Statistically Speaking

According to an article in the Financial Times, Google is toying with the idea of launching a "Google Price Index" or GPI, a twist on the government's CPI Index, a measurement of growth or decrease in prices for consumer goods.

Essentially, Google wants to tap its vast database of consumer product and shopping data to automate an index that the government still builds by sending people to stores to manually check prices. The primary downside to the government approach is a significant time lag before data are published. Google is considering publishing the Google Price Index on a daily basis.

Google has not definitely decided to publish this information yet, and I'm not sure it will do a lot for Google. At the same time, many data publishers are in strong positions to create business indexes of their own, and they can be powerful marketing tools if not new products in their own right.

Not every data publisher has the opportunity to create an index product. At a minimum you need comprehensive coverage of a market and good quality data that is refreshed regularly. You're in even better shape if you capture transactional data of any kind.

Creating an index needs to be done carefully, but it's not rocket science. At its essence, you measure certain things and track how they change over time. Once you've built your index and developed some history for it, you can compare it to changes in your industry or even the overall economy. The better the correlation, the more valuable the index.

Once you've got your index, the fun begins. You can name it after your company, a great way to build market visibility and credibility. Consider payroll company ADP, whose "ADP National Employment Report," spun directly out of its payroll database, rivals the official employment statistics in importance. Statistics like indexes make great news fodder, and they're sure to get you lots of valuable publicity. You'll often find your data being incorporated into reports and presentations, and all this solidifies your position as the industry expert and data source. The marketing and publicity angles are almost unlimited. Best of all, the more people who use and refer to your index, the more influential it becomes, encouraging even more people to use it and even depend on it for forecasting and analysis purposes.

Best of all, you can get all the marketing and publicity benefits of a good index just by publishing top-line data. That means you also get a revenue opportunity by being able to sell the detail information. Index data also has time-series value, meaning that old data can be just as valuable as new data. Not surprisingly, you'll also find that index data is usually interesting to a whole new group of customers than you currently serve, meaning you can broaden your customer base as you grow new revenue.

If the idea of creating an index intrigues you, or if you are generally interested in opportunities in developing statistical information from your data products, you'll want to attend DataContent 2010 in Philadelphia the week after next (there are still a few seats left),  which includes a session on this very topic.     

Talk About Buzz!

Our conference is just 2 weeks away,  and there are now just 37 seats remaining. DataContent 2010 is where ideas get ignited and business gets done. When you attend, you' re among the industry's hyper achievers, so you hear about emerging trends and big news firsthand. Need proof? Here's a sampling of what some of our presenters have been up to in just the last few days:

Reed Construction Data announced the creation of a new company, SMARTBIM LLC, which is a spin-out of its BIM Solutions Division. SMRATBIM LLC will be part-owned by Source 2, a private investment company focused on technology-enabled service companies. Don't know much about BIM (Building Information Modeling)? Well, you're in luck. Reed Construction Data CEO Iain Melville will be the keynote speaker at DataContent 2010.

2007 InfoCommerceModel of Excellence award winner Noza announced that it has been acquired by Blackbaud Inc. It looks like a perfect match: Noza's respected charitable giving database will now be paired with Blackbaud's powerful software for non-profit organizations. Noza founder Craig Harris will have a lot to talk about on our Excellence Revisited panel.

Fast-growing Compare Networks, operator of a number of vertical market online marketplaces, has just announced the acquisition of two print magazine titles, American Laboratory and American Biotechnology Laboratory, from International Scientific Communications. Print publications buttressing online marketplaces? Other savvy online players have made similar moves. Want more detail? Well, you're in luck as Compare's VP of Business Development, Bruce Bergwall, will be speaking on our Revenue 2.0 panel.

 

For innovation and rapid growth, look no further than InfoCommerce Model of Excellence nominee Universal Business Listing. UBL  is making a strong international push, opening offices in the Netherlands while launching a new business identity management offering in the UK. More to come? You bet, and you'll learn more from Doyal Bryant, Universal's CEO and co-founder, who'll be presenting on our Revenue 2.0 panel.

Success is all about the company you keep.  DataContent 2010 gives you access to those who make the news, and who can have a significant impact on your plans and future. Register now to join us at DataContent 2010. You'll be in excellent company!  

Symbolic Failure

Remember when the musician Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol back in 1993? Such a move could have put the artist out of business. After all, how do you sell music when nobody can look you up by name? But because Prince was the first to try this, a potential business disaster became a public relations bonanza. It also didn't hurt that the alternate appellation, "the artist formerly known as Prince" stuck with him, making it possible to still search on "Prince" and get to his music in most cases.

Intriguingly, things haven't progressed much on this front since 1993. Just last week, it was reported that a new CBS television series, '$#*! My Dad Says,' was paying an unexpected penalty for its choice of title: the show couldn't be found by the search software in most digital video recorders because of its use of symbols. With some 38% of U.S. households now owning a digital video recorder, this is no small issue. 

