Content Matters

Today, I add Alacra to the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

Alacra is a content aggregator, serving sell-side financial institutions, large consulting firms and law firms.  Founded by Steve Goldstein, Mike Angle and a team of their former Knight Ridder colleagues, Alacra has quietly focused on delivering quality solutions to their clients for more than nine years.

At the heart of Alacra’s business is their Concordance database.  Early on, Alacra realized that the opportunity for them was to do the “dirty work” of matching data from various data providers so that their customers can easily integrate content from many sources.  Data matching is always more complex than it seems.  Even public company data, where you can leverage ticker symbols or CUSIPs is complex.  Matching private companies, people or bond issues, where common identifiers are lacking, is difficult and labor-intensive.

As a result, customers have come to rely on Alacra to provide cross-vendor data integration.  Today, Alacra has integrated thousands of data elements from more than 100 content providers.

Having spoken to many Alacra customers, one other element is clear.  Alacra is highly focused on customer satisfaction.  Their reputation for delivering quality work on schedule is unmatched in this segment of the market.  Their customers consistently rave about their delivery and communication throughout.

Alacra’s absolute focus on data concordance and customer satisfaction would be enough to add them to this list.  But there’s a second, equally compelling reason to do so.  The Alacra team are very attuned to the changes going on in the content business.  Steve Goldstein’s Alacra Blog was one of the first b2b CEO blogs published.  Just recently, they’ve launched the Alacra Wiki, one of the first vertical-market b2b wiki.  Last month, Alacra launched the Alacra Store, a pay-per-view portal bringing together vast amounts of content from many content providers.  This should open up Alacra to new customers outside of its core institutional base.  Alacra continues to explore new technologies, media and methods to serve its customers needs.

With a strong and growing core business, a focus on customer excellence, and the courage to test new concepts, Alacra clearly is one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

Author’s note: Leadership Directories is a content partner of Alacra.

Six Apart is the leading provider of blogging tools to the “professional” blogging community. 

While Blogger (owned by Google) and AOL offer free tools to the consumer market, the bulk of the “serious” blogs you read are probably developed using either TypePad or Movable Type, both products of Six Apart.  Movable Type is a comprehensive platform designed for the enterprise, while TypePad is a hosted solution licensed on an annual fee (author's note: Content Matters is built on TypePad).  Earlier this year, Six Apart acquired LiveJournal, a (mostly) free, open source personal blogging environment catering to individuals.

Six Apart introduced the concept of trackbacks, enabling bloggers to easily find others who have linked to their blog.  This concept, as much as anything, has helped develop communities of like-minded bloggers and is a de-facto standard in all blogs today.

Though many people think the Six Apart name is derived from the community aspects of blogging (“six degrees of separation”), the Company reports that the name is based upon husband and wife Ben and Mena Trott’s birthdays – six days apart from one another.

The blogging space is competitive, and will get even more competitive as Yahoo, MSN and others focus more efforts there.  Open source solutions such as Drupal have a loyal and devoted user base.  Meanwhile, today, it’s estimated that Six Apart has more than 10 million users across their three product lines.  The Company has done an effective job localizing their software and has struck partnerships with key distribution channels in the U.S. and abroad.  Six Apart's 50+ employees span three continents today.

Six Apart continues to innovate.  They've recently added a “tip jar”, another way for bloggers to potentially monetize their content beyond running Google ads.  While few blogs tip jars will cover the daily coffee, it's a creative method to generate revenue and can also be used for fundraising, as Michael Parekh is doing on his blog. 

Six Apart has just announced that their new platform, code named Project Comet, early in 2006, which promises to integrate the community aspects of LiveJournal with multimedia and the robust capabilities of Movable Type and TypePad.

The challenge for Six Apart will be to fend off the competition in a market where there is a low barrier to entry.  While an eventual acquisition may be inevitable, according to Staci at PaidContent, Six Apart is well poised to continue seeing sustained growth in the professional blogging market in the near-term.  And, as the leader in a key segment of one of the fastest growing content technologies, Six Apart is clearly one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

Two interesting articles this weekend on Yahoo's moves into the original content space.

The NY Times profiled the latest moves by Lloyd Braun, putting into place a number of initiatives to make Yahoo a competitive media player, not just an aggregator of others' content.  The first of these is the previously announced "Kevin Sites in the HotZone", a multimedia blog from Mr. Sites who will be Yahoo's foreign correspondent.  Also in the works, according to the Times, is a "Daily Show" - like humorous take on the news.  It's clear that Terry Semel's vision of Yahoo as a platform for original video content it moving forward.

