Mar
22
Crowds, Voices and no Ties
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Two days were enough this week to encompass an industry in the making and in transition. Many participants at the London Web Summit on Monday, as well as at the IXXUS Future of Publishing meeting on Tuesday, would describe themselves as being in the Information Industry (aka media, publishing, information services and solutions etc). I went to both, and as I staggered home on Tuesday night I could only reflect that this is not one industry but a hundred, and the cultural differences between the pieces are now profound. In fact, this industry is a Lilleputian version of the whole world around it, which sounds the way it should sound. But doing the breadth in two days? Very frightening.
For a start there were 1000 delegates in the Old Brewery in Chiswell Street on Monday. Our ebullient hosts, Paddy Cosgrave and Mike Butcher (TechCrunch), compered it with the energy of a variety show in the Edwardian music halls. And they had a band that provided a 10 bar intro/exit for every speaker. It had something of everything, and, at King Paddy’s command, no ties were allowed (Yes, this is the sort of thing you do have to tell the English). And like a variety show (vaudeville) it was good in parts and not in other parts. The panels, despite some good appearances, were often so hurried and poorly moderated that it was hard to extract meaning at all. And the audience was very mixed – investors networked less easily here with a vast crowd of start-up hopefuls than they did at last year’s similarly sized NOAH show, but the same messgae was available. The energy is back in the London market, just as it is in Berlin and Barcelona, but London is the place to get the finance and finger the future. My Investor of the Day award goes to Niklas Zennstrom of Atomica: despite the questions from his moderator he came across as someone who had learnt real lessons from Skype and Joost, and knew how to listen to the next crazy and apply the right degree of enthusism, tolerance and sophisticated discouragement. And my Thinker of the Day would have to be J P Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com. His observation that we would at last overcome the entrapment of the Qwerty keyboard, and that the future of work was only understandable if we saw it as as massively integrated multi player videogame was delightful, as was his insistence that knowledge work on the network was “bursty” – so we invented the need for meetings to fill the gaps between activities.
Also high quality was the discussion on the future of money. We had two credit card -based services ranged against two chip-based money transfer services. I give the latter my vote, but questions like cost-free money transfer, the death of cash and the removal of some of the key roles of banks played very well, as did the notion that with digital money comes the end of money-handling privacy. Gareth Williams did a great job of persuading us that the Edinburgh – based, Scottish Equity Partners-backed online travel service SkyScanner would break into the Expedia /Kayak marketplace, but in truth its revenues of £2.5-3.0 m per month on a lead gen/referral business model, from 20 million unique monthly users, shows that it is well on the way. Offices in Singapore and now Hong Kong emphasize where the growth is, and 7 million apps testify to the mobile nature of the challenge. But is Google waiting to pounce on all of this?
So what else did I learn? That YAiA stands for “Yet another iPad App”. That 50% of Turkish shopping for consumer goods is now online. That Google only has 20% of the Russian search market, and Facebook is only the fourth most popular online service. That FAB has 3 million members (50% social network, 40% mobile) and sold 111,111 products last month on the way to revenues of $110m this year. So some of the players in the hall were definably big already. But you could not say that of Nick D’Aloisio, aged 16, funded to the tune of £350k , and launching his service (www.summly.com) to provide artificial intelligence support to people doing research online who needed to summarize what they had read. When he said that he was going to take two years off to do his A level school exams, there was a palpable sigh of relief from the 20 year old entrepreneurs in the audience.
It didn’t matter to me , proudly sporting the only grey beard in the room. But I have to admit that I felt relief amongst my peers in the IXXUS event, held in sunshine on the Kensington roof garden, which is improably furnished with ducks and flamingos (live). An audience of technocrats from all of the leading information services players were looking at the issues surrounding what seems to me the key question of the hour – how do we effectively re-platform in ways that add to our asset value, increase our ability to act fast to change our service dimensions in times of torrential market change and still stay within a broad avenue of standards now established and extending from XML right through to RDF and SPARQL. We can now discuss these things in London – they are of the present and I was delighted to hear John Powell of Alfresco (a real ornament to the Open Source model) and the IXXUS team under Steve Odart providing practical advice and guidance to real and urgent questions from the audience. Three years ago I would not have been allowed vocabulary like “ontologies” or “triples” in a publishing context: today this is coinage of the conversation and I rejoice in it.
And one last observation. Go to a conference of 1000 web developers and investors and what happens: from breakfast to dinner I never arrived at a boxed food table in time to find a box left to consume. Good for your figure, you may observe. Yes, but I made up for it the next day. They may have their drawbacks but publishers do know how to eat, and IXXUs responded to their proclivities very well indeed.
