Content Matters

Tonight were the 2008 SIIA CODiE awards, which recognize excellence by companies in the Content, Software and Education markets.

I was honored to accept a CODiE on behalf of Alacra for our Alacra Book application.
Alacra Book was the winner in the Best Solution Integrating Content into Workflow category. It was especially gratifying to be selected when we consider the tough competition in that category, including CCH, Cicero, EDGAR Online and Generate.

The CODiEs are awarded through the votes of our peers in the content, software and education space. This year, there were over 1,000 CODiE applications submitted, so we're somewhat humbled to be recognized among the many industry leaders.

During the past year, we have upgraded Alacra Book clients to the latest version of Alacra Book. The product enhancements were directly driven by client feedback, so we feel confident that the new version is living up to the goal of integrating content into workflow.

Congratulations to Product Manager Janet Tarendash, Vice President of Development Ajit Tharaken and the entire Alacra team who have been actively involved in the development, testing and rollout of Alacra Book.

Research Recap has released its first quarter Research Zeitgeist.

Research Recap, launched by Alacra last summer, highlights interesting credit, investment, economic and market research.  Each week, the most widely-read posts are noted in the Research Zeitgeist.  Then, each quarter, a comprehensive Zeitgeist identifies those posts that received the most attention during the three-month period.

The Research Zeitgeist for the first quarter of 2008 was released this morning. Not surprisingly, the most widely read posts of the quarter largely reflected the credit crunch and market turbulence of recent months.

The top posts for the quarter were:

1. Warning Signs Seen in Rising Credit Card Delinquencies (CreditSights)
2. Research Primer: Credit Default Swaps (Fitch)
3. Research Primer: Structured Investment Vehicles (Moody's)
4. Bond Insurer Downgrades Could Lead to Bank Downgrades  (S&P) 
5. Role of Hedge Funds in Subprime Crisis Examined (International Monetary Fund)
6. Subprime Mortgage Lending Primer (NERA Economic Consulting)
7. Market-led Measures Not Enough to Solve Subprime Fallout (Oxford Analytica)
8. Write-down Spotlight Shifts to European Banks (CreditSights)
9. Alternative Proposals to Stem Subprime Foreclosures (various)
10. Audit Integrity Questions Citigroup's Risk Assessment (Audit Analytics)

Hmmm... I think I'm sensing a theme here.  Perhaps if Ben Bernanke were reading Research Recap he might be less afraid to mention the R-word.  I hope that Q2 and Q3 can bring some posts about growth and recovery, but I'm not optimistic.

Alacra Book has been named a finalist in the SIIA CODiE awards.

The annual CODiE awards recognize leading products across three groups: Content, Technology and Education. Nominated products are reviewed by an SIIA-appointed judging panel who select the finalists. Winners will be selected by SIIA member votes and will be announced at the upcoming SIIA NetGain conference.

Alacra Book is a finalist in the Best Solution Integrating Content Into Workflow category (OK, that's a mouthful to say, but it's fairly descriptive of the category).

Alacra Book is a workflow application which enables investment banks and professional services firms to streamline the process of creating briefing books and public information books (PIBs), a key element of the business development process. Traditionally, creation of a PIB took an analyst or associate 3-4 hours, utilizing the individual products from each of their content providers. Alacra Book cuts that time to 10-15 minutes by integrating all of the databases into a simple workflow.  Today, 19 of the 20 largest investment banks have cut their research costs through use of Alacra Book.

The CODiE's are a competitive process - there were more than 1,000 nominations.  We're thrilled to have been named a finalist and look forward to the announcement of the winners May 20.  For those of you attending NetGain, I'll be a panelist on the Platforms - Will they Tilt In Your Favor? panel and hope to see you there.

I was thrilled that MarketingSherpa selected the Alacra Store as the subject of its latest case study, entitled "How Pay-Per-Article Option Tripled Revenue for Subscription Site". Those in marketing or eCommerce have come to rely upon MarketingSherpa's case studies for insights and real-world examples of successful online marketing.

The case study looks back at the brief history of the Alacra Store and documents its growth, particularly the strong growth of the past year. The article also provides a look at the overall platform that Alacra has launched in order to fuel future growth of the Alacra Store, including our Research Recap blog; Alacra Content Marketplace, the infrastructure to scale our integration of new content sources; and the Premium Content Ad Network, our just launched affiliate program that connects content with readers of financial blogs and websites. 

The case study was well-written and accurately depicts the steps that were taken. However, I'd like to make one small correction to the record. The writing style of the MarketingSherpa case studies tends to attribute all of the efforts to a single individual. In the case of the Alacra Store, it was clearly a team effort. I'd like to recognize a few of the indivduals who have been responsible for building the Alacra Store into what it is today - Jarid Lukin, Ron Waksman and Tony Bruni, among others, deserve the recognition for their efforts.

The full Alacra Store case study is available on the MarketingSherpa site.

Alacra has an opening for an aggressive business development manager with 1-3 years experience in an online biz dev role. This position will be responsible for recruiting partners for our newest offering, the Premium Content Ad Network, along with related products.

