AlacraBlog

SLA is Next Week in Denver - Win A Wii!

The Special Libraries Association Annual Conference is next week in Denver with Al Gore and Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) as the keynote speakers.  Alacra will be exhibiting in booth 312 on the right hand side when you walk in.  We have a number if announcements to make (new products, enhancements, etc.) and you can hear all about them at the vendor speed dating session on Monday at 4:00.  I hope to see you there - come by the booth and drop your card in the bowl - we're giving away a Nintendo Wii!

More on People Data

I'm following up on a post of a couple of weeks ago: The Rapidly Changing World of People Data. Last week I got a demo of an interesting new service called IntellectSpace which mines officer and director information from SEC Filings and adds some neat visualization tools.  I've played with the service for a few minutes myself and it's very powerful, especially for those whose job it is to uncover relationships between individuals and entities.  To get a sample of what their visualization software generates, go to www.newsvisual.com which is their blog that covers "the story behind the story."   Here's a sample showing the interrelationships between Microsoft and aQuantive.
While using SEC filings to grab officer and director information has its limitations, Intellectspace is thorough and comprehensive in that it goes beyond the proxies to include Forms 3 and 4, 6Ks, 8Ks, registration statements and 13ds and 13gs.  It's worth checking out if exploring people data is part of your work flow.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

David Meerman Scott's new book is out - a well written reference guide for marketers of all kinds.  David explains why marketing tactics and strategies that may have been effective in the past have lost their effectiveness, and recommends new techniques that need to be deployed by all successful marketers today. There's lots of research that reveals how to better communicate with consumers.  David's previous book, Cashing in With Content, was a big hit and I expect The New Rules of Marketing & PR to be even more popular. 

World-Check Continues To Shine

Alacra content partner World-Check recently issued two press releases highlighting their Terrorism and Insurgency Research Unit's continued ability to uncover dangerous people and entities ahead of government regulatory agencies.

May 4, 2007 - World-Check Ahead of US and UK Regulators
May 22, 2007 - World-Check's Terrorism List Continues to Outpace Government Alerts (excerpt here)

World-Check's Terrorism and Insurgency Research Unit (TIRU) has to date identified and profiled over 17,000 terrorism-related individuals and entities. To place this in perspective, the four most authoritative government sanctions issuing bodies, namely the US OFAC, UK Bank of England, the EU and UN, have only listed approximately 800 unique terrorism-related entries(i) -- making up only 5% of World-Check's overall terrorism-related content.

Alacra partners with World-Check by integrated their industry leading global database of heightened-risk individuals and businesses in our Alacra Compliance and Alacra Compliance Batch applications.  The database is updated daily in real-time by World-Check's international research team and is derived from hundreds of thousands of public sources.  Coverage includes PEPs, money launderers, fraudsters, terrorists amd sanctioned entities - plus indiviudals and business from over a dozen other high-risk categories.  The  database is used at hundreds of financial institutions for anti-money laundering (AML), Know-Your-Customer (KYC), Politically Exposed Person (PEP) screening and enhanced due diligence (EDD).

Alacra Partners With Markit

Perhaps the world's fastest growing financial information company is Markit Group Limited, the leading provider of independent data, portfolio valutions and OTC derivatives trade processing.  One key Markit offering is their CDS (Credit Default Swap) Identifiers called Markit RED, the industry standard alpha-numeric identifier for the credit derivative market, covering over 2,700 scrubbed reference entity and obligation pairs.  The explosion in derivatives and structured finance has made the range of Markit's services critical to every trading desk.

Markit RED provides confidence with market standard, scrubbed reference entity and obligation pairs:

• More than 2,700 scrubbed reference entity/obligation pairs
• Audited, accurate legal reference entity names
• Proprietary, tried and tested reference data scrubbing process
• Market-standard Dow Jones CDX and iTraxx credit index annexes
• Unique, nine-digit alpha-numeric CLIPS to identify a reference entity / obligation pair
• Complete re-scrubs at least annually or following a corporate event

Alacra recently partnered with Markit to make RED Codes available as part of our Concordance services to our mutual customers.  For financial institutions needing to map CDS counterparties and customers to other identifiers (DUNs numbers, rating agency issuer IDs, proprietary IDs etc.) Alacra has the solution.

“RED brings necessary operational efficiency to the CDS market and we strive to make it easily accessible to all market participants through industry-preferred solutions. By having access to RED Codes in conjunction with Concordance’s extensive data, Alacra’s customers have access to a seamless and integrated service.” said Penny Davenport, Managing Director of Markit RED.

By partnering with Markit and making RED Codes available, we are significantly expanding the market for our concordance services.

 

Datamonitor Sold to Informa for Almost $1 Billion

Congratulations to Mike Danson and the entire Datamonitor team on the pending sale of their business to Informa.  Datamonitor was one of the original Alacra (Data Downlink) content partners.  The sale price is an enterprise value multiple of 7 times 2006 revenue and 31 times 2006 EBITDA.  As the chart indicates, Datamonitor's stock price has been on a uninterrupted role for 5 years.

Enterprise RSS

Read/WriteWeb highlights a new Forrester Research report on Enterprise RSS: Enterprise RSS Tackles Information Worker Overload. 

Information workers today are drowning in content — email, newsletters, press releases, and spam — and the problem is getting worse. To deal with this tsunami, workers are turning to RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Although efficient for individual information workers, unmanaged, RSS can wreak havoc on enterprise IT. To prevent problems like bandwidth overload and security infractions, information and knowledge management professionals should implement enterprise RSS solutions. Enterprise RSS turbo-charges the benefits of unmanaged RSS adoption with internal content syndication, filtering, and collaboration. It also provides increased security and reduces IT requirements.

