Content Matters

I'm a big fan of the ASP model and try to minimize the installation of software wherever I can. 

However, there are times when I just cannot or prefer not to be connected.  I get frustrated on an airplane, when I can't type in my contact notes because Salesforce.com made "no software" their logo and mantra.  I take a commuter train each morning and have to write blog posts offline in Word, then copy them into TypePad when I'm connected.  I use an offline RSS reader to read posts on the train, even though I'd prefer the navigation of online-only reader Netvibes.

Google has taken note of this and has just announced Google Gears at its Developer Day event.  Google Gears is an open source development environment designed to run both online and offline.  Gears is driven by javascript APIs which support data storage, application cacheing and multi-threading technologies.  Google hopes that this plugin can become a standard for offline applications.

As part of the launch, Google has added Gears offline capabilities to its Google feed reader.  It will soon Gear-enable its office applications such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Calendar.

With Google, it's hard to anticipate whether they will put a serious push behind their new offerings, particularly those outside of its core advertising platform.  If they put a big push behind Gears and it gets takeup in the open source community, it could have a significant impact.

For more on Google Developer Day, take a look at http://code.google.com/events/developerday/
For more on Google Gears, see these posts from TechCrunch, O'Reilly Radar and Robert Scoble.

Blog search engine Technorati relaunched over the weekend.

Until now, Technorati's position has been as a search engine for blogs.  They have done a fairly good job, but it was a position that could not be sustained over time with competition from Google.  In this new incarnation, Technorati is trying to position themselves as a search engine for user generated media, including video, podcasts, photos and more.  You can read the details on founder Dave Sifry's blog.

In theory, that expansion makes sense.  In practice, I'm not so sure that they pull it off.  In the past, I'd enter a search on Technorati and get an easy to navigate set of results.  Their "authority rankings" made it easy to winnow the blog post results to those from credible (or at least highly linked) sources.

The new interface, while visually more appealing, is difficult to navigate.  There are a confusing set of choices.  Do I want to look at blog posts, video, photos or audio?  And when I drill down into blog posts, while I can see their authority ranking, there no longer seems to be a way to filter by it.  That was one of the biggest differentiators they had.  Thankfully, they've moved the legacy blog search to a new location at search.technorati.com.

In the long run, this may be a good move for Technorati.  It probably makes them more attractive to a potential suitor and gives them a chance to sit at the user-generated video table.  From the end-user perspective, I'm not sure that it's an advantage.  Specialized search engines are useful because they are specialized.  In amalgamating different types of content, I think they subtract from the value they offer.

CBS Corporation has acquired social media music site Last.fm for $280 million.

Last.fm today has roughly 15 million users of the largely free service, which takes a "wisdom of crowds" approach to music recommendations.  While other services, such as Pandora, are compelling, what makes Last.fm so successful is the fact that it's not intrusive.  Users simply download an iTunes plugin which monitors the music they play.  For example, you can see the music I listen to on my last.fm page.

According to the press release,"The Last.fm management team will work with all relevant CBS divisions to apply their community-building and technology expertise to extend CBS businesses online and within the mobile space."

This acquisition, coming on the tail of the smaller Wallstrip deal, makes it clear that CBS is taking a more serious look at new technologies.  It will be interesting to see whether they can leverage these new capabilities across their traditional businesses.

In an effort to marry structured and unstructured data, Business Objects has acquired Inxight Software.

Inxight, a Xerox Parc spinout, was among the early entrants into the unstructured data/tagging market.  Primarily an OEM provider of multilingual part-of-speech tagging, Inxight has made an effort in recent years to expand into the enterprise and government markets, to mixed results.

I've long felt the UDM market was long due for consolidation.  With this deal, following Reuters acquisition of ClearForest, that is beginning to occur.  What's less certain is whether the BOBJ-Inxight deal will lead to true integration of structured and unstructured data, or whether Inxight will largely remain a niche component.

TechCrunch reports that Google will acquire RSS feed management company Feedburner in a deal reportedly worth $100 million.

This deal could be big for a number of reasons:

First, it suggests that Google will put its force behind RSS adoption.
Second, it means that Google believes that it's feasible to monetize RSS feeds. 

Feedburner offers a feed and blog advertising network.  To-date, publishers have struggled to figure out a way to monetize the reading of their RSS feeds.  While most people think of Google as being in the search business, they're really in the traffic monetization business. The acquisition of Feedburner suggests that Google believes that RSS can be monetized through advertising.

Another way to look at this, as suggested by WebProNews, is that while Microsoft, through Vista, will be pushing user adoption of RSS, Google will be pushing publishers into creating more RSS.

Feedburner was founded in 2003 and has raised $10 million to date, led by Mobius Venture Capital, Union Square Ventures and Portage Ventures.

