And there are some real lessons in all of this. As a result, and almost freely (dumpr cost me $20) I now appreciate exactly why I have been saying for two years that the school textbook is a dodo. The richness of the tools and the potential in the screen-based learning experience bear real witness to this. Schools themselves can put together effective learning experiences very cheaply both to energize learners in every subject and level, and to support less able or confident teachers. TES Resources has led the way by creating a national signposting system to great teacher-produced lessons, effectively peer-reviewed by teachers. So lets stop producing textbooks, digital or otherwise, and start producing improved learning experiences? Is that the message? Well, in many ways it is. Just as teachers are moving into new roles, so are publishers. The best work that I have seen in education in the last year comes not from the great and the good of textbook publishing in the 1960s, when I practised it myself with more energy than effectiveness, but from services like Alfiesoft (supporting teachers in testing and marking and reporting: www.alfiesoft.com) and innovators like www.rendezvu.com, pushing out the boundaries around testing proficiency in a spoken language.

As I wandered away from the inspiring Jan Webb, a young woman stopped me in the crowded aisles and pressed into my hands a free…. newspaper. I was so shocked that I gulped and grasped it, and then said “thank-you”, before enquiring whether the schoolchildren who were about to receive it free as a result of a special offer would recognize it for what it was. After all most of them come from homes unvisited by such a thing. However, she said helpfully that kids knew they were the things you found in bins outside of petrol stations, so I thought it OK to take a copy of First News home and examine it. It certainly is a tabloid newspaper all right. Very little content and no learning. After Ms Webb I baulked at paying £875 per year for a class set of 32 copies of a non-collaborative, uncreative, non-experience. Then I did a little research. The paper is edited by a former BBC magazine publisher and its Editorial Director is Piers Morgan, erstwhile tabloid editor of the Daily Mirror and now the delight of US chat shows. His dark arts are everywhere evident, from the claim to a million readers every week (small print: Source – First News Readership Survey) to the picture of the Queen, the Union Jack – and David Cameron – on the front page. No ads and no topless girls, however. This whole confection is financed by Steve and Sarah Jane Thomson, who successfully sold their advertising monitoring bureau, Thomson Intermedia, to the eBiquity Group  and now run Addictive Interactive, a “bespoke social loyalty platform”.

So how can we blame the textbook publishers for not changing their ways when someone thinks there is still a business selling newspapers to schoolchildren? I don’t think Ms Webb would have one in her classroom – unless the pupils had made it themselves.

Until the day before yesterday, that is. For on the 14 December the European Union’s Official Journal published a settlement offer from Thomson Reuters in an competition enquiry which has run for two years (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2011:364:0021:0024:EN:PDF) The case concerns Thomson Reuters’ use of its RICs codes. Insofar as they have become the standard way in which traded equities are described in datafeeds, the fact that the market bought the Reuters solution as a surrogate for standardization did give Thomson Reuters competitive advantage – and this is made clear by the fact that the Commission investigation was prompted by its commercial rivals. But that advantage was not unearnt, and the standardization that resulted from it brought benefits across the market. Now Thomson Reuters, to end the process, offers licensing deals and increased access to its metadata. This may turn out to be a momentous moment for the industry.

I have no interest here in examining whether Thomson Reuters are right or wrong to seek a deal. From Microsoft to Google to Apple, the frustrations of enquiries by the competition commissioner’s office in Brussels have worn down the best and most resilient. But I do want to comment om what may be happening here. If you accept my thesis that content is becoming increasingly commoditized and that systems for describing it are increasingly valuable, we may have to recalibrate our picture of what is happening as a result of this news. What if, in fact, the commoditization involved here spreads slowly up the entire information value chain over time. In this model, the famous value pyramid which we have all used to subjugate our audiences and colleagues is under commoditization water at its base, which is where raw data and published works are kept. Now the next level is becoming slightly damp from this rising tide, as descriptive modalities get prised off and become part of the common property of all information users. So information vendors scramble further up the pyramid, seeking dry land where ownership can be re-asserted. Maybe more advanced metadata will offer protection and enhance asset value. The Scorm dataset in an educational product can annotate learning outcomes and allow objects and assessment to be associated. Or, following the financial services theme here, maybe we add Celerity-style intelligence to content which allows a news release to be “read” in machine-to-machine dialogue, and trading actions sparked by the understanding created. We will certainly do all these things, because no one will buy our services if they do not accord with the most appropriate descriptive norms available. But will they protect our intellectual property in conent or data? No, I am increasingly afraid that they will not.