At the same time, this morning's WSJ  reports that Yahoo Media Group and Yahoo Finance have hired some big names in the financial publishing market to pen columns for Yahoo.  Included in the list are Robert Kiyosaki, Stephen Covey and Ben Stein, among others, in an effort to attract more of the female 30-40 year-old demographic.

These latest moves bring into focus the divergence between Google and Yahoo. Google, run by technologists, continues to look to become the next computing platform, while Terry Semel's Yahoo is seeking the path to become the dominant next generation media company.

Since many blog readers are not using RSS feed readers for blog access, I've added the option to receive email alerts to new postings.  To sign up, simply enter your email address in the "subscribe me" box in the upper right corner of the blog.

I've chosen Feedblitz as my email syndication tool, due to their simple interface and flexible capabilities.  One advantage that Feedblitz offers over Bloglet is that the emails include the title of the posting in the message.  So, rather than just knowing that a post was added, you can see whether it might be relevant to you before clicking.

From a user perspective, Feedblitz allows you to manage all of your blog subscriptions in one place.  If you prefer to use email rather than an RSS reader for blogs, I'd recommend you give Feedblitz a try.

The premise behind Factiva was bold, yet challenging: bring together two fierce competitors in an effort to monetize their archives.  While integrating competitors is always difficult, Clare Hart and the Factiva team faced a greater difficulty in that, unlike in a merger or acquisition, in this joint venture, the two companies would continue to compete, outside of the JV.

Early on, Factiva saw itself as more than just an archive service.  They expanded their aggregation capabilities, today offering news and data from more than 9,000 content sources.  One advantage that Factiva capitalized upon was that they had no legacy infrastructure to support.  So, as they built their technology platform they were able to leverage state-of-the-art content technologies from the start.

More importantly, Factiva quickly realized that they needed to add value to the content.  While many companies tossed around comments that “Content is King”, Factiva realized that content was rapidly becoming a commodity.  The days of users paying huge premiums for better access to content were over.  In order to command premium value, Factiva began to develop workflow applications, integrating content into a users’ job. 

Factiva has introduced CRM solutions, bringing together news and contact data for sales and business development.  Using Factiva’s SalesWorks, a sales rep not only has the contact information they need, but access to detailed news and profile information so they have something relevant to talk about when they reach their prospect. 

Factiva has also reintroduced Factiva Insight, their Reputation Intelligence application, to allow companies and organizations to mine news, blogs, message boards and other internet content to quickly assess public opinions.  Unlike traditional clipping services, where the output is a list of news articles to read, this product looks to analyze and measure sentiment.  This is not a trivial challenge.  Technologically, text mining and categorization tools have yet to prove that they can consistently measure sentiment, particularly across diverse sets of content (informal language in a chat room or personal blog is not the same as authored text).  In fact, this is Factiva’s second attempt at corporate reputation, as the first effort with IBM’s WebFountain team yielded disappointing results.  This one is developed on an open platform, enabling Factiva to integrate best-of-breed technologies in a single solution.

Only time will tell if the new Reputation Intelligence product is a success.  Regardless of that, it’s clear that Factiva will continue to push aggressively to develop premium solutions that leverage content within a user’s workflow.  Based upon that vision, I’m adding Factiva to the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

UPDATE: For a sense of how Factiva is embracing Web 2.0, take a look at David Meerman Scott's notes on the Factiva Forum event earlier this week.

Google today confirmed its entry into the WiFi space.

Rumors began swirling around this about the time Google announced its secondary offering.  Om Malik was among the first to suggest in mid August the possibility that Google would put in place a nationwide broadband WiFi network.

As a beta, Google has launched secure WiFi in a few San Francisco locations.  Basically, it's a downloadable VPN application that lets users access the web (similar to Boingo).  Combined with rumors that Google has begun to get bids from providers for the development of a nationwide fiber network and their recent hiring of Vinton Cerf, people are surmising that Google intends to provide national WiFi access (perhaps for free).

What would this mean for Google?  Well, it would certainly give them an unbelievable advantage in terms of serving up local advertising.  If you know my exact location when I'm logging on, you can point me to the nearest coffee shop, restaurant or car dealer. 

Google could also use national broadband to serve up video content, opening up new markets for them to play in. 

It will also bring out privacy concerns.  The security comes from an encryption system that runs on Google servers.  Basically, you'd run all your content through Google, which would encrypt and send it. 

What does this mean for telecom and cable providers?  The broadband cash cow you were counting on for the next 5-10 years may quickly vanish.

