The models for information services are based on two basic revenue streams: advertising and subscriptions. There are a few free services based on donations (a loosey-goosey form of subscription), some pay-per-use services (a limited form of “subscription”), and a lot of services that blend the two streams in different proportions.
The last holiday season was replete with the sound of ads for Amazon Echo, Apple Home, Google Home, and Microsoft Cortana. All these products promise their owners the ability to speak aloud and have the receiving device trigger specific actions such as turning on the heat or reading the results
Last week the Times-Picayune, one of the most respected newspapers in the world, acted like it did not want to “go gently into that good night” and become a footnote in Wikipedia. We have come to expect spineless fatalism in the newspaper business (when they are not bribing policemen or
What happens when you have more metadata for a database record than there are fields of data in the original record itself? If you’re like almost every other company in the world you don’t have to imagine this scenario. It’s a reality you’ve lived with for quite some time. Every
One of the most underappreciated aspects of the rise of crowdsourcing is that it’s laying the groundwork for a fundamental change in the very nature of work. The construct of the M-F, 9am-5pm, on-site, day job is now only marginally workable. Employers find it more difficult to get demonstrable ROI
Our society’s move to digital has given rise to enormous uncertainty in legal quarters. Specifically, the ownership of information has never been more unclear at a time when we’re inundated with ever-increasing volumes of data. We got into this situation because of: the assertion of private rights over public data
All businesses struggle with seasonality or variability in their labor requirements, in one way or another. Resort hotels are busy in summer and much slower in winter. Tax preparation firms are swamped during the April crunch. Alaskan seafood operations work around the clock in summer and then stop completely in
New products come and go. The very best thrive for decades. Every once in a blue moon comes an idea so perfectly timed and executed that it could literally last forever. LinkedIn is one of those products—a cocktail napkin of an idea that changed the world of business overnight. It
New product development for information services is a risky business. It takes deep customer insight, rigorous data analysis, management buy-in, and no small amount of gumption for a new information service to succeed. The variables involved in success include: An unmet need: The solution to one or more of a
At IEI, we’re intimately familiar with the “demand side” of public information. It’s rare, though, that we get a glimpse of the issues facing public sector managers on the front lines of supplying that information. That’s just what we got when we were asked to participate in the City of
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