The first SIIA INFO Local Meetup took place at Scholz Garten on April 30, 2014. A crowd from diverse information-interested companies came together for an evening of networking and discussing data, social, content, and content marketing. Attendees included representatives from The Daily Dot, Vital Interaction, Leadspace, Planview, Builder Homesite, Do512,

There is often a tendency for the folks who build and run information services to adopt a “set it and forget it” approach. These services are tough to build and once they are up and running it’s easy to sit back and focus on renewal marketing. This is a mistake.

The news that Dun & Bradstreet has acquired Avention brings to a close one of the more interesting chapters in the annals of company information services. The firm came into being as OneSource, a CD-ROM company data aggregator that took the Internet plunge early and had more recently morphed into

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

The explosion of data-driven reporting, recent data privacy legislation, and the unfortunate loss of one of the Internet’s leading lights have brought the definition of “public” data back to the forefront of discussions about the information industry. At this late date in the game, it is astounding that there is

The push-back on a 100% automated world is well underway. Ecommerce merchants, including information services, are increasingly being forced by consumers to show that they actually have real, living, breathing employees to support their convenient online offerings. Hiding behind email contact forms and sites without a single human’s name, a

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.

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

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

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