AlacraBlog

A Social Networking Primer from the FT

The Weekend FT had an excellent, long article on Social Networks titled The high priestess of internet friendship, which profiled Danah Boyd.  The article presents plenty of evidence for the "you are what you publish theme." 

...most people, Boyd found, were using the sites to present themselves to a small group of friends and get their recognition and feedback. The sites are an opportunity to define in public who they are. By providing an audience, and the tools to interact with that audience, the social networks are satisfying that need. Boyd calls this behaviour “identity production” and, employing a favourite phrase of hers, says that young people are trying to “write themselves into being”. The MySpace page is like an online version of a teenager’s or student’s bedroom wall. “They are tuning into an audience,” said Fred Stutzman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies student behaviour on Facebook. “One of the things students do at college is they test out identities. Maybe that is one new thing we are seeing now - more rapid changes of identity. Online you get feedback and you can change at a moment’s notice.”

Of all Alacra's content partners, Forrester offers the most comprehensive coverage of the social networking space.  Some recent reports include:

• July 7, 2006 - Financial Consumers Adopt Social Computing by Bruce D. Temkin
• September 25, 2006 - Teens + Social Computing = Social Shopping by Charlene Li
• October 3, 2006 - How Consumers Find Web Sites In 2006 by Charlene Li

Charlene Li posts often on this space.

Google Buys JotSpot; Socialtext Teams With Microsoft

I've posted a number of times in the past about how the growing adoption of social software is in many ways Knowledge                Management 2.0.  Whereas five years ago Knowledge Management projects were typically complicated and expensive, and had dubious ROIs, now they're much simpler and easier to manage. 

The two leading companies in this area are SocialText and JotSpot, and, while they have both been making excellent progress, their utilization in many cases were in small groups within an organization.  This is likely to change now as Google has purchased JotSpot and SocialText has done a deal to be integrated into Microsoft's SharePoint.  JotSpot, which had a free and for-pay version, will now be completely free.  This has to be a concern for SocialText and will likely push them to do a deal of their own.  Ross Mayfield, Socialtext's CEO, comments here on the JotSpot deal.

Jarid Makes The Post - Photo And All

Alacra Director of E-Commerce Jarid Lukin was part of a New York Post article today on web-based job seeking. "I can say with 100 percent confidence that I would not have found this job without Indeed.com, because the vacancy was never listed on a job board," says Lukin. "I think Indeed.com picked news of it up from venture capitalist Fred Wilson's blog."  Indeed.com is a successful vertical search engine focused on jobs and did a great job matching Jarid to Alacra.

Wiki Adoption

There's a good article on wiki adoption over at internetnews.com:  Why Wikis Are Conquering the Enterprise.

Google Needs to Remain Synonymous With Search

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion posted on some silliness over at the Google blog where the Google folks only want you to use the verb "google" if you're using their search engine.  In other words, it's incorrect to say you're googling someone on Yahoo!  Google wants to be synonymous with search, like Kleenex is for tissues, but only if you're using their products. 
Don Roll, Alacra's MD for Europe, is giving a presentation next week in Amsterdam and asked if I could update some slides for him that I used at a 200 Club meeting in London in July.  I went back to the slides and just 4 months ago I said Google was becoming less synonymous with search:  In July they were nowhere in vertical search, blog search, video search and people search.  Four months later they've bought YouTube, the most trafficked video site; stepped on a handful of potential vertical search providers through the launch of Google Custom Search Engine and have made moves to increase the usage of Google Blog Search, by adding a link to Google News.  And while Google News Archive has been a disappointment, improvements are coming.  So while Google's stated corporate mission is to organize the world's information; their marketing mission is to remain synonymous with search and they're willing to pay and invest to achieve this mission.

VSS Communications Industry Forecast

Yesterday I received my copy of Veronis Suhler Stevenson's Communications Industry Forecast 2006-2010.  As usual, VSS delivers, with a tremendous collection of statistics, growth rates and analysis covering a very broad definition of the communications industry.  The chapter I flip to first, Professional & Business Information Services, had the following highlights:

• Total spending on professional information and business information services is expected to grow 8.2 percent to $135.35 billion in 2006...
• The market is expected to experience a CAGR of 7.8% during the forecast period due in part to the increasing use of online and wireless formats and the rising demand for complete service solutions.  Spending is expected to reach $181.90 billion by 2010.
• Spending on financial and economic information is expected to increase almost 10% per year through 2010.

