Content Matters

Nstein has announced its acquisition of Eurocortex, a content management provider headquartered in Toulouse, France.
The deal, valued at $1.4M Cdn, extends Nstein's reach into the publishing space.  Eurocortex claims more than 30 publishing/media clients including Agence France Presse, Reed Business Information, Hachette Group and Groupe Lagardere.

In the early days of semantic tagging, many of the leading software companies like Inxight, ClearForest and Nstein secured early adopter sales to content providers and aggregators.  These software companies saw the publishing market as an entry point, but saw their long-term opportunity in other, larger markets.  Unfortunately, due to the relative immaturity of their offerings and the complexity in communicating (and demonstrating) a strong ROI, semantic tagging software companies have struggled to make inroads in other markets.  As such, the publishing market, adopting this as a way to automate some of their manual tagging work, has remained a critical aspect of their business.

I believe that this market segment is ripe for a rollup, creating a single provider with revenues of $25-35M.  In the meantime, this acquisition makes sense for Nstein.  It gives it a new range of complementary products to sell and gives it a foot in the door to many European publishers.