AlacraBlog

Alacra @ SCIP

Alacra will be exhibiting at the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals' 2007 Annual Conference starting tonight and ending on Wednesday May 3.  The Conference is at the Marriott Marquis in New York.  For those of you not familar with SCIP: 

The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) is a global nonprofit membership organization for everyone involved in creating and managing business knowledge. Our mission is to enhance the success of our members through leadership, education, advocacy, and networking.

Specifically, SCIP provides education and networking opportunities for business professionals working in the rapidly growing field of competitive intelligence (the legal and ethical collection and analysis of information regarding the capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions of business competitors). Many SCIP members have backgrounds in market research, strategic analysis, or science and technology.

Established in 1986, today SCIP has over 50 chapters around the world, with individual members in more than 50 nations. In addition, SCIP has alliance partnerships with independent affiliate organizations in many countries.

If you plan to attend the conference, please stop by our stand and visit with Fran and Jeff.

Reuters Buys Clearforest; Launches Algo Trading Service

Reuters acquired Israeli text-analytics provider Clearforest for about $30 million and also announced the launch of their news sentiment analysis tool for algorithimic trading, which uses software from Corpora.  The algo trading service will include both a real-time component to drive automated trading and an archive database to facilitate back-testing.  Expected to be priced between $200,000 and $1 million per year, this is the kind of product that can move the revenue growth needle for Reuters.  But information services for rapidly trading hedge funds is a very competitive market and you're only as good as your most recent successful trades.

Thank Goodness Rafat Wasn't On The Cover...

Because being on the cover of Business Week often means you're at a peak.  It was great seeing Rafat Ali's picture on the inside of BW as one of The Big Shots of Blogdom, along with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Om Malik of GigaOM.  PaidContent.org, Rafat's main blogging vehicle is on roll that will continue.  In addition to the blog, Rafat has the event thing figured out:  John Blossom reported "it's been many years since I've attended an executive-level conference that's had as much energy and buzz as EconSM," last weeks Economics of Social Media pow wow.  And the move away from print and towards properties like paidcontent for breaking news was nicely summed up by Jason Calacanis this week:

"What this is really all about at the end of the day is that WIRED the print magazine--like other magazines and newspapers--are lost and adrift because they can't break stories any more. WIRED is six weeks old when you open it, hundreds of people read my blog posts minutes after they come out. It's impossible for print publications to have a "breaking news" role anymore, and they are certainly not going to be able to keep stories under wraps for six weeks when 90% of their subjects have blogs that are starved for content. Media is becoming two way, and print media can't keep up in a two way world. I think that people may have underestimated exactly how dead print is as a NEWS carrier--and why.  Print is dead in the news role because it can't keep up with the conversation--not because people don't like print per say.

Rafat has the art, science and business of conversation figured out and that's why he's a must read and his events are becoming must-attends.
[BW has a great photo of Rafat on the beach in the rain with an umbrella, but it's not online.  Photo here is courtesy of Rex Hammock.]

Seeking Alpha Interactive Q&A

Seeking Alpha is "the leading provider of stock market opinions and blogs money managers and investment newsletters and a provider of its own high-value, complementary financial content."  One of Seeking Alpha's own bits of content is their Interactive Q&A sessions with "prominent individuals in the investment world. These, however, are interviews with a twist: the individual has agreed to answer questions and respond to comments not from a single interviewer, but rather the Seeking Alpha community of readers and contributors."
The two most recent Interactive Q&A sessions are with executives in the information industry:  Katie Jacobs Stanton, the product manager for Google Finance and Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner.  These are great!

European Private Equity Market

Incisive Media and UK private equity firm Candover just released their Q1 Private Equity Barometer.  A few highlights from their key findings:

• Deal activity reached the highest quarterly value since 2001 with 404 deals recorded in Q1.
• There were 12 deals over E1bn, this is one less that Q4 2006.  This suggests mega-deals will continue to dominate the statistics on '07.
• So far 2007 has been a good year for venture capital, with a huge increase in activity in Q1

This is a report worth looking at as it covers all forms of private equity investment - buyouts, growth capital and early-stage investing.

Stuff Worth Reading

The Wall Street Journal has an informative piece on Microsoft's Sharepoint collaborative software product: Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software. Here's the summary from the online version. The shocker is that there are 85 million Sharepoint licenses in the world spread among 17,000 companies.   Robert Berkman at Information Advisor has made this month's Knowledge Management supplement available for free.  It's called Social Bookmarking as a Knowledge Management Strategy. Finally, there's an MIT Sloan Management Review Special Report called The Future of the Web which contains a great piece titled Beyond Enterprise 2.0. 