Managing RSS feeds is quickly becoming a desktop priority as more and more content is being delivered in this format.  While a year or so ago few if any of our customers had RSS strategies, we're increasingly being asked for advice in terms of managing RSS feeds of both external/premium content and content that is created behind the firewall.   We expect the use of RSS will continue to grow quickly within the enterprise.

The Rapidly Changing World of "People Data"

For many years customers would ask us for accurate data on people - contact information, biographies, six-degrees-of-separation, non-profit board memberships, etc.  So we worked with the officers and directors data of some of our existing partners (Thomson Financial, Reuters, Hemscott) and licensed a couple of new databases: Leadership Directories and Corporate Board Member. And we continue to try to add other content on executives our customers subscribe to: Boardex and Capital IQ.  We have an application called Alacra Connections that lets users search for people and companies meeting certain criteria that sits on top of the databases mentioned above, which have painstakingly concorded - we've mapped all the names so that each person has a unique ID.
Customers used to assign a significant amount of value to these databases and in many cases were forced to subscribe to more than one because they needed comprehensive, global coverage.  But in just a couple of years, the market for people-related data has changed dramatically and is approaching commoditization. 
Here's the evidence:  Company Insight Center, the new website jointly presented by sister companies Business Week and Capital IQ includes most of the corporate officer and director data available through Cap IQ's premium product.  Relationship information is nicely displayed and you get the now-readily-available compensation information from the proxy. This is an improvement over what's available on Yahoo Finance.  (The really valuable company and people information they collect on private equity firms doesn't appear to be there - yet.) Three search engines for people were discussed on TechCrunch yesterday: Wink, Spock and recently upgraded ZoomInfo.  They're each interesting in their own right, but Spock is asking/encouraging  users to contribute their own content for the greater good.  I've only seen Spock over someone's shoulder but according to a great post at WebWare,

Spock wants password access to your online contact lists.

This is made clear when beta users activate their invitation code. Spock asks you first for your personal connections: It wants you to provide a password to one system you use that has a personal address book. The options are LinkedIn, Plaxo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo. Spock does a one-time slurp from the contact list you give it. It says it uses the information so it can add your contacts to Spock, which is pretty cool and will make Spock look better to you, but by providing password access to your accounts, you're helping Spock get data it couldn't otherwise get from the public Web. In particular, you're providing not just names and data to fill out the Spock database, but also the connections between people.

So even if a small subset of Spock registered users contribute their personal contact information, this could conceivably create a broad and deep ad-supported search engine of people and their relationships.  And while the premium database providers will still retain some premium value (Corporate Board Member and Leadership Directories still have plenty of information that is impossible to find elsewhere) free is free.  New sales at premium prices won't be easy to come by.

Hinchcliffe on Web 2.0 and Corporate Culture

Last month at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Dion Hinchcliffe gave a 3 hour presentation called What is Web 2.0: The Rules for Creating Successful Online Products In The 21st Century. Several hundred people sat through the session in its entirety on a sunny Sunday afternoon.  It was the first session I attended and it was a terrific kick-off for the conference.  Whereas some of the conference sessions had me thinking "this has got to be a bubble," I kept thinking back to Dion's workshop and realized that regardless of what happens in the venture capital world, there's plenty of very useful technology being developed very inexpensively that a lot of people can use.
The best place to get more  of Dion is his blog at ZDNET.  His most recent post is Enterprise 2.0 as a Corporate Culture Catalyst.  (Sadly, there was no EBIC this spring but had there been, I am sure this topic would have been discussed repeatedly.)  Corporate culture can be an obstacle or lubricant for the adoption of new technologies and Dion cites Tom Davenport's skeptical post Why Enterprise 2.0 Won't Transform Organizations to point out the obstacles.  But I'm with Dion - the ease of use (and many other features) of the newer tools makes adoption easy without the permission or power struggles commonly required in a large organization.  And Davenport ends his post with (to my mind) the most important piece of the puzzle:

"I freely admit, however, to one key uncertainty. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens when the young bucks and buckettes of today's wired world hit the adult work force. Will they freely submit to such structured information environments as those provided by SAP and Oracle, content and knowledge management systems, and communication by email? Or will they overthrow the computational and communicational status quo with MySpace, MyBlog, and MyWiki?"

Youth will be served.

Revere M&A Scenario Reports

The possibility of three gigantic M&A deals hit the market this week:  Thomson buying Reuters; News Corp buying Dow Jones and Microsoft buying Yahoo!  Dozens of analysts have been and will continue to be working hard to assess what the combined entities will look like - where are the product overlaps, how much cost can be squeezed out, where revenue and margins can be expanded.  One fast way to examine the deals is through Revere Data's M&A Scenario Reports. 

These reports show what a hypothetical merger or acquisition between two firms would look like, with a particular focus on overlapping and complementary product lines, business divisions, customers, suppliers, and partners. The report shows the resulting competitors to the scenario, as well as pro forma financials on the combined company. Revere algorithms also mine Revere's proprietary databases to highlight other M&A scenarios closely correlated and relevant to the one proposed in the report.

Revere Data, an Alacra content partner, has agreed to let me post the scenario reports for these deals which must be viewed in Internet Explorer.  Please let me know what you think by posting a comment or sending me an email.

 Microsoft - Yahoo!

News Corp - Dow Jones

Thomson - Reuters