Feb

6

Sharing: More News

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, social media, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Don’t you hate those tacky moments in presentations when the speaker says something like “Hands up who used a deodorant this morning?” and we all squirm a bit and try to think of the right answer – are we meant to smell good, or not to use aerosols for environmental reasons, or rely on pure products like water to do the trick, or regard smelling bad as a badge of democracy? Somehow they always end up by putting you in a false position. So if these are the enemy tactics, then I plan to use them in a presentation I am due to make this afternoon.

Who owns an automobile? I plan to ask, fairly confident of a full house here in Washington DC. But who shares an auto? I seek users of ZipCar, or WhizzGo. And who shares a ride in an auto? Looking here for subscribers to NuRide, ZimRide, GoLoco. And who uses P2P car rental to avoid high rental costs? (see DriveMyCar.com, WhipCar and RelayRides). The point of this annoying catechism is simple. In the land where a man’s car is his castle, the last three years has seen an unprecedented rise in collaborative car investment sharing start-ups. It takes a recession to remind us that the aging, rusting hulk in the drive way costs us depreciation every year, apart from financing costs and running costs. Car ownership used to be a life style given: now its a conscious use of resources decision – and there are clearly other options. And those options rely on networked collaborative relationships to work.

So do my friends in the information markets think that people who shared a car to work will not share content collaboratively with third parties? On one side they acknowledge sharing cultures, and complain bitterly when they see breaches of intellectual property ownership. On the other side they shy away from service sharing with other source suppliers to create service solutions which would help, through ease and completeness of access, in avoiding such breaches. In doing so they force markets into other channels, and as the water finds its way round the rock they may find themselves in mortal danger.

While these thoughts reflect the ideas that I raised yesterday, they were also prompted by an announcement by the Macmillan Digital Science service, figshare, last week. In it figshare announced a new deal with the Public Library of Science in which figshare undertakes to load all of the experimental, evidential data associated with articles published by PLoS. This gives two big collaborative pluses for PLos; in the first place they are able to satisfy the strong demand for the publishing of evidential data without a huge technology investment, and they can point out to users that being enabled to view supplemental data in a browser alongside the article offers major advantages in discover-ability for datasets, videos, graphs, figures and images. All of these factors will draw more article traffic to PLoS. For figshare this collaboration moves them into the mainstream for open access data publishing, and since articles can be sourced from the researcher’s figshare repository prior to technical review by PLoS One, for example, it makes figshare a more sensible collaborator in the sharing that matters – between researcher/author and service supplier.

These collaborations become important and indicative of the future of the industry. For example, poll results (GP Bullhound 2013) this week indicated that over 60% of current games users would want, globally, to buy into the Xbox 720 technology rather than the Sony PS4. It may be that Sony have moved too slowly to turn the PS range into both a consumer and an educational platform. Microsoft, however, have been clear on the educational drive, using SharePoint (whats in a name?) to associate all sorts of content and service environments (think only of copyright cleared content resources like Global Grid for Learning). Walking around BETT in London last week I felt the forming of an answer to the question “Who shares this market with Pearson, if the duopoly idea holds true?” The answer at the moment would be Microsoft, with a sharing attitude towards technology and content collaboration which is serving them well.

Not that they won’t have a struggle in local markets. I was pleased to see at BETT how much revived the service lines of RM appeared to be, compared to a year ago. RM Unify, a system for creating single sign – on in the Cloud to the whole range of Cloud Apps and services that a school may use is obviously a great step forward. And I really liked the idea, in the RM eBooks library, that a teacher could create a research library around a topic for a class, and r3ent access to the books required for the duration of the project. Then let teachers review each others listings, I thought (perhaps via TES Resources?) and the collaborative loop is joined up. The question then remains, in this consolidating world, of who buys TES – or even RM?

Feb

6

The Collaboration Game

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Multi-tasking may be beyond me. I am finding it very hard to travel and blog at the same time. And having traveled 10 hours by train and over 50 in a plane in the past 14 days I must beg forgiveness for the gap in production on this blog. And the annoying thing is that many of the things encountered on these travels have been red meat for bloggers.