Many people (including me) have touted the "year of RSS" for the past few years.  With Microsoft and Google pushing it, it looks as though the time for RSS may finally have arrived.

I’ve just finished reading the galleys of David Meerman Scott’s latest book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.  The final version will be published in June; you can pre-order a copy here.

For those who read David’s Web Ink Now blog, the themes of this book will be familiar.  David released an eBook, the New Rules of PR, last year, focusing on direct-to-consumer press releases.  That eBook, plus all of his experiences in viral marketing have led to this new book. 

The book expands beyond PR to include online marketing, viral marketing and leveraging content.  As David points out, in this new environment, these areas are all converging.  A news release, posted to your website, simply becomes marketing content to the reader.  As with his previous book, Cashing in With Content, Scott uses compelling real-world examples to demonstrate the benefits of these methods.  I was pleased to see Alacra mentioned twice in the book – once for the Alacra Blog and again for the Alacra Wiki.

Even for those who read his blog regularly, David brings some new themes to the book.  There is an interesting discussion on the creation of buyer personas – for each type of buyer who may visit your site, so that you can provide relevant content to each buyer type.  This builds upon some of his earlier work, where he focused on content to address users in various phases of a purchase cycle. 

Roughly half the book is focused on putting these concepts to practice in your own environment.  These ten chapters provide specific guidance for understanding buyer personas, using content to position your company as a thought leader and writing content that will resonate with your buyers.  There are also hands-on chapters on blogging, podcasting and leveraging social networking sites.

David Meerman Scott clearly uses the tools that he writes about.  His eBook was downloaded more than 150,000 times, all through viral marketing.  Advance copies of his new book were distributed to a lengthy list of the bloggers who were mentioned in the book.  Clearly David knows that's an easy way to get all of those bloggers (like this one) to write a book review. 

The New Rules of Marketing and PR covers a lot of ground in less than 300 pages.   For traditional marketers and executives, the book is an accessible guide to the emerging models.  For those knee-deep in online marketing already, the New Rules serves as a useful checklist of tips and tools to ensure that your marketing, PR and content are working together to help you achieve your goals.

In the emerging new model for talent acquisition for Hollywood and the Networks, CBS has acquired video blog Wallstrip for $5 million.

According to TechCrunch, the goal of the acquisition was to acquire the talents of Wallstrip host Lindsay Campbell.

For those who haven’t watched it, Wallstrip is a compelling webcast, using humorous skits to explore the value of potential stocks.  My personal favorite Wallstrip piece is their take on Salesforce.com, a la Glengarry Glen Ross.  Campbell is a compelling performer and the outtakes at the end of each
piece are always fun.  Wallstrip was initially launched last October and has developed a small cult following.

The $5M price may be a bit high, considering Wallstrip’s narrow audience today, but it’s becoming clear that YouTube and Webcasts are the place to discover emerging talent.  CBS should see a strong ROI on this just by having a team in place that understands how to leverage this platform.

UPDATE: Fred Wilson, one of Wallstrip's angel investors, shares his perspective on the Wallstrip story.

People data has long been a solid niche in the content industry.  Multiple times in my career (particularly at Nelson and Leadership Directories), I’ve developed products built around people data.

While this segment has been changing over the past five years, the pace of change has accelerated dramatically during the past 12-18 months, and the traditional business models are quickly becoming obsolete. 

In recent weeks, there have been a few compelling new entries in this market.  For the traditional providers, the biggest short-term threat probably comes from the new partnership between Capital IQ and sister company Business Week.   The new Company Insight Center on Business Week’s website provides snapshots of both public and private companies.  The People section includes fairly accurate lists of officers and directors and also shows “degree of separation” relationships among board members for social networking.

In essence, Capital IQ is now providing for free a product that paid content providers have been selling for tens of thousands of dollars.  While the user interface of this beta version could use some improvement, that’s pretty easy to fix. 

In the longer term, the trend that’s likely to have a much greater impact is a paradigm shift to accessing people data through search.  Traditional providers have built proprietary (and often complex) user interfaces to view their data.  In an effort to address every potential user need (list building, views of complex organizational structures, sharing of user edits and more), vendors developed systems that were not intuitive and often required training of end-users.

But in today’s environment, users don’t want proprietary interfaces.  They don’t want to read documentation or sit through training sessions.  Users have already found a user interface which they like and it’s called Google.  I can hear the response of the traditional vendors - Google is too simplistic and can’t do all of the fantastic things which your proprietary interfaces allow.  Well, that may be true, but it’s the interface that the world has embraced and if your system is more complex, you’re going to be left behind.

