Content Matters

The theme of this year's InfoCommerce Conference is "Becoming One With Your Market". 
The first day included presentations from a mix of old and new database publishers.  The morning kicked off with a keynote by Jim Burke, CMO of D&B.  Jim spoke of efforts to turn around this 165-year old business.  D&B has historically been, at best, indifferent to their customer needs.  They are now attempting to reshape themselves with their stated aspiration "to be the most trusted source of commercial insight so our customers can decide with confidence."  Jim points to some successes, but based upon customer experiences, I think they still have an awfully long way to go.

Dean Stephens, CEO of Healthline Networks, gave an overview of their vertical search engine for the healthcare industry, launched last fall.  Healthline today sees about 3 million unique visitors per month, making it among the fastest growing websites.  Healthline is a great example of how domain expertise can be applied to improve search.  They have developed an extensive semantic taxonomy, linking diseases, symptoms and treatments, layering a visualization application ("healthmap") on top of the results.

The day wrapped up with presentations from a few startups in the information industry, featuring Dan Savage of b2b search engine TradeComet, Frank Vaculin of social networking site Spoke Software and Shoshanna Zilberberg-Winter, newly hired CMO of ShopWiki.  ShopWiki, founded by former Doubleclick leader Kevin Ryan and others from the Doubleclick team, is a compelling search engine for shopping.  The search engine itself is pretty compelling, offering natural language search and color-based search ("red luggage").  On top of that are community-based shopping guides (hence the wiki in the name) and user-submitted videos. 

Today's session includes a keynote by Highline Media's Andy Goodenough.  I'll be moderating a vertical search panel that follows, featuring ALM's Shannon Holman, Han Huang of FindGuru and Jeff Dearth of DeSilva & Phillips.