AlacraBlog

Bloomberg Data Set Free?

I can’t really take sides in the desktop battle being fought between Thomson and Reuters. But a new wrinkle is the rumored separation of Bloomberg’s data from Bloomberg’s box, as was reported today in the New York Post. This would be quite a strategic shift, with Bloomberg finally realizing that not everyone needs a terminal and that some customers want to build their own displays and applications with Bloomberg data. It will be interesting to see how this gets priced.

Best in Show at SLA

I had a chance to walk around the exhibit floor a few times at SLA and other than the new Factiva front-end, there were only a few interesting new products. The most interesting was Acumen Information, which is a combination of CMP high-tech trade journal content and Nstein’s content categorization tool. The result was an exceptionally well tagged and well indexed content set encompassing over 1600 technology specific topics presented using a tree-control, drill-down application. The content (or slices of it) can also be delivered via email or FTP. Acumen is offering a free trial that I think is worth checking out.

More on Google

Outsell hosted an excellent drinks/dinner at The Plaza Wednesday night. The guest speaker was Tim Armstrong, Vice President of Advertising for Google. Despite being in the “quiet period” Tim was able to answer a number of questions about Google, albeit at a very surface level. Most of the Q & A dealt with whether or not Google is friend or foe to business information publishers. Google’s view, of course, is that Google is friend to all, especially publishers, with whom they connect valuable eyeballs and generate advertising revenue.

But business information, be it found in trade journals, on the web sites of professional service firms, or hidden in the “deep web”, is not going to be found by Google. These pages are rarely linked to, making PageRank useless, and despite Google’s arguing to the contrary, their other algorithms do not compensate. The Google index is just too big, and the answers to many business information searches are too specific for Google to find. As I’ve mentioned before, the problem for business publishers is that users might think the stuff that Google does uncover might be good enough.

You Can Only Keep The Honest People Honest

I’ve never been a proponent of DRM (Digital Rights Management) for regularly used business information. Five reasons: 1) DRM is a hassle for users; 2) the shelf life of business information is relatively short (other than some market research reports); 3) the likelihood of someone needing the exact piece of information as someone else and at the same time is pretty small; 4) most individual bits of business information just aren’t that valuable out-of-context and 5) if someone really wants to steal something, they will. Hence the saying “You can only keep the honest people honest.”

Earlier this week Outsell published a briefing that Alacra was mentioned in. We called around to a few people asking for a copy, not of the entire report, but just the couple of pages that mentioned Alacra. Although several people invited us to their office to read the report, no one would send us anything. Bottom line: most people are honest and do respect intellectual property and copyright.

Google vs. Factiva vs. LexisNexis vs. Dialog NewsRoom?

An article in last week’s Inside Market Data (subscription required) entitled Could Google Be the Next Data Vendor? explores whether or not Google provides answers that are good enough to threaten the traditional news aggregators’ market positions. The article focuses on ways in which Factiva is making its content more available – transaction-based pricing models and integration into Microsoft Office 2003 are given as examples. But the real challenge for Factiva, LN and Dialog NewsRoom is not making the content more available, it’s adding value to the content in ways Google (or Yahoo!) cannot or will not. Factiva’s new Reputation Management service and LN’s Company Dossier (containing legal information) are examples of products that would be difficult for Google or Yahoo! to replicate, at least in the near term.

There will always be clients who need the content that is available via Factiva, LN and Newsroom that is not freely available on the web. Trade journals, the Wall Street Journal, and New York Times archives, for example, are not served up by Google News. So knowledge workers in financial and professional services, who need comprehensive and complete “news runs”, should be safe markets. It’s the marginal, price sensitive user that will become increasingly difficult for the premium services to win over.

The bigger risk is not that Google or Yahoo! develops a competitive premium service, but that the free services provide an additional catalyst for a devastating price war between the three premium players. While this may sound fantastic for business information consumers, in the long run dramatically lower margins can lead to dramatically lower levels of service.

Back From SLA in Nashville

With everyone trapped in the labyrinth that is the Gaylord Opryland, SLA seemed to be a success for most exhibitors. There were few new companies on the floor, largely because it's been so hard to start up anything new over the past couple of years. It does seem the days of library furniture firms exhibiting are behind us. Most of the people I spoke to thought the sessions were good. Here’s what was announced, new or interesting.

Thomson Financial announced they have an exclusive arrangement now with Merrill Lynch for aftermarket research.
Sharkrepellent (www.sharkrepellent.net) has incorporated compensation data from Equilar into some new Corporate Governance reports which looked as if they were creeping into ISS territory. Alacra already carries Sharkrepellent and will begin carrying information from ISS over the summer.

I got a demo of Factiva’s new Start page and toolbar, which I liked a lot. See a review here.
More later.