Rafat reported, and Fred posted about Austin Ventures' new $50 million roll-up fund focused on Corporate Social Networking and Services. The title of Fred's post was "Is Social Enterprise Software an Oxymoron?" That's a great question. My view has been that what people call Enterprise 2.0 is really cheaper, easier-to-deploy and more effective knowledge management tools. The challenge in building a business around this is that, as Fred suggests, most social software that is successful in the consumer space couldn't survive in the enterprise and, there are already a bunch of (very inexpensive) products that meet most of the knowledge management 2.0 needs: Jotspot, SocialText, LinkedIn, salesforce, and so on. What we've found most recently is a rebirth of Microsoft's Sharepoint in a number of financial institutions and professional service firms. But even with all the tools, it's often tough to get employees to share effectively within an enterprise, and sharing = social.
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- Lower Your Cost of Compliance with the Latest Release of Alacra Compliance Enterprise
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« March 2008 | Main | May 2008 »
Another Reason to Look at WSJ
Gordon Crovitz has a new column In the Wall Street Journal and on WSJ.com on Mondays called Information Age. The first installment, published Monday, was titled Optimism and the Digital World.
2008 BSeC Rant
"The people working to crush the existing publishing models are working much harder than the people trying to maintain the existing publishing models." Stephen Arnold
It never ceases to amaze me how two people can be in the
same room and hear entirely different things. Ace analyst and friend John Blossom of Shore Communications and I agree that this year’s Buying
and Selling eContent was a little stale. But we had very different views of the presentations. MY take is that the audience is composed of content buyers and
content sellers. The sellers want to
know how they can make more money and better meet customer needs. The buyers
want to use the forum to let the sellers know what their needs are as well as learn about what new products might be available. And everyone is there to network.
If you talk to an information professional or a buyer of
content at a financial institution or professional services firm, most would agree
with Andrew Keen – there is a need for a professional editorial process or
curator on all content that might be used internally or for a client engagement. They cannot take the risk of distributing to
their users or their clients anything that has not been vetted or that is not authoritative. So for the markets Alacra serves and for the buyers
in the audience (prestigious accounting firms, consulting firms and investment
banks, Fortune 500 companies) user-generated content comes with all sorts of
risks that cannot be hedged. Doctors contributing
to an Elsevier wiki are just too small a population to make sweeping endorsements
of the value of user-generated content. (The presentation by Y.S. Chi of Elsevier was very good.)
Further, while Manta and Jigsaw offer very interesting and
perhaps very valuable services to some demographic, that demographic was not
present in the room, the exception being all the vendor
salespeople in attendence. These products are aimed largely
at individuals or teams of salespeople, markets so crowded that margins must be
razor thin.
And then there was Stephen Arnold, who according to some people I spoke with might
be a genius. He seems like a smart guy but this wasn’t evident on Tuesday morning. Nothing he said (here's the speech) was
wrong, or even that controversial. It
was just unmemorable and not relevant to the audience. I paraphrase: "Enterprise search is broken. Someone is going to fix it. Stephen Arnold knows who the fixer will be.” The something about Silverlight and Google TV and...I forget. But it doesn’t help a publisher make his
numbers this year or next and doesn’t help a buyer better serve the information
consumers in their organization. One
thing Arnold said on Monday afternoon was spot on – the people working to crush the existing
publishing models are working much harder than the people trying to maintain
the existing publishing models. Technology aside, hard work usually prevails. But where my colleague John was politely impressed with Mr. Arnold ("well-polished and insightful presentation") I think the audience was looking for something else and something more.
Of course, it's always important to have speakers with different points of view or speakers that come from outside the conference's industry. But speakers need to stimulate their audience with information that is relevant to them or serendipitously interesting, like the Viet Nam War Memorial presentation by Footnote.com There just wasn't enough of that this year.
Felix Salmon on the WSJ.com Redesign
Felix highlights Rafat Ali's report on the multi-million dollar WSJ.com redesign. His take is this:
"...But at heart it will remain a conservative site, which means that it
won't adopt a truly revolutionary idea for a newspaper website: having
outbound links on its home page...On the internet, the more you send people away, the more they come back. Why don't any newspaper websites understand this?" I couldn't agree more.
Andrew Keen at BSeC
Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur was interviewed this morning at Buying & Selling eContent. This was the second time I've seen Andrew in the past few months. His point of view sort of grows on you, once you get passed the some of the more controversial comments like, "I've never learned anything from my 10 year old son." I've summarized the views that make the most sense to me:
"The new new thing is curation and professionalism." In other words, there's so much content available, both good and bad, that curators will command a premium. "The future is curation - real people putting together real reliable content."
Professional content providers need to authoritative. They must not try to be humble." I'm paraphrasing here but he went on to say that professional content creators must remain protected against the nasty little virus called the cult of the amateur.
Andrew seems to be a fan of Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, which is a curated search engine.
Finally, and this is easiest to agree with: "The crowd can't write." Andrew insists we need to maintain the distinction between the audience and the artist.
Wright Investors’ Service Added to Alacra
We recently added Wright Investors’ Service as a content partner to both Alacra Premium and AlacraStore.com. Wright Investors' Service, an internationally recognized investment advisory firm, produces timely, in-depth research reports on the world's leading 25,000 companies. Each report includes information about the company, competitors, Wright's proprietary quality rating analyses and up to 10 years of sales, price, earnings and dividends history. There also is also an analysis of balance sheet, income statement and sources of capital reports.
Wright is delivering their content through the recently launched Alacra Content Marketplace, which makes it easy for content providers to deliver their content through the Alacra platform.
To see recent research from Wright Investors’ Service, visit their Wright Publisher page on AlacraStore.com. We also have a sample report available for China Mobile Limited.
If you are interested in contributing your content to the Alacra Store (www.alacrastore.com), please contact Ron Waksman at ron[dot]waksman[at]alacra[dot]com.
Research Recap Releases Q1 Research Zeitgeist
Our Research Recap blog spotlights compelling credit, investment, economic, industry and market research reports each day. Launched last summer, we’ve found that Research Recap is often quite adept at identifying themes before they hit the mainstream news.
Research Recap editors began focusing heavily on the subprime crisis and the credit crunch early last summer, long before terms like CDO, SIV and and CDS became household terms.
One fascinating byproduct of Research Recap is the Research Zeitgeist. Research Zeitgeist provides a glimpse into the content that’s being read most widely on the Research Recap site. We publish a weekly Zeitgeist as well as a more comprehensive quarterly Research Zeitgeist.
The Research Zeitgeist for the first quarter of 2008 was released this morning. Not surprisingly, the most widely read posts of the quarter largely reflected the credit crunch and market turbulence of recent months.
The most widely read post was Credit Sights’ Warning Signs Seen in Rising Credit Card Delinquencies. Two of our research primer posts followed - Research Primer: Credit Default Swaps by Fitch Research with Moody’s Research Primer: Structured Investment Vehicles just behind. Bond Insurer Downgrades Could Lead to Bank Downgrades, focusing on an S&P report, was next, with the IMF’s Role of Hedge Funds in Subprime Crisis Examined rounding out the top five.
One interesting note is that the ten most-widely read posts sourced eight primary research providers. Only Credit Sights showed up twice, with rating agencies Fitch, Moody's and S&P each appearing once. Other sources among the top ten included NERA Economic Consulting, the International Monetary Fund, Oxford Analytica and Audit Integrity.
The full list of the top ten most widely read posts is available on the Research Recap site.