For more info on Google WiFi take a look at the Google WiFi FAQ.

Steve Goldstein and the crew at Alacra continue to explore the boundaries of the content market, with today's debut of the Alacra wiki.

Alacra was early to move to the blogging space, launching a b2b blog on their portal when most of us were just starting to experiment with personal blogging. 

Like the Alacra blog, the wiki is focused on the business information space.  They've created a half dozen or so categories, such as people, blogs, publishers and aggregators.  While the initial content is fairly modest, they've bulked up sections by including "Industry Spotlights" which provide aggregated content from the Alacra service.  Registered users can add content - bios, company profiles, product information, etc.

The wiki is a strong complement to the recently opened Alacra Store, offering pay-per-view access to many databases.  The wiki should help drive SEO traffic to the Alacra store and give users a reason to check back often.

The Wiki is a nice extension of Alacra's core offerings.  With a captive community of content users and providers, Alacra could become a very intriguing space for the sharing of product and service information.  Most wikis have relied upon enthusiasts in a given field to post, add and edit content.  It will be interesting to see if the b2b information industry generates enough activity to keep the content fresh and relevant. 

In the meantime, I applaud Alacra for continuing to push the envelope and take risks while many traditional publishers remain technological laggards.

The New York Times today introduced Times Select.

Times Select is available free to paid subscribers to the print product (NYT or International Herald Tribune), and as a paid service for non-print subscribers at $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year.

Times Select subscribers get a number of benefits:

§          Up to 100 articles from the NY Times archives (normally $3.95 per article)

§          More comprehensive Op/Ed materials, including some interactive capabilities

§          Early preview of Sunday Times content such as the Book Review

§          Some simple tools for creating alerts, tracking and storing Times articles of interest

I believe Times Select will be successful for the NY Times.  First, it provides their print subscribers with an additional benefit beyond what the rest of the world can get for free.  Personally, I’m happy to know that I get something extra for my paid subscription (beyond slightly blackened fingertips at the end of my train ride each morning).  Secondly, it provides the Times with the ability to shift content over time from the free site to paid.  While initially only the OpEd columnists (such as Kristof, Friedman and Dowd) will be solely for Select customers, it’s likely that other non-news features will be similarly moved across over time.

The NY Times has always been successful in its core business.  New York Times Digital has been hugely successful in expanding the Times brand beyond its traditional users and borders (roughly 20% of the online subscribers are outside the United States).  Now, the Times has developed a framework to allow it to cultivate an additional tier of customers between their paid print subscribers and free access users: paid online subscribers.  In addition to the revenues generated from selling the Times Select service, there should also be new advertising and sponsorship opportunities.  The name alone, Times Select, sounds tailor-made for special advertising targeting an upscale audience at higher CPMs than the current offering.

The Times continues to effectively balance the benefits provided to its advertisers, its paid subscribers and free users.  It’s a model that other content companies might want to emulate.

Research in Motion Ltd (RIM) has helped transform the way that many of us work today.  And, like Apple, their form factor is so simple and so useful, that all the competitors that have come to the market have yet to take any significant market share.

I got my first Blackberry in late 2000, when my company was looking to develop its first wireless application.  At the time, only technology executives were using them.  By mid-2001, the major investment banks began rolling them out to their bankers.  Going into the 2004 elections, all the political operatives got them, and today, whenever I sit down on a train or a plane, the person next to me is inevitably thumbing a quick message.

By 2002-2003, all the key industry players were lining up to become the Blackberry killer.  Microsoft launched its Pocket PC software, Palm launched its Treo, and the mobile phone manufacturers began to introduce their offerings, with T-Mobile launching the Danger Sidekick.  The screen of the Pocket-PC-based iPaq and others was superior, and the Treo offered a better phone, yet the Blackberry still prevailed, because the team at RIM never lost focus.  It was a wireless email device and performed its job extremely well.  The thumb-based interface takes only a half-day or so to master.  Palm grafiti, for example, was probably only mastered by 10% of the users, so most Palm users use it primarily as a read-only version of their Outlook calendar.

The opportunity is to create the second killer app for the Blackberry.  Email is clearly a dominant application, but I expect that in the next few years we will see the next round of wireless applications.  The app I worked on in 2000-2001, event notification, seemed a natural fit for I-banks and others who needed to keep up on critical news events without getting “alert overload” but didn’t catch on for various reasons.  The early email bots (like Halibot) were great but the companies couldn’t figure out how to monetize the traffic and largely faded away.  With a huge installed base of professional users, the Blackberry market seems ripe for b2b content applications, which should create strong opportunities for forward-thinking content providers.  In the meantime, through it’s simple interface, it’s consistent performance, and most importantly, its focus, RIM is clearly one of my 50 content companies that matter.

