Locating Opportunities

The release of the new Apple iPhone 3G has turned up the volume of the discussion about geo-location opportunities quite a bit.

Geo-location, for those not already familiar with it, is the same technology that powers GPS systems in cars, only now it's beginning to proliferate on cell phones. Download a free software application, and you can access GPS satellites to always know where you are. The flipside of that equation, and the place where all the excitement lies, is that others can know where you are as well.

This nascent industry is just beginning to grapple with the huge privacy issues that come along with this technology, but for the moment, it's a fascinating playground for all sorts of software and information companies. While numerous software companies are rushing out the expected social networking applications so that users can, for example, find out what bars their friends are at (who would ever have thought "GPS" might one day come to mean "Group Partying Software"?), information applications to date are much more sophisticated and interesting.

There are of course dozen of pundits breathlessly talking about all the advertising opportunities that will emerge from geo-location, almost always involving companies selling this new form of high tech advertising to local retailers. Of course, these are the same local retailers that yellow pages publishers are still trying to convince to establish a minimal web presence in 2008.

In the mean time, some of the data applications of geo-location look a lot more promising. Consider a New York City start-up called Sense Networks. It gives cell phone users a free software application called CitySense that gives users all sorts of social networking functionality. But on the back-end, it aggregates all the positional data it collects for highly sophisticated B2B applications such as store site location planning, retail competitive intelligence, even trend data on what stores and restaurants are doing well that hedge funds are attempting to use for an investment edge. Another company called Path Intelligence is doing something similar in the U.K. Microsoft has recently launched a service called Clearflow that uses similar technology to report traffic congestion in real-time and offer the best alternate routes. Inrix, a Microsoft spin-off, also offers traffic data, based in part on geo-location technology.

The data opportunities in geo-location look to be huge, with particular advantage for those who jump in sooner rather than later, because it's rapidly becoming clear that historical data for comparative purposes is going to be very valuable in this business. Ever better, data applications in geo-location tend to focus on aggregate data, meaning no need to wrestle with complex privacy issues.

Labels: clearflow, geolocation, inrix, Microsoft, path intelligence, sense networks

Manufacturers' News Buys IndustryNet

Manufacturers' News announced this week it has acquired IndustryNet.com and will merge it into its established industrial search engine, mniguide.com to build a more complete guide for individuals seeking manufacturers and suppliers.

IndustryNet has made a name for itself in the search engine space by only listing industrial companies. The listings are organized into one or more of IndustryNet's 10,000 product/service categories so buyers can easily identify the most relevant vendors. IndustryNet also has a request for quote feature that enables buyers to easily seek competitive bids from a variety of suppliers.

MNI compiles information about U.S. manufacturing companies and industrial businesses. Its search engine (mniguide.com) contains listing for nearly 600,000 companies. In addition, the company says that mniguide.com handles more than 20,000 unique searches each day. Users can send emails to or click through to the web sites of the 25,000 companies that have preferred listings in the directory. Users can also send requests for quotes to companies of interest to them.

Visitors to the mniguide.com site (www.mniguide.com) will be redirected to the IndustryNet domain.

This is certainly a smart move by Manufacturers' News. While their current search offering was robust enough to provide relevant results for users, the inclusion of IndustryNet data and functionality will only serve to make those search results even more powerful. If users can't find what they're looking for on your site, they won't hesitate to move on to a competitor. The combination of Manufacturers' News and IndustryNet should undoubtedly provide customers with exactly what they are looking for--and enable them to find it as quickly as possible. This definitely solidifies Manufacturers' News' standing in the industry and illustrates how committed the company is to providing a solid web offering.

New Service Makes CUSIP Content More Accessible, Manageable

CUSIP Global Services has launched the CUSIP Access premium-level service for its financial services clients. The new service features enhancements that will help clients more easily find and manage data they need and integrate it into their own data management systems.

CUSIP Access is a web-based reference data verification tool that can access all CUSIP numbers, including corporate, municipal, government, mortgage-backed and private placement issuers.

Among the new functionality that CUSIP boasts is a portfolio download that allows subscribing clients to download CUSIP data for up to 25 CUSIP numbers of ISINs from an external source. CUSIP NOW has scrolling real-time alerts of new CUSIP issuances for real-time clients and issue-level searches enable subscribers to search by issue description or update date values.

CUSIP is offering other subscription services through its CUSIP Access premium-level service. One is Associated Obligor, which helps users identify complex relationships by linking entities ultimately responsible for debt service payments in the municipal market and Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS). This enables searching for the industry groupings of an individual entity or viewing all entities within an industry group.