COLLABORATION SOFTWARE

 

The Situation: Over the past few years, Microsoft has quietly established itself in the emerging market for collaboration software with a product called SharePoint.

Why It Matters: Collaboration software -- which allows workers to share and work together -- is a new strategic foothold for technology makers trying to gain a broader hold on corporate customers.

What's Next: Expect a fierce fight among technology giants -- Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Adobe and others -- as each tries to become the central player in collaboration.

Moody's Covenant Quality Assessment Service

Moody's recently announced the introduction of their Covenant Quality Assessment Service. 

  Bond investors have become increasingly concerned about event risk and the absence   of meaningful covenants in bond indentures, leaving them exposed to potential credit   losses. Well-constructed covenants can provide bondholders with protection, particularly   in regard to event-driven credit risk. In Moody's view, event-related restrictions are   critical to bond-value preservation, assuming carve-outs are modest and are based on a   firm's needs in the course of normal business.

  Covenant Quality Assessment (CQA) reports will provide a rigorous and consistent framework   for evaluating covenant quality on individual bond offerings. As part of this initiative,   Moody's will also report on market norms for covenants over time, by sector, and by region.

Moody's Covenant Quality Assessment reports are available on Alacra and the Alacra Store.  A sample report can be viewed here. Download covenant_quality.pdf

Web 2.0 Expo Wrap-Up

In many ways, Web 2.0 Expo was like most other conferences - some of the sessions were very good and some of the sessions were not so good.  But it was extremely well-organized, the format for most of the sessions was excellent and the crowd (it was very crowded) was pumped.  Ignite on Sunday and the Launch Pad series were terrific.  Other sessions that stood out, for good or for bad:  Interviewing public company CEOs in front of 3000 people is a mistake.  Jeff Bezos got to do a 5 minute commercial for Amazon Web Services and then (not surprisingly) refused to answer any of John Batelle's tough questions.  If you know he's not going to answer (because he can't) then why ask?  Batelle's interview with Jeff Weiner of Yahoo! was much better.  I checked out Ten Ways to Run a Start-Up Like Genghis Khan which was surprisingly good.  Late yesterday afternoon I attended Enterprise 2.0: What Corporations Want and Are Using, which didn't quite hit the spot.  (One of the panelists was from Cisco; what happens technology-wise at Cisco is different than what happens at many other companies.)  The keynote earlier in the day - Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Is it Soup Yet was more interesting, in that it probed what a corporate CIO might think about Web 2.0 tools "leaking" behind the firewall.  I'm sure these issues discussed in these sessions will be handled much more effectively at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston in June.

Tuesday at SIIA & Web 2.0 Expo

I took in three sessions at the SIIA Content Forum yesterday.  George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates talked with Cindy Hill, formerly of Sun Microsystems about the possibility of advertising being used to defray the cost of premium content.  This turned into an interactive discussion but the answer was pretty clear - advertising distracts the workflow and there probably aren't enought page views or clicks to reduce  the costs of premium information in a meaningful way.  Ed Keating did a nice job moderating the CEO panel I was on yesterday with Tom Aley of Generate and Mike Pickett of Onvia.  And I stayed to hear Janice Lachance talked about the valuable role information professionals can many different situations. 
At Web 2.0 Expo I heard Dave Sifry of Technorati and Bill Tancer of Hitwise present about growth in the participatory web.  And at the end of the day, Dave Hornik of August Capital gave a talk called: What I Learned from Syphilis: Epidemiology & Viral Marketing.  It is unlikely these slides will be available anywhere, but the presentation was terrific.

Conference Organizers, Check This Out

I thought I would split time between SIIA Content Forum and Web 2.0 Expo but yesterday I was at Expo most of the day.  It's not fair to compare apples and oranges as these two conferences are not meant to be competitive, but Web 2.0 Expo is a remarkable event.  Don't quote me on the numbers but it I heard they were expecting 3000 people and close to 4000 showed up.  All the sessions I tried to attend were standing room only.  Content Forum and Expo each had a mash-up session going on simultaneously; I left Content Forum for Expo and had to stand in the doorway to hear Rod Smith of IBM. [Note to mashup experts:  Google Maps mashups are old news.]  Anyone who runs a conference should sign up for an O'Reilly event and see how they make it so compelling.
Sunday night at Expo they had a session called Ignite.  16 presenters each had 5 minutes to speak to 20 slides that automatically flipped very 15 seconds.  The subject matter was very broad:  Timothy Ferriss  talked about The 4-Hour Workweek, which I thought was the best 5 minute slot.  Jane McGonigal spoke about happiness metrics and was terrific.  Jordan Schwartz talked about beekeeping.  5 minutes is enough of an introduction to see if your interested; if you're not interested it's over in 5 minutes.  It was a great format and should be copied, in some form by other conferences.