The business model for selling subscriptions online has been based, from the beginning, on the idea of an automatic renewal of a subscription as a core part of the subscription agreement. This is what was called the “til forbid” model in the business-to-business circulation management world of the 1980s, and

Starting a new information service is hard. Customer expectations are sky high and they’ll pay top dollar only if the information is unique and timely and the software tools bundled with the information are top notch. That means a lot of upfront expense and a significant gamble on the part

IEI works with some of the world’s most successful company and executive information services. Our in-house research teams work on our customers’ projects via custom applications and we embed as many rules as we can into this software in order to prevent errors. Some examples of the ways we embed

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

Some 18 years ago I spoke at the European Association of Directory Publishers conference. This was at the very height of irrational exuberance over online information services. The conference attendees were all very interested in transactional business models such as those floated by VerticalNet. The idea was that you could

This year’s Business Information Media Summit (BIMS) continued the tradition of a strong program including some of the information industry’s leading lights. The general sessions took on more of a ‘data’ feel than in past years. Keynoters and those participating in the advertising, marketing, content, and strategy tracks all got

This is blog post was inspired by posts by Mitchell Davis of The Privacy Rights Council. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union (EU) law coming into effect on May 25th 2018. It’s intended to protect the data privacy of EU residents, including the export of personal

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

It’s tax time once again and the recent advertisements by H&R Block touting their use of IBM’s Watson technology are reminding me of how important strategic customer-vendor relationships can be. H&R Block didn’t need to mention IBM at all. They paid them for their work and IBM’s technology presumably worked.

As information services have evolved they have continually added data feeds to service their customers. Data feeds can be new product announcements, pricing alerts, executive shuffles, or any other sort of timely data with influence on industries and markets. The creation of these data feeds involves different tasks than the