AlacraBlog

Thomson Reuters in FT Lex

The Lex column in FT today has an interesting piece of the stock price differential between the London and Toronto exchanges for Thomson Reuters.  There's almost a 20% difference between the share prices on the two markets.

"The Canadian holders of Thomson Reutersstill see it as a mostly defensive professional publisher. Strong first quarter sales figures last week supported the thesis that the combined group is resilient. About half of revenues and earnings before interest, tax and amortisation come from the less volatile professional division. And, more by chance than by design, the combined financials business has limited exposure to the worst-hit areas – fixed income accounts for just 7 per cent of combined group sales.

The view from London, meanwhile, is that the Canadians have no idea what is about to hit them. Reuters (40 per cent of combined ebita) is still seen as a hostage to the fortunes of its main customers, the investment banks. During the last downturn it was clobbered. Underlying revenues fell by almost a fifth between 2001 and 2003. Even after five long years of restructuring, ebita margins fell from 15.4 per cent in 2001 to 12 per cent in 2006. The shares troughed only when the rate of contract cancellations stabilised; that was not until the first quarter of 2003."

 

News In Print, Volume 2

Today was one of the rare days the New York Times Business section had more than one interesting thing to read.  I didn't even get to the FT on the subway ride to the office.  The coverage of the abandoned Yahoo deal (NASD:YHOO) was fine, although I'm sure the coverage will be just as good elsewhere. 
Media columnist David Carr covers Apple's renewed efforts to dominate the movie download business in Steve Jobs Stakes Out the TV Den.  Carr writes, "I love my iPod and all 3,000 songs I have on it, but if I had it to do over again, and now I do, I wouldn’t have entered a lifetime partnership with Apple (NASD:AAPL). The studios may end up with a similar feeling, having helped Apple build another hardware franchise on the backs of their content."  (I remember several years ago hearing executives at Thomson say the same thing about FactSet - building a business on the backs of their content.)
Then there's an advertising article about technology publisher IDG: Publisher Tested the Waters Online, The Dove In, which covers their gradual move from print to online. 
If You Use Outlook E-Mail, Meet Xobni covers a free service that enhances your Outlook email experience.  (Xobni, which is "inbox" backwards is excellent - I've had it installed for 3 or 4 months now and use it everyday.
Finally, for music fans, there's a profile of indie record label Fueled by Ramen which brings us Panic at the Disco and Gym Class Heroes. 
It's hard to imagine the Times being able to deliver this level of quantity and quality everyday, (the quality is usually there but not the quantity) but they had me engaged this morning.  And then there was even a piece article on Elvis Costello's new CD.

News in Print, Volume 1

Given that Alacra licenses content from about 50 publishers, I get a bunch of magazines, newsletters and email newsletters very month.  I don't get time to read many of them, but I do flip through them quickly. The current edition of Corporate Board Member magazine (a bi-monthly), from the publishers of the The Directors Database, has an article titled Catching Up (and Up and Up and Up) with the Technology Bloggers.  It starts like this:

It’s amazing that any code or term sheets get written or any products shipped, considering how much time Silicon Valley denizens and their brothers and sisters around the U.S. devote to reading, writing, and discussing blogs. In the technology industry, the temptation is to think there are more blogs than workers, given the number of people who have two or three of the online diary-cum-communication tools going simultaneously.

The article goes on to mention venture capitalist Brad Feld and Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of SUN (NSDQ:JAVA) and highlights a handful well-known blogs the editors thought corporate board members should know about, including: BoingBoing, Techcrunch, Guy Kawasaki, Silicon Alley Insider and GigaOm.  They did a good job selecting high quality blogs.

At the back of the book there's another piece: Craigslist, The One Thing You Won't Find For Sale On Craigslist.org.  Here's an excerpt:

Meet Jim Buckmaster, 45, CEO of privately held Craigslist, the world’s No. 1 source of classified ads. Whether you’re shopping for a new job, a used car, a computer, an apartment to rent or a house to buy, Springsteen tickets, even a last-minute date (Craigslist’s “casual encounters” is an active category), you can find it among the 30 million ads placed by Craigslist users every month. Some 26.6 million American adults—that’s one in nine, and we do hope they’re adults because “casual encounters” can get pretty raunchy—visited the site in January, according to the digital-metrics gatherer ComScore. And although at 13 years old Craigslist is practically a senior citizen in Internet time, its audience is still growing at a sprightly rate: 2007 traffic was up 74% over 2006.

The magazine is well-written and well-produced and no doubt serves its readers  well.  It's hard to believe, though, that there's a population of very senior business people who don't know this stuff already.

European Private Equity - Q1 2008 Unquote Barometer

If haven't seen this before and you're interested in the private equity market, take a look at the Candover and Incisive Media Unquote Barometer.  Candover is a leading European buyout firm and Incisive Media is a rapidly growing B2B publisher.  Unquote is their quarterly review of the European private equity market.  Here's the summary:

Preliminary figures in the Q1 2008 Unquote Barometer published by Incisive Media and sponsored by Candover reveal the ongoing effects of the credit crisis on the European buyout market. The value of buyouts during Q1 fell by 32% from Q4 to just €19bn. This was the third consecutive decline, and contrasts sharply with the same quarter a year earlier, when €52 billion of deals were recorded.

Only three completed deals were valued at more than €1 billion, and this has obviously been a major factor in the decrease in value.   The UK continued to outperform other regions in Europe, maintaining its position as the largest market in terms of both volume and value, accounting for 11 out of the 20 largest buyouts and 50% of the total buyouts by value. Part of the UK’s resilience can be explained by a surge in activity at the end of march as many sales were rushed through to beat the deadline for the changes to capital gains tax legislation which came into effect in April.

