Content Matters

A number of my recent posts have showcased products developed using an Ajax approach.  Since I’m a believer in practicing what I preach, I’m pleased to note that this week, Alacra has unveiled an ajax-based version of the Alacra Store.

Ajax, short for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, allows web-based applications to function more like traditional software application.  Specifically, rather than redrawing an entire page every time a screen element changes, ajax allows you to refresh specific sections of a page, leaving the rest of the page intact.  While that may not sound like much, it completely changes the user experience. 

To see how different ajax-based applications are, take a look at the new Alacra Store.  When you perform a keyword search (wireless, for example), the results are displayed in seven content panels, each displaying one form of content related to that search (market research, credit & investment research, news, etc).  Until this release, any change in your search would require a full page refresh.

Now, with the ajax version, individual panels are updated without reloading the page.  For example, using the wireless search, uncheck the Company Profiles & Financials panel.  All the other panels remain active, while that panel closes. 

Next, let’s lower the maximum price range of any report to $1,000, using the slider bar on the left.  You’ll see all the panels refresh (once the "searching" boxes clear), with the results of each available when they are ready, rather than waiting for all seven to update.

For another example, click on the radio button to turn on KWIC (keyword in context).  Those content sources that offer KWIC will redisplay in KWIC mode, while the others remain constant.

These changes are modest.  They don’t enable functionality that wasn’t available before ajax.  However, they make much of that functionality usable.  The slider bar that allows you to set price ranges is a very practical way to navigate the results.  The traditional way to do that might have been to allow the user to put in minimums and maximums, then refresh the page.  While that approach might work if the user knows they have a $100 cap on any research they can buy, it’s not practical for someone who might want to browse what’s available at the low-end, then gradually increase their threshold until they find what they need.  The interactivity enabled by ajax can have a great impact on overall usability.

Ajax is still a fairly new approach and developers are just starting to test the boundaries of what this interactivity will allow them to do.  Microsoft has just announced its ajax-based capabilities, Microsoft Atlas, which is sure to increase the use of this approach.  In the months to come we should begin to see more and more complex functionality move to the web.

 TypePad, Six Apart's blog hosting service, has just introduced TypePad widgets.

Through TypePad widgets, users can add a select group of features to their blog.  For example, you can add a Eurekster Swicki, just like the tag cloud on the left pane of Content Matters, or add Rollyo, Feedburner, Pandora or any of more than 30 widgets.

Previously, the only way to add these to a TypePad blog was a somewhat arcane hack of creating a list, leaving a blank title then pasting the javascript or html code into the contents.  TypePad has eliminated the need for the hack (at least for the list of widgets they support), which should enable more people to use them.

If you’ve got a blog and are looking to add more functionality, take a look.  If you'd like to create your own TypePad widget, you can submit a request to Six Apart.

ajaxWrite is the latest in a group of web-based word processors, leveraging Ajax development processes.  Ajax, which stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, is a rapidly growing development approach which allows browser-based applications to act more like desktop applications.  Specifically, it uses javascript to enable applications to redraw individual portions of a screen so that the screen doesn't have to be fully redrawn each time a change or selection is made. 

The first thing you'll notice about ajaxWrite is that it looks and feels much like Microsoft Word(tm).  The second thing you'll notice is how fast it is.  Within a few seconds you'll be tempted to forget that you're using a web-based app and think you're using Word(tm).  Most of the menu items you're accustomed to are there, including format and style options.  ajaxWrite can open Word, WordPerfect, StarOffice and other file formats.  Documents can be saved as Word docs or even as PDF files.

So, what are the benefits of ajaxWrite?
One benefit is that it's free, where Microsoft Office runs about $500 per seat.  Also, ajaxWrite is platform independent; it runs on Windows, Linux or Mac.  As a hosted application, there's no IT required to install and new versions are automatically available.  Conversely, ajaxWrite is still a beta (even though there's no label to that effect).  It only runs in Firefox, not IE and some key features, such as spell checker, are still under development.

