NFAIS

Yesterday I attended the third and final day of the annual NFAIS conference in Philadelphia.  In the afternoon I was on a Hal Espo moderated panel called Embracing Change: The Search for New Business Models that Work with Rob Granader of MarketResearch.com, John Barnes of Thomson Gale and Eliot Pierce of Times Select.   Most of my comments were about Alacra's content packaging business model and our new AlacraStore initiative.  Rob described the issues selling expensive market research over the web; John talked about AccessMyLibrary and Gale's experiments with online content sales; Eliot describe the business model behind Times Select, initally contrasting the NY Times online strategy with that of the Wall Street Journal Online.  What was interesting about this conference was the diverse set of attendees (only four or five who I had met before).  It was mainly a vendor/publisher oriented conference with a large number of people from Elsevier, Nerac, Thomson Scientific and CSA.  David Turner, SVP Finance of Thomson gave an interesting talk in the morning on Thomson's transformation, in many respects mirroring what Dick Harrington described at the SIIA conference a few weeks ago.  And Google was mentioned the entire day, in almost every presentation.