The emerging providers are viewing this market as a vertical search issue.  ZoomInfo and LinkedIn were the first to take this approach.  New providers like Wink and Explode have launched compelling offerings.  Perhaps most interesting is a new site (still in early beta) called Spock.  Spock is sort of “ZoomInfo meets LinkedIn”, with a Web 2.0 interface which incorporates tagging and other community features.  When you first join Spock, it asks you for your ID and password to LinkedIn, Plaxo, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL.  It uses this information to scrape your existing network, adding that information to your Spock profile.  Spock automatically tags your profile, using term extraction to identify companies, titles and industry terms that represent you.  Users can “vote” as to whether the tags accurately represent the person, creating a tag cloud for each person. (Note: I will do a more comprehensive review of Spock in an upcoming post.)

The people data market is going through a transformation similar to that which affected news content a few years ago.  Contact and biographical data are rapidly becoming commodities and the next six to twelve months are sure to bring more disruption to this market.

Most of the traditional players in this market have built their business by identifying a niche which they can fill better than anyone else.  At Nelson, we knew industry specialties for buy and sell-side analysts; at Leadership, we could tell you which committee staffer had an interest in a particular subject.  But the dirty secret for most of these providers is that the core application typically accounted for only a third to half of their customer base.  The rest of the customers were just looking for lists for sales prospecting or recruitment.   While the emerging products may never be deep enough to steal away the core users, they are already getting good enough to pull off the ancillary user and will only get better.  So, if you’re trying to project 2010 revenues for one of the traditional players, there’s a pretty easy formula.  Just estimate about a third to half of their 2000 revenues and you’ll probably be on target.

Agree?  Disagree?  I'd love to hear.  Please post your comments.

More details have come out on the proposed Thomson acquisition of Reuters.

The combined entity, to be called Thomson-Reuters will be dually listed and would be headed by current Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.  Current Thomson CEO Dick Harrington would retire upon completion of the transaction.

On the financial side, the proposed deal would value Reuters at 8.87 billion Pounds (US $17.7 billion).  Woodbridge, the Thomson family trust, would own 53% of the merged company, with other Thomson shareholders getting 23% and Reuters shareholders approximately 24%.

The Board would consist of 15 members, with five to be drawn from the current Reuters board, plus CEO Tom Glocer.  Of the remaining nine, Woodbridge could name four, including the chairman.

According to Thomson CEO Dick Harrington, the combined company would "create a major global financial information player by combining the complementary strengths of Thomson Financial and Reuters to serve both buy-side and sell-side customers around the world."

It will be interesting to see how regulators view this potential merger from an antitrust perspective.  The combined Thomson-Reuters would equal the market share of Bloomberg, creating a duopoly in financial information.  At the same time, it could open up new opportunities for smaller players in that market to grow, as many financial institutions require a second source for critical content and merging the companies would eliminate each as an alternative option for earnings estimates, filings and research.

Roger Ehrenberg hypothesizes that the true value of a Thomson-Reuters merger could be in the creation
of what he calls a "Smart Pipe".  In essence, that the huge repository of content these two companies
house could be leveraged in the creation of numerous high value products, if all the content is  tagged, organized and accessible. 

Both Thomson and Reuters have made efforts in this area (most recently through Reuters' proposed   acqusition of ClearForest) though neither have much to show so far.  While they will have incredible
content resources available, it's not clear to me that the combined company will be nimble enough to 
exploit what each has failed to do individually.  And, with massive integration projects on the horizon, I don't see that changing in the short-term. 

Assuming this merger goes through as planned, I think that it will create some interesting opportunities for small, nimble players to establish strong positions in niche segments.

While the long-rumored Microsoft-Yahoo collaboration makes sense on many levels, there are two interesting articles that suggest the deal will not happen.

 BusinessWeek reports that last week's rumors of the deal heating up were nothing new and that the NY Times and WSJ articles, in fact were based upon talks from a few months ago.  As that article points out, things are actually looking more positive for Yahoo today than they were earlier in the year.  The launch of Panama and recent acquisition of Right Media should buy some more time for Yahoo to get their act together. 

Meanwhile, Forrester's Charlene Li point out that integrating the two companies would be a Herculean task.  The Redmond and Sunnyvale corporate cultures are very different from one another.  Anyone who's been through any type of merger or acquisition knows that conflicting cultures can wreak havoc on even the best deals.  And, as Li indicates, this integration would have to take place while the combined company tries to head off Google's dominance of the industry.

On paper, a Microsoft Yahoo merger makes a lot of sense.  The combination of Yahoo's web 2.0 savvy, market and advertising capabilities plus Microsoft's technological skills could make a formidable competitor to Google.  But, like sporting events, business doesn't get played on paper.

I believe that Yahoo is relatively undervalued at $30 per share, but only if they can unlock the value of their disparate assets.  If the merger route is not the best path, perhaps a refocusing (a la the infamous peanut butter memo) will help.  Last week's announcement that they will finally kill Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr is a good starting point.