It will take many years to happen. And it will happen at a very different pace in different marketplaces. But the days when you valued a company by its content IP, by its copyrights and its unique ownership value have been over for some time. And now we can see that the higher order values are themselves becoming susceptible to competition regulation which seems, in this age, to over-ride IP rights in every instance. So what are we actually doing when we say we are building value? Normally, it seems to me, we are combining content with operational software systems to create value represented by utility. From the app to the workflow system, content retains its importance in the network because we shape it not just for research, but for action, for process, for communication. And that, after all, is where the definition of a networked society with a networked economy lies.

And if we were in doubt about this, reflect on the current pre-occupation about Big Data. Is our society going to be willing to hold up the vital release of “new” scientific knowledge from the ossified files of journal publishers just because some of this stuff is owned by Elsevier and some by Wiley? The water of analytic progress is already flowing around the dams of copyright ownership, and this week surged past a major player protecting his coding, though the proposed licensing scheme does leave a finger in the hole in the dyke. We seem to me to be running at ever greater speed towards a service economy in professional information where the only sustaining value is the customer appreciation of service given, measured in terms of productivity, process improvement, and compliance . These benefits will be created from content largely available on the open web, and increasingly using metadata standards which have gone generic and are now, like RICs, part of the common parlance of the networked marketplace. The language of IP in he information economy is getting to sound a bit old-fashioned.

Certainly it is always alleged that his predecessor, Dick Harrington, did not know that a discreet negotiation continued behind the scenes bringing Thomson and Reuters together with no place in it for him. That, if true, must have been a surprise. Did Tom Glocer come by a similar “confronts reality” shock, as the FT termed it? And what was the reality that was being confronted? I can think of at least three realities that must needs be in the minds of Thomson Reuters CEOs, and none of them relate to the decline in market value which is widely blamed for triggering these changes. The first, and most important, is the nature of the company’s ownership. Wherever a big player is really 55% controlled by the family of its original founders, confidence issues will come into play. This is real control, not the artificial dominance of voting shares practised by Murdochs or Harmsworths in defiance of market views of good practice. And this real control means that, as in the eighteenth century, once the incumbent first minister loses the confidence of the King and his closest advisor, it is impossible to continue in office. That rule applied to the reign of Ken Thomson and John Tory, as it does in the Woodbridge Trust of David Thomson and Geoffrey Beattie. It is simple and natural; you go when the owners no longer believe you can deliver.

And since Thomson Reuters are the largest professional player in the marketplace, it is worth asking what these men need to have confidence about. As far as the press commentary is concerned, one would think that the only issue is the Eikon terminal and its slow start. Well, the history of Reuters is littered with slow starts, one of which let Bloomberg into the marketplace to begin with, and several of which cumulated to create this peculiar position where the smartest and most modern application is also the cheapest and has lost market share in the recession to Bloomberg’s older and more expensive option. In each of these cycles the market for trading systems has returned to rough parity. Over at the professional side of Thomson they know about these cycles, having sometimes been up and sometimes down, but in that market they are currently in the Bloomberg position and Lexis are in the Reuters position. So did Tom Glocer’s acceleration towards the swing doors relate to all this?

Certainly this may have been the symptom, but perhaps it was not the underlying problem. The mandate that Tom Glocer accepted was to build an integrated company and it is possible, as the company became wracked by the issue of combining the parts to create new growth as a whole, that the Woodbridge owners began to doubt whether this aim was ever going to be achieved through these policies. Certainly the sacrificial slaughter of a layer of Reuters management and the balkanization of the company into an unmanageable number of operating units did not lull any misgivings in Toronto, though they may have given rise to rejoicing in old Thomson management circles, where the attitudes of their new Reuters colleagues had been met with all of the enthusiasm that the Anglo-Saxons showed to their new Norman rulers. In the new dispensation we are back down to five divisions, with former Reuters strategy chief (latterly running GRC) David Craig taking the old Market divisions, Legal going to Mike Suchsland, Tax and Accounting to Brian Peccarelli, and Global Growth to Shanker Ramamurthy. Jon Robson gets the Business Development role. What factor is common to all of these? None of them comes from a very long term Reuters and/or Thomson background. A generation has effectively passed.

