Jun
13
Getting into the Info-Drug Argument
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, STM | Leave a Comment
It was an argumentative week in New York last week . Not that I found myself arguing with the publishing and information community , of course . As ever they were gentle and sapient beings who could see all three sides of every question . Yet more than on a number of recent trips I found that the relationships of suppliers , intermediaries and hooked users in the info drugs trade were strained , and this was not , and wouldn’t be in this sector , about users being threatened with cold turkey after a reduction of supply . In fact , we are flooded with the stuff and users often beg for less , or better ways of monitoring the flow . And it is about price . And the arguments of last week were being played out against the backdrop of BP’s overflow , the movement of world oil prices , and BP’s share price and dividend decision. Indeed with Presidents and Prime Ministers in phone meetings to ensure that we understood that the raging argument was not a raging argument , the scene was set for the media classes to fall to bickering on their own .
First off the blocks were the New York Times , Apple Inc and Alphonso Labs Inc . Who ? You may be forgiven for not knowing that the last-named are a brand new , boys -in- their- early- twenties -working -in -a-Palo-Alto -garage set-up . We shall no doubt hear more of Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta , not least because their first product , the Pulse News Reader App for the iPad, was specifically mentioned last week in his WWDC speech by Steve Jobs , first in line of great Palo Alto garage graduates , as a great example of how Apps could focus usage and intensify reader experience .
So it was a great surprize when Pulse was withdrawn mid-week , apparently at the request of the New York Times . Was it because the Pulse advert featured the NYT in its frame ? Was it because the Pulse application was better than the NYT’s own reader app ( while it was up in its original state the app was downloaded in a few days 35,000 times at £2.39 each ) ? Or was it because , although as yet it has no paywall policy , the NYT objects in principle to being framed by anyone ( are we really going to get back to that tired old internet argument ) ? Or did the NYT simply want a cut of the action and didn’t know whom to ask ?
The iPad is the latest ace hookah from which we take our info-drugs . The Pulse App is simply a smarter way of collecting RSS feeds , for which individuals could register for free , and playing them on the new hookah through a software called Safari , which everyone , including NYT , have to use if they are to have access to the new habit . The boys from the garage just gave the NYT 35,000 new subscribers to a service they already offer , and featured the NYT in their advertisements . Seems to me that editors with bouquets should attend their garage doors , not lawyers with writs . And Apple , far from removing the kids ( who won a Stanford Institute of Design award for this ) should give them a job . But Apple , having moved from hardware/software supplier to access controller and owner of the user profile on the Web , must now play a different game with content suppliers . And this one is a dangerous one .Apple , like Google in a similar role , would be too powerful in this position to make life comfortable for either growers or smokers .
( PS I understand that Pulse has now gone back up – with the NYT amputated . Who does that help ? )
At the same time in California a noisy spat was taking place between the University of California and Nature Publishing Group . Nature has been renegotiating its deal with the California Digital Library . Talks surrounded the depth of discount that the library should enjoy : Nature says it currently gives California an 88% discount on its list prices , and wants this to be close to the average of 50% that it gives other users , while California stigmatizes this as a 400% price increase . California wrote an open letter to faculty representatives on its ten campuses , thus “outing ” the argument in an attempt to put public pressure on Nature . , who point out that they have capped list prices at 7%, and are the major publisher most compliant with the so-called ” green agenda ” of open access .
No one is going to win this one either . Nature’s output is “must-have ” to an outfit of California’s standing , but not beyond price . As a major buyer the university authorities could imagine that by making an example of a medium-sized player they will soften up the negotiations with the larger lists of Elsevier , Wiley-Blackwell or Springer . Both parties are in a recession , and both will plead poverty and the need to guarantee survival . It is however as unthinkable that California will not supply its students and researchers with Nature magazine at an average download price , under Nature’s proposed pricing , of $0.56 per download , as it is that Nature will walk away from an institution where its authors litter every street corner . So who blinks first , and who blows smoke in the faces of addicts and users everywhere ?
At the end , these are power plays . Is the University a big enough power block to make its will felt , and can the newspaper use its ownership any more to control how the end-user views its content ? These struggles used to take place behind closed doors . Then the golden rules were – never push your power too far , for in the exercise of using it you are losing it . NYT is clearly some way down that track : if the University of California forces its students to subscribe seperately to Nature then it too begins to lose control of the argument . How much do you need it and can you kick the habit are still powerful questions in the world of commoditized information .
