AlacraBlog

Team Lipshtat Takes The Cup!

In an incredibly close competition, Team Lipshtat edged out Team Tharaken and Team Bruni to take the 2007 Alacra Cup Hack-a-thon.  Team Lipshtat, pictured here, developed a working prototype of an email request service for end-users and information professionals to request and fulfil premium content requests through Alacra.  The service, which will take several weeks to bring to production, will help end-users get the information the need in a timely fashion and will significantly enhance the cost recovery efforts of our customers.  Congratulations to Orly and her team!  From left to right: Karl Kaebnick, Rosa Sac-Wilkins, Orly Lipshtat, Simon Vileshin, Alex Leytes.  More pictures here!

The First Alacra Cup Hack-A-Thon

This morning we kicked off the first Alacra Cup Hack-A-Thon.  The development group was split into three teams and each team was given a project to complete by 11:00 tomorrow morning.  Here are the projects:
Email Wishlist:  Build a workflow connecting buyers of business information (research centers, librarians, information professionals) with requesters/end-users of business information.
Better Book:  Overhaul the Alacra Book user interface and workflow with design and user interface elements from the Alacra Store.
Store Affiliate Program: Build a ‘plug-in’ which web site publishers may use to include Alacra Store results in their sites.
Tomorrow, starting at 11:00, each team will present their finished work to the judges and the winning team will get the Alacra Cup!
I'll let you know the results mid-day tomorrow.

 

The Essex Blades

Alacra Product Management star Janet Tarendash is also a star on the ice.  This past weekend Janet led The Essex Blades Synchronized Skating team in a performance at the Mennen Arena in Morristown.  Proceeds from ticket sales were  donated to the Alzheimer's Association of Greater New Jersey.

Three Views on Private Equity

There wasn't any wifi at BSeC so I missed my regular blog reading on Monday and Tuesday.  But on the plane last night I opened up the FT and there was a post (an article? a column?) on the op-ed page by Information Arbitrage blogger Roger Ehrenberg.  Why the Blackstone offer may signify a bubble is only for FT subscribers, but it condenses a number of Roger's earlier posts on the growing bubble in private equity.
Mergermarket just posted their fourth annual Buy & Build Monitor, which presents hard data on private equity businesses pursuing buy and build strategies. 
Financial News Online has a story titled Bankers expect flood of private equity public offerings.  The story references a Keefe, Bruyette & Woods research report examining the trend in alternative asset managers going public. 

Buying & Selling eContent - Day 2

There were a lot of conference attendees on my 4:00PM flight to Newark, so I suspect David Scott, the final speaker, was talking to a half-empty room.  This is unfortunate because I'm sure David was a highlight of the conference.  The morning session featured Mike Stelzer of E&Y, Jim McGinty of Cambridge Information Group and Cynthia Hill, formerly of Sun.  Mike talked about how E&Y, with over 100,000 far- flung employees, was trying to adopt Enterprise 2.0 technologies to improve productivity and collaboration.  Cynthia Hill talked about the information arena and collaboration capabilities in Second Life.  While I understand the entertainment proposition for Second Life, I'm still having a difficult time seeing how work is done more effectively in a virtual world.  I guess it's like that Graham Parker lyric - "I can't see the point but I see the attraction."
Rafat Ali (pictured here with Michelle Manafy) spoke for 15 minutes about the journalist as entrepreneur and the history of PaidContent.org. He answered some questions from Michelle about the "voice" of his coverage and writers.  He replied that the PaidContent voice was "not being dull" and that "we never quote anybody."
The networking at the conference was excellent as usual.  I think, though, that the conference is much better when at least some of the speakers come from outside the "traditional" electronic content industry.

