(Posted by Jarid Lukin, Director of E-Commerce)
To say 2006 was a big year for the Alacra Store could be the understatement of the year. Not only did we successfully complete our beta period, we also established ourselves as the go-to source for business information for tens of thousands of visitors EVERY DAY. How have we accomplished this feat you might ask? Besides having a great team, we also have great customers who love to give us feedback and help us improve our product. Many of the enhancements we have worked on this year have been the direct result of input from our passionate users.
Here are just a few of the highlights from 2006:
- Ajax Keyword Search - In Q1, we relaunched our keyword search results using Ajax technology. This upgrade gave our users federated searching capabilities across all of our databases, with the ability to seamlessly refine their search criteria and interact with the search results, easily going from thousands of "results" to a few potential "answers" in seconds.
- Company Snapshots with RSS Feeds - In June, we announced new Company Snapshots on over 200,000 public and private companies, including free RSS feeds on each company containing alerts on the latest credit and investment research from our premium business information publishers such as CreditSights, Moody’s Investors Service, and Thomson Financial.
- Google News Archive Integration - In September, Google released Google News Archive as the first incarnation of their efforts to go beyond free web content. All of the Alacra Store's historical premium credit and investment research, market research, and economic data is now included in Google News, greatly increasing the scope of its business information content.
- Country Snapshots - Just a few weeks ago, we added over 200 Country Snapshots to the Alacra Store, in partnership with our friends at the Economist Intelligence Unit. In partnering with Alacra, the EIU made many key economic indicators, such as Historical GDP and GDP Growth Rates, publicly available on the Web for free for the first time.
Last, but certainly not least, the Alacra store would not exist without our world-class premium business information publishers. Since we launched, we have added valuable content from all 3 major credit rating agencies (Moody's, Fitch, and S&P), company profiles from Experian, Hemscott, and Institutional Shareholder Services, televison transcripts from Voxant and Congressional Quarterly, and industry news from Access Intelligence, ALM Research, and Newstex. The list of all of our business information publishers reads like a "Who's Who" of the business information industry. These leading-edge publishers were willing to experiment with a new transactional business model and are now starting to see the benefits.
As you can see, 2006 was a tremendous year for the Alacra Store. I would like to thank our entire team, all of our publishers, and of course, our (vocal!) customers who have pushed us to where we are today and continue to push us forward for the future. As we stated when we launched, whatever you want to call it – the “deep web” or the “invisible web” – there’s still a tremendous amount of valuable information online that cannot be found on search engines and is only accessible to those who pay hefty subscription fees. With the Alacra Store, we can now offer much of that content to anyone with a credit card.
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