-add transactions along its travels. Instead, DRM controls say in effect that they really don't want the content to leave the barn. Content, in their minds, is dumb and weak and must be protected by instruments of war. The paradigm suggested by the Weed DRM scheme that allows users to benefit monetarily from content distribution at least suggests that content can go out grazing and let us know where it is so that we can track it down. So perhaps Microsoft's licensing of Weed portends interesting future developments.
In the meantime Wikinomics is going to become a classic read, albeit attached to an unfortunate title. Wiki technology per se is a very small part of the collaborative content picture and is going to be superseded by other publishing technologies fairly rapidly. There is a chapter in the print version of the book that is actually a pointer to the Wikinomics Web site, which includes a Wiki where people can add their own stories about collaborative content to the picture. There is also a weblog, of course, and sample book chapters in PDF format for browsing. This is likely to become a standard format for book publishing over the next few years, pioneered by Chris Anderson's Long Tail weblog that served as a proving ground and input collector for his business book of the same title. Chris happened to be on the same program as Don and I at BookExpo, equipped with stacks of pre-release copies of his book. No doubt there were some lessons learned by Don from Chris' efforts - lessons that appear to have been well applied.
I would have liked to have seen Wikinomics available as a downloadable eBook with the ability to mark it up with comments, as can be done with some of today's eBook reader packages, but unfortunately the book industry is still in the agricultural mode with its own business models. Well, when you're in a war economy, you have to take your spoils where you find them, I guess. Good luck with the book, Don, it looks like a hit. Hopefully Content Nation gobbles it up.
With the confetti from New Year's celebrations barely in the dumpster the hangover from a heady 2006 weighs heavily on the minds of many content services providers. The pace of change for content producers in 2007 doesn't promise to slow down a whit - and in fact is likely to gain steam as a stalling economy promises to push slow-to-change publishers off the stage altogether and to accelerate the shift to electronic revenues. Our preview of our full-blown Outlook 2007 focuses on six key "A"s for the new year: Audience, Aggregation, APIs, Alternatives, Acceleration and Asia.
