AlacraBlog

The Movie Business Challenge

I'm a fan of Mark Cuban's Blogmaverick.  In a recent post he issued the The Movie Business Challenge whereby he offered a job to someone who could solve the following problem:

"How do you get people out of the house to see your movie without spending a fortune. How can you convince 5 million people to give up their weekend and go to a theater to see a specific movie without spending 60mm dollars.  For those of you doing the math. You are right. Its not unusual to spend 8, 10 , 12 dollars PER PERSON that goes to a movie in the opening weekend. Shoot, its not unusual for studios to spend that much per person to get people to go to the theater through a movies entire run !"

The amazing thing about this post was that the last time I looked there were 827 comments that provided suggestions as to how to solve the problem.  I didn't read all of them but many of these, I thought, we actually creative, effective ideas. (One thirteen year old girl posted 2 comments, numbers 820 and 823, both interesting ideas.  My comment is number 781.)  There were another 40 or so comments at GigaOM where Robert Young has a lengthy post.  When solving a business problem there's typically no shortage of ideas, it's the execution that's the toughest thing.  But if you have 800+ ideas, most of which coming from customers, the odds on finding a few that can be well-executed have to increase noticeably.

Long Tail Gets Stepped On

Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal takes his shot at Chris Anderson's Long Tail thesis and then Chris deals with the backlash. Whereas Tim Wu's critique on Slate confirmed the existence of the tail, but questioned is universal applicability, Gomes isn't sure that even where the long tail does exist, it's that big a deal.  Gomes questions whether "hits are starting to rule less" and whether the role of the tail is "getting bigger and bigger."
My view is that Chris has a very interesting thesis, at a level similar to Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Surowieki's The Wisdom of Crowds, or Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice.  And I am enjoying the book.  But can one change their strategy to leverage the tail?  By luck or by design, the easy long tail business are spoken for.  And no one tries to manufacture something specifically to sell it in the tail.  It takes too long and, well, you'd always like to have a hit.  And even if you have a long tail business already, like the Alacra Store, adding more content (inventory) and improving discoverability (SEO, marketing) are the common sense tactics to generate more revenue.  So Chris has made a wonderful observation, backed it up with some reasonable good research and is an excellent writer.  All the makings of a hit. 
[The chart shows the distribution of Company Snapshot pages requested on the Alacra Store.  In the head are popular, high cap companies and companies for that score high in terms of SEO; in the tail are all other companies.  The top 1000 companies requested only account for 17% of the company snapshot page views.  So we have a pretty long tail.]

Idea Generation in Investment Banking and Asset Management

Fred had a great post yesterday called Transparency, Markets, and the Internet.  He highlights a number of his investments that have used the internet to increase market transparency and provide better workflow for investment professionals.  While transparency is a wonderful byproduct, what both sides of the street are really starving for are ideas. That's why Comscore, Majestic and Monitor 110 who Fred mentions and Alacra content partners Mergermarket, CreditSights, ISS and other independent research providers are often valued so highly.  Idea generation leads to transparency and market efficiency which in turn leads to more idea generation.  And the application of technology to this endeavor continues apace.

10th Anniversary Party

Thursday night we had almost 100 people over to mark Alacra's 10th anniversary.  I was planning on making a brief toast, thanking everyone for coming and for their support.  I often say that Alacra faced a chicken and egg challenge when we started: It was hard to get customers without any content and it was hard to get content without and customers.  So it was wonderful to have a great mix of content providers and customers together to help us celebrate 10 years.  We're going to post a photo album shortly and you can see some other pictures over at Barry's Content Matters.

The Wrong Tail

I'm a fan of Chris Anderson and the long tail thesis.  I read the original article a while back, I check his blog regularly and I'm half-way through the book.  And Alacra and the Alacra Store are long tail businesses.  But I think Tim Wu's article in Slate, The Wrong Tail, is right on the money - the long tail certainly exists but it doesn't exist everywhere.  It's most prevalent in the content arena - music, books, movies, online business information - but the theory is much less applicable in the world of physical goods.  I had been talking to people in the office about this but Tim's article is much more articulate expression of why the long tail is a bit overreaching.

Good Luck, Barbara

One of our original employees, Barbara Koscs, recently left Alacra to spend more time with her family.  Barbara was an ace customer service and salesperson at Knight-Ridder, and we jumped at the chance to hire her back in 1997.  She was our first successful salesperson here when we were Data Downlink and eventually took on the VP of Product Management role as we changed to Alacra.  Barbara's knowledge of our business, understanding of our customers and attention to detail will be sorely missed here.  But we want to wish her the best of luck in whatever she chooses to do next. 

