Every project manager has conducted a “post-mortem” after their big product has launched or their information service redesign has rolled out to their customers. Nits are picked, fingers may be pointed and, on occasion, heads can roll. In these days of pervasive predictive analytics, though, can we realistically prevent major

Information services have been steadily raising the bar on the functionality of software tools bundled with their data, making it easier for their customers to get value from their products. As these tools get more and more robust—and as customer expectations for software performance get higher and higher— these tools

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

Every information service wants their content to be discovered on the Internet and billions have been made serving that need. Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the “data discovery” technology that powers services like Outbrain, Taboola, nRelate (IAC), Gravity (AOL), Disqus, Scribol, and ShareThrough. Using a combination of

Most data publishers are familiar with Tableau‘s data visualization tool through Tableau Public. Few, however, realize that the software can be a robust platform for delivering their data to subscribers. Tableau-based information services are visually stunning and functionally robust. They act more like local applications than web-based services. A notable

People often ask me about the Austin ‘recipe’ that has created such a remarkable environment for innovation here in Central Texas. The recent “Chasing Greatness” thought leadership speaker series held by Spredfast and Google last week offered some clues to this with their excellent panel of Austin innovators. Here are

Driving usage for online subscription products or SaaS offerings makes the difference between long-term success and a slow, painful failure. Savvy publishers are therefore spending more and more time and money to ensure the kind of heavy usage that leads to strong renewal rates and a truly sustainable business. Usage

The 2013 DataContent conference just wrapped up yesterday and, once again, it offered outstanding insight into the innovation going on in our industry. Here are my favorite highlights from the show: RetailNext: Founded by some ex-Cisco engineers in 2007 these folks use heat sensors in retail shops to track traffic

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

Taking information at face value is a risky proposition, as Gary Hoover (formerly of Hoover’s and four other companies launched over the course of his career to date), pointed out last week in a Fundamentals of Business Research presentation, part of the University of Texas’s Information Institute‘s “Boiling The Ocean: