AlacraBlog

2006 M&A League Tables from mergermarket

Alacra content partner mergermarket have posted their 2006 M&A league tables covering both financial advisors and legal advisors.  The rankings are broken down geographically as well as by dollar volume and number of deals and can be accessed from this page.

Monitor 110 Launch

Last night I attended the Monitor 110 launch party at Link near Union Square.  Monitor 110, which has been in stealth mode for a couple of years, combs the web for market intelligence that would be of interest to hedge funds and asset managers.  TechCrunch wrote up Monitor 110 in September as did the FT.  Roger spoke for a few minutes about the passion of his team, which reminded a lot of the passion of the Alacra team.  Best of luck to the Monitor 110 team.

Social Media Invades...

The Attentio blog links to some new research entitled The Hype is Real: Social Media Invades the Inc. 500. 

The research proves conclusively that social media is coming to the business world at a faster rate than many anticipated.  It also indicates that corporate familiarity and usage of social media is racing far ahead of what many have predicted.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that social media and knowledge management are interchangeable terms in a business environment.  But the increasingly rapid adoption of social media/social software in business settings clearly highlights the value that knowledge management practitioners have been trying to bring to their organizations since the late 90s.

A Long, But Complete Definition of Web 2.0

I got around to reading the FT's special section on Digitial Business from Wednesday's paper.  You can see it here but most of it is subscription only.  Richard Waters has a piece titled Can mash-ups match business needs?  There he gives a three-pronged definition of Web 2.0, which seemed to hit home, compared to some of the other more amorphous definitions:

Notoriously difficult to pin down, the “Web 2.0” label is generally applied to three things. One is a family of “social” software – the blogs, wikis (web pages that are open to a group of people to write on or edit) and other tools that have made it easier and cheaper to self-publish and collaborate on the internet. This promises an escape from e-mail hell: rather than circulate endless e-mail attachments to groups of co-workers, why not co-operate on web-based applications?

A second use of the term is to describe a low-cost, rapid approach to software development. The most visible results are mash-ups, services created by combining data from different sources to create composite applications. Thanks to new standards-based technology (Web 2.0 draws heavily on the so-called web services standards), it is now easier to create these ad hoc.

Third, the phrase is used to describe new browser-based technologies, such as Ajax, that make internet applications behave more like desktop-based software, creating a richer experience.

Waters' article has a handful of comments from Tim O'Reilly, Ross Mayfield and Kim Polese and then concludes with two concerns that linger around Web 2.0 apps: 

Given the nature of many of these tools, this piecemeal adoption should sound alarm bells. Security is one concern: how safe is corporate data submitted to a Web 2.0 internet site? What is the risk that important corporate information will be lost completely? At a time when compliance looms large for CIOs, this user-driven approach to technology adoption cuts across the grain.

To be effective, the sort of new technologies that go under the “Web 2.0” banner also rely on a willingness to share data that in the past has sat in isolated silos. “Understanding what data you can abstract and share among users is the fundamental Web 2.0 exercise,” says Mr O’Reilly.

If you have an FT.com subscription, the special section is worth taking a look at.

IBM's Many Eyes Brings Data Visualization to Everyone

Posted by Barry Graubart, Vice President, Product Management

Identifying and understanding relationships across large data sets is difficult.  Traditional row & column approaches can't scale or support non-linear relationships.  For a number of years, specialized data visualization
tools have allowed analysts to find relevant patterns in data. 

IBM's Visual Communications Lab has launched a social visualization platform called Many Eyes, led by data visualization gurus Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas.  The site offers what they refer to as "social data analysis".  Many Eyes users can upload time series or other data sets, which can then be used by members of the community to build visual analyses. 

Many Eyes is similar in some ways to the recently launched Swivel, which bills itself as the "YouTube for Data".  While Swivel is more focused on data mining, Many Eyes has put their efforts into more advanced visualization.  Both offer simple charts, graphs and cross-tabulation, but Many Eyes includes geographical maps, histograms, bubble diagrams, network diagrams and tree maps.  The maps also support data mining techniques such as co-occurrence of terms (terms that appear together in a document or data record).