The following are some further thoughts on Barbara's departure from Colin duSaire, Alacra V.P. and Carol Ann Thomas, Alacra's Marketing Manager:

A few weeks ago, a most valued employee, Barbara Koscs, left us to pursue other new and exciting endeavors.  For those of you who do not know Barbara well, she was our information source, our project management “goddess”, our documenter, our friend.  She “kept the trains running” as Tony Bruni liked to say and we will all miss her. 

Most of you will remember fondly, the emails that admonished us for not reading the documentation in order to find an answer to some burning question.  Who reads documentation anyway?  Wasn’t it faster and more efficient to just dial 3848 and get the answer from Barbara herself…and then some?  Of course it was.

Need to know why a customer has some strange configuration and all the history behind it?  Just call Barb.  There was little she didn’t know the answer to.  Plus, calling was always better than email, since she never failed to copy customer service on replies, some of which we may not have wanted others to see.  And for heavens sake you better have spell-checked any missives you penned before hitting send.  This lesson we learned from her.  A tough lesson indeed.

How many of us have been skewered by some finely tuned words in a response, sometimes not even realizing it for some time afterwards.  We most certainly have.  Barbara was not a wielder of a saber when a rapier would do the trick.  This is the Barbara we know and love and she always believes in doing the right thing, however painful the process.  Some may have been put off by this but that was the job, to be the information source and pass it on in the most efficient way.  To be the documenter and encourage us to adopt the same practice.  To be the one who said "we cannot put that into production, it would be a disservice to our client".  To be the one who finished on time.  To be the one who "kept the trains running". 

Barbara, we want to thank you for your enormous contribution to Alacra, to the people here, and most especially to me and Cat. 

Good luck and…thank you always.

AlacraWiki Spotlights

The UK eInformation Group (UKeiG) voted AlacraWiki Spotlights to their top 10 list of Business Information Sites.  On their blog they wrote, "The Alacra Industry Spotlights in particular are extremely useful in providing reviews and commentary on industry specific web sites that have statistics, market research and news."  Congratulations to the Alacra Editorial team for their hard work creating and maintaining the Spotlights.

Alacra Product Management Conference

Late in June the Alacra Product Management team had a two-day offsite, bringing together staff from New York and London.  The conference was a big success with the after hours eight-ball tournament clearly the highlight.  It was very close at the end but the tournament was won by Mike Angle and Angela Lowther.

Blogging from London

I'm over in London checking out Alacra's new UK office and meeting with customers and content providers.  Tonight I'm giving a short presentation to The 200 Club called The Impact of technology on the Information Industry.  Four key points (all of which I've made before elsewhere)  will be 1) verticalization of search, 2) information will arrive via RSS, 3) social software will spur a rebirth of "knowledge management" and 4) You Are What You Publish.  In Friday's Wall Street Journal there was a front page story Covering Your Tracks In an Online World Takes a Few Tricks (subscribers only) about someone who wanted to erase his MySpace profile in advance of an interview.  It's not easy, so you need to be careful with what you publish.

Ten Years Later

Alacra, born Data Downlink Corporation, is ten years old today.  A few other companies that started within a few weeks of when we did include Financial Engines, Hollywood Stock Exchange, Infospace, Internet Capital, Intralinks and Soundview Technology Group (purchased by Schwab).  eBay was started a couple of months later. There's a long list of companies in the information space that started at the same time we did but didn't make it through the bust.  You may remember Triene, Amulet, Xigo, edatafinder, Sagemaker/Divine, to name a few.
  So why have we survived and succeeded?  Five reasons stand out.  First, we have been fortunate to hire terrific people and these terrific people have joined together to make an outstanding team.  This team has earned the respect of our customers and content partners and have created our excellent reputation in the marketplace.  Second, our angel investors who got us started and Dave Rutter, (then at Prebon now at BrokerTec) who gave us free office space for a year.  Third, when the going got tough during the Web 1.0 bust, our primary investors, Fred Wilson (then at Flatiron now Union Square Ventures) and the guys at Barra (Andrew Rudd, Kamal Duggirala, Jim Kirsner, Bruce Ledesma, Gregg Stockett) gave us tremendous support. Without them we wouldn't be here now.  Fourth, our content partners have really helped us build our business, especially the handful who helped us with our chicken and egg problem - getting content without having any customers.  This group included Greg Smith, then at Indepth Data now at Cicada, Tom Clarke, then at Technimetrics now at TheStreet.com and Mike Danson of Datamonitor.  Finally, our customers, whose names I can't mention but whose business we truly appreciate.  So I want to thank everyone for helping us get this far and say Happy Birthday.