Candidates should have a proven track record in targeting and recruiting partners for an online business and should have a strong understanding of internet business models including affiliate marketing and online advertising.  This role requires someone comfortable with all facets of web 2.0 technology. This is a true biz dev role, not a sales position.

The position is based in our downtown NYC headquarters.

Qualified candidates should email their CV to nyjobs (at) alacra (dot) com.

Full position details are provided on the Alacra site.

Lisa Bodell, CEO of futurethink led the panel discussion on Information Industry Innvators.

The panelists were Jim Brock, CEO of Attributor, Alacra CEO Steve Goldstein and Darrell Gunter, Chief Marketing Officer for Collexis.

Each panelist had 3 minutes and 3 slides with images and no words to describe their business.

Attributor:

• We do heavy lifting; we help track where your content appears anywhere on teh Internet
• We help customers look at the entire internet to put your content out; we are the harvester; we allow you to see how your content is being used, whether there is commercial value being generated, and whether there are links back to your site.
• Why we're innovative - we make lemonade out of lemons.  The changes in the content industry

Alacra

• We're a content company - license & aggregate all sorts of biz info and resell it to financial svcs, mgmt consultants and accounting firms; we make money in 2 ways: we resell it on a transaction basis and we also package it
• In essence, we're a packaging company of all this content in variety of different ways.
• Innovation: we get our ideas from our customers; also, we try a lot of new things.  How can we apply new technologies?

Collexis:

• Collect key concepts and put them into a fingerprint to be able to show the key concepts within a long document
• What we do - we shine a bright light into information; we can show you who are the subject matter experts in a given area; we also can show the emerging trends that may occur in the future - leads to hypothesis generation (show co-occurring concep ts)
• Innovative because "we make scientists happy"; we save them time

Strategies for innovation:
Lisa: If you were addressing 100 CEO's in the information industry on innovation, what's your top starting point for innovation?

Steve: Many companies are sitting on a wealth of assets that they're not doing anything with.  Rather than creating from scratch, we find lots of great opportunities by leveraging things that you already have.

Jim Brock: watch the social networks as a laboratory; if you can gain visibility into how your users are mashing up your info, you gain insights as to how you should be doing things with your data.

Lisa: How do you define innovation?
Steve: it's sort of like pornography; you can't really define it but you know it when you see it.  We focus on how we might solve a particular customer problem. 

Jim: We had a recent discussion around this.  It has to be something non-obvious.  But, it could be something non-technical.  It could be administrative, legal or something else.

Lisa: Where do you get the ideas (aha moments) for your business?

Steve: most of our ideas come from the customers; we try to synthesize what customers are doing.  It's not an "in the shower" aha moment.  It's more that we synthesize things from multiple customers.

Lisa: Once you identify something, how do you get it out the door?  Do you dedicate people, money, time?
Darrell: You need to have a champion, then you need to set a plan in place for development, then work with a user-centered design group.

Jim: For me, it's people & machines.  How many people are on something; how much of their time is dedicated to it and how many machines are working on it.

Lisa: It's hard to get people to be innovative.  What do you do to encourage innovation?

Steve: we try to get as many of our employees out of the office as is possible.  It's hard to be creative when you're in your comfort zone in our office.

Darrell: We have the opposite problem.  We have a lot of innovative people that generate lots of ideas but we have to narrow them down.

Lisa: Name a company you aspire to, outside of your industry

Steve: Evan Williams, who invented Twitter; you take something that already exists (blogging) and made it smaller by limiting the number of users. 

Jim: LinkedIn; I go to it every few weeks and always find it interesting

What are your New Year's Resolutions for your business?
Jim: we have to get as close as possible to the customer.  For us, it's about opening the API up to the customer.

Steve: similar in terms of speaking with more customers; but for this years it's more getting out of our sweet spots to find prospects who have similar problems to our customers

Darrell: Goal is to be in the top 100 institutions in the United States

Despite improvements in contextual and behavioral internet advertising, for many sites, the typical ads that are served are not very relevant.  This is particularly the case with blogs and websites offering financial commentary and business information.

The challenge is that most internet advertising is product-focused.  So, if I'm writing a blog post about the company Motorola, contextual ad engines will most likely serve up an ad prompting the user to buy a  mobile phone.  But when a user reads a post on this blog, she's not looking to buy a phone; she's more likely trying to learn more about the company and research its stock.

Introducing the Premium Content Ad Network.

That's why Alacra has launched the Premium Content Ad Network ("PCAN").  PCAN has been developed to help publishers of business and financial information better monetize their websites.

For a blog or website covering stocks, PCAN will serve up contextually relevant ads which contain links to premium business information on the company being written about.  Leveraging the content in the Alacra data warehouse, PCAN automatically generates ads consisting of selected premium business information based upon the content of the page the visitor is viewing,   In the above example, a user landing on a page for Motorola (MOT) might see a list of recent credit or investment research, conference call transcripts, company profiles or other content about Motorola the company.

For web publishers, PCAN is complementary to existing advertising programs.  Publishers can continue to run display ads and use ad networks such as Google AdSense for text ads.  PCAN is a pay-per-action network; leveraging the Alacra affiliate program, participating websites will receive a share of revenue on any content sales.

The initial Alacra partners for PCAN are EDGAR Online and blog the Livermore Report.  You can view PCAN ads, for example, on the following pages:

• EDGAR Online page for Citigroup
• Livermore Reports page for IBM

For more coverage of the PCAN launch, read Silicon Alley Insider, Fred Wilson's A VC, MediaPost and the Alacra Blog. 

Publishers interested in learning more about the Premium Content Ad Network should contact Ron-dot-Waksman at Alacra-dot-com or visit here.

Research Recap, launched by Alacra last summer, has unveiled the 10 most widely read posts of 2007.

Research Recap is a free service that highlights and abstracts compelling credit, investment, economic, market and industry research.  Research Recap is published in blog format and is also available as a free RSS feed. Much of the underlying research is available free of charge, while some is available for a fee, either through the Alacra Store or from individual content provider sites.

 

Research Recap editors review tens of thousands of research reports each year, surfacing those reports which they feel provide insights and information not well-covered in the mainstream media. Topics covered by Research Recap in 2007 were varied, with considerable coverage of the housing and credit markets, eCommerce and social networking, corporate governance, energy and green technologies, hedge funds among others. 

While the topics covered by Research Recap during the year were broad, eight of the ten most widely-read Research Recap posts were focused on the subprime mortgage market implosion.

The most widely read post this year was, US “Housing Bust” Effects to Linger Until 2009, based upon a report issued by Moody's Economy.com, barely nudging past More Bank, Brokerage Writedowns, Ratings Cuts Inevitable, which sourced a CreditSights report.  Other posts among our top 10 highlighted reports issued by S&P, the International Monetary Fund, Fitch Research,  the Wharton School of Business and Salary.com among others.   

The full top-10 list is available on the Research Recap site and can also be found here.

During the year, we were most proud of the fact that Research Recap consistently surfaced topics that were later picked up in the mainstream media.  For example, in October, Research Recap highlighted several reports suggesting the possibility of the subprime crisis spilling over into commercial real estate.  That same topic was covered two months later by major business publications.  Similarly, Research Recap has been out in front on topics such as the questionable wisdom of using food crops for biofuels and bailout plans for complex financial instruments such as SIVs. 

Each Friday, Research Recap publishes a Research Zeitgeist post, highlighting the most widely read and other notable posts from the prior week.  Another regular feature of Research Recap are our highly alliterative Research Recap Research Roundups, which provide quick links and summaries to multiple views on a given topic.

Publishers seeking to have their content reviewed by Research Recap may contact the Research Recap editor at editor-at-researchrecap-dot-com.

Alacra today announced the launch of the Alacra Content Marketplace ("ACM").
ACM is a web-based self-service site that allows content publishers to automatically upload their content for sale via Alacra's institutional and eCommerce platforms (Alacra Premium and the Alacra Store).

Today, Alacra hosts more than 120 premium business databases in its data warehouse.  Each database has been added manually, requiring weeks of developer time.  As a result, there are many premium content sources which we'd love to have, but haven't had the available development cycles to load them.  Alacra Content Marketplace solves that issue.

With ACM, publishers can submit either individual documents through the website or can batch-load massive numbers of documents, tagging them and pricing them as they wish.  That content is then made available to the numerous users of various Alacra products.  Revenues are shared between Alacra and its publisher partners.

ACM is a great way for publishers to increase revenues with little or no downside risk.  Publishers focused on vertical markets can make their content more widely available.  Those which sell content only on a subscription basis can suddenly have access to a transactional, pay-per-view platform without any investment in technology.

More details are available on the Alacra Blog.  Publishers interested in submitting their content via ACM should contact Alacra VP of eCommerce Ron Waksman at ron-dot-waksman-at-alacra-dot-com.

Creating and maintaining accurate reference data is not among the more glamorous aspects of the financial services industry; but it’s the backbone that drives numerous mission-critical applications.

From a CRM perspective, firms have long strived to have a 360-degree view of their customers.  Patriot Act, Bank Secrecy Act and FSA regulations have raised the bar in terms of “Know Your Customer” requirements.  New regulatory measures, such as MiFID and Basel II, designed to help regulators assess risk, require financial institutions to have a comprehensive picture of each of their client relationships.

In 2006, Alacra launched Alacra Concordance, as a means to help clients clean and maintain reference data from a wide range of internal and external sources.  In addition to the data cleansing process, Alacra Concordance appends various public and private identifiers and can also update credit ratings from ratings agencies like Fitch, S&P and Moody's. 

While we’ve heard numerous anecdotal examples from clients of cost savings and improved productivity,
it's been hard for us to quantify and communicate that effectively.  To better quantify those benefits, Alacra recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to perform an ROI analysis of the product, using Forrester’s TEI (Total Economic Impact) methodology.  Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with four Alacra customers and created a composite organization from the four. 

Forrester Consulting concluded that the composite company realized a 402 percent return on investment, and that the company paid for its use of Concordance within two months. The composite company realized $1,911,163 in cost savings by using the Alacra Concordance Solution.

The press release describing the TEI study is posted here.  To request a copy of the full TEI study, click here.