RBI Expands Presence in Aviation Market

Reed Business Information (RBI), a unit of Reed Business and Reed Elsevier, has acquired Commercial Aviation Report and Commercial Aviation Value Report from London-based Commercial Aviation Media (CAM). RBI will integrate the titles into its Flight portfolio, which contains Flight International and Airline Business magazines, the http://www.flightglobal.com/ web portal, the Air Transport Intelligence (ATI) service and the ACAS fleet database.

RBI plans to cease publishing CAM's magazines in print and will transition the publications online to complement Flight's ATI news and data service. The publications will be rebranded as Flight Commercial Aviation Online and will cover the latest aircraft deal transactions, new aircraft and airline financings, analysis of airline financials, expert industry comment and financial gossip from the aviation market. In addition, Flight will will also benefit from PBI's new ownership of CAM events--The U.S. Valuation Conference and The European Aviation Conference. Flight already manages several aviation conferences, including the Network series and the new Asian Aerospace Congress.

RBI also plans to tap into CAM leadership. Laura Mueller and Olivier Bonnassies, who edited and published CAM's magazines will join RBI and report to Flight’s managing editor Andrew Doyle at Flight's U.K. headquarters.

This deal effectively expands RBI's presence in the aviation market by combining Flight's expertise in the aerospace industry with CAM's knowledge of the air finance market. It would certainly have been too great a challenge to create CAM's content on its own; and purchasing a well-established brand is usually a good move. With the market recognition and deep pockets that RBI can provide, look for the entire CAM portfolio to be enhanced in features and functionality going forward.

It's interesting that RBI is abandoning the print products so quickly, but company officials must feel strongly that this market would be better served (and perhaps prefer) to access its content through the online ATI service. If anything, it's a smart cost-saving move.

Idearc To Acquire InfoSpace Directories

Idearc Inc., which owns Superpages.com and is the publisher of the Verizon Yellow Pages announced plans this week to acquire Switchboard.com and additional online directory properties from InfoSpace Inc. at a price of $225 million. Idearc will assume Switchboard.com's existing distribution network.

According to comScore's Media Matrix, Superpages.com's network had 21.3 million unique visitors and InfoSpace Directories and Resources had 7.7 million unique visitors in August 2007. Superpages.com had more than 2.8 billion network searches in 2006.

Idearc officials outlined in a press release announcing the deal that the company expects to increase the scale of its local search platform to help advertisers reach an even larger group of customers.

This acquisition was definitely a good move by Idearc since it will simply help Superpages.com solidify its position as a leader among Internet yellow pages sites. More advertisers will likely be drawn to Superpages.com because of its even greater reach. It will be interesting to see if Superpages.com bolsters the features and functionality of its offerings as well. It will also be interesting to see what happens to InfoSpace now that it has left this 'space.' InfoSpace had only acquired Switchboard in 2004 (for a $160 million price tag).

Facebook Meets Google

Facebook has announced that public search listings will be freely accessible on the Web--meaning individuals who are not logged on to Facebook will be able to view Facebook profiles when they search for another individual via a general search engine. According to Facebook, these publish search listings display less information than a Facebook user could access and that Facebook members will be able to control the viewing of their listings. If they don't want it to be accessible outside the Facebook network, they can adjust their search privacy settings.

Facebook gave its members a one-month notice about the new public search capability to ensure that they were comfortable with their profiles "going public." This certainly isn't a revolutionary idea. It's one that has been successfully embraced by both ZoomInfo and LinkedIn.

Still, there's no doubt this new search function will help individuals find each other when they use more general search engines like Google. But it will also serve to add more attention--free publicity--to Facebook with every search conducted. That's most likely the main reason behind this. However, it would see that the ultimate reason people create profiles on services such as LinkedIn and Facebook is to be found. Such an addition to Facebook was invevitable.

Model of Excellence Award Winner

We're pleased to announce that NOZA has received a 2007 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence award for its NOZA product.

Labels: Noza, nozasearch.com

Everywhere and Nowhere

An impressive piece of detective work by blogger Mike Blumenthal details the existence of something called "mapspam." Mapspam is the practice of businesses misrepresenting their physical locations to artificially improve their search engine results rankings.

At first glance, mapspam looks like just one more example of the "one step forward, one step back" evolution of the web, where every new advance is quickly undone by spammers and those trying to game the system. But hold on a minute. Is this really new? And more importantly, is this really wrong?

The example used in the blog article was of a suburban florist listing itself in such a way that it appeared to be in the center of a large city nearby. The technique, creating a false address, was certainly sleazy, but again, does it matter?

Florists have several elaborate national networks that allow them to accept orders for prompt delivery anywhere in the country. The customer doesn't know who fulfilled the order at the distant end, and the customer doesn't care. What matters is that the specified goods were delivered in the specified timeframe to the specified recipient.

Further, the old-timers among us will recall the acronym "RCF" for Remote Call Forwarding, a well- established and entirely legitimate service long offered by the phone companies to allow companies to give the appearance of having a local presence in distant markets. For decades, this has been viewed as smart business, not deceptive business.

What seems most important is not the actual physical location of the retailer, but whether or not they can deliver on the promises they make to their customers. The florist business can do this. Auto body shops and pizza parlors can't, but there's no advantage to them misrepresenting themselves. A Los Angeles pizza parlor taking orders for delivery in New York City won't last very long.

What is simultaneously intriguing, ironic and problematic is that as increasing resources are being put against identifying, locating and classifying local businesses, growing numbers of these businesses are seeing that they can build national markets, and because of this they start to view their physical locations as more of a hindrance than an advantage. This phenomenon is no less true of larger companies that are rapidly becoming so diffuse that they actively avoid designating any physical location as their headquarters. And many web-based companies want only email or toll-free number contact, allowing them to never disclose even a hint of their physical location, if indeed they have one.

The bottom line issue for data publishers is to recognize that we are largely working with databases and tools based on business practices and norms that are rapidly evolving. There's no easy answer to mapspam or any of the related issues involving physical location. But those who will prosper will be those who reflect how business does business, rather than trying to dictate it.

Labels: local business, location, mapspam, mike blumenthal, RCF