According to the company, future enhancements will include the availability of loan CUSIPs.

The increased functionality that CUSIP has created through its new premium-level service should be well-received by users who already value CUSIP's offerings. Perhaps the main features content users demand today are the ability to integrate that content into the workflow along with the ability to more easily search that content to yield the most relevant results. CUSIP's new service promises both. In addition, real-time alerts are gaining in popularity too, as the web is an ideal enabler for such immediate access to valuable content; and CUSIP has addressed this trend as well.

While current CUSIP customers will likely want to take advantage of this new functionality, prospective customers may be more apt to try this more complete offering too.

Dot What?

In a move that surprised many, ICANN, the body that administers, among other things, the Internet's addressing conventions, approved a plan to basically open up the domain system (technically known as generic top-level domains) to all comers (actually all comers with at least $50K to spend). If dot com, dot info, dot net, etc. don't catch your fancy, now you can order up your own top level domain. How about dot stuff? Dot data? Dot jones? If you've got enough cash, it's yours.

If that isn't mind-boggling enough, ICANN is also pondering the use of non-Arabic script in domains as well. Yes, Chinese websites may someday have domains using Chinese characters.

Rationale for this move? It's hard to say. Some pundits suggest that ICANN is just looking for more money, but ICANN is indicating it will have to invest $20 million to implement this new system. Is there huge, pent-up demand for these new top-level domains? It really doesn't appear that way.

As far as implications of this move, this is a tough one to call. Internet domain registries seem generally upbeat, presumably because it gives them more merchandise to sell. At the same time, their public pronouncements talk only generally about how this new policy will "spur creativity." It doesn't seem that anyone knows exactly what is going to happen or how. Possible losers from this move include companies that have amassed tens of thousands of domains in the hope users will navigate to them accidentally and then click on one of the paid links on those pages. These companies need limited domain inventory to make their business models work.

While dot com domains are likely to retain their cachet for some time, as more business web addresses leech into new domains, I will made a prediction of a modest upside for data publishers. Right now, a user can guess many company URL's simply by typing in the company name followed by dot com. As that formula becomes less certain, the need for directional information (i.e. directories) will increase. When it comes to information, confusion and uncertainty create opportunity for those who will take on the task of organizing and simplifying things. Just one more reason why the wild, wild Web has been more beneficial to data publishers than most other media.

Labels: gTLD, ICANN

Go Ahead, Make My Page

If you think back to the early days of the web when excitement was high and comprehension of what the web was and how it worked was extremely low, a popular offering of many data publishers was what was called the "template web site." Publishers would make available to their advertisers a series of fill-in-the-blank web page templates that would give advertisers a modest, semi-custom online presence at a very low cost.

The early template-based web sites were expectedly quite crude. Even the notion of the advertiser having its own domain name hadn't evolved. Sites tended to be limited to a few pages, and were heavy on graphics and light on content. Still, it was a website, and it delivered value in an era when the few people competent to build them from scratch were both overbooked and overpaid. It was a nice revenue producer for publishers, but publisher enthusiasm faded as it became easier and easier for companies to create their own websites.

Clearly, times have changed. Or have they? While there's little question that creating one's own website is now both inexpensive and relatively straightforward, advertisers are once again turning to publishers to both develop and maintain their websites for them. The trend appears to be particularly pronounced among local retailers, who still see websites as big hassles that are unlikely to do much for their revenues, but it also cuts across a surprising range of companies even at this late date.

Indeed, some data publishers never got out of the business of building websites for their advertisers. ThomasNet.com reportedly has a very nice business developing online catalogs for its advertisers, a complex specialty where there is lots of opportunity to add value. And both Lexis Nexis Martindale Hubbell and Thomson West continue to build a large number of remarkably sophisticated sites for their law firm customers, many of them leveraging these companies' own proprietary legal content, another powerful form of value-add.

Part of this renewed interest on the part of companies to rely on data publishers for website development is a new-found understanding that just building a website doesn't mean that anyone is ever going to see it. Data publishers offer not only ease in developing sites for their advertisers, but can also leverage their own enormous site traffic and SEO expertise to make sure the sites they develop rank high in search engine results pages. That's today's holy grail, and many data publishers are well positioned to deliver. Maybe there's an opportunity for you in this business that never really went away, and seems to be coming back strong.

Labels: lexisnexis, martindale