Generate helps make the published article the starting (not end) point of search

Generate Inc.’s announcement of "Generate gClick" was the most interesting and consequential new product introduction at the Infocommerce 2007 conference (and unveiled simultaneously at DEMOfall 07).  As background, Generate was founded in 2004 by alumni of companies including Reed Elsevier, Amazon, and Ziff Davis, and launched a Web 2.0-model business intelligence service last fall.  It claims marquee enterprise customers in high-tech, financial services, consulting - and media, including LexisNexis, Experian, and strategic investor American City Business Journals.  Generate’s initial (“G2”) and subsequent products have focused on enterprise solutions, using dynamic indexing and extraction to deliver contextual information on people, companies, and events, from open web and other sources;  and a business networking functionality that shows “who knows whom.” 

The new gClick product leverages the same underlying technology in a service aimed at publishers.  Similar to other content technology players like Sphere (see my September 2X post) and Inform Technologies, gClick generates contextually relevant links to deeper information on local or remote databases, via a server side widget.

At the conference, Generate EVP Bill O’Connor positioned gClick as a response to needs of publishers and media companies in the Web 2.0 era, e.g., increasing the frequency of content use; making content more relevant and contextual; brand loyalty; capturing higher CPM or ROI for advertising; and adding value in applications or delivery.  Most publishers’ sites, he noted, are single-purposed, requiring users to move away to get related information.  And most knowledge workers investigate topics by surfing or searching – only a small percentage of users rely on a single provider’s site for all of the answers needed in a given situation. 

For example, Monster, one of the early trialists of gClick, noticed that users were finding potential opportunities, then navigating to other sites for contextual information.  Generate sees that many publishers and information providers are still lacking the means to be an integral part of user workflow, and lacking the depth to “dead end” the “Google Path," and have needs for related content that can help provide users a competitive edge and new opportunities.  gClick is essentially a tool enabling publishers to offer many of the same business intelligence services that Generate provides directly to enterprise customers.  After selecting an article, the user clicks on the gClick icon on a publisher’s page, and sees an index of related people, companies, and events.  New pages are publisher branded, and create additional CPM inventory.  The gClick interface can be deployed as a custom-branded browser add-in, as an embedded link or widget on a company’s published pages, or as preprocessed, published content that can be featured on publisher sites.  Links can be created to local or remote databases, via a server side widget.

gClick is still in early stages of coming to market, of course, but, according to another Generate executive, the business model will likely be based on different proportions of license fees and share of incremental advertising revenue (from the additional page view inventory created), depending on customers’ initial level of confidence that it would “generate” the intended return.   gClick will also be marketed to enterprises to help integrate intranet pages, for example, with internal documents and related, already-purchased premium content.

The total market accessible to Generate by partnering with other publishers could be orders of magnitude larger than whatever share of the enterprise business intelligence market it can capture, and gClick is essentially a tool enabling publishers to offer many of the same business intelligence services that Generate provides directly to enterprise customers.  That there will be intense competition to provide such "contextual integration" is a future certainty; this would be a natural area for encroachment by Microsoft and/or Google.  But Generate seems well-positioned for whatever comes next.  A growing presence in large enterprises, when combined with large-scale partnering with content providers (if gClick and its successors succeed), would lever both ends of the content supply chain.  In relationship to the search-and-retrieve model, this is indeed “turning data inside out” (to echo the conference theme), making the published article the starting point as well as the end point of search.