And what of Jim Smith, the new CEO. Some commentators have him as a caretaker, awaiting the new strategic leader to be found and installed. Others, and I incline to this view, see him as chairman and arbiter of resource and manpower development and deployment to support and drive the integration of these two companies. So not a traditional Thomson CEO, any more than Erik Enstrom is a traditional Reed Elsevier CEO. In the latter case one has a feeling of a profoundly numerate portfolio owner looking to encourage the growth points with acquisition investment, dispose of underperformers and reward successful managers who reliably produce results. It is almost as if Reed Elsevier does not see a need anymore for an informing central strategy about its market positioning, other that “we will invest in anything that works and avoid the bits that don’t”. By contrast, Thomson Reuters is built around a distinctive market positioning, a “big niche” strategy and definite ideas about what it needed to buy, sell or grow to make the aspiration work. And yet… once you have the strategy in place, here too market strategic thinking devolves to the operating unit quite quickly. Hopefully that means that in both of these market leading players, the doors will soon stop revolving at the speed of light and we can get back  the real problems of addressing the needs of global information markets in times of scarcity.

PS. One of the items on Jim Smith’s agenda must surely be the finalization of the sale of Healthcare, whose projected disposal was an early agenda item for his predecessor. It is hard to remember but this move has now been projected for almost four years!

Which brings me to Siri. The Apple iPhone voice App has now had three months of shrill publicity (http://www.transhumanistic.com/2011/10/new-iphone%E2%80%99s-killer-app-%E2%80%93-voice-controlled-personal-assistant/) and (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uo5CUgEYKI&noredirect=1).

Given its ability with natural language searching, which gives it a degree of “intelligence”, reviewers think this should be a winner, and I agree on one level. On another I have some reservations, and these are largely concerned with our apparent inability to position and market voice services effectively.

Twenty years ago a senior executive at Random House told me that I was wasting my time with “Multimedia”, which was what we were then working on for CD-ROM. All the market wanted, he said, were good audio readings to play in the car on long distance travel, and he introduced me to his bright young manager who was providing just that. That manager told me two things that have stuck with me: one was the now obvious reflection that publishers were rubbish at marketing anything at all, and this would never change since they believed that they could sell anything. The second was that voice markets appeared to him to be finite: you quickly reached the voice susceptible segment, then growth got very hard. It is a thought that comes back as even Barnes and Noble discover digital (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/49567-barnes–noble-sees-bright-future-in-digital.html). And who would have thought that would happen!

My young friend of then is now the manager of an important media venture fund, so I will preserve his anonymity. And I do not want to argue that eBook or digital versioning is similarly finite. But I do want to suggest that voice is a vital component of the network and thus of digital service provision, that we grossly neglect its impact in product and service development, and that but for two unfortunate voice misuse environments we would be using a great deal more in more intelligent environments. I am told for example that voice search is now a really easy application to roll out in many service contexts. However, the reason given for its relatively modest showing is the prevalence of hugely annoying telephone voice menu systems, which daily have reasonable people howling in frustration. Having discovered a rare four tier example this week in a hospital group, I am tempted to initiate an award scheme for organizations who employ human beings to answer the phone. The second is automated public service messaging in airports and elsewhere, but in terms of both the problem is not voice, but marketing. I even encountered an airport lounge in my October travels which announced, every five minutes, that no flight departure announcements would be made and that passengers should consult the information screens!

For all of these reasons the future of voice is vital. Siri may point the direction towards intelligent guidance, but completely voice-directed computing has been feasible for a long time and must be a part of the five year scenario. And you do not need to have a Babelfish in your ear to believe in voice/language text translation, which the network is begging for in countless sectors and which is increasingly feasible at a basic level. Slowly we will edit out poor voice practises and it will become rare for web environments to lack audio components as it is for them now to lack video activity. I have had the pleasure recently to work with a group in Dublin who are creating virtual environments to help students pass tests in proficiency in spoken languages. There is an early example at http://www.examspeak.com but there is much more to come. The network is the ideal environment for voice-based training, language learning and virtual voice service development. Eventually the digital communications revolution will come full circle and re-integrate voice as the critical element in networked communications that it always has been, and we shall wonder why this component took so long to fall into place.

And then, we shall call the health insurer through the network and hear his computer say, “Forget all those options and numbers – tell me how I can help”!

