Microsoft didn’t expect the web scrapers to fight back. It seemed so obvious to the massive multinational firm: We own the LinkedIn content that we paid billions of dollars to acquire. What Microsoft didn’t realize (and not for the first time*) was that the people who created the content were
Last week we saw two great cases at IEI where “data exhaust” — data created incidentally as part of a particular data management process — turned out to hold great value for our customers. In both cases we took simple telephone verification processes designed just to confirm that an executive’s contact information was still
Changing an information service’s business model is risky business. If you built your model the right way, there are several revenue streams (multiple advertising opportunities based on a variety of delivery devices, multiple subscription options based on delivery frequency and the volume/type of content, ecommerce hooks of every conceivable type)
In the beginning, the heaviest users of online information services were librarians. For several decades now these ‘power-users’ have had incredible insight into how frequently and in what specific ways their end-users were using the electronic tools the librarians purchased for them. Librarians leveraged this information to inform their purchasing
Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is a term used to describe tools designed for individuals and companies to manage their economic relationships. In other words, the user defines who they do business with (i.e., a “reverse” CRM system) and the “way” that they choose to interact with them. For instance, inbound
We built Information Evolution to pursue the holy grail of database ownership: true real-time accuracy in a world where databases degrade at a rapid pace. A lofty goal, but today we do see cases where large-scale monitoring systems come within spitting distance of making this goal a reality. The methodology—harvesting-monitoring-updating—is
A recent article in the SF Chronicle gave a vivid, very visual, demonstration of the power access to “public” data can have in municipal policy debates. The story covered companies that match buyers and sellers of services often heavily taxed by municipalities: taxis and hotels. Specifically, it looked at their
Data publishers love structure. Very granular fielded data allows their customers to locate very specific things — for example, all investment banks in Boston that invested in green energy start-ups — instantly. Fielded data allows quick apples-to-apples comparisons, lets you know more about your prospective customers, and makes data analysis
Businesses based on selling data on a subscription basis are in a truly turbulent period right now. Competition from open source databases and low-cost API databases is starting to emerge and firms with killer workflow integration software are also hungrily eyeing B2B database publishers’ steady revenue streams. Adding to the
A few years ago, I spoke of a promised land of interlocking APIs aggregating disparate yet authoritative sources of information, so that information services could provide up-to-the-minute data accuracy. If a corporate office were to move or an executive be promoted, those changes could be reflected far and wide and
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