May
18
From the walls of ancient Merv
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Three weeks without email is a wonderful restorative . And if you catch at something really important to replace the daily messaging fix then you are weaned of the habit within a few hours . For me , travel is just such a replacement habit . As we wandered in the Registan at Samarkand or across the Maidan in Isfahan , then my head was alive to the possibilities of town planning in (ancient) civilized cities . The palace complex at Persepolis awoke ideas of power concentrations and communications , just as the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargarde reminded me of how easy it is to lay a trail which misleads as much as informs one’s successors.
But it was the walls of ancient Merv that brought me down . Having struggled arthritically to the top , and then onto the citadel , the view from what was once the greatest city in the world barring only Babylon exhibits – a desert . After Genghis Khan , the great city , which may have had a population close to one million , was never re-occupied . The deserts of Turkmenistan are unforgiving. Progress stopped here .
Almost the first thing that I saw on my return to work was the agenda for the next ePublishing Innovation Forum 2010 (www.epublishing-forum.com) which I am chairing in London on 25-26 May – next week – in London . Like the view from the top of the walls of Merv , it is inspiring , but for utterly different reasons . It reminds me of the pace and iterative nature of change in an information marketplace that is recreating itself from ground level in cycles that used to take a decade to complete , but which can now take 10 months .
Peering from the top of the walls , I know that I can no longer envisage an agenda that covers the whole spectrum of change . The great team who organize this event now know this too , so the keynotes are particularly important , from Simon Waldman of the Guardian at the beginning ( “The internet ate my business” !) to Shane O’Neill and his political perspective on using third party ( government) content at the end . In between come some case studies I really want to hear – Chris Pilling on the Complinet experience , or the Economist strategy on networks from Aeneas McDonnell . Evan Schnittman at OUP is a wonderful commentator on distribution issues , and Jonathan Glasspool at Bloomsbury is building a new digital world of professional and academic publishing with some interesting acquisitions .
Out there on the walls are also some seasoned observors , eyes narrowed to slits in the face of blinding sun and sandstorms . Adam Hodgkin , one of the industries most experienced venturers , will tell us how you build businesses which exploit iPhone and iPad , while Hugo Drayton , veteran of the Advertising Legion , puts fresh heart into markets which have at times looked like the Karakoram Desert itself .
And I have only scratched the surface .Ian Eckert knows all about publishing platforms – from newspapers ( I first met him at Portsmouth and Sunderland , a group now as well forgotten as Merv itself ) to UBM , to TES and now back to making things work at Abacus . And TES’s current CEO , Louise Rogers , will be there to show how UGC really works .Other case studies include Fish4 ( who will no doubt remind me that I was once their chairman too ) and Conde Nast . And the panellists come from vital places like Nature , Penguin , Incisive Media and Pearson Education .All this gets somehow shoe-horned into two days ( pity the chairman ) and has so far gained a bigger audience than last year . I am pleased and proud that my colleagues at Outsell are once more , for a third year , its media partners .
Unlike ancient Merv , the network allows media to die in one context while regenerating in another . We have to use events like this to tap into the collective experience of that powerfull speaking team to find out what natural laws govern that regeneration , whether experience can be replicated , how we can really understand user behaviour , what constitutes value add in the eyes of our users and whether we can understand and work with them successfully before they decide that we are part of the problem , not the solution . While I remain confident that publishing will never become a deserted city , it may be best to find out now what is in the minds of the Mongol horde on the network ,something which the citizens of old Merv never deigned to do .
I look forward to seeing you there .
Apr
16
A Breathless Hush in the Close
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, news media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
As so often , the FT story by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson ( April 13) on Thomson Reuters was story of the week for me . As once in the mighty battles of Lexis and Westlaw , so now in the generational remake of the two financial market giants , there is something of the Great Game in the air . The competitive urges are fired by understandable needs for demonstrable success , yet at the same time the subject matter is the very stuff of which the future of all sectors of the information marketplace will be made.
The Thomson Reuters markets division will become two simplified platforms by the autumn , dealing with enterprize users on the one hand , and individual users and small operators on the other . These platforms will be web-based , and the Thomson Reuters servers will be able to be moved alongside client servers to ensure lower operational costs . The web -based environments clearly are designed to appeal to a new generation in the industry which joined since trading platforms were in place , as well as providing a contrast with the Bloomberg insistence on its dedicated terminals ( Shades of the dedicated Lexis box ! )
And something else as well . Andrew quotes Devin Wenig, the CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets , as saying ” The industry is a hugely different place from where it was in April 2008 ( when the Thomson Reuters merger took place ) and we think a lot of changes are permanent and structural. Big banks are disapearingbut we’ve created 1000 new accounts in …six months ”
And there is surely the essence . Players in rapidly restructuring networked markets will themselves have to be slimmer , do more on less and enable their clients to do more in the network at least for the same pricing . And that new generation of clients will expect a greater fluency in customization and personalization along with better risk management and improved collaboration features ( the launch of Eikon ) as well as interfaces to news and information ( like Insider ) which source video as well as text and allow brokers to offer analysis on video to their clients across the platform .
In short , Thomson Reuters are , with a few exceptions , facing very similar issues to those faced by a Pearson in education , or an Elsevier in STM . And from here on in the parallelism ceases and turns into convergence . Thomson Reuters announced a deal last week to bring Palantir’s QA Studio software to its platforms . This type of quantitative analysis allows data exploration , do pattern identification , test alpha strategies and collaborate . This pushes on with the developments in data mining began with ClearForest three years ago , and again parallels what is alreday happening ( Palantir’s markets are the intelligence , defense and law enforcement communities ! )
Where does the next push come ? Well , data management is now crucial , and so is compliance and risk management/reduction . And that sounds just like the issues facing diagnostic systems in the medical marketplaces . Often in financial markets there is too much news , and it is insufficiently auto or machine analysed , and human intervention takes too long : this points towards further pressure for automated news tagging so that it can be submitted directly to computerized trading systems . And here another common broad market problem occurs . Users and regulators begin to exert pressure at the lowest levels of data organization for common standards to emerge ( XBRL would be the case study in the finance field ). This moves the competition zone up a level , but that competitive element must remain because it drives everything forward . Without it , common standards turn into a reason for not changing anything . So play up , lads and play the game ! We still have to tackle workflow and process improvement before the end of this long information industry day !
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