A Taxing Acquisition

Business and professional publishing giant The Thomson Corp. observed tax season this month with its acquisition of CrossBorder Solutions, a tax software company. CrossBorder, which has operations in New York and London, will be integrated into the Thomson Tax & Accounting unit. Thomson officials said the deal will enable the company to expand its presence in the tax provisions market and move into the transfer pricing/tax market.

CrossBorder Solutions is known in its industry for products that enable transfer pricing documentation and FAS 109 compliance. Its customer base includes multinational, publicly-traded organizations in the U.S. and Europe.

Thomson is always on the look-out for acquisitions that will enable the publishing powerhouse to bolster the offerings it provides to current customers and yield a new customer base in the process. This deal is no different. While Thomson certainly isn't afraid to build (over the years, they have launched several innovative products in this market as well as others in which they compete). But they are also not against buying in order to increase their market share. Thomson’s main goal is to provide customers with the best products in the marketplace and the company has always done what's necessary to accomplish that. Look for more acquisitions, both large and small, this year as a result.

Dude, Make Some New Friends

Topix.net, a specialized search engine for news, made news itself this week, announcing it had acquired the domain name topix.com for a hefty $1 million. Why a company that has branded itself around a domain name it does own suddenly feels compelled to spend big money for a variant domain name is a fascinating topic in its own right, but there's a better angle to this story.

In announcing the purchase of this new domain name, company management publicly fretted to the Wall Street Journal that they were afraid of taking a traffic hit by moving from ".net" to ".com," and suggested that Google (which is the source of 90% of the company’s traffic) should somehow assist companies in the same situation so they would not be penalized in search results rankings. That's not a crazy request in this day and age, but consider Google's remarkable response to this idea: websites shouldn't become overly reliant on traffic from search engines!

How does one even begin to respond to a statement like that, especially since Google is right, provided that your website operates in a parallel universe where people discover websites by ... well, how exactly? Google helpfully provides some ideas, suggesting that sites could, for example, set up user forums, which presumably users would learn about by, well how would they learn about them?

Google has earned itself a $138 billion market capitalization because it was instrumental in helping to make search engines everyone's favored entry point onto the web. Now that everyone is so dependent on search engines for both discovery and navigation, and Google has monetized its leadership position in search six ways from Sunday, guess what? Google's new stance is "dude, you need to make some new friends."

Google wants it both ways. It wants the revenue that comes from operating the biggest toll booth onto the web, but not the responsibility. But the reality is that, because of its dominance, its every move has consequences for other businesses, and they are not all positive consequences. Until Google does the math on this simple equation, I guess our only option is to start getting busy with those new user forums.

InfoCommerce Models of Excellence

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Labels: google, Infocommerce, oodle, topix, topix.com, topix.net, web traffic

A Healthy Dose of Analytics

New Hope Natural Media, a media resource and information provider for the natural, organic and healthy products industry, has partnered with SPINS (an organization that provides sales data for the natural products industry) to offer SPINS' industry-specific sales data to New Hope customers.

The results of the partnership will take shape quickly. New Hope's magazine, The Natural Foods Merchandiser, will feature a "Trendspotting" page beginning with its March issue that will include analysis from SPINS. SPINS will also provide other content in the magazine going forward and SPINS experts will be featured speakers for the magazine's webinar series.

This partnership will help New Hope form a stronger connection with its magazine readers. As we have all known for years, readers want more than plain content. They want the value-added features. They want the analysis that helps them more effectively use that content -- and they expect publishers to deliver. They realize that data is useless if they don't know what it means. And if publishers don't have the analytics capabilities in-house, they have to seek partners that have proven expertise in their given industry.

Convincing potential partners to collaborate shouldn't be very difficult. The benefits are powerful for them as well. For instance, in the New Hope deal, SPINS will gain a connection to the NFM readers who might not be aware of the firm's capabilities; and it is possible NFM subscribers will seek out the firm's services for a more customized analysis.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if publishers have their own analytics team or if they outsource this function. In order to be a full-service information provider, the only source of data customers choose, publishers must make analytics a must-have part of the business.

Labels: analytics, data, Infocommerce, new hope natural media, SPINS

Elsevier Bolsters Chemical Offerings

Reed Elsevier has acquired the Beilstein Database, a prominent database covering the organic chemistry field. The deal further cements the relationship between Elsevier and the database. Elsevier has played an integral role in the production and marketing of the database since 1998. Nearly 5 million compounds have been added or updated by Elsevier during that time.

The Beilstein Database's records date back to 1771. The overall database contains more than 9.8 million compounds, 10 million reactions and 320 million experimental data on chemical properties. The database also includes more than 900,000 original author abstracts from 1980 to the present.

This acquisition really just finalizes a partnership that has apparently well served both Elsevier and the Beilstein Database's former owner, the Beilstein-Institut, for nearly a decade. Look for Elsevier to bolster the contents and functionality of the database even further as the STM publishing giant utilizes resources it already has in the chemical field. Currently, the company's Crossfire and DiscoverGate interfaces allow customers to link between Scopus (Elsevier's abstract and indexing database) and the chemical reactions and compounds housed in the Beilstein Database. The connection among Elsevier's scientific properties will undoubtedly grow as the publisher continues to respond to a user base now accustomed to tools that are seamlessly integrated into the workflow.

R.R. Bowker Releases Analytics Tool

R.R. Bowker last week launched a business intelligence tool for its publishing industry clients. PubTrack Consumer will serve as a source of marketing information publishers have always struggled to find. The new product provides data on consumer book purchases as well as demographic and behavior profiles of the purchasers.

PubTrack Consumer's database is comprised of information Bowker collects from a group of men and women (aged 13 and older) on a weekly basis. These individuals are asked, in a survey, a list of 60 core questions and as many as 15 proprietary questions submitted by PubTrack Consumer clients. Bowker has outsourced the panel and survey functions to a couple of U.S.-based market research firms.

PubTrack Consumer fits neatly into R.R. Bowker's suite of tools geared toward the information needs of the publishing industry. It also meets an ever-increasing demand for sales and marketing analytics tools that enable publishers to more easily and efficiently analyze their own sales data and adjust their strategies accordingly. Targeted customer data is typically difficult to obtain, so publishers will surely benefit from the in-depth look PubTrack Consumer promises to provide. Bowker has already signed on Random House as a subscriber to the new service and other prominent publishing houses are sure to follow.