AlacraBlog

Alacra Book Case Study

Alacra Book is our industry-leading application that electronically builds Public Information Books (PIBs) for investment banks and professional service firms.  A PIB contains publicly available information on company including but not limited to SEC filings, news stories, shareholding data, earnings estimates, M&A histories, investment & credit research, etc.  To build an Alacra Book a user enters a company name or a ticker symbol.  Then multiple databases are searched in parallel, the user selects from the search results the content they want included in their book and minutes later they have a PDF that has a customized cover sheet and table of contents.  In addition to PDF, we offer Word and PowerPoint versions too. 
In the July issue of VIP, Alexia Miller contributed Case Study: Developing a customised Alacra Book which described her experience rolling out Alacra Book in her firm.  Some highlights:

The key strength of the Alacra Book platform is just how customisable it can be, ranging from an almost 'off-the-shelf' product to highly tailored, client-specific Books.

Because we also tied the Alacra Book into the firm's intranet and customer relationship management systems, it had the added benefit of increasing traffic to these knowledge-sharing sites.

Over the next few months we plan on upgrading all our Alacra Book customers to newer, significantly more flexible version.  If you have a need to publish or present company-specific or industry-specific information from disparate, premium content providers, give us a call.

Acoona Revisited

Just back from two great weeks in Israel - hence the light posting. 

I've posted a couple of times over the years about search engine Accoona, first in December 2004 and then again in March 2006.  Then earlier this month the Accoona filed to go public which seemed ridiculous to me at the time, as I had been following them at a distance but hadn't heard anything substantive about them for months.  Last week the NY Times reported on the IPO being pulled, due to the reasons summarized by Marc Andreessen here.  A scam is a scam is a scam...

Content Industry M&A Surges in Second Quarter

Content industry M&A hit $33.1 billion in the second quarter according to Whitestone Communications’ quarterly “Who’s Buying Whom”.  That’s the highest quarterly figure since the first quarter of 2000, which featured the AOL – Time-Warner deal.  The growth was fueled by Thomson’s $17.1 billion acquisition of Reuters.

Other large deals for the quarter included the sale of Thomson Learning to Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners for $7.75 billion and Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick.

A number of Alacra partners were involved in transactions, both as buyers and sellers.  In addition to Thomson and Reuters, Alacra partner Datamonitor plc was acquired by Informa Group for nearly $1 billion; business intelligence provider Access Intelligence acquired TradeFair Group, expanding their coverage in the power industry; Dow Jones acquired UK content provider eFinancial Holdings; while Experian acquired web analytics provider Hitwise. 

The deal flow is likely to slow during the second half of the year, due to tightening credit and as the big players take time to absorb their recent acquisitions.

The Three Papers

I look at The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and FT every day - the print editions.  It's a habit I can't seem to break - I can't read for more than a few minutes at a time on the screen.  So I closely follow the business models and experiments of the three papers.  In the past week or so there have been some new developments at the Times - they plan on setting TimesSelect free, which is something they should never have charged for in the first place.  Logic prevails.  And there's talk the WSJ.com will also be set free - there's even a Lehman Brothers report , courtesy of paidcontent that examines the financial viability of doing so.  A quick summary of the report is here.  So what is the FT to do?  The FT has tons of content everyone wants to read and talk about but that few people want to pay for.  Although Rupert Murdoch might not like to read the longer articles in Journal, the long analysis pieces in the front section of FT are consistently excellent.  Unfortunately, they are all behind the subscription wall, designated by the salmon dollar sign. The FT's digital strategy has always been in flux, but I think that they will need to follow the leads of the Times and the Journal and make the content available through an ad-supported model. 

Good Luck Susan

I've mentioned here before that I've kept a list of content companies that started around the same time as Alacra in the mid-90s but weren't able to survive the dot com bust.  The list includes Amulet, Triene, eCountries, edatafinder.com, peerscape, Taurion, Sagemaker and perhaps a dozen more.  It was very difficult to survive that downturn and I feel very fortunate that we did.  One of the challenges we've always had is capsulized in something people who know me have heard me say over and over: "It's hard to make a living selling other people's content." 
So given the hard times during the bust, and the fact that she and her husband were selling something that was free, Susan and Marc Strausberg at Edgar-Online have always had my respect and admiration.  Susan stepped down as Edgar-Online's Chairman and CEO last week after having run the Company for 12 years.  The Edgar filing space has always been extremely competitive and the fact that Edgar-Online survived and prospered is a reflection of Susan's leadership and management talent.  Edgar-Online has been an important content partner of Alacra's for many years.  We wish Susan success and happiness in whatever she takes on next.

Our multi-talented staff...