Symbols in a name may sound like an obscure issue, and to a great extent, it is. But it speaks to a larger issue: in today's digital world, you are your index. How you permit your content to be accessed is as important as the content itself.

Here's another example: I subscribe to a music service called Rhapsody. It allows me to access and stream millions of songs on demand. You can search Rhapsody by artist name, album name or track name. So far so good. But in its apparent rush to provide access to millions of songs, Rhapsody made an incredibly basic error: every album, track or musical group that starts with the article "The" is listed under "T." Many, many thousands of them. Happy scrolling!

 

And while search technology seems to get more powerful every day, site searching, including database searches, remains a real backwater. "Better searching" is always on the short list of user requests when we survey users of both free and paid data products. Users expect, for example, to see search results that include both "&" and "and" regardless of which one is entered. Users want search software that can handle common misspellings. Data publishers can add a lot of value by normalizing their data to minimize some of these issues. But ultimately, users want search software that can do a lot of the thinking for them and that frees them from having to become conversant with your editorial style rules in order to get optimal search results.

 

Great, valuable data is only great and valuable if users can easily access it. Too many data publishers focus obsessively on creating great data, while settling for off-the-shelf search technology that doesn't do justice to their content. It's important to invest resources in both areas. 

Interesting Point

The rapid growth of mobile and trendy applications like Foursquare have put a spotlight on the need for so-called point of interest data -- latitude and longitude for museums and attractions, but also for all businesses as well. And where there is a need, there is opportunity.

Not surprisingly, traditional B2B databases compilers such as InfoGroup and Acxiom have stepped into the geocoding fray. I previously wrote about an interesting company called Placecast that launched a product called MatchAPI that attempted to reconcile the varying results produced by the various geo-coding vendors, and ambitious master data play.

Of course, when a need for data like this crops up, somebody immediately starts to figure out how to give it away for free. In this case, it's a company called Factual, which through its "Free Database of Place," is giving away geo-location data on over 14 million businesses. You can see an actual sample of the dataset by clicking here.

This is exciting news for data publishers who would like to do more with mapping and adding other types of geo-aware intelligence to their data products. At the same time, it's a rude reminder that it's hard to maintain a proprietary data edge in this world. Of course, if Factual wants to deliver good quality data, that means real costs associated with data compilation and maintenance (and oh how often we see brash young start-ups that made no provision to maintain their data!), which ultimately means that some revenue will have to be generated. But for now at least, here's a valuable, free dataset that you can use to kick-start your thinking about the many ways you can make your data geo-aware, especially as mobile access continues to proliferate.

Mind Your Model

I stumbled across a fascinating interview given by the new CEO of Dex One, who rather candidly admitted the company is searching for a strategy.

Dex One, for those of you who don't follow the endlessly shape-shifting yellow pages industry, is an entity created when yellow pages sales agent R.H. Donnelley went on a shopping spree and started buying up yellow pages directories from its phone company customers. When the market started to question the wisdom of acquiring so many print properties in an increasingly online world, R.H. Donnelley said "no problem" and snapped up website Business.com.

 

Not surprisingly, this ill-timed shopping spree caused R.H. Donnelley to file for bankruptcy in 2009. What emerged from the bankruptcy was Dex One, still a major player in the industry with a $500 million market cap and over 3,000 employees. So when Dex One admits its next act isn't clear, this is big news.

I have long chastised the yellow pages industry for not having a deep understanding of its own business model. Very simply, yellow pages publishers have long been little more than ad sales organizations. Every other aspect of the business was viewed as an expense and an annoyance.

So when the Internet came along, the major yellow pages publishers saw Nirvana: it was a chance for these inherently regional publishers to quickly expand nationally. The natural expectation was the formula that had worked so brilliantly on a regional level would work just as well when extended nationally. But it did not work out that way at all. Here's why.

These yellow pages publishers thought all they needed to do was license a national business database of names, addresses and phone numbers and they would be ipso facto, national yellow pages publishers. Not true. In yellow pages and buying guides, it is the advertising, not the name and address listings that is the content. Throwing up 10 million name and address listings is easy; selling the requisite number of ads to have a meaningful base of content nationwide was well beyond the resources of even these giant publishers. Users quickly discovered that online yellow pages weren't very useful for sourcing products and services because there was so little content depth, so they started to look elsewhere -- easy to do online -- creating an opening for all sorts of competitors who delivered deeper content that both detailed and differentiated vendors. These competitors  have been merrily chipping away at the formerly impregnable yellow pages franchise ever since.

Dex One is re-positioning itself as a marketing services company in the belief that its relationship with its extensive advertiser base is now its core asset. That's not an unreasonable approach, but one wonders if that will be enough at this stage in the evolution of the Internet.

The story of online yellow pages is an important cautionary tale for all buying guide publishers. It did itself in by trying to grow too much, too fast because it didn't understand its own business model. Buying guide publishers can't sell advertising on a sustained basis unless they are delivering value to their user bases as well. Forgetting one side of your business can cost you your entire business.