AlacraBlog

New Additions to Alacra

We’re adding a couple of new content sets to Alacra next week – Structured Finance research from Standard & Poor’s and technology research from Forrester.  The Structured Finance content rounds out our offering from the three top credit ratings agencies, while the addition of Forrester will help meet a longstanding request from many customers. 

MSN Search – Quick First Impressions

I tried the beta version of MSN search a few times today.  Half of the time the service was unavailable.  The other times I found the results of business-oriented queries to be better and different than Google.  Our off-the-shelf business test searches are:

• cable modem market share
• France GDP
• iPod units sold

Historically, the cable modem market share search on Google has yielded very old data.  Results on the first page contain data from 1999-2002, nothing more recent.  The results on MSN were much better.  I found excellent information dated July 2004 and September 2004. 

For the France GDP search, on both services, you get to the CIA FactBook on the first page of results, which is a reasonable source.  But MSN had some other interesting results and I thought overall the MSN first page was better.

Finally, the first result for the ipod units sold query on MSN was a blog called FirstAdopter.  The precise answer to my query was on the cached version of the page, included in a blog post from October. 

It’s very early but it seems like MSN is going to be a viable alternative to Google for business-oriented searches. 

Conference Review - JEGI Business Information Executive Forum

The Jordan, Edmiston Group put on a good show Thursday at the Four Seasons with their Annual JEGI Business Information Forum.  The highlight was Paul Steiger, Editor-In-Chief of the Wall Street Journal, moderating a panel on the State of the Capital Markets.  Responding to a question from Wilma Jordan about the election, Steiger said that Bush and Rove ran a fantastic campaign and that even the Kerry people acknowledged that for every move they made, the Bush team had a response.  Two memorable quotes: “Bush is just so energized by people…much more energized than he is by the issues.”  “What are the democrats happy about?  They don’t have to run against Bush again.”

Quick summary of the conference:

Panel 1 was “Innovating for Growth: How Large Companies are Responding to Market Conditions.”  Everyone (execs from Thomson, McGraw-Hill, McKinsey and Reuters) agreed – acquisitions are critical.

Panel 2 was “Fueling Growth: The State of the Capital Markets.”  Bottom line – there’s too much money in every class – VC, private equity, debt – chasing too few deals.  Multiples are going up.

Panel 3 was “New Information Business Models.”  Good panel moderated by Lee Greenhouse but really, there are not too many new business models.  I am interested in checking out one of the companies whose CEO was on the panel – Pharmetrics.

Ted Meisel, CEO of Overture, was the keynote; it was too much of a sales pitch.  Joe Mansueto of Morningstar closed the conference; it was a nice talk about a great company.