Content Matters

The second day of InfoCommerce seemed more lively and more relevant (at least to me).

Andy Goodenough led with the keynote, talking about how they'd built Highline Media to a $50M business in just over three years through a combination of acquisition and organic growth.  It was interesting to note that Highline's data division, largely a byproduct of its editorial focus, will exceed $10M in revenues in 2006.

My vertical search panel followed, with presentations from Shannon Holman of ALM, Han Huang of FindGuru and DeSilva & Phillips Partner Jeff Dearth.  We covered a lot of ground in an hour, showing examples of successful vertical search as a core (ad supported) product, as a value-add to subscription products and as a means of driving premium content sales.

One of the most interesting panels of the Conference was the Inferential Data panel, with presentations from Planalytics, MedMeme and Kelley Blue Book.  Scott Bernhardt, SVP of Sales & Marketing for Planalytics walked us through a fascinating presentation of their weather-based business intelligence applications.  Basically, they overlay weather data on a set of proprietary models to generate forecasts for retailers.  For example, we had a cold and wet September, which translates to an improved market for rainwear, sweaters, soup and cough medicine and a down market for lawn & garden products and barbecue charcoal.  In other words, they projected a good month for Kohl's (who later reported a 16% boost year-over-year in same store sales) and a poor one for Home Depot (who are yet to report their September numbers).  I'd not seen Planalytics before and was very impressed with their offering.

Renny Ponvert, who is stepping down as President of Hemscott following its acquisition by i-Deal, led an interesting presentation on "Who's Winning and Why".  Renny, a veteran of the financial information business, got everyone's attention by describing the defensive position many publishers take: "Insecurity, masked by cannibalization concerns creates a low-growth, slow death spiral", exemplified by the newspaper industry.  On the positive side, Renny identified three tactics that content provider can use to their benefit: Visualization (examples were NY Times bubble charts and CNET Heat Maps), the use of crawl technology to scale your content business and the utilization of vertical search to reduce noise and improve the depth of your site.

InfoCommerce is a somewhat quirky conference.  Of the content industry events, it probably has the largest percentage of old media including a handful of ostrich-like directory publishers.  That said, there are always some interesting models from companies that otherwise don't show up on the radar.  This year, for me, those included Planalytics, Healthline Networks and Health Market Science.  Russell Perkins, who runs the event in conjunction with Roxanne Christensen and Megan St. John, has successfully transitioned the focus from traditional directories to now include vertical search, the inferential data companies mentioned above, b2b lead generation and other data-driven content businesses.

On Wednesday evening, InfoCommerce held a dinner where they presented their "Model of Excellence Awards" to about eight products.  Alacra was honored to receive an award for its Alacra Compliance application.

If you haven't been to an InfoCommerce event recently, I'd recommend you put it on your calendar for next fall.