“Duedil is a new business information company that offers free financial information sourced from UK’s Companies House (Public Sector Information). It is so confident in the quality of its data, that it offers a £5 payment if one finds any discrepancies in its financials, no questions asked. The company was launched in April 2011 by Damian Kimmelman, owner of “We Are VI Ltd” and co-founder of Mackin Gaming. Duedil claims in its website to have the largest database of free company financials in the world! That is a tall order for an upstart that is only several months in operation. Duedil aggregates data from all over the web and bring this to users along-side information which it pays for. It says the information will correspond directly with the information found at Companies House delivering company financial statements, going back 10 years, with company histories, name changes, litigations, director lists, family graphs & more. According to Duedil, it is funded by Passion Capital, who is predominantly funded by the UK government. Other investors are some of the people behind Skype, LastFM, Yahoo!, AOL & QXL/Tradus, and was chosen as a Microsoft Bizspark company.”

This service is well worth a look. For one thing, the data presentation is good enough to seriously challenge the sector players, and for another the information collection is also hugely competitive. But the irony comes in the thought that a freemium model could be used to take a Trojan Horse right into the middle of the commercial credit rating encampment. Industry professionals rightly point out that Duedil would have to support a great deal of advertising to support such a service long term. But what if that is not the point at all. Instead, a cogent strategy here would concentrate on getting very high free usage levels, and all the time stretch those staid competitors by adding more and more Open Web derived content into the mix, so that the comparison was not with publicly available “official” content, but with the Duedil selection above and beyond that. Then, when you have the attention of the audience, you can begin to charge subscriptions for higher level activities: in-greater-depth analysis, time-elapsed reporting on watch lists, custom service applications for automated purchasing systems, social media-style buying clubs based on shared content with user groups etc. And when you get that second level market locked in, then you will be able to sell plenty of service advertising on the still-free core site.

The creators of DueDil have grasped a key point that the established market has long since conveniently forgotten. The market is all about the collection of commoditized data from the web, and there really is no defensible barrier to entry in that business. Insofar as credit scoring and the development of formulae for rating credit worthiness are concerned, the established industry is on safer ground, but as we used to say on the farm in my youth, if you try to sell potatoes with the dirt on them, you get rich for a while until people realize that clean potatoes cost no more, and are better value. Attempts to sell on openly available content as if it was an “answer” fits this case, and this is the bluff that DueDil calls. Soon, as in every other sector in every information market that I know, the players here those who seek survival will be heading up the value chain. Analytics, the application of Big Data principles and practice, the widespread integration of workflow modelling with third party strategic alliances – all of these are part of the future of a sector which we still call Credit and Business Information, but which we will increasingly come to see as whole web monitoring for business and personal performance.

And as that happens, so will consolidation become more interesting. Choicepoint and Lexis may have been an early sign. Both in the enterprize software solutions field and in the major B2B holdings there must be potential interest in those of the big sector players who add real value. But lets emphasize “value” again – DueDil have demonstrated that the value from pure data collection is negligible, and consolidators, especially if they are deeply into advanced taxonomic search and linked data, may find that smaller regional players in the existing industry have little to add. In the next play, much of their data will look as insignificant as the large and once much vaunted databases of the directory publishers do now.

In short, DueDil is a mouse that roared, and while the elephant of Big Credit is still in the room, he is trying to stand on the curtain rail!

(Declare an interest – I am currently chairman of BIIA – a powerhouse of industry discussion in Asia Pacific!)

This year’s invite required a fee, so I anticipated less people, and thought the move to the Old Billingsgate conference venue probably meant that less sponsorship than in the first two years had diminished the budget. How wrong could one be? Marco produced a two day show, in a larger venue, with 1180 attendees paying over £300 each, and greater sponsorship. Some 97 people and companies spoke and sat on panels. Sessions ran right through breaks and meals when necessary, and outside of the auditorium there was as much chatter around the six or so booths of an incipient exhibition as there was in the conference hall. So the whole British investment community was represented? Well, broadly, but alongside their European peers. For a meeting held in London, this was as European as they come. One subject of debate centred on the idea that Europe now has an equivalence in start-up and development terms to Silicon Valley – but then we all disagreed on whether that was best represented by London’s 800 companies in the Silicon Roundabout at Old Street, or by the powerhouse of software development that is moving things in Berlin, or by the design talent and entrepreneurial drive of Barcelona. I took a straw poll in one group and Berlin won, but, then, there were a huge number of German players on display.