I don't expect ajaxWrite or its bretheren like Writely (recently acquired by Google) or Zoho Writer to take significant market share from Microsoft.  At least not initially, and not in the core business market.  But these applications may begin to eat into Microsoft in certain markets, particularly in the educational market, nonprofits and small business, as well as some of the efforts to bring technology to the Third World. 

What are the implications for publishers?
I think that ajaxWrite sends a few strong signals to any technology-focused company.
First, by going right after the number one business application, ajaxWrite helps bring prominence to Ajax programming and the ability to create real apps on the web.  If your web-based applications are still simple flat views of content, it's probably time to rethink them.

Second, these approaches have changed the pace at which products are developed.  Companies still using traditional development processes, with 9-18 month development cycles, will have difficulty remaining competitive.  Innovative companies today are working in 3-6 month development cycles, often releasing products with an extended beta period, using customer feedback to enhance the product after it's been released. 

Third, the business models for these applications are different.  A hosted application doesn't need to be sold the way shrink-wrapped software might.  These applications are well-suited towards free advertising-supported versions, perhaps with a premium version on a subscription basis.  This model should help publishers, particularly those with an ad-supported content business.

Products like ajaxWrite or the new Google Finance prove that you can quickly develop and deploy strong functionality in web-based applications.  Publishers looking to increase revenue and market share should look at these as models for how they can provide tools to increase the usability of their content.

New startup Congoo last week launched a search engine focused on premium subscription content.  Congoo includes more than thirty premium content providers including the Wall Street Journal, Morningstar, the Street.com, Institutional Investor, ESPN, the FT, PRNewswire, Encyclopaedia Brittanica and more.

The results pages show premium content at the top, then free Yahoo search results at the bottom of each page. 

The Congoo model is a “try then buy” approach.  As a Congoo user, you get free access to a given number of articles from each content provider.  The specific number is set by the content provider. 

At the heart of Congoo is their NetPass.  The NetPass is a toolbar plugin that makes the Congoo system secure for premium content.  Unlike a simple cookie-based approach, which can be easily circumvented (just delete the cookie and create a new user name), the NetPass is a permanent cookie that can only be deleted by uninstalling the toolbar, rebooting and reinstalling.  The NetPass is what allows Congoo to enforce the “try then buy” approach. 

From the publisher perspective, one benefit is that Congoo shares details on your visitors.  The NetPass captures and holds basic identity information (email, gender and zip code), which is then passed to publishers as users use the free content.  Of course, the publishers’ hope is that their content is like heroin: once a user has a few free tastes, they’ll come back and pay for a subscription.

The Congoo business model is simply based upon running Google Adsense ads along the right side of their screen.  So, Congoo aims to drive subscriptions for its publishing partners, while generating advertising revenue as a typical search engine.  The Congoo founders come from the content industry, notably CEO Ash Nashed, formerly of Choice Media and Advanstar.  According to Nashed, Google and other search engines are focused on the end-user, while Congoo is focused on the needs of premium publishers.

I took Congoo out for a test drive, with mixed results.

When I did a search for “Bank Secrecy Act”, it found nearly 700 premium content listings that matched.  However, the bulk of these were press releases from PR Newswire or Businesswire, with a few Institutional Investor articles mixed in.  The press releases could easily be found for free using Google News.

I then tried a search for “Dodge & Cox Stock”, a mutual fund.  There were about 400 results for this search.  Knowing that Morningstar was a Congoo partner, and knowing Dodge & Cox Stock had just received a high “stewardship” grade from Morningstar this morning, I had hoped to see a Morningstar profile among the top results.  But, while there were a few older Morningstar articles among the top 10 results, I didn’t see the profile, nor did I see this morning’s article on high stewardship.