As with Swivel, they've seeded the site with publicly available data from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Federal Reserve.  As more data gets added, the relevance of the visual maps will surely increase.

Data visualization allows users to identify patterns in vast sets of data.  As users become accustomed to navigating and mining data visually, these tools will allow them to use data in creative new ways.

John Battelle Interviews Joe Kraus

John Battelle of of Searchblog interviews Joe Kraus, the founder and CEO of JotSpot, which was recently acquired by Google.  No insights into the Googleization of knowledge management, but Joe does describe what it's like to be at Google.

More Enterprise Social Software Validation

The New York Times reported yesterday IBM to Introduce Worker's Networking Software, which describes the integration of Web 2.0 style collaboration features into Lotus Notes.  Business Week reported that Lotus Connections

wraps five social networking technologies up into one integrated package—similar to what Microsoft's Office does for traditional desktop productivity software such as Word and Excel...  The IBM package includes five applications: profiles, where employees post information about their expertise and interests; communities, which are formed and managed by people with common interests; activities, which are used to manage group projects; bookmarks, where people share documents and Web sites with others; and blogs, where people post ongoing commentaries.

The integration of social software by IBM is viewed as part of the battle with Microsoft as some of these capabilities are already built into Sharepoint.  But as Erica Driver of Forrester commented in the Times article, "“I talk to corporate clients every day, and I’m finding the topic of social networking comes up all the time.  What I.B.M. has done validates the use of social computing tools for businesses.”  Lotus Notes, despite all its shortcomings, was always the closest thing to an out-of-the-box Knowledge Management framework.  With these enhancements, plus competition from Microsoft, Google/JotSpot and Socialtext, KM is on a path to become an integral part of the enterprise.

More On Thomson Business Intelligence

Barbara Quint of Information Today has detailed coverage of the re-structuring at Thomson and the dismantling of Thomson Business Intelligence.

Social Networks and Executive Pay

From James Surowieki's Financial Page Column The Sky-High Club in The New Yorker this week:

And, as with any virus, some people are more potent transmitters: Kenneth Langone, the board member who engineered (Bob) Nardelli's hiring at Home Depot, was also the head of the compensation committee that approved Dick Grasso's extravagant payday at the New York Stock Exchange, and was on G.E. board's compensation committee that approved Jack Welch's luxurious retirement package.  Langone is what an epidemiologist might call a super-carrier of the executive pay virus.

The column is all about the "social networks that bind directors and executives together," the kind of relationships that are easily found and examined using Alacra's Connections service.  Surowieki cites research by Amir Barnea and Ilan Guedj at the University of Texas that found that "C.E.O.s at companies whose directors sat on a number of other boards were paid 30% more than C.E.O.s at companies whose directors were not."  And these companies under-perform...

Bob Berkman on IBISWorld

Bob Berkman is the Editor of The Information Advisor (subscription only) and the blogger behind Intelligent Agent.  This month's Information Advisor has a detailed write-up of IBISWorld, one of Alacra's featured market research content partners.  The review looked closely into what niche markets IBISWorld covers compared to other market research publishers and the overall quality of the reports. 

We found the reports to be well-organized, crisply written, and filled with lots of useful charts and data.  They also had accompanying succinct analyses.  We were particularly impressed with the amount of finely grained data throughout the report, which was presented in a very clear and understandable context.  In many ways, the reports reminded us of a more detailed and thorough version of the kind of industry profiles that used to be available from the U.S. government's Industry and Trade Outlook directory.

Bob does his usual excellent job in his review/analysis of IBISWorld as a publisher, and we've found that our customers are, without exception, extremely pleased with the quality of IBISWorld reports.  By following these links you can see some snippets of IBISWorld Australia market research and IBISWorld US market research.