Oct
20
Bonfires of B2B Vanities
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Do you hear that slightly soggy, slushy sound, followed by a low moan? That is the sound of a whole industry falling on its sword. The signs are everywhere. Here is W H Smith in the UK, banning self-published books because it cannot see which ones are pornographic and which are not (http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/whsmith-boycotts-self-published-authors). Remember when booksellers used to be able to read? And over here, in my favoured B2B zone, I came across a suggestion in the building and construction information marketplace last week that, to quote my correspondent “it is not the publishers job to produce data for automated building processes; builders have to learn that for themselves”!
As you may imagine, this lit my blue touch paper. In the user-centric world of the network, it will probably become a capital crime to tell the user what he should do – but for me it will always be a criminal offence to stop short, or define the publishing role so that it stops short, of going to the very last point of user satisfaction. Our obligation in every instance must surely be to create the ultimate in end user satisfaction in order to prevent third parties from inserting themselves between us and our customers, and removing our value-add leverage. I do not much mind if in the process we become a content- to -software company – or even a software company – since I see less risk in this than in the removal of our direct-to-client relationships and our ability to raise prices and margins through value add and enhanced client satisfaction. And I refuse to believe that the construction industry, as it slowly unfreezes from recession in Europe, is any different from any other vertical market. I have talked in these columns about the aircraft industry, the workflow of science, medical diagnostic systems, legal practice work-engines and similar developments in the auto industry and elsewhere.
So you cannot find a vertical market without finding automation of basic functions, workflow modelling, data analysis and predictive analytics, and machine-to-machine communications. And when I made my phone call I was looking at the German and Nordic construction markets, since there has been interest recently in Docu Group, a major player comprised of the former Bau Verlag companies of Springer, with the ByggFacta companies that I well recall from Thomson. And I was surprized by how little reaction there has been amongst the European construction information services to the arrival of BIM. And my call was intended to check out whether this was true as well in the UK. It appears that it was, and that no one was very willing to invest in doing anything about it.
This may be linked to the deep recession in the building industry, and it is certainly does not mean that the companies concerned do not have the data. While they remain publishers of magazines, for some curious reason, all the players I looked at – EMAP, Bau, (former) UBM ,Byggfacta – all had familiar collections of data on new building starts, on materials and labour pricing, and on regulation, and good services for bid-monitoring. They showed no sign of collecting public or third party data, enriching it or building knowledge stores of any sort. And yet if you look at the US websites of Hanley Wood, Reed Construction or the McGraw-Hill services you see an acute awareness of the importance of predictive data modelling and an anxiety to help customers use it. This I find almost completely absent in Europe. Yet in a networked society the architect, the builder, the contractor, the engineer, and the property developer are working cheek-by-jowl. It is in everyone’s interest to ensure, through predictive data modelling, that what is planned will work, within its budget, before physical work begins. And we are not short in Europe of institutions like the Institute for Applied Building Informatics in Munich to tell us how to do this. So why not?
My conclusion at the end of my phone call was that many in the information industry went as far as “research” and then stopped dead. It is almost as if by assembling data and allowing users to search it, the publishers satisfied all processing requirements, and that the role of the industry, at least in Europe, stops there. Well, said my colleague, AutoCAD will do all that when its needed, and the big global players will build their own, and the small builders aren’t interested and anyway our events are where we make our money and we are going to concentrate on those. And much of this may be true (indeed, Bau runs excellent technical conferences that train builders to use innovations that they themselves play no part in providing). But to me it all sounds like elements in a collective death wish. If AutoCAD are to do it (and I have not a clue as to where their ambitions lie), who will be their partners and marketeers in European countries. Who can supply the data attached to trusted brands?
There can be no doubt that the European construction industry will revive. Negotiating the streets in central London closed by construction work last week it was hard not to think that it had not done so already. But will the European construction information industry recover in time to be any use other than as legacy data providers? And while this appears to me to be acute in Construction, is it also the case in other vertical markets? Recovery depends upon re-investment and new partnerships. Where are they? And if they are not in place, then those trying to sell untransformed B2B players with ancient lineage but no leverage may find the prices offered hugely disappointing.
