OAG, FCm Form Data-Software Partnership

Flight information and data solutions company OAG (Official Airline Guide) has partnered with FCm Travel Solutions, a worldwide corporate travel and expense management consultancy, to create a one-stop travel planning and booking service.

OAG Travel Planner Pro, which will officially launch in early April, is an online business travel planning application that will enable users (business travelers and professional travel arrangers) to plan, book and manage multiple trip plans for multiple travelers. Users will also be able to create complex itineraries.

Before the creation of the new application, OAG customers had to rely on other providers to book their travel. They could only use OAG's information to create their itineraries. Now, OAG will be able to serve their complete travel needs on just one site.

This is just another great example of a data company partnering with a software firm to create a very powerful new tool. Such partnerships are a vital component in content providers' continuing quest to become one-stop shops for their customers.

Data alone isn't going to create traction for a web site. Customers want and need more than that. The content-software partnership is a true necessity in our 24/7 world.

Carroll Launches Local Database Product

Carroll Publishing last week launched GovSearchLocal, an online searchable database that contains contact information for officials at the state, city and county levels. This includes contacts for all three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial).

Other content contained in GovSearchLocal includes federal government offices located within a state, annual expenditures, monthly payroll figures and numbers of employees. The information is updated daily and the database offers broad functionality, such as the ability to build and download unlimited contact lists, the creation of organization charts and the ability to perform targeted searches by person, position, office, facility or congressional district.

Customers who only need content for one particular state are best served by this product, which eliminates the need for them to purchase a national database that is naturally more expensive.

This is a smart move by Carroll Publishing. The company recognizes the fact that many customers only want and need specific slices of data. Instead of requiring customers who just need local data from one state (the customers Carroll is targeting with GovSearchLocal) to purchase a complete national database, the company is enabling those customers to purchase just that one slice.

It's definitely worth it for Carroll and other publishers to follow this strategy. Instead of alienating a customer and losing a sale, publishers can instead begin small, yet valuable relationships with customers; relationships that have the potential to grow over time. If customers' needs change, they will know exactly who to turn to for their content needs. For directory and database publishers who can easily slice and dice their data to produce streamlined offerings, the effort is worth it. A small sale is better than no sale at all.

A Wiki-Powered Buyer's Guide Launched By Latin American Media Company

The BuscaPe Group, a Latin America media company, has launched Wiki2Buy, an Internet-based collaborative buyer's guide. Wiki2Buy was developed through the use of MediaWiki, the same platform that is used by Wikipedia and it enables users to contribute content related to purchasing decisions. Content includes information about products, services and service providers.

Journalism students helped create the first guides.

This is a very clever concept, but still very much a work in progress. Internet users are increasing becoming interested in utilizing the web as a collaborative platform and, for the most part, seem interested in contributing content for the common good. However, it's too early to say if they will become engaged with Wiki2Buy and engaged enough to help create a robust offering. Time will tell if the time is right for a buyer's guide built on the Wiki concept. Users certainly control the destiny of this initiative. It will be interesting to see what they do.

Because It's There

In September, 1996, a young man named Naveen Jain held court during a cocktail reception at the InfoCommerce Conference, telling a large group that his six month old start-up company, in his humble opinion, was worth $25 million. Most people smiled indulgently at this audacious statement. It turned out that Jain was wrong, very wrong. Jain's company, InfoSpace, an early dot-com IPO, commanded a market cap of nearly $40 billion just four years later.

Jain left InfoSpace in an acrimonious parting in 2003, and promptly launched a new venture called Intelius. Initially a homeland security play, Intelius aggregated huge amounts of public domain information on individuals. This morphed into a low-end consumer play ("get background information on anyone") and now seems to be trying to move upscale with a range of services like identity theft protection and nanny background checks.

Intelius has recently filed for a $143 million IPO, but just as lightening seems ready to strike twice for Jain, the company has become embroiled in controversy over its newest offering, a reverse cellular phone number directory.

Leave aside for the moment just how useful this product might be. Not long after the major wireless carriers abandoned plans for a national, opt-in cellular directory, along comes Intelius, apparently using a combination of lists and web spidering, with the same product. The general public, which made clear that it didn't want a plain vanilla cell phone directory, is seeing red at this seemingly sneaky and invasive database. And the wireless carriers agree with their customers. Verizon Wireless is even threatening litigation against Intelius, and the database has piqued the interests of the federal government as well.

Who legitimately needs this product that Intelius has built? Very few, at least relative to the effort involved in building this database. Further, couldn't Intelius anticipate the response to this product when the public had so recently and loudly rejected the concept of even a permission-based cell phone directory?

So why did they do it? I suspect the simple answer is, "because it's there." It's a troubling trend in a lot of companies these days. They see mountains of data, and turn some clever programmers loose to mine nuggets from it. In most cases it's a benign though expensive waste of resources to create a data product that nobody wants. In cases like Intelius, however, someone should have realized that not only is the product of marginal utility, it is going to face a firestorm of opposition.

The lesson is simple but important: just because you can efficiently build huge databases of information by extracting content from the web doesn't mean you should. More times than not, these databases are of little value. And in some cases too, it's important to consider whether society is ready for the data you are aggregating. When it comes to data mining, the test of whether or not an activity is legal is a pretty low bar. Intelius is a perfect example of a company that may pay a very high price in a cratered IPO for activities that appear to be perfectly legal. So be very wary of the "because it's there" business model.

Labels: infospace, intelius, naveen jain

Hoover's Launches Hoover's Connect; To Acquire Visible Path

Hoover's this week announced the official launch of its business networking tool, Hoover's Connect. At the same, Hoover's announced that it will acquire Visible Path, the company that run the Hoover's Connect service. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Hoover's Connect had been available for the past year in a Beta version on the company's free site. This release now gives Hoover's subscribers access to the networking service that enables users to connect to someone new through an individual already in their network and better equipped to make an introduction.

Subscribers can access Hoover's Connect when they visit a web page containing a company record. When the click the "Connect" button on that page, referral paths appear that highlight the strongest path within that particular subscriber's network. Users can actively build the network by inviting people to join or passively with an Outlook plug-in that applies social networking algorithms to automatically rate relationship strength.

According to Hoover's this service differs from other professional networking tools because it can identify the strongest relationships by evaluating users' Outlook systems (e-mail and calendars). Hoover's Connect then assesses the strengths and rates them. Privacy settings prevent identities from being revealed if individuals want to remain anonyomous.

Hoover's Connect seemed like a good idea when it launched in Beta a year ago and it still seems like a good idea now. Social networking continues to be a popular information sharing concept, so it was really a natural next step for Hoover's. Customers already rely on Hoover's to provide them with the business information (about companies and individuals) they need to complete their work-related tasks. It makes complete sense to complement that main service with one that enables subscribers to truly complete their tasks--by connecting them to individuals they want to do business with.

Entering the market after such established networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn really isn't a factor here. If anything, those sites paved the way for social networking and helped demonstrate its value to the business community. Most of Hoover's users have probably already used the features of such networking services already, so getting used to Hoover's Connect should be an easy adjustment. Getting them to try it should also be a bit easier thanks to the privacy safeguards Hoover's has installed. It will be surprising if Hoover's Connect is anything but a success.