CONGRATULATIONS are due to Alacra Product Manager extraordinnaire, Janet Tarendash (seen here with her son Jonathan).  An accomplished figure-skater and member of the Essex Blades competitive adult synchro team, Janet was recently awarded the 2007 Joan Burroughs Memorial Award for TEAM SPIRIT by the Essex Skating Club of New Jersey!  Here at Alacra, we are equally happy she's is playing for our team! (photo courtesy of Innovative Images)

YHOO - The Last Portal

Using data from Comscore and eMarketer, Bear Stearns tries to make a case for Yahoo! entering the social networking space.  The two key points are 1) Social networks are growing much faster than the "traditional portals" and 2) Will social networks become the new portal?  Jeff Jarvis had the right response:

It made me want to scream:

Portals are dead, damnit. They are the last vestige of old-media bigthink, of the misguided belief that media can corral us into masses and that we want to be treated like herds. The essential moral to the story of Yahoo’s decline is that it is a portal and portals don’t work. But here’s Bear Sterns looking for the next portal. Arrrggghhh.

Bear says that "social networking sites may have Ad Dollar Splintering (ADS) effects."  Yes.  But of course.  The issue they're missing is that everything on the web from now on is going to have an Ad Dollar Splintering effect.  The idea, as Jeff precisely explains, is to get one's content and advertising well distributed on the web:

...Yahoo should blow itself up and become the unportal, enabling anyone anywhere to take anything from Yahoo and put it on their own sites, feeding content — which Google doesn’t have — and advertising all around the web, becoming the great enabler of social interaction via content rather than buying Facebook.

Facebook may in fact be the next portal, where eyeballs go for entertainment on the web, at the expense of Yahoo!  But I agree with Jeff - portals don't work.

FDS - "Likely to be picked up by somebody"

Miriam Metzinger reported that in Jim Cramer's Mad Money Lightening Round Picks on July 31 he commented on FactSet saying, "'I think this is a natural to be snapped up by someone."  But snapped up by who?  Reuters,Thomson and Dow Jones are tied up for awhile; it doesn't make sense for Bloomberg and the price would scare off most other peripheral players.  FactSet has a $3 billion market cap and trades at 6x sales.  Cramer knows a lot of things that I don't know...this is probably one of them.

Is All This Merger Advice Worth the Price?

If you missed the Sunday Times Business section yesterday there was a Dealbook article titled They're All No. 1, but Are They Worth It?   Essentially an after-the-fact slice and dice of the league table manipulations investment banks conduct to show their expertise in a market niche, the NY Times and Capital IQ put tried to assess the value of investment bank advice by looking at acquirer stock performance. 

But amid all the jockeying and boasting over which bank is on top, one question seems to get lost: Is all this merger advice worth the price?  ...It turns out that if you look at the stock market performance of companies that made acquisitions in recent years, having Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley in your corner may not always have been the best choice, according to an exhaustive new analysis by Capital IQ, a unit of Standard & Poor’s, for Sunday Business.

Oddly enough, Deutsche Bank, a commercial banking powerhouse that has only recently gained some traction as an investment bank, has advised on deals in which buyers appear to have wildly outperformed others in their sector. The analysis, which looked at deals announced from January 2002 to December 2005, shows that Deutsche Bank’s clients outperformed other companies in their sector by 28 percent, while clients of Goldman Sachs, for example, outperformed their peer group by only 6 percent. These numbers are based on a calculation of the median performance of companies that made acquisitions with the banks’ advice.

While the study itself might have had some more interesting take-aways, what the article highlighted seemed just like a league table game - depending on the size of the deals and the time period analyzed, different banks would come fair differently.  Felix Rohatyn summed it up nicely to close the piece: “The notion that people would fight like tigers to get from No. 20 to No. 7 on the league tables makes no sense,” Mr. Rohatyn said. “Very bad advice can get you to the top of the tables.”

Facebook for Business? Nope

Lots of follow-through last week on whether or not Facebook can morph into a business medium.  I'm a big fan of Netvibes - it's my primary RSS reader - and last week Netvibes released a widget that lets you get pieces of Facebook in their reader.  This is helpful to me because it cuts down on the distraction of actually being in Facebook.  But there was a lot of piling on by naysayers as well:
Dave Winer posted Lock-in becomes a Web 2.0 issue which doesn't focus on the Facebook for business issue but does draw attention to having all your data locked in inside Facebook.
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 is more emphatic in his post Facebook is NOT for Business

    But business and professional needs are NOT the same as personal needs. I have no need to “poke” my professional colleagues or specify that our working relationship began when we “hooked up.” I don’t need to know about my professional colleagues what gender they are interested in mating with, or what they are looking for in a relationship, or what their favorite TV shows are — these things may be of voyeuristic quasi-social interest, but they don’t help me connect or collaborate professionally (other than maybe topics for idle — or embarrassing — chit-chat).

In other words, it's a hugely distracting in a business setting.  But that's not to say it isn't entertaining - I've had a couple of Facebook invites from people I wouldn't regularly be in contact with - and it was great to hear from them.  I will probably do my Facebooking from home and use LinkedIn in the office.
Other recent Facebook coverage:
List of companies pulling adverts from Facebook grows
Facebook: How Complicated Has This Site Become?
Facebook is a Niche Market
How to make a case against Facebook