Nov

12

Marco’s Magical Mystery Tour

Filed Under Blog, Education, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Two days at the Old Billingsgate conference centre last week, but for investors  and early stage and post start-up information service and technology players the annual Noah conference, moderated by Noah’s co-founder and genial ringmaster/moderator, Marco Rodzynek, has never been a chore but an exhausting pleasure. The meeting seems to go by in a blur – I  seem to have written notes on 55 short presentations – and the food, drink and parties all add to the atmosphere. Even the Prime Minister’s office talking about the Shoreditch Tech City sounded upbeat (and a bit spaced out!). Marco and his colleagues shifted the focus a bit this year, and while there were a satisfying number of UK, French and German companies, there was special emphasis on Turkey, Israel and Russia, releasing some really interesting perspectives on those marketplaces.

There were specialist break-out groups for those who wanted to get closer to the action than the variety show on the main stage permitted. And there were a couple of really interesting panel sessions and investor recaps/case studies. Two of these – a session on the digital investment strategy of Axel Springer, and a strange panel on the future of television, which oddly sounded like “everything will change except the primacy of broadcast, schedule and channel” (ie nothing will change) – were mentioned here in Friday’s blog (“Monty’s Flagging Circus”). Both gave food for thought. And it was a good idea to put Priceline (the forgotten man, but now a critical investor), Facebook and eBay up to talk about their strategies. On the other hand there was a muted atmosphere to the music industry panel, with a strong feeling that while some would still like to play the old tunes, the band has moved on for this sector.

It was in the agenda sessions that the real value lay, as a wonderful diversity of information and tech players each gave a 10 minute toot on the trumpet. It almost feels invidious to mention names, but who could fail to be impressed by Fiverr? The global marketplace for services – “turn your hobby into a revenue stream” – is now in 200 countries, has a million listed businesses, and 15% of those see Fiverr as their primary income stream. AVAST, the consumer antivirus player from Prague, now has an installed base of 170 m computers and works in 43 languages. Naturally, it shifts into mobile, with 1 million new Android users joining per month. They have their incremental cost of a adding new customer down to 2 cents per year – and currently, on all devices, 250,000 are joining each day. In conversations around the hall, I heard advocates for Klarna, the online payment system that started in Sweden, has Sequoia and General Atlantic amongst its investors and says it will do 140m euro in revenue this year. Wix (Bessemer, Mangrove, Benchmark) have 27 million users for their quick build website service, and have now built 23 million sites. MyTaxi, meanwhile, one of the start-up school of 2009, report 2.5 million downloads of their taxi calling service as they move it out from Hamburg, across Germany and into Washington DC, Madrid and Warsaw this year. 90 million people download IronSource per month to ease software download problems in a market where 40% of consumer downloads fail. Or consider Schibsted’s LeBobCoin.fr (a mirror of blocket.se), a classifieds site with revenues of 63m euro and an ebitda of 70%. I sat wondering whether this market would turn into matchmaking services, but at the moment, as with Axel Springer, the classifieds business, now unrelated to news and newspapers, is forging ahead.

Are you getting breathless? Have a look at Nordeus, from Serbia, whose TopEleven game has 2.1 million daily active users. Then dash over to hepsiburada.com, Turkey’s most popular shopping mall. In a country without nationwide branded departmental stores, and 50% of the population between 15-45 (40% of internet users are under 25) there has to be a future for shopping. Then check out Russian fashions on KupiVIP.ru, or, if growth is your magnet, look at Spain’s Privalia, strongly selling end of season fashions and competing for Spanish speaking populations of over 500m with only 50% current internet penetration (USA is around 80%). Their demographic profile is the 20-40 age range, they claim more Facebook connections than any other fashion site, 1 in 4 sales are on mobile devices, and their 300 m euro revenues are rising at 100% (400% in Latin America) CAGR. And if you are fed up with stores, try Stuffle for an online flea market – they have done 450k in revenue in the first six months.

And still I have not done justice to the show. WyWy is an interesting Shazam-style service for television. Wynsh has 3 million users who record their wants photographically while the brilliant and beautiful Busuu.com goes from strength as a language learning environment for consumers. The peer to peer element is interesting here, as is the mobile apps angle. Since it is estimated that 2 billion will speak English by 2020 improving performance is going to be a big market. Or Cooliris, claiming to be the no 1 app on the iPad in 75 countries as it helps people manage and present their photographs.  I would also like to talk about Skobbler, the navigation site, or the very impressive small loans site Kreditech from Hamburg. Given space, we could look at Wrapp, the social gifting service, or Burda’s HolidayCheck travel review site or Israel’s Conduit (or ask.fm from Riga with 9 m users). But you are now tired and I am exhausted – you need several days to sleep off a Noah conference.

I left with a profound impression of huge growth and energy in Europe on the internet, and a feeling in consumer markets that building a base of a few million users is no longer the problem. Sustaining and renewing that audience is the issue, and it is interesting that the Noah seedlings are now very various in size and shape. And the Noah people are right about something else as well: this is now a dynamic investment market with real growth prospects, especially where European players are able to seek global markets as well as local ones.

