Standard & Poor's Launches New Integrated Product

Standard & Poor's has partnered with Sky Road LLC, a hosted trading solutions services provider to the hedge fund industry, to enable S&P to access the company's real-time credit data in an integrated, cross-asset management platform. Both companies expect the partnership will help customers (such as portfolio managers, compliance officers and risk officers) more efficiently obtain S&P Credit Ratings.

The integration of the Credit Ratings into Sky Road's ASP platform will yield several capabilities for users, including front-to-back office functionality, portfolio and risk management, custom analytics, market data integration, automated prime broker and fund administrator connectivity and workflows, and disaster recovery.

Capabilities such as these are a requirement today. Customers demand tools that are fully integrated into the workflow and combining S&P's content with Sky Road's technology will effectively accomplish that for S&P's hedge fund customers. The announcement of this alliance is certainly not a surprise. S&P has been very receptive to customers' changing needs, while being equally receptive to the latest technology that responds to increasing customer demands.

KnowledgeStorm Adds Blog Collection to Portfolio

KnowledgeStorm, a search resource of technology solutions and information, has launched FindTech Blogs (www.findtechblogs.com), a collection of blog sites geared toward business-to-business and technology professionals. The site also organizes aggregated blog content into categories so user can more easily find topics of interest. Users will also be able to locate relevant technology solution vendors, who will be represented on the site through sponsorships and online advertising. FindTech Blogs is an extension of other offerings available from KnowledgeStorm, such as the FindTech vertical search engine (which is also geared toward technology professionals) and FindTech Insights, a websites that offers in-depth news, research and analysis on recent and noteworthy technology topics and trends.

Among the features of FindTech Blogs is the inclusion of "spotlight bloggers," vendor neutral experts enlisted by KnowledgeStorm to address each topic category. New bloggers can also express their opinions on the site. FindTech Blogs allows them to create their own blog, while enabling existing bloggers to syndicate their blogs for free. KnowledgeStorm monitors the content to ensure it is classified in appropriate categories. Each page contains online advertising and links to vendor content located on KnowledgeStorm.com.

KnowledgeStorm is using technology from iUpload to run the new site. iUpload uses a collection of blogging, Wiki and content management tools to meet the needs of this new offering.

KnowledgeStorm has made a name for itself as a resource for technology professionals. This new launch just helps further solidify the company as a complete source of technology-related content offerings. As blogs continue to increase in number and rise in popularity, there is certainly a need for a site that can organize them so interested readers can find this unique content. KnowledgeStorm is definitely qualified to be that site. Look for the company to launch sites targeted toward other content.

Customer Feedback Yields New Polk Reports

R.L. Polk & Co. has launched Polk's On-Line Media Reports, a new offering that provides online access to interactive reports for the media industry. The reports offer media companies information about the automotive industry they can use to better communicate with automotive advertising buyers. These new reports are just one product geared toward Polk's media company customers.

The reports contain data that helps media professionals understand automotive buying trends and market share and helps them make more informed advertising recommendations to their automotive customers.

Because customers are the ones using your products, they truly are the best equipped to know how to make them better. In this case, Polk customers asked for an easier way to use the Polk data--and Polk responded with these new online reports. This new product announcement also highlights the diversity of Polk's customer base, which includes the media companies for which the online reports are targeted, and others like automotive manufacturers and dealers, and market research firms. Polk appears to be very good at manipulating its data to make it work for everyone. The company is really making the most of its content.

Publishers in the Driver's Seat

Just a few days ago, Answers.com (NASDAQ: ANSW) put out a press release noting a sudden 28% drop in its site traffic, and blaming the drop on recent changes by Google to its search algorithms. There's more than a little bit of irony here, because Google has been using Answers.com as its default content provider for users seeking definitions of specific terms. What Google is giving Answers.com with one hand it now appears to be taking back with the other.

As several search engine pundits have noted, when other companies complain publicly that they have been hurt by changes to the Google search algorithms, Google typically responds with the corporate equivalent of a shrug.

Occasionally however, Google does respond. As I noted in a post back in March, a company called Topix.net which wanted to start using the topix.com domain name, made a public plea to Google to "transfer" its search engine rankings to the new domain so it wouldn't have to take a traffic hit. Google's response was that companies shouldn't become so reliant on search engines for their traffic. That struck me as an incredibly disingenuous statement at the time, but I wonder if the market isn't now beginning to take that statement to heart.

As it happens, Answers.com is in the midst of trying to acquire Dictionary.com, and plans to go through with the acquisition despite the precipitous drop in traffic to its own site. Rationale? Dictionary.com has a very high percentage of "direct traffic," traffic that comes directly to Dictionary.com and not via search engines.

What we may be seeing is the start of a new, more nuanced way of operating in the traffic economy in which all web visitors will no longer be considered equal. Quite possibly, we'll see start to see websites with substantial direct traffic being valued more than those sites with primarily search-derived traffic.

Implications? Huge. Google, by endlessly tinkering with its algorithms, has created an environment where it's increasingly difficult to build a secure and sustainable web property. As a consequence, websites will put a new emphasis on building direct traffic, simultaneously increasing their enterprise value while reducing the power of the search engines. And the primary beneficiaries will be established sites with large repositories of quality content that users want and need to use repeatedly and will navigate to directly. This shift won't happen overnight, but if I'm calling it right, a fundamental, tectonic shift may be underway that will put content providers with loyal repeat visitors in the driver's seat.

Labels: algorithms, answers.com, dictionary.com, direct traffic, google

Nielsen Leverages Product Line to Create New Offering

The Nielsen Company has launched a new offering that will enable its advertiser customers to target television audiences by demographic group and lifestyle. The new product combines several Nielsen strengths--its NPOWER television ratings analysis tool, its Claritas target marketing services and its PRIZM NE lifestyle segmentation product.

NPOWER is used by Nielsen television clients to perform customized analysis of television viewing based on Nielsen's People Meter database. With the PRIZM NE product, Claritas classifies 66 segments of the U.S. population based on factors such as socio-economic data--income, age, race, occupation, education and household composition--and lifestyle attributes of interest to advertisers, such as when people vacation, what vehicles they drive and their favorite brands. By using descriptive names for the segments, Nielsen will provide a profile of the groups and information about their media habits for its advertising customers. Some of those segments include: blue blood estates (the nation's second-wealthiest group; business executives, managers and professionals who earn six-figure salaries), young digerati (the nation's tech-savvy singles and couples living in fashionable neighborhoods on the urban fringe) and bohemian mix (a progressive mix of young singles and couples, students and professionals).

Nielsen expects customers to be able to conduct more complete analysis as a result of the combining the functionality of NPOWER and PRIZM NE. This entire initiative represents Nielsen finally pooling its resources across divisional boundaries to launch new product offerings for customers. Separately, customers already find much value in Nielsen's products. Together, they will undoubtedly find a complete solution. Nielsen can probably find other synergies between additional product offerings and perhaps this is just the beginning of the media giant making the most of its assets to build a even more robust portfolio of offerings for the marketplace.