The best of the rest from Infocommerce 2007

A selection of other noteworthy presentations from last week’s conference:

An impressive presentation was given by Robert Battista of Doctor Evidence, a new healthcare publisher focused on making medical evidence more accessible to both consumers and professionals. From a library of full text and abstracts describing 4000 clinical studies on the top 300 drugs, it extracts key data elements in order to populate tabular reports comparing the relative effectiveness of alternative drugs for specific conditions. The data can be “drilled down” to the source studies, and is also “distilled” into a summary of effectiveness. Revenue channels being developed include doctor portals, OTC portals, a TV show being developed with WB, industry/manufacturer portals (e.g. GlaxoSmithKline), direct to consumer portals, payor portals, and health software companies.

Mailpound.com has become the highest ranked travel-trade website (with 2.3M pageviews/month). It serves travel agents and tour operators with information on travel offers, and has also developed an online, custom-publishing application for travel brochures. An excellent example of a content workflow solution: it provides direct to consumer delivery of personalized print and electronic brochures, with targeted marketing messages. President Bob Maier noted that the e-brochures have an especially robust value proposition, enabling reduced supplier costs, dynamic pricing of travel offers, targeted marketing by travel agencies, results tracking, and enhanced probability of online booking.

Those of us who may have been skeptical of the premise behind Jigsaw – that businesspeople and professionals would share their business cards, and that the resulting pool of information would be of sufficient value to compete with other “people” databases – have to acknowledge that the company seems to have won its bet. According to CEO Jim Fowler, it now has 6.8 million contacts in its database, growing by 10,000 per day. Members gain credits for correcting errors as well as sharing new contacts. Two differentiators from other people-finding services: much deeper mid-level contacts; and 55% of the contacts include a direct phone number. Jigsaw introduced two new services at the conference – an offering for corporate accounts (Jigsaw team), and a data cleansing service (Jigsaw Clean).

Another people-finder story, ZoomInfo, had $12M in sales last year, mostly from 2500 subscription customers. It is just now beginning to monetize traffic to the site, with 35M pageviews/month (and the fastest growing network in the US with 276% annual growth in traffic according to Nielsen Netratings). COO Bryan Burdick described how a premature jump from recruiting to sales intelligence applications created some missteps, but a re-launch should yield $2M in sales this year, helped by a relationship with Salesforce.com via the latter’s AppExchange program. Next stop: a vertical search model a la Business.com.

Judy Luther of Informed Strategies provided an update on Project Counter, the initiative to bring cross-publisher consistency to the measurement of online information usage in the STM academic and corporate marketplaces. After five years, there are now 10,000 journals from 70 vendors participating. Librarians are beginning to derive cost-per-use metrics, and relying upon usage data to drive renewal decisions; and publishers such as ACS, IEEE, and Project MUSE are developing usage-based pricing models. And, perhaps most interestingly, there is growing support for the concept of a “usage factor” based on usage behavior, as a complement to the “impact factor” measuring author (and journal) influence in the scientific community, as pioneered by Thomson’s ISI. A full report on this initiative is here.

A presentation by Fred Dixon of Toronto-based Serence provided an appropriately B2B / enterprise desktop view of widget technology and applications, with an emphasis on widgets as self-installing, branded desktop applications, and client examples including Reed Business, Wolters Kluwer, and Staples. The value proposition in this context: easier access to data users care about, in order to differentiate services based on ease of use and timeliness of delivery; driving more traffic back to the destination site/portal; enabling users to customize content applications to their workflow.

Hugh Owen, president of Owen Media Partners, provided a fairly stunning example of turning around a small, old-school publisher of business and industrial directories (e.g. McCrae’s Blue Book). In three years the company has gone from 1M to 100M page views, and 100,000 users to 50 million users, with a 20-fold increase in online revenues, a two-fold increase in offline revenue, and 400% overall revenue growth. How? 1) Leverage assets to work together in “clickstream continuity” by removing registration barriers, removing brochureware, making databases browseable, and leveraging brands via link partnerships to drive Google rankings; 2) Focus on the user experience and let Google do the marketing; 3) Set realistic traffic goals for each brand and monetize with premium display ads, Adsense, ad networks (including GlobalSpec and the new Reed Partner Network), and introduce new subscription products.

Two workflow integration stories from different perspectives, both involved partnering with Salesforce.com: Dow Jones Wealth Manager, an impressive investment advisor workflow integration of Dow Jones news resources (another instance of AppExchange, or, alternatively a web service to internal platforms); and Verticals on Demand, a “new kind of CRM business,” based on enabling CRM products that are loaded with complete, accurate contact data from day one. In the initial vertical, it is providing accurate data on doctors, drug performance, shipment data, formularies, payors for use by Pharma sales teams – reselling Salesforce.com as part of the service.

Thanks to Russell, Megan, and Roxanne at Infocommerce Group for another successful and highly informative conference!

 

Comments

[T.J. Elliott]

It's almost as good as being there, Steve. What a nice service!!

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