May
6
Meet You in a New Reality…?
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
I blinked at today’s announcement with incredulity. Neilsen Expositions sold to private equity for $950m? (http://www.followmag.com/2013). Where does this madness end? Since 2008 we have been living, in traditional B2B markets, with the reality of the network. We have all talked increasingly confidently about the irreversible decline of advertising in print, and our inability to replace it in a satisfactory way online. We have talked of companies getting smaller – but more profitable – and we have talked about the future in terms of creating workflow solutions for our customers, using our data to create these service solutions for them, and using our metadata as the sandbox of new product development to build applications that really bind customers to us. The opportunity is now open to us to effectively lead our markets into the future, basing our claim to our clients squarely on the proposition that we can improve their productivity (and thus cut costs), and enhance their decision-making by getting all the salient knowledge into the right framework at the right time, while protecting their backs against the thorn hedge of re-regulation that encroaches the post-recession world. This is a wonderful opportunity, and how good it is to see Thomson Reuters, Reed Business, Lexis Risk and others getting fully to grip with it.
Meanwhile, how sad it is to see the old B2B players in Europe dodging the inevitable. While Schibsteds and Axel Springer in the declining newspaper market now make a fetish of collecting B2B classifieds services (Reed sold Total Jobs to the latter very shrewdly), mainstream B2B in the UK, outside of the market leaders mentioned, seems to have something of a collective death wish at the moment. Like Gaul, EMAP is in three parts, each of them unsalable as they stand. The data section is too diverse, the exhibitions is too small, and the magazines too unprofitable. Over at UBM, they now talk the language of exhibitions and conferences as if it was the golden hope. B2B at Informa remains a collection of fragmented and unrelated businesses, which was how management wanted things historically, but now ignores the need to centre on data, and play the combined strengths of all the data into the key markets you want to grow. And if Datamonitor does not provide a rich way of enhancing service values across the group then what does? Meanwhile Incisive and Haymarket seem to groan for solutions, while only Centaur amongst the smaller players seems to have woken up and smelt the coffee.
I am reciting this doleful catalogue as a way of steeling myself for this week’s PPA Conference in London. What would make me most happy is hearing someone say – “Yes, we are re-investing our events portfolio with a transformative agreement with a software partner. The object is to build readership into virtual events, extending our conferences and exhibitions into year-long happenings, open 24/7. Yes, we know we have to give attendees at real events more – find out what they want, research and book meetings for them etc, while giving exhibitors a better deal, client introductions and profiles, and a year long follow-up with new product releases and regular contact. Yes, we know that, even if it almost too late, we need to build community urgently before we finally lose the chance, and we know that conference delegates, exhibition attendees and exhibitors all want a better deal. Not several better deals – just the one will be good enough”.
I was once, briefly, non-executive chairman of an events software company. I know that rapid development has taken place to assemble data, match buyers and sellers, set up itineraries and update core data holdings with key changes year by year. And I go to about 15 conferences and exhibitions each year, but have yet to be asked who I wanted to meet, or what I wanted to realise from the experience. Afterwards, however, I am deluged with surveys about what I accomplished and how good the show was. This seems to me to be quite upside down. Like most of my fellow citizens, I am well-known in the network: find me on LinkedIn or Twitter and you could even guess, from my friends and contacts, who else I might like to meet. UBM bought the rights to reality-failed COMDEX, and launched a virtual exhibition in November 2012. It attracted an audience that seemed to please UBM, but on the website I see no mention of a 2013 edition, or even of a web presence continuing from the last effort. And last year’s registration asked none of the questions that might be thought relevant to using the meeting effectively. Yet, as I have mentioned here before, if virtual reality is cheap enough to teach language learners spoken English proficiency (www.rendezvu.com) then it will surely sustain the 5000 visitors and 50 exhibitors that came last year. Or will it just slip away, just as London’s Online show has slipped back into a library conference in the hands of Incisive.
So I am worried by what I will find at the PPA. Meanwhile, virtual reality is being used intensively in other places – particularly in the cash-starved museums and art galleries of Europe. Maybe our publishing directors should organize an outing to the local resource to see how its done!
