Jan
18
Two is a Trend
Filed Under B2B, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Different origins, different side of the market, different impetus for creativity, similar result. I had a great deal of mail of one sort or another after writing “I wish I had done that…” just before the holidays. In that piece, wrapped around the launch of Digital Science Ltd by Macmillan/Nature, I tried to exemplify the continuing drive to workflow in producing sustained responses to the demand for solutions. But the topic was not Lexis for the insurance industry or Thomson Reuters GRC for financial services, but how you run research procedures in a lab in a more productive, effective and compliant way. And the science research market is vitally important, not just because of the impact of science on our society, or because a segment of that society now cries “foul” at unwelcome results before trying to technically discredit unpalatable truths, but because the science community is the historic belwether of change in the networked society. They had it first.
So I was fascinated to find in my mail a kindly note from one of the founders of BioRAFT (www.bioraft.com). He pointed out that the problems tackled by Timo Hannay and his team at Digital Science were content-orientated just because the angle of approach via Nature was publishing derived. But there was a number of ways of examining these issues. One, and I am now persuaded that it is a very valid one, is to look at them from the viewpoint of lab technicians and lab management and maintenance. I have always been told that over two thirds of searchers in the scholarly literature seek not research results which support or destroy their own findings or direction of enquiry: instead they are looking for experimental techniques which pass muster, yield compliance, and cannot be easily over-turned by critics. Results are important, as is data derived in research mode, but nothing stands up if the technique is faulty and the experimental warcraft is holed at the waterline.
Obviously good literature research helps to ensure the appropriate selection of experimental techniques. But it does not stop there. BioRAFT seeks a unified system of management in research, and its proponents are research managers who clearly pride themselves on creating solutions with an “intuitive approach which even the most hard-nosed PI will use and value”. This is researcher-for-researcher solutioning, grounded in lab procedures, with a strong bent to community, to quality outcomes and to innovation to make it all work. Solutions can be customized, genuinely difficult compliance issues managed (take a look at the “NIH Guidelines for Research involving recombinent DNA modules “if you doubt the size of the compliance Himalyas in this sector), and biosecurity and biosafety can be married to simplicity in use.
Otherwise BioRAFT (it stands for Research Applications and Financial Tracking) Inc. is a neat start-up, based on the east and west US coasts and in Lebanon, very into Open Source and full of good sentiments about sustainability. Is it publishing? No. Does that matter? No, it is to be welcomed. The solutions in question will only be created by the content people coming over the bridge from one direction and the research laboratory procedures people coming in the other. And we are trying to build a bridge here, which, if you start from both banks simultaneously, means sharing data and materials to ensure that the structure meets up midstream. It seems to me therefore that Digital Science and BioRAFT may potentially be partners in some contexts, and that there may be a great many more sectoral BioRAFT’s out there than the content community suspect.
This experience re-inforces a long held prejudice: we are only just scratching the surface. BioRAFT claims a genesis in 2003, which is honourably aged but cannot disguise the fact that it is now that take off appears imminent, because it is now that the research community, like so many other networked groupings, are beginning to believe that there has to be a smarter, more consistent and more auditable way of doing things in the network. And if networks create the methodologies for releasing the accumulated experience of communities into insight and understanding, then BioRAFT is a good exemplar. It takes a long time to get started and then everything goes with a rush. BioRAFT and its founder Nathan Watson are participants to watch.
Dec
19
News Not Fit to Print
Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
One of the themes of this year has been the wearisome regularity with which the “news” comes up as a topic of conversation at conferences and fora. It seems that every audience contains a voice, half-defensive, half angry, asking why people have a down on newspapers, claiming that they will always be needed, and indicating that they have changed and are adapting wonderfully to the networked world. I am not the only one with a wonky view of reality. So I am writing today to those who still appear to think, as one UK national newspaper proprietor once said to me, “that we must expect a time when everyone gets over this digital fascination”. And my message is simple: all print and broadcast news media will survive for as long as their idea of periodicity equates with the demands of their users. When they get out of step in terms of time, the end is nigh.
One of the greatest drivers of news used to be what was happening in the financial markets. The day has long passed when you could read that over your breakfast and then react, but lets go over and see what is happening in the fast lane. Selerity (www.seleritycorp.com) is a wonderful case study. Here ex Thomson Reuters people are building an actionable news service using what they undramatically call “low latency event data”. In other words they take Quantitative News from corporate announcements, retailers’ sales performance statements, or car sales releases and they squeeze it down the network in micro seconds so that when it hits pre-progammed, rule-based automated equity trading systems instant decisions can be made and actioned. My guess is that machine readable news will soon dominate the financial markets where that news can be reduced to market data, and that over time it will be possible to add more and more “sentiment ” into this news-stream, and react to that within the algorithmic trading approach.
Over at Alacra they are well down this track in one sense, since their PulsePro technology (http://pulse.alacra.com/pulse-solutions), with some 3000 sources, reads and scores the blogs and commentaries of pundits, traders, journalists (but hopefully not me) in order to create programmatic trading based on a sentiment score. Slower of course, but still a way of generating news and applying it to decisions before any of the existing players are awake. And this type of feed will have its echo in other walks of life. Monitoring blogs, where Factiva was a pioneer in its headier days, has morphed into Corporate Reputation Management. The argument is that by the time the bloggers have finished with a topic and it reaches the media, it is too late to put things right, so the successors of the PR agencies are into pre-emptive monitoring ( do they even read those carefully automated news clipping files – except to put them into the client report!). In truth, news has moved upstream, and companies like www.infegy.com are beginning to build news businesses there.
And when we get really clever we will use the technology to write the news as well as reading and reacting to them. Over, then, to StatSheet, a start-up player in the fielsd of sports reporting. In the statistics fest which is US college football and basketball, this company has built a niche called StatSheet Network which in turn creates a newsite for each team (currently 345 NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball teams). This adds in all the latest game statistics from each team, and then provides narratives and analysis as a form of robotic news development. For smaller teams with little infrastructure, this is clearly a godsend (http://statsheet.com/#websites).
Some newspapers may re-invent themselves online, and sometimes (as with the UK’s MailOnline, its online presence will take on a life of its own and become very distinct from its real world form and meaning. A few years back I was more confident of this. Now I wonder. It seemed to me then that it would be non-trivial but possible to create micro-news publishing and re-invent the local press. Now I feel that the format and business model of the newspaper world make it impossible for those immersed in that world to see enough of what is going on around them to start again in a new place. Only new players with unclouded minds can do that. If you can analyse need and come up with solutions that do not necessarily need journalists, or sub-editors, or even feature writers then you are beginning to think again. I see little evidence that our press are doing that.
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