Those of us who filled the hot and airless evening sessions of the late nineties would have recognized the flavour in the room: this was First Monday or Last Friday or whatever they were called playing out on a large scale. It was important to be there and to be seen, and just as important as doing deals was promoting the investor’s image as the right player for an outstanding opportunity, while desperate developers asserted that they did not really need the money – unless of course someone wanted to help them go faster, further and right past their competition. Outside the doors last week, equity markets were lurching like a trawler in a gale, and two governments in Europe fell while we enthused about opportunity. And that is the essence of Marco’s magic: he has persuaded us to suspend judgement for a moment and observe how, even in difficult times, a group of mostly consumer-facing network service are achieving really interesting growth rates, how audience transfer to these services remains rapid, how the smartphone challenge is now at last being met with some worthy service responses. And while he does this it is noticeable that very few services from the traditional vendor community are making much headway (interesting to see both Axel Springer and Schibsted looking so mundane in this company) and that there are relatively less pan-European services than I would have expected from the first two events.

If there was an exception to that rule it was perhaps HomeAway, which predates its US owners in the UK and is the secret giant of holiday bookings (larger than TripAdvisor at 4.5 million bookings per month), or Softonics, or eHarmony (re-inventing relationship management). Or even ZooPlus, selling unconscionable amounts of dogfood despite depression. But in some ways the most impressive players were the niche operators. It is a moot question whether indeed these service companies scale globally. Groupon was on the platform talking about rediscovering local internet, and this is surely true if we are to get beyond the whole business of classifieds – looking at this meeting like a very flat place to be – and re-ignite geographical community with service offers and hyper-local interest. The man from FourSquare clearly had aspirations to do this, but they always seem to get overtaken by what I suspect are the less lasting joys of finding out that your friends are all drinking in the pub you are just passing. But then the focus shifted again: here is good Sverre Munck of Schibsted, who I thought once would create the first real digital newspapers, rightly saying we should watch the Indonesians, and see how a society behaves when its primary link to the Internet is Smartphone, without any precursor experience of other technologies. And did I hear someone say that online recruitment is now a 27 billion dollar business globally? There were some good niche examples on display here. And there was also a splendid man from Lehavi who used his brain, working through his computer, to move his toy remote car around. And Tony Castells of Barcelona produced great incidental music of his own composition to fill the breaks that Marco was so anxious to deny us.

In short this was a very diverting conference. But less is more, and greater variety of investment fields (where was music, or personal finance, or sport, let alone business!) will be welcome as it develops further. It could be that the advertising model is not the entire answer, though you would have thought it was the ultimate in business model development here. More on hybrid models, and less on old-fashioned classifieds. And a final recognition that old media are not going to cut it here. But keep tapping the vein of frenzy that makes this such a fascinating area for so many investors – and keep giving them a place to meet and talk and, as in that first rush of internet blood to the head in the late 90s, to stimulate and force each other to compete.

And from a couple of answers to my enquiries there does seem to be a change from when I last looked at this a year ago. One obvious point of enquiry was Comdex, famously bought by UBM for a dollar, and revived as a virtual event. The news is that in its second year this show increased its exhibitors significantly, and now seems to be attracting well over 5000 paying customers, making it an exhibition worth attending. Elsewhere, it would be my surmise that Globalspec, having launched a great number of events last year, are now doing a sort of culling operation, retaining and building what works and scrapping the rest.

If virtual eventing is to emerge as an art form, then it is important that shows should be cheap to initiate and that there should be a sort of rough hewn hierarchy of development values in play. This seems to be happening, as shows get upgraded from virtual conferencing to “catalogue exhibitions” and then on to virtual reality full-on, with a genuine effort being made to replicate the communications of the exhibition hall. Conferences superficially seem easier, but simply watching a live videocast and tweeting may not be the most interesting interaction we have ever had. Few have moved to live broadcast full interactivity, yet it is surely only a turn of the network wheel away. Wait for colleagues to say “I was in a really interesting conference in Tokyo on the train coming into Waterloo this morning..”

So lets look around and see the variety of models now at work. All of these happen to be in UBM (a lesson in the results of listening closely to David Levin!) but they are not untypical of the range of activities happening elsewhere. Of course, you would expect the technology events to be on the move here, but they are certainly not the vanguard. Black Hat is interesting: this security technology meeting has opted for variable packages for online users depending on whether they attend on the day, or look at it retrospectively. So if you go to Uplink, in this case, for live streaming video, you get 2 tracks of 20 supplier briefings, two keynotes and the interactive service which allows you to ask questions and enter into dialogue. If you use the on demand service you get two keynotes and the best two presentations from each track. And if you visit Interop online, you simply get a video library to search and download.