The Forecast, significantly larger this year than last, covers 16 distinct segments including a new  section on Business & Institutional End-User.  If you need to size an industry or segment, this is one resource you have to have.

Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006

On September 29, President Bush signed the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006 which, over time, will increase competition in a market that is currently dominated by two players, S&P and Moody's.  Glenn Reynolds, CEO of CreditSights, has testified before Congress and regulatory agencies a number of times on the Rating Agency duopoly. [House Committee on Financial Services November 2005; SEC November 2002.]  Glenn recently wrote a  piece titled Rating Agency Legislation: Great Boost for Competition, which CreditSights has allowed us to make available here.
[Disclosure: S&P, Moody's, Fitch, and CreditSights are Alacra Content Partners.]

Knowledge Management Pieces, Loosely Joined

Read/Write Web has become a favorite blog.  Wednesday they had a post called Personalized News: A Market Overview, which compares and contrasts a number of personalized content solutions.  "The idea is that everyone has their own pattern of reading. To recognize your pattern, Personalized Content services omit stopwords and extract keywords from the news you read - then use Bayesian Statistical analysis to predict what kind of news you will like or dislike in future."  For knowledge workers this has always been a topic of keen interest but commercial solutions to date have not been effective.  The web-based leaders  are Reddit and Findory, but there are a number of newer services that are tackling the problem. 
Thursday they posted on SocialText and Enterprise 2.0, the definition of which varies widely.  From my (albeit narrow) perspective it means the adoption of social software (wikis, blogs) within the enterprise or Knowledge Management 2.0.  SocialText's success is dependent on wider enterprise adoption of social software and their latest release goes a long way towards meeting the needs of new users who need simplicity and orientation.  For more information on SocialText 2.0 check out their screencast.

Now I Know Why We Survived

Paul Graham has a terrific post called The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups.  I'm going to excerpt  here with the some comments about Alacra but the essay is worth reading all the way through.  Prior to getting into the list, Paul explains, "...there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something that users want.  If you make something users want, you'll probably be fine..."
Here's the list:
1. Single Founder - "It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him." 
2. Bad location - NY is on the list of good locations.
3. Marginal niche - We chose a pretty big niche - aggregated business information.
4. Derivative idea - We were probably guilty of this - aggregated business information over the internet delivered in speadsheets.  The internet was derivative in 1996.
5. Obstinacy - "Start-ups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads."
6. Hiring Bad Programmers - Little of that here.
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform - None of that here either.
8. Slowness in Launching - Our first product www.xls.com, launched with 4 databases.
9. Launching Too Early - Critical mass in content was over a year away, but in retrospect we timed our launch well.
10. Having No Specific User in Mind - For us it was information professionals and the ubiquitous "knowledge worker."
11. Raising Too Little Money - We raised $500,000 in angel money, which I thought was plenty. But the angel who invested the most money, Dale Prouty, told me, "Steve, you can't start a lemonade stand with $500,000."  And he was right.
12. Spending too much - Not a problem here - we didn't even buy the used Herman Miller chairs when the were cheap and widely available.
13. Raising Too Much Money - We were OK here too.
14. Poor Investor Management - I think we lucked out here because our investors were either incredibly easy to manage or not needing any management at all.
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit - This point refers to having a clear business model; we always had specific users and a specific business model in mind.
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty - This point assumes that the founder(s) is a programmer. "Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from it." 
17. Fights Between Founders - I can see how this would be a problem, so we avoid that here.
18. A Half-Hearted Effort - "Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job."  The difficulty of this if you have a mortgage and young children cannot be overstated. 
If you're thinking of starting something up, this is a must-read.

Factiva, a Dow Jones Company

People were surprised when Dow Jones and Reuters joined their archival news retrieval businesses in 1999. People were even more surprised when the venture was named Factiva.  And I suspect people will be surprised to learn this morning that Dow Jones has bought out Reuters' half for about $160 million in cash and stock, valuing the business at a little more the 1x sales.  Factiva, (a long-time Alacra partner) has great products, great people and a significant share of the market for packaged, aggregated, archival global news.  But the news business has changed the dramatically since Factiva was formed and it was clear to many that the 50-50 structure was not helping the Company make progress.  So this deal should work out well for both Dow Jones and Reuters.  With Clare Hart sitting in a spot where she can influence the direction of Factiva without having to deal with an unwieldy Board structure, Factiva customers should benefit as well.