Last, I did a search for General Motors.  The first page of results were a combination of PR Newswire press releases and variations on a listing from Encyclopaedia Brittanica.  While Encyclopaedia Brittanica’s content is not freely available on the web, a more thorough listing for GM could be found at wikipedia.

I think that Congoo has a high hurdle to clear.  Users who have regular need for content in a specific vertical are likely to already know about the products in that market, and either subscribe or consciously decide not to.  The Congoo user who finds a document via search is very different.  They may need a specific document or article now, but they are probably using Congoo either because they don’t have a regular need for that type of information OR they have knowingly decided not to subscribe.  In my opinion, pay-per-view is a more appropriate model for the occasional user who has an urgent need for information at that moment.

In addition, Congoo’s content partners today are somewhat limited.  My test searches found that the majority of the information consisted of press releases and other content that is available for free on the web. 

There clearly is a market opportunity for providing premium content to SOHO users, professionals away from the office and other users.  Other providers, such as Highbeam, have developed a much more comprehensive library of content, while transactional services like our own Alacra Store cater to the “need it now” customer.  It will be interesting to see if Congoo can find a niche for itself in the premium content business.

One of the great things about Web 2.0 is that a great idea can be developed and launched quickly. One of the fastest paths to a quick launch is a mashup. For those unfamiliar with the term, a mashup is a website that leverages two or more existing sites, overlaying content from one on the other, to create a higher value derivative solution.

One of the more compelling mashups today is Trulia.  Trulia has latched on to a very simple, yet compelling idea.  They are taking residential real estate listings from realtor feeds and overlaying them on Google Maps, providing a regional view of real estate.  With Trulia, you can quickly view all the real estate listings in a given zip code, city or county, then drill down based upon various parameters.

For example, suppose you're looking for a coop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with 3 BR and priced between $700k - $1.4M.  With a few clicks you can see there are seven such properties on the market.  The interactive map lets you easily retrieve more details on each property, while a tabular list provides a comprehensive view. 

Today, Trulia is operating in California and New York with Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and other locations on the horizon.

What makes a mashup possible? To begin with, you’ll need access to the underlying content. That’s why RSS feeds have become an enabler of mashups. Trulia uses RSS feeds from realtor listings to create a database of property listings. The RSS feed also means that Trulia can keep costs down as there are no expenses for data entry and editing. Today, Trulia has only 17 employees, most of which are split between technical and business development roles.

What are the implications for publishers?

Open access to content can create many opportunities to create high value, derivative works using readily available content. While Trulia has developed relationships with the realtor community in order to access proprietary content, there are significant opportunities using public information as well. Demographic and census data, business incorporation data, SEC filings, e-commerce listings and public health information all provide a wealth of information that can be overlaid on maps, company profiles, product information and more. Among the most heavily used content sources for mashups are Google, Yahoo, eBay, Craigslist and Amazon. As always, some publishers may see mashups as a threat and may decide not to allow RSS access to their content. Successful content providers will see the tremendous value of content reuse and will encourage use of their branded content in mashups.

Google today took the wraps off the beta version of Google Finance.
Google Finance is a financial portal, a la Yahoo Finance.  The look & feel are clearly Googlesque, from the sparse entry page to the beta label that will probably be there forever.  The technology is clearly Google as well, featuring dynamic charts that can be stretched and moved, with corresponding content dynamically updated.  The charts are built using Flash, with Ajax to enable instant refresh of the relevant news stories for the day(s) of the chart that you click on.

Another innovative aspect of the UI is the way that they provide snapshots of the executives profiled.  While the basic display is a simply tabular list, as you mouse over each one, a profile pops up showing more details, along with a photo.  The executive profiles come from Google's index of the underlying websites, as shown in this example for Informatica.

The portal is built using content from various content providers, namely Reuters, D&B, Morningstar, Hoovers and Revere Data.  What I found most surprising was that peer group charts, research reports and insider trading information came courtesy of Yahoo Finance.
With the dozens and dozens of financial content providers, it seems strange that these two arch foes would strike a licensing agreement but perhaps portals also make strange bedfellows.

