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

Over the years I have seen (and designed) a few successful new business models. A few years ago I came up with one that is fast becoming my favorite: the idea that companies can generate revenues with a 100% margin by simply rejecting work that they cannot do. Imagine that

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

CRM databases are full of bad, old data. The garbage continues to accrue over time getting worse as new files from purchased lists are added, acquired firms’ CRM files are merged, and salespeople keep adding their Rolodexes while no existing records are ever removed. For this reason salespeople at most

Here are a few of my favorite moments from the DataContent 2013 conference, which was, as always, a unique opportunity to learn more about what’s going on in our industry. Marketing Subscription Data Services bootcamp—Russell Perkins and Minal Bopaiah did a great job of giving us a lot of interesting,

On the eve of SXSW, Information Evolution’s U.S.-based team gathered at our Austin office for an informal meetup and photo. Pictured are, from left to right, Chuck Greene, Beatty Wilson, Matt Manning, Scott Smith, Deborah Dunlap, Shyamali Ghosh, and Kevin Dodds, the tough but non-adversarial cowpokes to our gracious and

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

In 2015 we saw strong incremental progress on several technical fronts that should make 2016 an interesting year for those of us in the data trenches. The volume of data is ballooning across the board. Unstructured data is becoming more structured (making it easier to use), so we’re witnessing an

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