But I found two areas where different models and pace of development were in play. Airline maintenance costs and technology is clearly one. I surmize that you may have to sleep a long time between sessions, so visiting this in bed may be essential. However, I was really taken with www.retailinvestorsconference.com. This is a neat partnership between Betterinvesting (National Association of Investors Corp, www.betterinvesting.org) with  MUNCmedia and UBM’s PR Newswire. The target is private investors, and particularly those who do not use advisors or stockbrokers. They do a one day virtual meeting a month. On 3 November you could have heard a presentation by the Nasdaq – quoted China Precision Steel Corp. As part of the deal, the video and presentation collateral get distributed by PR Newswire. However, attendees on the day (I wonder if they give their avatars blue rinses!) have a terrific range of interactive choices. They can go to the auditorium and hear the session (EST timings get Florida as well as the North East). Or they can go to the Exhibit Hall and visit the presenter’s booth, make contact with staff and ask further questions. Finally, there is the Lounge, with the opportunity to talk to other investors and see what experiences they have had. The organizers appear to be doing one day a month, and up to 8 sessions per day. This is like having a trade show with 96 exhibitors and speakers – and a huge growth opportunity within the other 353 days of the year.

So a wide range of business and presentation models, but now I feel that this movement is rumbling towards real marketplaces. The App and tablet combination will be important in making theses shows work, and making their interfaces seamless. Ambitious management in tough times are trying to make a little technology go a long way, and charge for the virtual as if it were real, Some of the pricing packages will slow market development, and some of the attempted bundles are too ambitious as well. My feeling is that this opportunity is larger – and cheaper – than many believe.

And, finally, there is one opportunity here which is being seriously neglected. Virtual events throw off data like dandruff. Skilled developers will know everything about user profiles – who is interested in what, what key questions were asked, what ongoing interest survived the meeting etc. This can be anonymized and re-used, subjected to analysis on behalf of individual clients, and served up to help newcomers to profile themselves  when they first use the service. It adds value and serves to offset the effect on pricing of relatively lower cost bases. But above all, it  brings the  events companies to the important threshold of becoming B2B data companies, and if they fail that challenge then they will fail the full opportunity that becomes available when these new businesses mature. Lets postpone the rush to judgement. The jury is still out and the odds must be stacked in favour of a huge advancement in the age-old business of introducing buyers to sellers happening here.

And I never won the competition. My candidate for volcanic disruption and extinction was always advertising and PR agencies. According to Sir Martin Sorrell, who should know, these have now disappeared entirely, but I suspect that this is because he has renamed his world-leading enterprizes “data and marketing agencies”. But two events brought all of this to mind. In the first place I saw a headline which said, on October 6, “PR Newswire and Ektron Strike Up One-of-a-kind Strategic Alliance”, and then I had the pleasure of listening to and questioning David Levin, CEO of UBM, at the Outsell Signature Event in Phoenix last week. (Pause for Plug and statement of interest: I work part-time for Outsell, I moderated parts of this meeting, I know of nowhere else in the industry where you can speak with CEOs in depth under Chatham House rules – I cannot tell you what they said – but for sheer depth and understanding talking to Scott Key (IHS), Y S Chi (Elsevier) and David Levin is a bargain at any price, though here it was surrounded by case studies in change from another 13 CEOs and senior executives. Miss it at your Peril – it will be in Europe next year! Obviously I am not going to quote the views of David Levin, and no information market disruptor is ever wise to predict the demise of a part of his customer base while they are still buying services, but I left the room more and more convinced that the “strategy and monitoring” role of these agencies is beginning to shift, even if the creative role stays in place.

So what is this interesting strategic alliance at PRN all about? For me, it is simply another stage in the coupling of PR releases with media response measurement with market response measurement. The Press Release of yesteryear, that single page of grey, effusive but cautious text with the typical note for editors on the participants has given way to documents built around demos and video presentations, with multiple media input, intended to ring bells not only amongst media commentators, but to awaken financial analysts and gain general- to-specialist network user reaction. The destination of much of this stuff is social networks and You Tube. The idea is to launch the communication and then track it, and then track the ripples of activity that circle out from it, in blogs and tweets, and then to be able to take part in, redirect, respond, learn from the feedback loop. Increasingly this seems to be what marketing departments do, and increasingly they can do it for themselves (countless book publishers – yes, even them! – use a simple  package to launch a seperate web presence for every book published, using as tools the Superdu components, which any marketing assistant can handle). So, PR Newswire, as the largest distributor of “press releases” (www.prnewswire.com), now moves into media monitoring by plugging its PR Newswire Sync application into Ektron’s widely used corporate marketing web management platform (www.ektron.com). The vital part of all of this is the PR Newswire Listening Dashboard, which enables a primary analysis and social media monitoring tool. This reminds me of something I have been watching for a long time – the evolution of the old Durrants media monitoring outfit into Gorkana (http://www.gorkana.com/group/#index), where the emphasis is on the analysis. Whether we are talking CRM (corporate relationship management) or product launch, it seems to me that more of the game is now managed inside the corporate marketing function, more analysis can be done there with these tools, and more strategy can be created there than ever before. No wonder Sir Martin and his merry men are building the world’s largest data dump of consumer buying decisions, to get “predictive insight” into likely purchasing outcomes: they must add value now by the shovel load, since a whole sector of their traditional skills has been peeled off and re-installed as workflow on the desktop of the most lowly (and low paid) marketing department operative. One of Ektron’s largest customers is the UK National Health Service!

