AlacraBlog

Founders at Work

I just finished the wonderful Steve Wozniak interview from the forthcoming Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston.  The Wozniak chapter is available here for free and is really a great read.  Part of the blurb from the publishers website: "All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever.”—Steve Wozniak, Apple.  The book will also contain inteviews with Mitch Kapor of Lotus, Ray Ozzie of Groove, Craig Newmark of Craigslist and a host of other entreprenuers. 

The New York Times on Newspapers

Following Friday's coverage in The Economist, the Sunday NY Times Business section had a long front-page article title What-Ifs of a Media Eclipse, focusing on the industry in general but Knight-Ridder specifically.   It reprinted that poignant Len-Vaughn-Lahman photo of Tony.  Jay Harris, who bolted from KR in 2001 rather than make another round of costs cuts at the Mercury News, hit the nail on the head: "Could anyone imagine 10 years ago saying that in 10 years, Knight-Ridder would not exist?  It was one of the strongest newspaper companies in America.  How could you have a hand like that and play it in such a way that you would end up losing everything?"  The KR refugees I keep in touch with thought Tony could keep it running until retirement and then merge it with one of the other big companies.  But having ignored reality for years... it couldn't last that long.

The Economist on Newspapers

The cover story in The Economist the week is Who Killed the Newspaper? The leader is here and the story is here.  Highlights (or lowlights):

"Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time."

"Having ignored reality for years..."

"In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism."

Overall, a combination of The Times They Are A Changin' and A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall...

On Newswires and Why a Bloomberg Killer is So Hard to Build

Dave Winer at Scripting News recently created a way to read NY Times and BBC News headlines on mobile devices, calling them "rivers of news."  Here's what it looks like on a Treo.  Paul Kedrosky follows with a post titled Dave Winer Rediscovers the Newswire, which says the rivers of news have been around almost as long as, well, rivers.  They've been previously called newswires. I have to agree with Paul on this; they've been around awhile and while nice for some, it's no big deal.
To me, the more interesting part of Paul's post was his call for a "proper Bloomberg-killer" which was commented upon by Seth Finkelstein.  Seth asked "Just curious, what's the big problem with the "Bloomberg-killer"?
Licenses? With all the aggregating and repackaging that's being done
now, combined with all the hype about it, shouldn't every conceivable
variation be done to death?"  I'm not sure what exactly Paul meant by a Bloomberg-killer, but to answer Seth's question, the switching costs for a Bloomberg user are huge, in part because some of the data is hard to get and in part because some of the applications/analytics would be hard to replicate.  But the main reason it's hard to kill Bloomberg (or a handful of other information services) is the packaging - how the data and the analytics interact consistently across markets and applications.  For a great (but 10 year-old) background article on Bloomberg look here at Johns Hopkins Magazine.

Another Story about the Evolution of News

I was thinking about the recent acquisition of mergermarket by Pearson for $192 million.  Fifteen years ago, while working for Knight-Ridder Financial (KRF), one of our problems was that our news service was the show horse in a four horse race.  We were behind Reuters and Dow Jones with Bloomberg behind us, well-financed and coming on strong.  Knight-Ridder Financial News (KRFN) had the best coverage in some markets.  We were strongest in commodities and mortgage-backed securities and we were rapidly improving in foreign exchange.  And the news team, led by Angus Robertson, was second to none.  But overall we didn't have the resources to catch up.  So we had brainstorming sessions about how to do more with less and how to differentiate or redefine our financial news.  KRFN didn't cover stocks and we knew that to compete we eventually had to cover equities, which would require a huge investment.

At one of these brainstorming sessions, someone (it might have been me) suggested we start what would essentially be rumor wire.  Initially the focus would be on M&A and then the discussion expanded the idea to other markets.  The rumor wire idea was shot down by some of the KRFN journalists but senior management of KRF also found the idea difficult to support: They couldn't imagine the Pulitzer Prize winning team at Knight-Ridder corporate allowing us to redefine news coverage to include rumors.

Perhaps had we called it an intelligence service, as mergermarket does, we might have had a small chance to get it off the ground.   But clearly, the definition of news has changed in all media, from television to the web.  And investors continue to see financial returns, from the mergermarket deal,  to the rumored sale of efinancial news where mergermarket got its start, to recent investments in blog sites such as GigaOm, PaidContent and the Huffington Post.

Our Great Experiences With Summer Interns

Last summer we hired Harry Chan, a Johnson School (Cornell) MBA student to put together the Alacra Wiki.  After eight weeks (with some help from some Alacra staffers), Harry took our vision and created something out of nothing.  The Alacra Wiki was, and continues to be, a big hit.

For several years, we have wanted to update the Alacra web site, both the external pages and the pages behind the user ID and password.  Our look was stale and it was hard to tell from our site exactly what Alacra did.  So again we hired a summer intern, Linh Pham, an MFA candidate with a major in Design and Technology from Parsons.  This was a much bigger project, as there were a lot of moving parts, so Linh had a lot of help.  But she did an unbelieveable job and today we released the new external pages at www.alacra.com. 

Some of the highlights of the new Alacra.com include detailed product descriptions on each of the Alacra products like Compliance and Current Awareness, as well as listings on the 100+ business information databases from the providers we have partnered with for premium content.

Thanks again to Harry and thanks this time to Linh for a job well done!

Outsell acquires EPS, expands global coverage

(Posted by Barry Graubart, Vice President of Product Management, Alacra)

Content industry analysts Outsell announced today that they'd acquired Electronic Publishing Services, Ltd. ("EPS") of London.

EPS has a 20 year history, providing market intelligence and consulting services, typically for large, international publishers.  They publish a Market Intelligence and Advisory Service that crosses STM, education and business information.  Founder and Chairman David Worlock leads a team of 14.

Outsell has a team of more than 35 analysts (including those in its extended network), serving sellers and buyers of content, as well as those in the investment community.

According to Outsell CEO Anthea Stratigos, the merged company will serve more than 300 clients globally and have a team of nearly 60 people.  The company will maintain offices in London and San Francisco.  David Worlock will join the merged company, serving as Chief Research Fellow.

I-Metrix via TheMarkets.com

                                              Two Alacra content partners - Edgar-Online and TheMarkets.com teamed up today.  TheMarkets.com will offer Edgar-Online's I-Metrix service to their 1400 buy-side customers.  This helps Edgar-Online with a distribution challenge and allows TheMarkets.com to offer a new set of functionality and content to its customers.  Gartner favorably reviewed I-Metrix in December.  Back in May I commented on the lofty market cap at EDGR.  The stock is down a little since then but all things being equal this deal can only help.

Today's Highlights

Dilbert on Information.
An Introduction to Mashups.

Mergermarket Sold to Pearson

Congratulations to Caspar Hobbs and the team at mergermarket for building a great journalistic business and selling it to Pearson.