InfoInnovation

Alacra's new Pulse platform: mining expert opinion on the real-time Web

Alacra, Inc., an established, independent content aggregator, has over the past decade quietly established itself in some of the most lucrative niches of the information business.   Yesterday, the company launched a new product, Street Pulse, the first of several planned companion products based on a new “Pulse” platform oriented to mining and organizing selected real-time Web content. 

Alacra has a history of competing successfully against much larger business information providers through innovative use of technology, and understanding the needs of information-insatiable professionals in financial services and management consulting.  Pulse continues that tradition by capitalizing on the reality that important news about companies now appears on the Web first, with the gap created by the shrinking cadre of sell-side analysts being filled by independent analysts and opinion leaders in the blogosphere.  Another critical enabler is ubiquity of RSS, the XML-based circulatory system of the blogosphere and, increasingly the larger Web. 

Street Pulse draws upon 2000 or so selected feeds of real-time news, opinion and analysis on publicly-traded companies.  It applies Alacra’s semantic analysis technology to automatically organize and cross-link the articles and posts by company, analyst and analyst firm.  On one side of the screen are the most recent stories corresponding to a given company, analyst or firm; on the other side, a continuously updated “ticker” of new analyst and blogger commentary.  Clicking on a company, analyst or firm link (e.g., the Google links in a commentary or news item about that company) produces the most recent posts by or (in this example) about that entity – which I find makes for very intuitive browsing.  It also draws on “social” input such as suggestions of additional analyst sources.  Other applications to be launched on the new platform include Deal Pulse (M&A), Weak Pulse (news about distressed companies), Credit Pulse (comments by rating agency and other credit analysts) and Legal Pulse (covering mentions of law firms).

The Pulse platform is using a “freemium” pricing model.  That is, it is available as a free service on the Web (with expected revenue from advertising, and e-commerce sales of content from the Alacra Store).  For professional users such as the traditional Alacra customers, there is a premium version that will provide mobile and desktop alerting, the ability to create watchlists, tools for sharing results, and integration with subscription content.  It will be priced on a per seat basis like Alacra’s other professional products, with a single “slice” (e.g. Street Pulse, or one of the other applications) generating between $60,000 and $90,000 from the largest firms. 

I seldom write about the information content services I actually use personally.  But not only is Street Pulse innovative and newsworthy, it’s also a tool I easily could see fitting into my regular diet of information.  In addition to routinely tracking information industry companies as part of my consulting practice, I’m a moderately active individual investor (that is, I subscribe to the theory that selective stock-picking by non-professionals makes sense in this environment).  As such, I use Yahoo Finance as my main dashboard for tracking stocks and seeing articles of general financial interest.  And Street Pulse offers what seems to be an excellent complement to Yahoo Finance, CNNMoney.com, AOL Money, CNBC.com, and other financial sites geared to non-professionals.

Pulse continues a trend of mining free information on the Web that began with people-tracking services like Zoominfo, spread to news aggregators like Google News, Digg, the Huffington Post and Newser, and is now moving into more specialized realms.  We’ll see a lot more of this type of service; in the meantime, Alacra has grabbed an early-mover position in the valuable realm of market-moving opinion and analysis “for the rest of us.”

 

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!

 

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.

Edmunds: an online re-invention success story

Keynote speaker George Kang, executive director of automotive buyers’ guide publisher Edmunds Inc., described a business transformation that evolved from early online experimentation to current success in lead generation and advertising on the Web.   In the past six years, Edmunds’ revenue has grown about 40% year over year (1300%).  Its audience has grown from 2 million to 13 million unique monthly visitors. 

A pivotal early decision (in 1995) was to make its entire database of automotive information, including the key element of dealer invoice pricing, freely accessible on the Web.  Then, online-car-buying pioneer Autobytel offered to pay for lead generation [Historians please note: this was, at least to my recollection as someone who was watching closely at the time, was the first significant lead-gen deal on the Web.]  Lead-generation to online and offline automotive retailers developed into a robust revenue stream.  Since then, Edmunds has spun out additional sites – InsideLine (for enthusiasts), CarSpace (community), and AutoObserver (industry commentary) for better segmentation and targeting. 

In 2001 Edmunds introduced its first online advertising, strictly endemic (i.e., in this case, automotive-related).  And it saw that the car buying process – including an initial research phase during which consumers learn what vehicles are available, form their opinions on those models, and design their consideration set, before ultimately choosing and buying a vehicle – created different consumer needs for marketing messages at all stages.   

More recent innovations have included the development of “true market value” pricing, attempting to show what most people are actually paying (i.e. the actual purchase point between MSRP and deal invoice); consumer-validated market intelligence reports; and dealer ratings and reviews.  Along the way, Edmunds has resisted pressures from its advertising and lead-gen customers (e.g. dealers that have been subject to negative reviews) and maintained editorial independence.  In terms of marketing and discoverability in the Age of Google, it’s over 800,000 pages of content online help drive favorable search engine rankings.  As traffic has grown, Edmunds has, by design, held down the volume leads delivered to dealers, keeping it in line with advertising traffic, in order not to delete the value of leads delivered.

Kang emphasized some consistent principles to which Edmunds’ success can be attributed:  empower consumers, then monetize; stay true to the mission if it is bringing value to the audience; look for insights using your internal data; look for stress points in the market; drive value by using data as a lubricant to ensure that business is run at optimal level.   No startling insights there, perhaps, but certainly an excellent set of themes with which to lead off the conference.