Take as an example last week’s Information Industry Summit, organized as ever by the SIIA and held this year at New York’s Pier 60. This is a really important industry event, and I was pleased to be amongst a crowd of some 250 who enjoyed a very varied and interesting agenda. And specially interesting for me these days since these conferences provide a verbal map of industry sentiment. One would have thought, for example, that for many SIIA members 2012 was a disaster worth forgetting. Consolidation goes on apace but many of the “great” players of yesteryear took considerable reverses, and investor sentiment about the “information industry”, if that means failing print to some, must be flagging. With McGraw-Hill dividing into two, and selling the weaker part, and News Corp dividing into two and racking up real problems in the bad bank side, there are plenty of examples of near terminal troubles. And yet the room was full as ever of investors and analysts. I cannot be certain of course whether they were there to pick over the wreckage, or to re-invest post-digital development, but they are still there. And while they are there I really think we should give them a vision of the future which is not framed by our rear view mirror.

So the conference began with George Colony, the articulate and persuasive father of Forrester, giving a talk about Thunderstorms. Indeed, this was a recurrent theme. It reminded me of where we have been these last 20 years. Do you remember the long years when every conference started with a Christensen-esque speech on Disruption? Well, we learnt to live with Disruption, and we ignored the wonderful advice of the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. For the next five years we were Crossing Chasms, getting one foot into the digital world, rebalancing ourselves. Well, does anyone know if we crossed? Or are we still poised? Then every media sector got involved, and all of a sudden we were Transitioning and Migrating. These may have been words which pleased investors at the time, and helped to explain why nothing much was happening at discernible speeds, but using them now seems laughable. How many major print-based powerhouses of 1993 can you name that have a stake in digital markets that matches a Google, or an Amazon, or a Facebook? We have businesses like Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier who have carved out niches in digital workflow, and players like Pearson who dominate education markets which have been slower to move to the network. But giants? Those have been built anew and elsewhere.

So when the conversation turned to Thunderstorm last week I wondered whether Americans had adopted the English art of under-statement. Cataclysm was the word that came to mind that week as I read Gannett’s results statement. If George Colony meant that our industry was under water then I might agree, but I suspect that he was looking or a metaphor for mindless violence, but came up short. Yet the metaphor led me to the totally sane, healthy and interesting part of the week. One objective of my trip was to help my friends at TEMIS, the French semantic analysis software company, launch their LUXID Community, a collaborative network of software players, content companies and platform providers. I was delighted to find some of the themes of the launch event taken up in the main conference. Look for yourself at http://www.temis.com/join-the-luxid-community or come to one of their meetings and express a view.

When extra-ordinary events take place, and change the entire landscape in which we work within a timeframe as short as 20 years, our reaction as businesses might reflect how we react as individuals in an earthquake or a tsunami. We pool our resources and pull together. I believe in what TEMIS are proposing because I do not think we will develop solutions for customers, or exploit to the full the digital opportunities given us by our content, our data, our market knowledge or our ability to develop high quality software unless we work together. Collaboration and co-operation are essential even if tomorrow we also need to buy or merge with some of those with whom we work today. Above all, this collaboration must extend to our customers: the lonely years of competition for competition’s sake must end, and we have to embrace our customers as partners – or they will become our competitors in ways which would be very toxic indeed.

Here then is a theme we could use to re-invigorate investors. Ask them to score us in terms of our proclivity for partnership. Look at us to see if we have a culture of experimentation that involves combining resources and attributes from several different sources to create a value which would have been otherwise impossible. As we move into a networked world where most service and solutions providers will sub-contract, outsource, partner and collaborate as easily as breathing then we in vital information markets could be leaders in proving that Vital is just as important as Big – and maybe more profitable. The LUXID Community may be a small step, but we could look back at this week as a very important one.

« go back — keep looking »