Some people will say that this is reskilling an industry that had very few skills to start with. Other, kinder, souls will point to the continuing need for creativity, and I can see re-intermediation happening already. Typical would be Jeremy Swinfen Green’s Amberlight Agency (www.amber-light.co.uk). Meeting Jeremy recently for the first time in 15 years (as a young digital ad-man he helped me carry the argument for AdHunter (later launched as Fish4) in a Cotswold country house hotel before a very dubious Northcliffe board) I began to see, through his practise as a very busy Human-Computer Interface (HCI) advisor where this fragmentation of skills was taking us. Anyone for a game of Under the Volcano? I am still gong to choose advertising and PR for the lava and hot ash…!

And this in turn re-introduces us to the battle ground in business solutions software which is the liveliest part of the B2B scene at present. It is the only battle ground where Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Bloomberg (more marginally for the moment) and Reed Elsevier do battle. And like Philoctetes and his poisoned arrows, the battle is now intense and those wounded in the last round are back on their feet and summoning fresh acquisition forces into the fray. Thus Thomson Reuters this week clear their decks by selling out of their position in trade risk management to Vista Equity Partners (http://wp.me/p17ayu-3e) in favour of concentrating their investments onto operational risk. Interestingly, the would-be purchasers here seem to have been mostly private equity players, happier with the medium term growth profile of the business Thomson Reuters were exiting and not necessarily needing, as the strategics would, a very immediate contribution today. This then was one of the few transactions of recent months that had a prerecession feel to it.

Which is not something that you could say about today’s news that Reed Elsevier are to buy Accuity (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/278a1d66-e80f-11e0-9fc7-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Z5nwd7oT). The deal, which sees Investcorp selling its position for £343 million (around 12 times Ebitda), creates a new global presence in banking solutions, where all the other players have strong interests and where Wolters Kluwer were wont to claim pre-eminence. Accuity Holdings is an interesting property, having been split out by its owner from Source Media, the old American Banker and Bondbuyer business. As one of those who worked on the then Thomson Corporation purchase of American Banker in the 1970s I feel the pull of history here. Later generations sold the business because it was regarded as a mainly print prospect. Now here are Reed buying the regenerative software arm of that once print business. No end then to our circularities!

Or our mysteries. The bit of Reed which bought Accuity was not Lexis Risk Management, where it had seemed that the resistance to Thomson Reuters bid to dominate operational risk management was centred. The actual buyer was RBI, now coming out from under the cloud of the later Crispin Davies years. The plan is to merge Accuity with Bankers Almanac, the venerable directory environment which transitioned into bank transfer coding and then into banking transactions and risk management. The guts to devise new things to sell to bankers at this juncture deserves an industry round of applause, and the risk is probably well – justified. However, Reed seem intent on building a new global business (the geographic fit here is a real value) founded on payment efficiency, risk reduction and regulatory compliance. Accuity is a data software business, with 14000 clients, a 95% renewal rate to its subscription base, and it claims all 25 top US banks as customers. Those banks, of course, are also clients of Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg. So battle is joined on a number of fronts. Reed’s shares went up 10p on the news, though one might have thought that they should have gone down an equal amount in the wake of losing BNA to Bloomberg, given that this acquisition lets Bloomberg into some interesting regulatory compliance areas, around government and also around areas like employment law BNA’s HR Advisor suite). Reading the analysts on Reed’s move, one senses the confusion: this is an immediately accretive buy that makes sense, but was performed by the part of the business that once seemed lost and now becomes the seed of growth.

