This post could also be titled What We Did on Our Summer Vacation. Each of the past few summers we've hired some interns and had them assist with a project we wanted to get off the ground in a couple of months. Two summers ago the project was AlacraWiki; we wanted to experiment with wiki software and take a shot at building a wiki that would have some utility for the business information industry. We subsequently built an internal wiki for information sharing between Alacra employees and this has been a tremendous success. Last summer we did a thorough re-design of Alacra's websites which included some significant user interface enhancements. This summer we were working on Research Recap, which we formally launched today with this press release.
At Alacra, we get to see a lot of research - we are partners with dozens of research publishers (Moody's, Fitch, S&P, Forrester, Freedonia, etc,) and also redistribute a number of aggregated sets of investment and market research (Investext, Reuters Research and marketresearch.com). Plus, we have publishers of all sizes asking us to load their content on Alacra and the Alacra Store for resale. So we thought there would be interest in a website that highlighted some of the best research published in the business arena and we began to develop Research Recap. We built some tools that automate how new research gets to us to help with the discovery process and we have a handful of editors select and comment upon the best pieces. These comments are posted with links at www.researchrecap.com. There are two goals: First, to help consumers of research find interesting, relevant and current content. Second, to provide a forum for smaller research publishers to expose their content on a site other than their own.
There's no firm business model right now (costs are low), but some of the research we highlight will be available for sale in the Alacra Store. To ensure we have a terrific, objective site we've brought on fellow Knight-Ridder alum Angus Robertson to be editor-in-chief. If you have any comments or suggestion please let me know.
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