While I am not sure that the world needs another finance portal, Google can certainly leverage their search traffic to "guide" users to this portal.  It's got a very nice, clean interface and over time could serve as a strong platform for delivery of additional financial content.

For more than one hundred years, companies like Marquis Who’s Who have built a strong business based largely on vanity publishing. The concept is fairly simple. Put someone’s name, bio and profile into a directory, position it as the “who’s who” of an industry, market or country, then sell copies back to the individuals listed. That worked fine in the past. However, as printed directories fade away, what’s the role of vanity publishing on the web?

One company that may have figured it out is Ziggs. 

Ziggs has repositioned vanity publishing for the web. Rather than positioning it around prestige a la “who’s who”, Ziggs has shifted the focus to managing your image on the Internet. Their basic premise is that if you are a professional, people will search for you on the web. Rather than having them land on some random page that mentions you, you’ll want them to find your information on a page that you control. In essence, Ziggs’ pitch is that they enable you to control your personal branding.

Ziggs basic package allows you to create a professional profile including your name, a narrative bio, a chronological bio (“background”), a pseudo interview, links to your personal or business pages and a contact page. Ziggs will assign you an internal contact address that can be redirected to your email, so your email address isn’t exposed.

 

For $5 per month, Ziggs will add premium options, most notably, Search Engine Marketing (“SEM”). Ziggs SEM will bid on your name on the major (GYM) search engines, so that your Ziggs profile will have prominent positioning any time someone searches your name. Of course, when your name is Barry Graubart, the SEM isn’t needed, but for more common names it might be worthwhile.  Ziggs also emails you whenever a user clicks on your profile, providing the search terms, date, time and location of the user.

For end-users, Ziggs is a fairly powerful and compelling way to search for individuals. Whether trying to locate a specific person using name search, or to find sales prospects by geographic location and job title, Ziggs is a powerful tool. I find it most useful when trying to gain background information prior to meeting with a new prospect, vendor or employment candidate. Recently, Ziggs added the capability to add “Search Ziggs” to the Google Toolbar, which should help drive more search traffic to them.

From a database publishing perspective, Ziggs has effectively shifted the editorial burden to its listees. There is no manual review process for the information on Ziggs. Users update their information and it is presented “as-is”. That allows Ziggs to have more than 3 million profiles today, despite having only 12 full-time and a half-dozen part time employees. While I expect that the number of users paying for profiles remains modest, if Ziggs can continue to build traffic, they will have various ways to augment their premium listing revenue, via advertising, sponsorship and database licensing. With low costs and only $7.5M in financing to date, profitability should not be far off.

The people search market will continue to grow, with uses as varied as sales prospecting and recruitment to performing due diligence for dating. Ziggs is well-positioned to field a significant portion of that traffic.  At the same time, changing dynamics in the workplace mean that personal branding and positioning will become more critical for professionals in the future, strengthening Ziggs' core message.

Meanwhile, the future for Marquis and other traditional vanity publishers is murky at best. 

I’ve spoken and posted often about the need for content providers to step up in the value chain by delivering workflow-based solutions, rather than point applications. Yet most content providers continue to develop products based upon the content of their data, rather than the workflow of their customers.

This past week, I attended the Money Laundering Conference in Hollywood, Florida.

The conference was geared towards compliance and AML officers at banks, securities firms, insurance companies and money services businesses worldwide. Patriot Act and Bank Secrecy Act regulations have dramatically changed the “know your customer” provisions for all of these businesses in an effort to disrupt and detect money laundering and terrorist financing activities.

Of course, these initiatives have created a tremendous opportunity for content providers. And while many such providers are merely compiling data from various watch lists, I was heartened to see a number of companies providing workflow-based solutions. Many of the most compelling applications were transaction monitoring solutions coming from traditional analytics providers like SAS. However, a number of content providers also were showing applications mapped to the customer’s workflow.

