Mar
10
Contains No Nuts
Filed Under B2B, Blog, internet, online advertising, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
I am used to the questions . Many arise from a need to challenge or or a need for re-assurance or a fear of silence . So the person who asked , this week , ” what is the technology launch that is the best indicator of media futures ?” , wanted , I think , something like ” iPad , or , err , something else mobile-ish….”.This would have helped her view that she is afloat on a sea of uncertainty , but bobbing in the right direction .
My answer is the Cisco CRS-3 , the newest router which really equips the internet as an integrator of digital video (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011300638_cisco10.html) . It could , say Cisco , move the entire Library of Congress in one second , or the entire archive of every film ever made in four minutes . But the thing that fascinates me at the moment is the way in which networks with embedded technologies like this will remove the volume/speed excuse that has traditionally lain beneath the reluctance of niched information providers to give whole solutions to user problems/demands . This is no where more obvious than in STM , which is where my second question arose .
“Well, ” he said , ” you clearly took a shine to Globalspec : what is the equivalent in STM and why are they any better than we are “. I ignored the challenge implicit here , and replied that my pick in STM over a decade had been Nature Publishing , and this was about attitude . ” Full of geeks and nerds , eh ? ” Not at all , I replied ( mentally writing the title to this piece as I did so),
but it is certainly true that they are very quickly responsive to change , and experiment publicly in beta and in conjunction with their users until they find useful combinations that fit . Clearly therefore the new Nature iPhone App ( http://www.nature.com/mobileapps/) is not the end of the story , but it demonstrates Nature’s keen concern to get involved , early on and with an open mind , and strive to create utility for their users . This was the case with Connotea , their ground-breaking social tagging environment , with Scintilla , their news-tagging activity , with Nature Networks and with the network local hubs . It seems to me that the attitude here is service -orientated and not product -centric , and that the logic says that users who are involved in service developments and have a stake in them are less likely to go elsewhere , especially if they started with Nature as grad students .
This does not mean that more traditional business development activities can be ignored . Nature has to be top of the heap in quality terms . Over a decade its content coverage has improved mightily and , through its associated publishing , it is now well on the way to core coverage across the “hard ” sciences . In one sense nothing is more traditional than recruitment advertising : once an area of neglect this is now a keystone of the arch and a factor which helps cement the Nature community together . I predicted to my interlocutor that I thought education would be a continuing interest , and that I was vitally concerned to see how Nature was able in time to make rafts of multiple media experimental evidential data available to users . Their Gateway strategy , from Cell Signalling and Neuroscience , had led the way in this field : when , I wondered , would it become the norm for research published by Nature to be linked to the evidential databases behind the work .
He leapt upon “education “. ” You mean Second Nature on Second Life – if we had all gone there we would be bankrupt “. Well , I have no idea what Nature has spent with Second Life , but I do know that when people like me stop writing about things , then other people tend to think that they have ceased to exist . Plainly wrong . Traded revenues on Second Life in 2009 totalled , in real world dollars , 567 million , a 65% increase on the previous year . And in December , with 770,000 unique users during the month , residents/users checked out $ 55 million in earnings converted into cash . Not centre stage , but certainly not dead ( see also .http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/22_09_09 )
And no doubt Nature will be pursuing other educational initiatives : pulling Scientific American under the same management is undoubtedly a step forward in this regard. While continually consolidating and refining their offerings through the lessons taught by their users , I have also no doubt that their tradition of experimentation will continue to thrive in a company increasing divergent from its peers in this respect . Elsewhere the impact of technology , while far-reaching , has often been isolated from the thinking about editorially constructing a research journal . But then , Nature was always more than just a research journal .
Last word with Google . In the week of the Cisco announcement , they indicated an experiment with Dish to create Google TV-Search (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10465956-93.html ) , a way of intercombining a Google search and a set-top box , while TiVo announced new digital video recorders which bring back video from the Web . This is the next New Frontier : we need to calculate the impact on the expectations of users in B2B, STM or other areas of business and professional information now , while we are at the on-ramp , not when we are facing new competitors . This is what Nature have done so well .