Aug
6
Open a Fab Lab and Re-Invent the Newspaper
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
First of all, a (very) old, (very) bad joke. The great Roy Thomson is sitting in an aircraft at Bangkok en route to Australia. “Get me the Bangkok Times”, he snaps to an aide. The young assistant returns in due course and gives the press tycoon his newspaper. “What did it cost us?”, the great man enquires. “10p”, replies the slightly surprized executive. “Cheap at the price if we got the properties as well” growled the newspaper acquisition legend. But this story comes to mind yet again from my 1960s publishing days not just because the price of a newspaper title is falling so rapidly, but because Roy Thomson was the last of a breed: he bought newspapers without any intention of imposing his views on the world, but simply – indeed, “purely” – to make money. Since his time, and I do not exempt Rupert Murdoch from this, newspaper proprietors have bought in to change the world, exercise power, develop a personal following or compensate for something missing elsewhere in life. And this week, as the Boston Globe goes for a pittance to an industrialist and now the Washington Post goes to Jeff Bezos for a mere $250 million we are back on the track created by the Chicago Herald Tribune: very expensive power jewellery for very rich people.
None of this will save a newspaper or make it more relevant to now-lost audiences. Jeff Bezos is an outstanding businessman who has created a singularly powerful ecommerce environment, but he may not have the answer to news in the network. Bob Woodward says on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This isn’t Rupert Murdoch buying The Wall Street Journal, this is somebody who believes in the values that the Post has been prominent in practicing, and so I don’t see any downside,”
(http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/washington-post-sale-jeff-bezos-bob-woodward-rupert-murdoch-95226.html#ixzz2bDFk8ntc”), but for all we know at present, Politico, where I saw this story, is the true successor of political news and comment in newspapers. Jeff Bezos will be an experimenter and a catalyst for change, if we can go by his record, but while we wait it may be more interesting to see how the remaining assets of the Graham family fall. For example, will Kaplan go, and which Pearson competitor will try to offset flagging textbook fortunes by buying it (although even Kaplan is looking a bit past its best).
What would be good is a way of putting together the thinking of the best minds and begin to test and re-iterate models of engagement for networked populations. OK, we have done this before and the answer was Twitter – but I do not despair. The best thing that Jeff Bezos has bought may be a brand that he can transfer elsewhere for credibility and profit. All predecessors in the re-invention stakes have started from the idea that you take content first formulated from print and then re-condition it for online audiences. He doesn’t – or does not have to – think like that. And he will look at the Guardian, with 50 million online users, the voice of global liberalism in English, the place where everyone from Assange to Snowden comes to leak, and he will wonder why such a mighty distribution empire produces such pitiful revenues. And he will, as an online storekeeper, know which buttons to press to get revenues moving, since he survived the derision of the world for having no business model at Amazon – until his business model, once found, brought the consumer book industry to its knees and may yet point to its exit.
The keynote here is experimentation and re-iteration. All of us who work in the network must work this way now. Even in domestic terms, as I realised this morning when my wife said “I think we really need to have a 3D printer”. As is wise, I agreed, and then sought to justify my agreement by looking at the things that we might do in a small village in the Chilterns with such a device. And within moments I had found it! The largest number of installations of 3D printers and allied additive manufacturing technologies in Europe and the US is in so-called Fab Labs, many of them housed in libraries. My nearest Fab Lab, one of around 150 created in the past 5 years, is at Manchester, some 200 miles away. Here is its rationale: “Fab Labs – digital fabrication laboratories – were set up to inspire people and entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into new products and prototypes by giving them access to a range of advanced digital manufacturing technology.
The idea was conceived by renowned inventor and scientist Professor Neil Gershenfeld at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His idea was a simple one: to provide the environment, skills, advanced materials and technology to make things cheaply and quickly anywhere in the world, and to make this available on a local basis to entrepreneurs, students, artists, small businesses and, in fact, anyone who wants to create something new or bespoke.” (www.fablabmanchester.org) And here is something about their impact:
“A global network of over 150 Fab Labs now exists, connecting people, communities and businesses across the world and enabling them to collaborate, problem solve and brainstorm ideas.
Shepherds in Norway have used their Fab Lab to create a system for tracking sheep using their mobile phones, while in Ghana, people have made an innovative truck refrigeration system powered by the vehicle’s own exhaust gases.
In Afghanistan, people are fashioning customised prosthetic limbs, while in South Africa a government and business backed project is creating simple internet connected computers that hook up to televisions and cost just ten dollars each.”
Compared to this record of innovation, surely re-inventing what the newspaper means in the network would be easy? And once we are fully functional as the first Village Fab Lab in Britain we may have a go at that too!
« go back — keep looking »