So what is the strategy here now? The new grouping at RBI looks a bit like the old banking group (http://www.wolterskluwerfs.com/solutions/Market/Banking.html) at Wolters Kluwer (also run out of Chicago – Accuity was a neighbour of CCH in Skokie, Illinois). Are Reed pursuing a parallel train of thought to Thomson Reuters, but in narrow niches like banking (RBI) or insurance (Lexis Risk Management)? For Mark Kelsey and his colleagues at RBI, coming as it does immediately after the purchase of Ascend for their aviation division, this is a huge vote of confidence. For Lexis, coming on top of the loss of BNA, this seems like the opposite. Yet the strategic direction on all fronts is exactly the same: use data and software to create solutions that save the customer from the regulator, from the wrath of his customers and from himself. We are back to all those confidential documents on Googlemail.

First, the details. Bloomberg have apparently offered $990m for BNA, which is around 2.25 X the current stock price, 3 X current revenues of $331 m and about 13 X EBITDA. This is a very good price at this time, though a pre-recession valuation might have been a shade higher. BNA was an employee-owned company with an eighty year history of democratic process (to attend an AGM, with its board election involving some 1500 shareholders, was always an impressive demonstration of this). Its founders, New Deal lawyers, all shared a principled view of the importance of participation and the sharing of information. Now it joins another (intensely) private company, younger by 50 years but also founded on the idea that content should and could be shared more effectively.

So what does all of this do to the balance of power? For Thomson Reuters, comparatively little, given that it has moved decisively (through its GRC developments) into that wider view of legal and regulatory relevance stated above. BNA’s two great assets would be its brand, forever associated with the reporting of embryonic law in committee in DC, but actually much wider in content and significance, and its tax services, a market leader in conjunction with CCH (Wolters Kluwer) and Thomson Reuters Tax (RIA). It is notable that Thomson, Reed Elsevier (Lexis), and CCH all license content from BNA for access online. This will presumably end after current contracts expire. Thomson will be hurt least by this. But note how important contextualised news is now to everyone: BNA gives this to Bloomberg in a way which helps to neutralize the Reuters/West advantage.

But both Lexis and CCH will suffer collateral damage. The loss of the tax content will cause real hurt to both, and the wider impact of the loss of the BNA brand and full content set will be hard for Lexis in particular. BNA content was important in that context in particular, since previous attempts to absorb and use highly branded legal content (Matthew Bender) seem to have petered out in terms of user recognition. Given that private equity was unable to enter the contest at these valuations, Lexis would have been the obvious candidate as a counter bidder, and the fact that it felt unable to match a high but not astronomic bid points to possible future environments. It may be that Reed Elsevier see their future with Lexis in risk management rather than in legal as such, and if that were the case then we could well, in the next five years, see a new order of things, with Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg dominating legal and regulatory marketplaces, and CCH and Lexis forming a sort of second division in positions increasingly hard to maintain outside of specialist niches. There is only one shoe left to drop in US legal marketplaces. Analysts will now look closely at whether ALM (owned by Apax) will be the last major play.

Bloomberg appear to be indicating that they will hold BNA as a separate wholly-owned subsidiary in the first instance. This makes sense: they have distinctive cultures and need time to get to know each other. It is however interesting to think where the optimum first linkages will take place. Certainly management in the nascent Bloomberg Government unit will be salivating: they will rightly see the congressional law reporting as a key element in bringing more widespread usage in government at all levels. And everyone involved in the business of proliferating Bloomberg terminals more widely in the tax advisory marketplace will be exultant, since this is a real game changer for them. If the claim that we are all moving to workflow is correct, then BNA is vital to Bloomberg in its wish to move into adjoining, content – related markets like legal and paralegal.

And a final and personal note on culture. As an advisory director to BNA’s international marketing (Bloomberg will transform that with their global coverage) I have, for almost 25 years, worked with quite the most civilized publisher on the Planet. The values of the founders were exemplified by their successors, and while employee ownership sometimes caused problems of its own, those who worked there were embued well beyond the normal with a sense of purpose, and indeed, a lifetime commitment, to what they were doing, and a belief that their purpose was part of the public good. This cannot be bottled, so Bloomberg must be careful to preserve it. Having tried to enter security law in the early years of this century, and made very slow progress, they should know how difficult it is to get very high level editorial intervention and commentary to work properly. The biggest property they have so far bought is BusinessWeek, which was not strictly comparable. BNA is different, and to get the real value they will need to treat it very differently.