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« June 2006 | Main | August 2006 »

July 26, 2006

Thomson applies text mining to news

Thomson_logoThomson Financial and Uptick Data have announced a partnership, leveraging text mining tools from Uptick to extract business and financial events from news.

Thomson and other financial content providers have experimented with text mining for the past few years.  Most of the early efforts have focused on automating (or semi-automating) the manual tagging process, with the primary focus on cost-cutting and scaling and managing a workflow that often varies with filing and market cycles.  For many, text mining has been viewed as an alternative to outsourcing.  This partnership is focused on leveraging the Uptick technology to trigger news alerts based on business events, a potentially more lucrative endeavor.

Content providers can leverage text mining to generate new revenues through creation of new products, micro-chunking existing content, developing alerts and more.  Sophisticated providers can then add analytics to the extracted information to create higher value solutions.

 

Conversely, one of the challenges to automated tagging is the level of accuracy.  The absolutely best systems today achieve a break-even score (where precision=recall) in the 80-90% range.  Even at the top of the range, you're still getting one out of ten wrong.  And, unlike humans, when the engine gets it wrong it often looks ridiculous.  An example I often used in my days at ClearForest was that, due to the vagaries of language, you might see an event tagged as "Graubart acquires Starbucks", when the underlying story merely said that I bought a cup of coffee.

It will be interesting to see where Thomson and Uptick take this partnership.  And, it will be even more interesting to see how accepting the financial markets users are of the imperfect results.

July 21, 2006

A Significant Milestone

Alacralogomed
Last night, Alacra celebrated its tenth anniversary.

Alacra01 At a time when many investors focus only on the next quarter, and most startups don’t make it past their first year, ten years is quite an accomplishment.  Many contributed to that success – the employees who’ve worked so hard, the early adopters who were willing to trust a startup with their business and the content partners without whom we’d have no products.

Alacra05 While the business has had to adapt to changes in customer needs and market conditions, Alacra’s core vision of delivering content in support of a user’s workflow, backed by exceptional customer service, remains unchanged.

Last night, many of those partners and customers joined our employees in celebration of these ten years.  We thank you for your support and look forward to many more years of working together.

Alacra03       Alacra04_1                                     Alacra08             Alacra06 Alacra09

 

July 19, 2006

The 50 Content Companies that Matter: the New York Times

Nytimes_logo_1 Few industries have been impacted by the Internet more than newspapers.  Circulation has declined, while help-wanted and other classified advertising has been displaced by web-based solutions.  At the same time, investors, disappointed by earnings, have stormed the boardroom, pushing for divestitures or more.

According to Freedonia Research, circulation of daily newspapers dropped about 0.8% per year during the ten year period from 1994-2004, despite population increases during this period.

Throughout this storm, a few newspaper companies have not only weathered these changes, but embraced them.  At the top of that list sits the New York Times. 

The Times entered the Internet market in 1995, through its investment in CareerPath.com, along with KnightRidder, Times Mirror, the Washington Post and Tribune Company.  A few months later, its Boston Globe division launched boston.com, with the New York Times on the Web launched in early 1996.  In 1999, the Times created New York Times Digital, a dedicated operating unit to focus on the growth of its web properties.

Last year, the Times acquired About.com from Primedia for $410M.  In hindsight, the deal looks like a bargain, as About.com revenues and EBITDA have continued their rapid ascent.  With EBITDA of about $15M for the first 6 months of 2006, the purchase price is only about 14x expected 2006 earnings.

Today, the New York Times on the web is the number one news site on the Internet, with 74 million unique visitors a month.  That’s more than double that of CNN and more than fifty times the readership of the print edition.  More than one in ten internet users worldwide visit the NYTimes.com site.  As a whole, NY Times Internet properties offer more than a billion page views per month.  Internet revenues remain modest, however. The Times Q2 2006 Internet revenues of $66m were only 7.7% of their overall revenue for the quarter, but that is up from $49M (5.8%) a year ago. 

Revenues include about $9M from the TimesSelect program, begun last November.  While it’s fair to debate whether closing off the Times editorial page to non-subscribers makes long-term sense (IMO the negatives to doing so outweigh the positives), the combination of nytimes.com, TimesSelect and About.com gives the Times a diverse set of properties catering to paid subscribers, registered users and open visitors.

Most importantly, the New York Times has grown its brand and expanded its reach dramatically in the Internet age.  While other newspapers face uncertain futures, the Times has established its position as the premier source of news for English-speaking readers worldwide. 

That positioning, leveraging their reputation built over the past 100 years, means the Times is well-positioned for growth regardless of where technology might take them.  The Times’ ability to balance their growth and traditional markets clearly makes them one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

July 14, 2006

CCC Rightsphere helps companies leverage their content subscriptions

Rightsphere_1 A few weeks ago, at the Special Libraries Association conference in Baltimore, I had the chance to sit down with Bill Burger, VP Marketing at Copyright Clearance Center, for a demo of their new Rightsphere™ product.

Rightsphere_agreement_manager_1 Rightsphere™ brings Copyright Clearance Center to the user side of content rights.  Rightsphere™ is a licensing management platform that allows companies to promote collaboration, while ensuring compliance with copyrights and license terms.

Here are the highlights from my discussion with Bill:

Content Matters (“CM”): Tell me about Rightsphere.

Burger: Rightsphere sets out to inject some clarity into the complex web of licenses and content agreements that companies have with publishers and information providers.  It does this by providing a simple answer to a common question people have in a lot of work environments: "What can I do with this content?"  The answer to that question often lies buried somewhere among the stacks of agreements companies negotiate with providers and getting the correct answer at the right time is exceedingly difficult in most companies.  That's the problem Rightsphere addresses

Bill_burger_ccc_1 CM: CCC has previously focused its efforts on publishers.  What were the drivers
in moving to the client side
?

Burger: We've always been client focused when it came to creating new licensing structures and services that expanded the ways people could use content in the corporate or academic markets.  But from the standpoint of creating technology-driven services for content uses, and perhaps this is what you were getting at, I think it's fair to say that Rightsphere breaks new ground.  Our only other comparable product is Rightslink, which is a service aimed at publishers that enables them to offer a host of licensing and reprint services to people reading their content online.  As to why we invested as we did in Rightsphere, the answer is really very simple: our clients needed help.  They told us they had trouble managing their various licenses and that it was next to impossible to keep track of all of the rights they had bought through the multitude of agreements they had negotiated.  In essence, they told us that for all the value they placed on our licenses, we still had more work to do to reduce the friction that was holding back the flow of content.

CM: The value proposition for Rightsphere has both the carrot and the stick - customers can avoid copyright violations, while also getting more value out of the content they license.  Which of these two areas seems to be the driver for your initial interest, avoiding litigation or collaboration?

Burger: Absolutely that latter.  One of the things we found during our market research was that a number of our customers don't fully appreciate or realize the value of the licenses they buy from us or any number of content providers they work with.  The reason was that they had no way to let their employees know what rights they had because it was just too hard to convey.  So what did they do?  In some cases they erred on side of caution and issued strict policies against sharing content--even when one or more of their agreements would have allowed it.  So much for collaboration in a situation like that.  Rightsphere addresses that problem directly by making it possible for everyone in a company to see what rights they have.

CM: What is the typical ramp-up time for getting all of the content license information loaded into Rightsphere?

Burger: We expect that in most cases it will take a few weeks, but there are a number of factors to consider.  First is how many different content agreements a company has.  Second is the degree to which a company has centralized the management and tracking of its agreements.  If they know what they have it will help speed the process.  But it's worth keeping in mind that a considerable amount of value will be realized just by the fact that Rightsphere will immediately show the rights a company has through its CCC agreements, so even from Day 1 there's a real benefit.

CM: Your initial beta clients are both in the pharmaceutical market.  What other markets have expressed interest in Rightsphere?

