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 !

Mar

28

Rage , Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized | 16 Comments

I should be writing about Google and China , but I am too angry . Through sadness , despair and incomprehension  I emerge on the dark shores of irrational anger with the Man and his doltish acolytes who have sentenced to stagnant death the oldest and at times the greatest of Britain’s serious newspapers . Between now and the offer of the Lebvedev Pound is only a long or short period of decay . At Times Newspapers a total bankrupcy of strategic imagination leaves the  once great  Thunderer anaesthetized  and awaiting only dementia and demise .

This may sound over dramatic  , but the arrival of the £1 per day /£2 per week pay wall at the Times needs to be seen this way , or as some sort of outlandish joke . The problem facing the Times was about recreating its relationships with eitherits advertisers or with its readers . There is no strategic reason for the paywall : it is simply the expression of tired managerial brains , cudgelled by a demanding owner , saying ridiculous things like ” Well , we put so much effort into it that we should be able to get a £1 for it …” or   , even worse , ” People don’t recognize our value so we must make them pay for it …”

There is great value in the Times , even if too much of its news reporting is agency rewrites . There is value in its journal of record status , in its commentators and in its editorial position , when that does not refect its owner’s desire to play political kingmaker . Under Murdoch it is far reduced from even its Thomson days . Its brand still has power and value . What was needed was the skill and insight to stop and start again. What is the user relationship online ? What value add features , branded by the Times but searching the entire web through a Times-created focus , are valuable enough to become desktop attributes , a way of organizing and personalizing the news for the fixed , or seperately , for mobile markets ?What rich subcommunities does the Times have around its citeable Law Reports , or its obituaries , or its classifieds , that could become a platform for user exchange within the Times brand ? While Times Online has done some good and innovative things over the past five years , none of them got a look in at the end . Instead we got the crass decision : it is a newspaper in the real world , and being no different on the Web , we charge £1 for it

I learn from Jeff Jarvis and Michael Wolff in various quotations that Rupert Murdoch does not use the Internet , but that he has recently started to use email . This may explain the stumbling , stubborn road to ruin on the Web . My Space was bad enough:there was an opportunity to innovate and stay in front . Arguably Facebook should never have made it if Murdoch’s men had not thought that buying market share was enough ,and had realized instead that buying market share just gives you an opportunity to tune and develop service attributes from the front of the market , not the back . .

Now News is ailing . They provide casebook examples of how difficult it is for real world media executives , even if they are His Children and Trusted Cronies  , to make network publishing decisions without any network publishing experience . With advertizing markets down , growth in satellite curtailed by regulators and the Chinese government , and Fox becoming a politicized space that does not appeal to all communities and advertizers , it is possible to imagine the rise and fall of this media Imperium within the single generation of a remarkable dealmaker who never really understood the media he owned . None of which quite quenches my anger about the Times . .

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