PS In my note Viva , Las Vegas , and here , I have tried to emphasize the continuing importance of virtual reality , so it was good to see UBM relaunch the Comdex compueter show as VR only(.http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10463726-93.html )
Feb
12
Taking a Global View
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
I am getting into serious trouble. Previously kindly critics of this blog are ganging up on me. “Why all this Death, Doom and Disaster?” writes one. “Are there no positive trends in your dystopic vision?” says another, “try hitting the keyboard after opening a bottle of wine”. And again, “You are running out of traditional media to write obituary notices on, so why not write about some successes, not the trend to media failure?”
Ok , guilty as charged. I have become too used to having to shock traditional media owners into action through prophecies of instant decline. And I do claim to be an individual of sunny and optimistic disposition. So I am going to write about a 1996 start-up which now has a commanding market position in its sector. It announced its global registered users for the end of 2009 in a statement this week, and though it is a success story well worth telling, for traditional media players in engineering, manufacturing and the science and technology segments attached to them, it is a filter placed between themselves and their users which few can now avoid or supplant.
The company is GlobalSpec. Here a now hugely experienced team under Jeff Killeen have slowly but surely created a category leader through the simple device of treating engineers as a community, and encouraging them to do so around the data content of the sector. Put all the product catalogues and listings with the product specifications in one place (25,000 catalogues, with 2.2 million products and 184 million searchable product specs). Make them parametrically searchable, and you have a result that slots into engineering workflow as a must have component. Then add a vertical search engine alongside this, where all sources of engineering information available on the web can be categorized and found, where the design specifications of working engineers can be sourced, and where third party content as well as freely available public content can be obtained ( if you own an engineering journal, you face the agony of being here – or of not being seen). Then add over 60 emailed engineering sector newsletters, all pushing industry news and announcements to self-qualified audiences. And from this year, add eEvents, meetings, conference and exhibitions) .
So they have got a tiny segment well sewn up? You could say that. This week’s announcement about this “tiny segment” indicates that their registered user count rose during 2009, recession notwithstanding, by some 900,000 engineers. They now have 5.6 million registered users. In that same year of slowdown and industrial decline globally, registered readership of the e-newsletters went up 21% , to an astounding total of 9.1 million. And still new users are coming on board: the company indicates an accretion rate of 80,000 new users a month.
So something fairly significent is happening in places like this. This is not about whether people will read their engineering newspaper on their laptop or their iPad, or whether there is still a place for long-form narrative in engineering texts, reference books or white papers. It is about solutions to information handling that increase productivity, improve decision making and ensure better and less costly compliance with the regulation that bedevils the sector. It is about the nature of the network: a community identifying itself, and communicating with and between itself. GlobalSpec is the result of the painstaking work of people who now understand exactly how engineers work on their desktops within their enterprise systems.
So the engineers have congregated at Globalspec: how do you make money out of them? With their willing co-operation you create sales and marketing services that suppliers in this marketplace will pay for. Real-time sales leads from the database which give those suppliers who put their content in lead generation which is filtered, measured and immediately contactable. Do not contaminate this with the word Advertising, but it is paid for from the same budget. The newsletters, now moving down into highly fragmented sub-sectors of product and service types in the industry (and providing more inventory as they subdivide), also give more traditional promotional opportunities, as do the e-events. Ask yourself: as a seller, do you go to the traditional engineering newsheet classifieds page to place your product in the community eye – or do you come here?
And this is truly Global. If you want to speak to engineers in Shanghai instead of Scunthorpe or Spokane, then come here. The questions about it are many: How many GlobalSpecs can a sector sustain? What happens to traditional media players who now supply their customers through this interface? Do “old media” buy these success stories and could they run them if they did? The fact is however that a new world order has arrived, and we all need to recognise it. A colleague said recently “You never write about vertical search anymore – did it fail?” No. I don’t need to write about it anymore , because it has succeeded.
Footnote : Warburg Pincus, and Mark Colodny, the Managing Director who has been responsible for Globalspec, deserve recognition for patient and consistent support through the growth period. As a result they now have a property of high value. The exit is the real test!
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