Buying & Selling eContent - Day 1

When you attend the same conference year after year, the years often seem to blend together.  Sometimes you can't remember who spoke about what when.  But I do remember that BSeC usually had at least a couple of provocative or controversial speakers, especially when Google burst onto the scene.  While yesterday's program was fine, it wasn't until the end of the day when Patrick Spain talked about whether "all content will be free" that a somewhat edgy viewpoint was offered.  And it was Patrick's presentation that was compelling, more than his hypothesis that an increasing amount of content will be available for free and be monetized through advertising. 
Prior to Patrick's talk I attended a "Knowledge Cafe" called Through the Firewall - Intranet Access to External Content, hosted by Martin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus.  About 8 of us (buyers, sellers and an investment banker) had a interesting conversation that strayed to whether or not a professional services firm would allow advertising on their intranet to offset the cost of premium content or other information services.  I've asked a lot of customers about this and while some find the question worth thinking about, the answer has always been no.
For more BSeC coverage, Barry has posts at www.contentmatters.info.

New Life for Sell-Side Research?

As practically every Alacra customer knows, there have been huge changes occurring in the after-market sell-side research arena.  Equity research departments of major firms have been adjusting their distribution strategies to better monetize their published work.  Alacra, as well as our partners at Thomson, Reuters and TheMarkets.com, have been working hard to meet the needs of the equity research publishers while at the same time trying to deliver what research consumers want. [Alacra is working with several customers on enhanced cost-recovery fcapabilities so these customers can more accurately determine who's consumimg what content, and why.]  While I'm not sure to what extent the monetization of equity research can be improved, there is clearly a need for sell-side shops to change their distribution strategies to reverse the "napsterization" of their product. 
On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that Merrill Lynch was taking such steps.  Candance Browning, SVP, Head of Global Securities Research & Economics at Merrill Lynch said, "much like the music and film industries before us, Merrill Lynch research is in the throes of being Napsterized."  So what is Merrill going to do?  In a "Message from Research Management" Ms. Browning explains:

So, starting this month, we have begun to take a number of aggressive steps to ensure that we can continue to provide premium products and services for the exclusive use of our clients. We are rolling out a digital distribution strategy that 1) terminates research access to non-clients on our proprietary site and external vendor platforms; 2) further restricts and delays media access to selected content; 3) eliminates existing licensing arrangements that erode the value of our written product and 4) establishes licensing agreements at market prices competitive with services offered by other providers.

As a re-distributor and re-seller of business information, Alacra is an advocate of higher prices for content.  Whereas several years ago we generated a significant amount of revenue from the sale of embargoed investment research, this revenue stream has all but disappeared as the perceived value of a sell-side research report has diminished.  So, while we're certainly not in favor of limiting re-distribution and increasing the embargo period on the release of research to the after-market, we are very much in favor of publishers receiving a fair price for their content.  Let's see how Merrill's new strategy is executed and whether other equity research shops follow suit.
For more on sell-side research, see Booz-Allen's Saving Sell-Side Research from June of last year.

Businesses Adopt Web 2.0

Nicholas Carr posted on Wednesday a quick summary of two recent studies on business use of Web 2.0 technologies. The McKinsey study, from which this graph is taken, is available free.  The Forrester report, titled Efficiency Gains And Competitive Pressures Drive Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption, is available through the Alacra Store.

Buying & Selling eContent

Barry and I are off to the 8th annual Buying & Selling eContent conference put on by Information Today at Camelback in Scottsdale.  This is always a great conference for me in that I get to meet with many content partners and several customers at a terrific venue.  Plus, coming from New York, the weather is always better in Arizona this time of year. 
This year the speaker line-up is the best they've had:  Clare Hart of Dow Jones, Paul Pellman of Hoover's, Jonathan Hoy of LexisNexis, John Blossom of Shore, Patrick Spain of Highbeam, Mike Stelzer of E&Y, Rafat Ali of PaidContent, Corilee Christou of Cygnus and David Scott of Freshspot Marketing will be some of the highlights for me.  Barry is hosting one of the Monday afternoon "Conversations." His topic is How Vertical Search Can Enhance or Create a Line of Business.

FT Ask the Expert, With Glenn Reynolds of CreditSights

Glenn Reynolds, Co-founder and CEO of Alacra content partner CreditSights, is currently featured on the FT's Ask the Expert column. Glenn answers readers questions on credit spreads, the relationship between the subprime mortgage market and auto and credit card loans, prospects for the DAX and S&P 500 and a handful of other timely investment issues.