AlacraBlog

Alacra's PowerPoint "Book"

First we delivered Alacra Books (Public Information Books) to investment banks as PDF files.  These "books" contained information on a company (news, SEC filings, investment research, executive bios, earnings estimates, etc.) from disparate sources.  We took a time-consuming, manual process and automated it.  We then had requests to create a Microsoft Word version so that internal documents could more readily be added and the document as a whole could be more easily edited.  Most recently we've had a number of customers ask us if we could create an Alacra Book equivalent in Microsoft PowerPoint.  These customers frequently create PowerPoint slides containing the same bits of company-specific information.  So we have this figured out now.  It works really well and many firms are finding this application to be a useful tool as part of their pitchbook process.  Here's a sample.

Outsell's Leader Board

Last Friday's Outsell Now contained this chart on SADS - Search, Aggregation and Data Services.  Apart from feeling left out, it seems that an ecletic group of companies had been included.  Perhaps the MarketView report this has been excerpted from contains the inclusion criteria but it's an expensive report so I may never know.

AlacraWiki One Month Later

We launched the AlacraWiki one month ago and since we're using Hitbox, we can track visitors and trends.  In the first month we had over 13,000 page views and over 2,000 unique visitors.  Not surprisingly, the People section and Alacra Industry Spotlights were most frequently visited.  While I think the numbers are pretty good, I know we need to beef up the content to enhance the site's usefulness.  To date there have been over 300 edits made.  We're actively soliciting industry marketing executives to post information on their companies, databases and corporate executives and we plan on having Alacra personnel continue to add content.

What I Found While Packing

It’s not moving that’s such a drag. It’s the packing. Especially for people like me who have a hard time throwing anything out. I save photos, articles, prospectuses, business plans, magazines – almost anything. Highlights of what I found: 

Copy Number 11 of Mosaic Communications Corporation (Netscape) business plan, dated August 17, 1994 and Copy Number 135 of Netscape Communications Corporation Private Placement Memorandum - $2,000,000 Shares Series C Preferred priced at $9.00 per share. Relating to Knight-Ridder’s pre-IPO investment in Netscape.

Two articles by Rich Karlgaard: When Cash Is King, December 25, 2000 and Carly Fiorina’s Seven Deadly Sins, February 11, 2005. I’ve read each of these several times. Carly’s first sin: acting like a rock star. “In the U.S., only entrepreneurs get to act as rock stars.”

Lead article, New York Times Money and Business Section, Sunday July 4, 1999: Now, AOL Everywhere. I lost a small fortune shorting AOL in the mid-nineties – I knew it would implode, but I was almost 10 years too early.  Subscription businesses take a long time to die. More evidence that you know the end is near is when there’s big article or cover story in the Times or Business Week.

Sunday New York Times November 7, 2004: How to Avoid Living Like a Poor Student at Age 70 by Ben Stein. Like Karlgaard’s When Cash Is King piece, a strong message on the virtues of frugality.

Finally, a couple of my favorite Hank Blaustein cartoons from Grant's Interest Rate Observer.  The cartoon archive is here.

All Moved In

Well almost. I haven’t been able to post much lately as we’ve been preparing for our big move west. After 8 years as a Barra subtenant at 88 Pine Street, on Saturday we moved a few blocks west to 100 Broadway, opposite Trinity Church.  Our new space is bigger, brighter and better in many ways.  If you plan on being in the neighborhood, please give us a call and pay us a visit.

Good Luck Ollie

Veteran Account Executive Oliver White left us last week to take a sales management position at Azdex, a London-based reference data shop.  During his six years with Alacra, Ollie was critical in developing our business in the UK and did an terrific job covering some of our largest customers.  He also did an excellent job representing us outside the office.  We wish Ollie the best of luck.