Apr
24
Spring in the Ku’damm
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Spring came late to Berlin this year, as elsewhere in Europe. But with the Spargel festival just starting, the trees in bud on Unter den Linden, the German courts ruling that you cannot re-sell an ebook and the German Government’s technical advisors indicating that government-funded research must be Open Access, it was clearly time to be there for the 10th annual Publishers’ Forum. Developed by Helmut von Berg and his colleagues at Klopotek, this has now clearly emerged as one of the leading places in Europe to talk about the future of what we are increasingly calling “networked publishing”. The meeting has moved from the Brandenburg Gate and the Pariserplatz back to the regenerating West Berlin of the Kurfurstendamm, but the urge to get to the roots of progressive development in what we once called the book business has not diminished.
By design and accident (loss of a keynoter) I played to more halls in this meeting than in any of the previous five that I have attended. Leave that to one side: my slideset is available under downloads on this site and on the conference site at www.publishersforum.de you will find slides, summaries, images, videos and references (including a very interesting tweetstream at #publishersforum) as these meetings get increasingly blanket-documented with linked description, comment and commentary. Data, in fact. An audience of 350 people at work with speakers, organizers, and media to discuss and share. Collaboration. And that was the theme of the meeting – Collaboration in the Age of Data adds up to Networked Publishing.
And from these sessions it is now clear where we are headed This Spring is definitive in ways that other Springs have not quite been. In every previous year you could be sure, here in thoughtful, conservative Germany, that someone would say that we wee jumping the gun, that format would survive fragmentation, that the “book would never die”. No such voices this week. In an audience that loves books and lives by them, I felt an absolute certainty that while “book as comforting metaphor” would survive, my friends and colleagues in the body of the hall knew that they had entered the Age of Data. We described network publishing as allusive, particulate, and above all, linked. We talked about workflow: our customer’s workflow as well as our own. This was the age of Metadata as well as the Age of Data. Speaker after speaker spoke of the potential to release new value from content as data, and the need for systems and services to support that monetization potential.
And the feedback loop was everywhere in evidence. The user and the networked power of users has completely shifted the balance from the editorial selectivity of gatekeeper producers to the individualized requirements of users. We once Pushed where now the increasingly Pull. But loyalty was not sacrificed on the way: if you provide solutions that fit user needs exactly then you can experience what Jan Reicert of Mendeley described in a private session as “amazing user love”. On the main agenda, Brian O’Leary spoke, with his usual lucid intelligence, on the disaggregation of supply, and amongst publishers Dan Pollock (formerly Nature, now Jordans) effectively defined the network publishing challenge, (replete like the auto industry with lack of standards) while Fionnuala Duggan of Coursesmart tracked the way in which the textbook in digital form becomes a change agent in conservative teaching societies while enabling the development of new learning tools. Kim Sienkiewicz of IIl demonstrated the semantic web at work in educational metadata. And Christian Dirschl of Wolters Kluwer Germany updated us on the continued development of the Jurion project, a landmark in semantic web publishing for lawyers.
Alongside the publishers stood the Enablers. Publishing seldom realises the value that it gets from its suppliers. Indeed, one of my current mantras is that the importance of software in the industry is now so great that few content players are not also software developers, and that the relationships they enter into with third parties are often no longer supplier agreements, but really partnership and often strategic alliance agreements, and need to be recognized as such. They not only add value, but they materially affect the valuation of the content players themselves. It is no accident that it was Uli von Klopotek who opened this event for his company, and it was gratifying to see on the platform a range of services that are symptomatic of the re-birth described here. Hugh McGuire from Pressbooks in Canada exemplifies that enablement, as does Martin Kaltenbock of Austria’s Semantic Web Company. Jack Freivald of Information Builders, Adam DuVander of Progammable Web, and Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks of ValoBox were each able to demonstrate further value additionality through an elaboration of networked publishing. The result was a rich gulasch suppe of networked expedients ( far more nutritional than the prevalent currywurst of this city!).
The conference agenda spoke of momentum. Laura Dawson (Bowker), a prescient commentator, noted how far we had gone in her Open Book presentation. And if we still lack standards, we have people like BISG and Editeur on this agenda struggling towards them. One of the most attractive features of the old book business was its anarchic and “cottage industry” flavour. I think it will retain many anarchic and small business qualities in the network, but it will be increasing bounded by standards of networked communication.
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