Star of the show goes to Yossi Vardi, veteran Israeli investor and doyen of the tech community. Peering into an audience of 1400 paying delegates, he said that while giving  a recent speech in Tel Aviv he noticed that a man in the third row had fallen fast asleep. So Mr Vardi pointed to the man next to him and said “Wake him up, he’s fallen asleep”. To which the man next to the sleeper replied “You wake him up – you put him to sleep in the first place”.

Nov

4

Beware: Lawyers at Work

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments

Writing a piece here in September (The Way Lawyers Work Now) drove me back to the sustaining works of Richard Susskind: “The Future of Law” (1996), “Transforming the Law” (2000), and “The End of Lawyers?” (2008). They remain a most impressive achievement, and as well a rare effort to forecast the future of work in a particular vertical market sector. The trends that are apparent now align closely with the Susskind theses, especially in terms of the moves into practice solutioning, where Lexis now pursue PLC much more closely in the UK, with the benefit of being able to support their solutions by invoking the whole research environment as well. Whether these moves support ideas of the democritization of access to the law – Richard quotes Shaw’s dictum that “all professions are a conspiracy against the laity” – is not the question for this blog. However, they certainly deliver a vision of deskilling and cost erosion, and thoughts that many corporate and individual clients may in future have a very different procedural access to the law and its requirements.

I was encouraged in this thinking by discovering that Lexis UK last month published some of their own research survey findings, under the title “Practice Points”. This was a very worthwhile process, though not so that we could learn that 66% of respondents forecast 10% growth per annum over the next two years. With so many UK law practices currently debating their status after the last government’s liberalization measures, no one contemplating incorporation of floatation would say anything else. What impressed me more was the high score that lawyers gave to increased competition associated with the ABS (Alternative Business Structures) legislation, and the increase in M&A activity that this foretold. In order to hold costs and even reduce them (those surveyed saw fixed fee not hourly rates as the future business model) the gearing had to change – they needed to recruit more support staff who were not going to share  profits or become partners. The way in which many would do this was by outsourcing to a fixed fee legal outsourcing company, often in the UK but sometimes offshore as well. And IT was the critical element – 60% looked to process automation to reduce costs and create the communications with clients and third party suppliers which will make this work.

This plays well with the line on practice solutions now being taken by Lexis and long held by PLC in the UK. PLC’s US expansion still appears on course, though moving more slowly in the recession. But I wondered about continental Europe, especially given the traditional positioning of German lawyers between clients, and provincial regulation, Federal law and EU requirements. Do not forget that both Thomson Reuters and Lexis, in various ways, quit this difficult marketplace in the last decade. So I was delighted at Frankfurt to find Christian Dirschl of Wolters Kluwer Germany on my panel, and to be able to ask him whether German law publishers were having to adjust their positioning and move towards new access models  alongside their existing commitment to research tools. And, since I have always found WK Deutschland very difficult to understand as an outsider, since it has 8 constituent law companies and another four tax imprints, I was hugely impressed by the answer: WK Germany has fully embraced semantic technologies by launching the Jurion interface (www.jurion.de) to make much of its own and growing amounts of third party content  accessible in a contextualizable environment.

There are a number of very striking points about Jurion. In the first instance WK have gone back and re-engineered their content acquisition, enrichment and bundling cycle. With their metadata ducks all in a row, and fundamental problems of delivery format and functionality solved, they have been able to invite third parties on to the platform to work through the same interface. So here you can get your Haufe content as well as your Lucterhand WK content, and if you are not a subscriber to the particular Haufe service, you can join up in 20 seconds. Then again they are members of the EU-supported LOD 2 project (http://lod2.eu), with 15 other companies in 12 countries. This lets Jurion swim in the world of EU Open Government (via the publicdata.eu platform), and provides not just another layer of content accessibility, but a context in which open source semantic technologies (DBpedia, Virtuoso, Sindice, Silk) can work jointly. Add to this rich stew a few more ingredients: their ability with semantic analysis and the LOD (linked open data) environments has propelled them into the development of major taxonomic instruments, with the legal thesauri now covering a large range of public/private content and WK becoming the effective gateway and standards setter for legal access. And then consider that at the same time they have integrated document construction and document location, using the same metadata. And then search all of this on legal terms and legal concepts. And then add, from the end of this year, web data as well as web content (look at the Wikipedia -style work accomplished here). Very impressive.

But what does it look like from the user screen? When I open my Jurion desktop I have options. jSearch is a normal law database environment with semantic search. jStore has the WK products, its partners’ products, fast purchase and – almost inevitably, a recommendation system which is likely to be very important. jLink will allow annotation sharing  and thus becomes a gateway to social media. jBook allows personalization and rebundling of content – and you can have it as an eBook or print copy too. jCreate allows content creation, metadata allocation and sharing – via jStore for a fee if necessary. And jDesk, which subsumes the lawyers user desktop, giving him indexation, and coverage of the whole or parts of the firm’s network. Here clients have OCR, citation recognition, topic classification, and document creation. This is not yet fully completed, but remains a startling step forward. It potentially transforms the competitive structure of the German law and tax market, and it is based on vital ideas of collaboration which have to underlie all of these developments in future.

WK Germany have gone horizontal in their effort to supply the lawyer in Germany with a complete access point. Lexis in the UK have gone vertical in their bid for practice solutions. Both of these legitimate approaches will one day end in the same place, with comprehensive and collaborative  service environments that eventually begin to democratize access to the law.

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