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!
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