Mar
4
Sell the Magazines – NOW!
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Cengage, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
As a Thomson man of the generation of ’67, I was well schooled in the dictum “its not what you buy, but what and when you sell that makes the real difference.”* And having spent almost three decades button-holing anyone who would listen, like some crazed digital ancient mariner, on the importance of building digital presence in B2B publishing and information markets, I should probably be pleased to see headlines in the Financial Times (3 March 2012) heralding the sale of EMAP’s print assets (“Analysts say EMAP faces challenge to move away from print”). But I am not. I know exactly when these print assets should have been sold: in 2002 at the end of the Dotcom Bust. And I cannot persuade myself that a wrong move then will be rectified by a pointless move now, or that value will be added to anything by selling the subscription/advertising print stable at EMAP – or at UBM, or at Haymarket, or Centaur, or Incisive – to someone who is simply going to live on a declining annuity until it expires. There will in any case be few buyers, and those who do appear will not want the stable, but just one or two of the old nags. The analysts who shriek the headline of this piece are simply transaction mongers who have a firmer grip of deal commissions than they do of the current strategic realities of B2B. So lets go back to 2002 and see what has happened after the management of B2B information and publishing and events decided that it was far too early to exit print subscriptions and, like the regional press, the market would come back to them.
By 2005 it was becoming clear that the bits that worked in B2B, outside of events, were information services and solutions. By that year controlled circulation magazines and newsletters, which had proliferated and at times been generated by online at the end of the previous decade began to wilt. Just as in the pre-2005 period we had spoken of VANs and VADs, so we began to talk about “vertical search” (it turned out to be much the same anyway) and started providing tailored information to self-defined users in commerce and industry. We were beginning to experience for the first time what it was going to be like to live in a “networked society/economy”. A small revolution was taking place: managers were beginning to have to find out what their users did for a living and construct solutions around their daily lives. This meant specialization and expertise in particular verticals: managers could no longer be shifted from title to title on the basis that they knew journalists and advertisers and everything else was the same whether you were publishing in machine tools or in ladies fashions.
And then we came to workflow. If we were really entering an information solutions-type world (where Thomson Reuters had already gone in IP and GRC , and Lexis Risk in insurance) then we had to provide our content directly to the desk of the user, sliced so that it modelled his working patterns, and supported by software tools that added value to it and kept us essential to his processes, and thus too important to be lightly discontinued. And how did we plan to earn his trust in this guise? By either inventing a new brand (think Globalspec in engineering) or by using our old print brands to ensure user confidence (think Bankers Almanac at RBI). Never mind that the print which supported those brands had eroded away, since they were there for entirely different reasons.
And now we are laying another layer in digital development on top of all of this. We now talk of Big Data, of using the services we have created for users as a sort of focussing glass so that we can go out from them to the client’s own content and all sorts of other datasets and find linkages through data mining and extraction, squeezing fresh insight all the time into the workflow of users who, wherever they work, have increasingly become, like us, knowledge workers. And our events activities increasingly morph into always-on trading and learning experiences, where we do introduce clients to the range of products and services in the sector, update and inform on new releases to people who have said they want to know, and move increasingly into the training and professional development of the sectors that we have chosen. Do you see where we are going? We are going to be the full service providers to a handful of vertical markets which we feel confident about dominating.
Why are we confident about that domination? Because we have the brands, many of them over a hundred years old in this country, which our verticals were brought up upon. And behind those brands are archival morgues, full of data with residual value in a Big Data sense. We did not sell those brands in 2002 when they were a going concern, so why sell them now when they are a cause for concern. By all means close the print, by all means reconstruct the service values using far less journalists in targeted niche environments online. By all means drive towards areas where you have real data intensity, but on the way remember the community and its existing brand affiliations. You want to take them with you.
Which brings us back round to EMAP. I see no point in hanging on to peripheral services, even data-based services like DeHavilland bought as recently as 2007, if they have no strategic coherence in terms of the markets that give EMAP positions of strength. I take these to be construction, local government, broadcast media and fashion. If strength in automotive cannot be linked to the Guardian’s position in Trader Media, then sell that too. But hold onto brands where they can be used to give community credibility and data where it can give archival searchability. By selling them you get a smaller but more profitable business. And that is also the result of digital network development of the type described here – smaller and more profitable businesses. Just don’t throw away something which is pretty worthless now on its own, but which may be needed on a journey to a much better place.
* Note that the companies that Thomson SOLD in the mid-1980s in the UK form the majority of EMAP and Trinity Mirror today, as well as large chunks of Springer and Infinitas, and elsewhere and afterwards the bulk of Cengage and a big portion of the US regional press. Were they right or not?
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