In their typical, low key fashion, Google has launched the beta version of their Blog Search.  No major press releases, no huge developer conference, not even a mention on their main search page.  But, if you click "more", there it is under Google Services.

It's exactly what you'd expect from Google.  The same clean interface as their web search engine, an advanced search option, plus the accurate results you'd expect to see.  In fact, when I tested a few phrases and keywords,  I found the results were much closer to what I expected to see than those of other Blog search engines such as IceRocket or BlogDigger. 

I think users will find that Advanced Search is more important when searching blogs than when searching websites.  The Google link-based algorithms for relevancy work very well in web search, but seem less so in my initial blog search tests.  The ability to search by Blog Name, by words in the title of the blog or anywhere in the text is much more critical in searching blogs than looking, for example, for a corporate website.  Narrowing the search by date range and author make it even more compelling.  An interesting feature is the ability to receive results of your search via RSS. 

Google waited a while before dipping its toe into the world of blogging, but now they are here and will be here in a big way.  The independents (Technorati, IceRocket, etc.) will have to continue to focus on providing analytics and feedback to bloggers as I believe Google will own the end-user blog search space.

The CRM space has gone through an interesting cycle during the past 10 years.  In the mid-90’s, CRM was clearly in the Hype Cycle, with vendors promising almost instantaneous ROI.  As with ERP before it, once customers began to understand the ongoing commitment and workflow changes necessary for successful CRM, they began to see positive results.

In CRM sales suites, Siebel has clearly been the 800 lb gorilla.  While the large software players (Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft) and niche providers (Onyx, Pivotal, etc.) fought among themselves for a distant second place, Siebel took commanding market share.

More recently, the hosted (ASP) model players began to make inroads, particularly among SMBs.  Salesforce.com has shown strong and steady growth, while Siebel acquired its strongest competitor, UpShot.  Siebel has struggled a bit during the past two years, with founder Tom Siebel stepping down last year, and his replacement, Mike Lawrie being replaced by George Shaheen (ex-Webvan) a year later. 

Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel should put the CRM provider back in steady hands.  It will solidify Oracle’s position vs. SAP positioned Siebel to retain its status as the solution of choice for large-scale CRM implementations.  Leveraging the Oracle tools, Siebel will have very strong data integration capabilities along with a vast number of analytic solutions.  Following on the footsteps of Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft, this will continue to round out the application stack which sits on top of the database platform.

In related news, SalesForce.com announced the release of AppExchange, which they hope will transform SalesForce into a development platform.  One of the initial AppExchange partners is OneSource, whose application will allow their Account Intelligence product to be integrated directly with SalesForce.com.  Through this integration, the OneSource content will become part of the user’s workflow, whether for prospecting, sales management, territory analysis or marketing.  More and more, we are beginning to see integrated solutions of content and technology, increasing the value of both the software and the information.

OK, I’m cheating on this post, including two companies: Sirius Satellite and XM Satellite Radio.  Together, these two companies have signed up more than six million paid subscribers to satellite radio.  With 4.4 million subscribers, XM has about double that of Sirius, due in part to the fact that they arrived on the scene a year earlier.  Sirius has begun to close the gap by signing exclusive content including Howard Stern, the NFL and Martha Stewart.

During the past year, both companies have signed a number of key partnerships which should drive growth substantially in the next few years.  XM Satellite can be factory installed in GM vehicles and got a boost from the recent “employee pricing” drives by GM.  Sirius has signed an exclusive deal with Ford, but won’t be available until the 2006 models roll off the lots, so didn’t see the same pickup recently. 

Each company has now launched portable players and have signed partnerships with various industry players (XM with AOL, Audible and even Hyatt Hotels; Sirius with Sprint for delivery of music through Sprint’s phone network).

XM has recently launched a player with “Tivo-like” capabilities (MyFi), allowing users to record up to five hours of audio for later playback.  This can become a real differentiator and reason to purchase satellite radio.  Unlike traditional radio, which often is relegated to background noise, the ability to “time shift” means you can record Howard Stern, Jimmy Buffet, or whatever your preference may be, then listen to it at the gym or on the commute home.  I am sure that Sirius will provide a matching capability soon.

A year ago I thought that satellite radio was, at best, a niche product.  Now, by developing the sales channels through the automotive OEMs, these devices are beginning to become ubiquitous.  Wall Street estimates are for total satellite radio subscriptions in the 55-60 million range by 2015.  That's amazing growth, particularly when you compare it to cell phones, DVD players and other products that took much longer to take hold.