For example, Factiva PFA (Public Figures and Associates) is a database of politically exposed persons and their associates. In addition to the traditional search approach, Factiva has built PFA as an XML-based solution so that it can easily be integrated into a customer’s account vetting applications. 

Alacra used this event to announce and showcase the launch of our newest product, Alacra Compliance.   Alacra Compliance is a workflow-based application that helps researchers ensure a comprehensive and consistent approach to new account vetting and enhanced due diligence. Alacra Compliance used federated search to allow a single query to search dozens of premium content databases and the Alacra Compliance Web, an index of more than 600 compliance-related websites. 

In the compliance market, customers are scrambling to find solutions which can address current regulatory needs and which also have the scalability and flexibility to adapt to a rapidly changing regulatory environment. Those content and solutions providers who can support these processes are finding compelling market opportunities. There will continue to be a market for general reference databases, but they will see a much smaller piece of the pie for mission-critical applications.

The concept of vertical search engines has been around for quite a few years. In fact, Alacra  launched its Portal B vertical search engine more than five years ago. Of course, timing is everything in technology and it seems that now the timing is right for vertical search.

One of the emerging leaders in this space is Rollyo. Named for “roll your own” search engine, Rollyo allows you to select up to twenty five websites and create a custom search engine indexing just those sites. 

Users can create multiple “searchrolls” for different topics. Or, a user could create a searchroll containing news from your favorite news sites for a given topic. And, as with any good Web 2.0 app, you can easily share your searchrolls with others, providing a social component to search indexes. 

So, who needs a personal search engine? Most of us do, actually. While there are times when you want to search the entire Internet for some obscure information, there are many other times when you want to search “trusted sources” which can provide you with more relevant results. There are numerous technologies out there which try to use statistical or linguistic approaches to disambiguate terms with multiple meanings. But, if your search index contains only sites related to island-hopping, there’s no confusion over which “Java” you’re search for. 

For a quick test drive of a personal search engine, try out the Content Industry Searchroll which I created in about three minutes using Rollyo.  Try terms like tagging, workflow or blog and see how the results are more relevant than in a full search engine.  Want to learn how Pfizer uses content-related technologies?  Just enter "Pfizer" in the search box and browse the results.  That would be an impossible search to do using Google on the full web.

What’s the implication for publishers?

Publishers, particularly trade press, enthusiast publications or industry-specific information publishers are well-suited to provide vertical search to their users. Whether it’s indexing surfer sites for Surfer Magazine, building and construction sites for McGraw Hill’s CIG or political coverage for CQ, enabling users to search an editorially-chosen set of trusted content is a tremendous value. 

I have heard many database publishers complain that the Internet is eating away at their business and that they are having difficulty retaining customers. Creating a vertical search engine is an effective and manageable way to add significant value to your content beyond what Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can deliver. After all, you’ve been saying for years that you add editorial value beyond simple compilation. Well, roll your own and prove it. 

The M&A market for the content industry continues to be strong.  VNU today announced that it has accepted an $8.9 Billion offer from a private equity consortium, which translates to 13.4X EBITDA, a pretty nice multiple for this industry.   The consortium includes all the typical players, including Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, Thomas Lee, Hellman & Friedman and AlpInvest Partners.
VNU was forced into position to sell after its proposed acquisition of IMS Health failed.

At the same time, PaidContent is reporting that the list of suitors for Knight Ridder has been narrowed to three: McClatchy Newspapers, a joint effort by Gannett and MediaNews Group, and another private equity consortium led by Thomas Lee Partners.  Final bids, due Thursday, are rumored to be in the $5-6 Billion range.  That seems like a high premium for a company that will need significant investment in the years to come, but I guess there aren't many opportunities to buy a newspaper chain on this scale. 

There remains a lot of private equity money on the sideline looking for deals.  I expect 2006 to continue the heavy M&A activity of the past few years in the content space.