2008 will be a quieter year than of late, but the private equity market is a resilient one, and history has shown that a downturn on the markets can prove to be a good time for investing.

Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0

Rafat reported, and Fred posted about Austin Ventures' new $50 million roll-up fund focused on Corporate Social Networking and Services.  The title of Fred's post was "Is Social Enterprise Software an Oxymoron?"  That's a great question.  My view has been that what people call Enterprise 2.0 is really cheaper, easier-to-deploy and more effective knowledge management tools.  The challenge in building a business around this is that, as Fred suggests, most social software that is successful in the consumer space couldn't survive in the enterprise and, there are already a bunch of (very inexpensive) products that meet most of the knowledge management 2.0 needs: Jotspot, SocialText, LinkedIn, salesforce, and so on.  What we've found most recently is a rebirth of Microsoft's Sharepoint in a number of financial institutions and professional service firms.  But even with all the tools, it's often tough to get employees to share effectively within an enterprise, and sharing = social. 

Another Reason to Look at WSJ

Gordon Crovitz has a new column In the Wall Street Journal and on WSJ.com on Mondays called Information Age. The first installment, published Monday, was titled Optimism and the Digital World.

2008 BSeC Rant

"The people working to crush the existing publishing models are working much harder than the people trying to maintain the existing publishing models." Stephen Arnold

It never ceases to amaze me how two people can be in the same room and hear entirely different things. Ace analyst and friend John Blossom of Shore Communications and I agree that this year’s Buying and Selling eContent was a little stale. But we had very different views of the presentations. MY take is that the audience is composed of content buyers and content sellers. The sellers want to know how they can make more money and better meet customer needs. The buyers want to use the forum to let the sellers know what their needs are as well as learn about what new products might be available.  And everyone is there to network.

If you talk to an information professional or a buyer of content at a financial institution or professional services firm, most would agree with Andrew Keen – there is a need for a professional editorial process or curator on all content that might be used internally or for a client engagement. They cannot take the risk of distributing to their users or their clients anything that has not been vetted or that is not authoritative. So for the markets Alacra serves and for the buyers in the audience (prestigious accounting firms, consulting firms and investment banks, Fortune 500 companies) user-generated content comes with all sorts of risks that cannot be hedged. Doctors contributing to an Elsevier wiki are just too small a population to make sweeping endorsements of the value of user-generated content. (The presentation by Y.S. Chi of Elsevier was very good.)

Further, while Manta and Jigsaw offer very interesting and perhaps very valuable services to some demographic, that demographic was not present in the room, the exception being all the vendor salespeople in attendence. These products are aimed largely at individuals or teams of salespeople, markets so crowded that margins must be razor thin.    

And then there was Stephen Arnold, who according to some people I spoke with might be a genius. He seems like a smart guy but this wasn’t evident on Tuesday morning. Nothing he said (here's the speech) was wrong, or even that controversial. It was just unmemorable and not relevant to the audience. I paraphrase:  "Enterprise search is broken. Someone is going to fix it. Stephen Arnold knows who the fixer will be.”  The something about Silverlight and Google TV and...I forget. But it doesn’t help a publisher make his numbers this year or next and doesn’t help a buyer better serve the information consumers in their organization. One thing Arnold said on Monday afternoon was spot on – the people working to crush the existing publishing models are working much harder than the people trying to maintain the existing publishing models. Technology aside, hard work usually prevails.  But where my colleague John was politely impressed with Mr. Arnold ("well-polished and insightful presentation") I think the audience was looking for something else and something more.

Of course, it's always important to have speakers with different points of view or speakers that come from outside the conference's industry.  But speakers need to stimulate their audience with information that is relevant to them or serendipitously interesting, like the Viet Nam War Memorial presentation by Footnote.com  There just wasn't enough of that this year.

Felix Salmon on the WSJ.com Redesign

Felix highlights Rafat Ali's report on the multi-million dollar WSJ.com redesign.  His take is this:
"...But at heart it will remain a conservative site, which means that it won't adopt a truly revolutionary idea for a newspaper website: having outbound links on its home page...On the internet, the more you send people away, the more they come back. Why don't any newspaper websites understand this?" I couldn't agree more.

Two Transactions of Note

Market research publisher and Alacra content partner Mintel acquired another Alacra content partner this week: Snapdata International, which publishes the Snapshots Series of reports.  MRWEB has some additional information here.
Reference and counter party data provider CounterpartyLink (another Alacra content partner) was purchased by Investors Guaranty Global Alliance. The press release is here:  Download cpl_igga_press_release_april_2008_final_2.pdf

Andrew Keen at BSeC

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur was interviewed this morning at Buying & Selling eContent.  This was the second time I've seen Andrew in the past few months.  His point of view sort of grows on you, once you get passed the some of the more controversial comments like, "I've never learned anything from my 10 year old son."  I've summarized the views that make the most sense to me:
"The new new thing is curation and professionalism."  In other words, there's so much content available, both good and bad, that curators will command a premium.  "The future is curation - real people putting together real reliable content." 
Professional content providers need to authoritative.  They must not try to be humble."  I'm paraphrasing here but he went on to say that professional content creators must remain protected against the nasty little virus called the cult of the amateur.
Andrew seems to be a fan of Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, which is a curated search engine.
Finally, and this is easiest to agree with: "The crowd can't write."  Andrew insists we need to maintain the distinction between the audience and the artist.