Jun
6
Coming of Age: from Putney to Eagan
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, Thomson | 1 Comment
After the previous week’s heady adventures it felt natural to seek anonymity . And where better to do that than in the bowels of the European Commission as an evaluation rapporteur , quietly sifting the hopeful and hopeless proposers of technology projects in a selection process so scientifically refined that the winners might be described as truly opaque – the people for whom no selectorial prejudice might be entertained .Very dull. And then , taking my Blackberry outside the building for the Commission equivalent ( an info-fix?) of a smoking break , I discovered the joyous news that Thomson Reuters and Complinet had done the deal .
Joyous ? Yes , they need each other at this juncture . Often when major conglomerate players meet maturing ex-start-ups the romance is around trophy assets , scale and exit . And of course these are all elements here . But there is also another element which is much more exciting . Thomson Reuters Markets is in every financial services institution worth thinking about . Thomson Reuters Law division is in every law and tax unit worth thinking about . The one area that unifies these markets more intensely than any other is , as we hesitatingly emerge from recession , compliance with the new rule books of re-regulated financial marketplaces . Thomson Reuters need to have a strategy in place that brings new service values into play across the huge datasets held in its distinctly different Markets and Law operating units . Complinet has been doing that bridgework effectively for 12 years .
When I first went to visit Complinet in Putney in the late 1990s they were a revelation . In the first instance they had nothing on board that sounded like “publishing ” . While some of their people had some sales experience in information companies – including Thomsons- no one talked the structural and process talk of publishing . From the start this was a service-orientated development , and while we did not use the word then , this was all about “workflow”. The object was to put alongside compliance officers and operational managers a service environment for risk management and reduction . So it seemed quite natural that one of the first people I interviewed in the business was a former enforcement inspector from a regulatory agency . Not research-based ? Concerned with adding value to the working environment ? Service -driven thinking ? This company , by the time I had known it for 5 years , was ticking all the boxes for me in terms of what we now understand as value-added “network publishing “.
But growing up in a hostile or unregarding society is always difficult . Other publishers confided to me that they thought Complinet’s business model ,( which then as now had a consultancy element ) was impure (!). In order to succeed the company would have to succeed in the US as well as Europe – a notoriously difficult migration for small British companies . Some content providers were unwilling to license datasets , while others , including some Asia-Pacific exchanges , did not have their regulations in usable formats and needed help . And where did the business model stop : Complinet always took a full service view of its niche , which meant audit of compliance updates and the educational processes by which management and regulator can be sure that changes , once logged , are familiar to operating staff . In other words , Complinet was prepared to look at the whole workflow of compliance in its sector , not just the bits that had law or tax documentation in them . Since their competitors were companies like Wolters Kluwer who were obsessed by the research need and not by the workflow , Complinet were able to establish themselves and grow . Now everyone is obsessed by the workflow .
This is a coming of age in another sense as well . This is the first sale in the information sector of an integrated services company of any size . Initially the publishers all bought service software companies who sold to end users , and tried ( sometimes not very hard ) to bolt these on to their information assets . It seldom worked . This is not to say that the purchases were wrong : some were brilliant ( and Wolters Kluwer made some notable buys in Europe in this area ) . It was simply that the cultures of software development and research information sales were totally different , and all too often purchasers did not know how to integrate them , or believed that they should stand alone within a group context so that shareholders could clearly assess the contribution of the acquisition . Mercifully those days have passed , but some major players are still left with technology buys whose relevance to other activities is now a mystery !
Thomson Reuters have not been like that , but they , as well as Reed-Elsevier ( WestLaw and Lexis ) have seen the need to migrate to the law and tax office workflow but found it harder to accomplish in practise , especicially during the recent difficult years when subscription revenues for reseach database products were being challenged by traditional professional subscribers . But if you subscribe , as I do , to the UK expert Richard Susskind’s view of the decline of the lawyer , then players like Lexis and Westlaw should be moving across to help end-users ( in this case compliance officers in banks ) to manage their own regulatory practise destiny . And empowering their law firm advisors to unwind and customize these solutions for them . We cannot at once be within a wholly networked economy yet seek to preserve the business relationships of the pre-internet age . Complinet is a child of the networked age – it can now complete its growth phases in a much larger incubator , and help its new host to change as well in the process.
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