In a recent Institutional Investor interview, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin indicated his belief that customer demand will be fairly inelastic, so both these companies should be in position to raise their subscription rates when growth slows down.

Satellite radio seems to be here to stay.  I don’t know which of these two formats will win in the end (or whether they will end up merging), but in the near term, they both clearly belong in the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

Consumer Reports is a fantastic story of how an old-line, traditional publisher has transformed itself into one of the larger success stories in consumer publishing on the web.

Recently, Consumer Reports announced its two millionth active paid subscriber to their online service.  That’s two and one-half times that of WSJ Online.  And, they have gotten there while maintaining the core principles that led to their offline success.

A large part of their growth has been attributed to affiliate partnerships they have signed with sites like Yahoo, AOL, BabyCenter.com and others.  MarketingSherpa provides a great interview with Jerry Steinbrink, General Manager Information Products at Consumer Reports on this subject.

Consumer Reports is a great online product.  As I’ve previously written, rating sites are big winners on the web.  With e-commerce continuing to grow, and product research (even when the purchase is made offline) growing even faster, rating sites are thriving.  Consumer Reports can take this one step further in that they are a rating service backed by a trusted brand.  While community-based rating sites such as Trip Advisor, Amazon, eBags and others are valuable, they are also subject to manipulation (just look at the ratings for books by Al Franken or Ann Coulter to see examples where most of the ratings are authored by those who’d never even read their books).  With Consumer Reports, you get the benefit of ratings backed by a well-defined (and clearly communicated) methodology.  There are very few companies on the web that can offer that – perhaps S&P and the recently acquired (also by McGraw Hill) J.D. Power carry similar quality cache. 

Of Consumer Reports’ online subscribers, roughly 25% are existing print subscribers, meaning that 75% of their online audience are subscribers they would not otherwise reach.  I count myself in that group.  I signed up initially when purchasing a new car a few years ago, but continue the service “just in case”.  While I may go months or even a year between visits, it’s nice to know that it’s there when I need it.  I am sure that many others feel the same.

Going forward, I would like to see if Consumer Reports can bring in some level of user opinions in conjunction with their “official” ratings.  Even though they are (relatively) anonymous opinions, I love the ratings and comments on Amazon and Trip Advisor.  If there were a way for Consumer Reports to capture and expose feedback from its readers without negatively impacting their “official” ratings it would be the best of both worlds.  I think that there are ways to do this effectively without damaging the brand; after all, Consumer Reports’ used vehicle repair records are based upon the input of their users. In addition, they’ve introduced some moderated message boards to their site.  They key will be to bring these two together without letting reader reviews overwhelm the Consumer Reports ratings.

Consumer Reports has done an effective job of bridging the gap between the demographics of their traditional subscribers and their new online subscribers.  And that assures them of continued growth for years to come.  And, it assures them of a spot on my "50 Content Companies that Matter" list.

I love Skype.  I think it's got a great interface and a lot of enthusiastic users (more than 52 million registered users and  more than 2 million paying customers).  Most of all, I like the fact that it actually works as promised.  It handles more than a third of internet-based phone calls in the U.S. today.

What I don't understand is the fit with eBay.  I see Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are battling it out in the IM world and will each start to move more aggressively into telecom over the web.  I could see one of them acquiring Skype to gain market share.  Any of those three could figure out how to better monetize those 50 million-plus users.  I could also see Verizon or another telecom or cable company acquiring Skype, rather than sitting on the sidelines watching their core business erode further.

I could also see Skype remaining independent.  They could fund their growth either through strategic partnerships or through an IPO. 

eBay certainly has a lot of cash.  And Skype has a lot of active users.  But I don't see any synergy between eBay and Skype.  And trying to bring these two companies together will probably just distract each from their core focus.  These two companies are great at what they do, and should keep that focus. 

And so, I hope Skype remains independent for a little while longer.

With the tragedy of Katrina continuing to unfold, my August 29 posting commending wiki technology for keeping up with the storm now seems somewhat inappropriate.  Obviously, at the time of the post, it appeared that New Orleans had avoided the brunt of the storm.  Of course, 12 hours after the posting, the situation dramatically changed.

As all Americans, my thoughts are with those who struggle to regain a semblance of normalcy in their lives and to those who've suffered immeasurable losses.

Please continue to support the American Red Cross and other relief agencies who are helping those who need our help.  I urge you to give whatever you can afford to, then go back and give some more.