Burger: We've done a tremendous amount of market research on this question and one of the findings that gives us confidence about the product is how widespread the interest is.  Broadly speaking, we saw that industries that face some level of regulation, that use content intensively in their business and that place a premium on innovation, speed to market and collaboration all expressed a real interest in the concept. In addition to pharmaceutical and related firms, that would include financial firms, the energy sector, chemicals, telecommunications and other technology-centric markets.

Rightsphere_5_buttons CM: Based upon the initial feedback from users, what might you be adding in upcoming releases?

Burger: Our customers most definitely will be guiding us and Rightsphere will be a product that is always improving.  At this stage it's probably too early to tell what new features will end of at the top of the to-do list for future releases, but I think it's safe to say that you'll see us looking to add new types of uses to the list of licensing options we offer.  We'll also be working hard to improve the commerce experience for our customers.  And some new features will, I'm sure, key off the content needs of new sectors as they come on board.

For more coverage of Rightsphere, take a look at John Blossom’s analysis, InfoToday and the July issue of eContent.

July 11, 2006

MyBlogLog Puts the Community in Blogging

Mybloglog_logo MyBlogLog launched a set of analytics tools about a year ago to help bloggers track activity on their blog.  You may have noticed text such as "nth most popular outgoing link" pop up when you mouse over a link on Content Matters.  That's MyBlogLog at work.  It gives bloggers a better sense of what their readers are reading, where they're coming from and what external links they click on.

Mybloglog_community_1 Last month, the team at MyBlogLog took that one large step further, adding a community aspect to blogs.  On the left pane of Content Matters, you'll see a new section, Content Matters Community, including photos and screen names of the five most recent visitors to the site.

Readers are encouraged to "join" the community for the blogs which they read.  These communities then can be used to generate recommendations for other communities to join (blogs to read).  Even cooler, MyBlogLog can automatically set you to "join" a community after you've visited that blog X times (default is 10).  In much the same way that last.fm can introduce you to music that you may like, MyBlogLog can introduce you to new blog content which is of interest to others in your community.

To learn more, take a moment to set up a free MyBlogLog account and join the Content Matters community.

What's the impact for publishers?
Trade magazine publishers and other content providers who dominate vertical markets should be looking for ways to create a community. There are many ways to increase user interaction; simply having your readers faces appear on your blog can be an easy, yet appealing piece of the community experience.  You might showcase community members elsewhere on your site, or even use them as a sounding board for editorial and features.

Eric Marcoullier, Todd Sampson and their team have created an interesting environment catering to the blog community.  Right now, it's fairly bare-bones, but it will be interesting to see where users take these communities.

In the meantime, I'd encourage you to sign up and begin to play.

Some of the notable blogs which have adopted MyBlogLog Communities already include:

Fred Wilson's A VC
Brad Feld's Feld Thoughts
Ben Barren's RSS'ing Down Under
Steve Rubel's MicroPersuasion
Valleywag
and hundreds more

July 06, 2006

It's a series of tubes...

Tubes With the long holiday weekend, you, like me, might have missed some of the debate on the net neutrality bill.

I've previously gone on record suggesting that legislators who can't navigate a website shouldn't be able to vote on critical issues like net neutrality. 

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens did a wonderful job of supporting that argument earlier this week.
When asked to explain why he voted against an amendment to insert some net neutrality provisions into a telecommunications bill, Senator Stevens gave a convoluted explanation that seemed to talk about how downloadable video would clog the tubes and keep him from getting emails from his staff.  At least, that's what I think he said.

Here are a few quotes:
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially."

..."And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

Here's the full transcript, courtesy of Wired Blogs' 27B Stroke 6  , or listen to the audio, via Public Knowledge.

Ted_stevens I know that Stevens is 82, and I don't expect him to really get the Internet.  But, it's scary to think that he and his peers are making decisions that will have a huge impact on the ability of technology startups to compete.  Stevens' party claims that it's the party of business, and in particular, small business, but they're simply giving the lobbyists of the large telecoms what they want.

In the meantime, make sure you tell your Senators and Representative that you support net neutrality.

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