BusinessWeek.com Extends Reach With LinkedIn Partnership

BusinessWeek.com this week announced that it has formed two partnerships with LinkedIn, the online professional network. BusinessWeek.com and Capital IQ, a unit of Standard & Poors, will provide company data for LinkedIn's new Company Profile feature, which launched last week. [BusinessWeek and Standard & Poors are McGraw-Hill companies].

Users who take advantage of the Company Profile feature will gain access to business overviews that contain industry statistics provided by BusinessWeek and Capital IQ in additional to information about a specific company from LinkedIn. In addition, the company profile feature also contains a link to BusinessWeek.com's Company Insight Center, where users can find additional company information free of charge.

BusinessWeek.com added the Company Insider feature, where users can view personal contacts on LinkedIn at companies that are featured in BusinessWeek.com stories. Company Insider, which launched earlier this month, is the first of several LinkedIn Intelligent Applications that will be added to the site.

In a press release announcing the partnerships, Roger Neal, BusinessWeek Digital's senior vice president and general manager, noted how the features will expand the publisher's content to BusinessWeek.com's 8 million users and LinkedIn's network of 20 million registered professionals. This is certainly a great way for BusinessWeek to expand its customer base and get its content in the hands of a group that really needs it.

LinkedIn has become such a prominent player in the business networking arena that it makes perfect sense for a prominent business content player like BusinessWeek to form a partnership. This alliance will certain open many eyes to the value of BusinessWeek content and will undoubtedly lead to an increase in traffic to the BusinessWeek.com site as well as a boost in subscriptions. It's also a smart move for LinkedIn, which certainly has a credible name in the marketplace already; but being aligned with a long-established brand like BusinessWeek definitely doesn't hurt.

With Company Insider the first of many LinkedIn applications BusinessWeek.com has planned for its site, it will be interesting to see what other features are next. They certainly have to potential to make BusinessWeek.com an even more robust source for business information.

Good Vibrations

One thing that's been curiously missing from the social networking/user-generated content frenzy of the past few years has been efforts to harness these concepts to build good company databases. It's particularly surprising given the success of professional sites such as Jigsaw and Linked-In, both of which have built remarkably robust databases of business professionals. But where's the company information?

We have seen a few attempts at letting users build out company content. Two basic models have been employed to date: a "backbone" model, where users can append comments to a fixed list of companies, and the publisher takes on the task of maintaining basic company contact details. Successful examples of this model include Yahoo Finance, Vault.com and start-up yellow pages sites such as BrownBook. The other model is "free-form" model where users decide what companies to cover and in what way, with the publisher supplying no content, and few if any restrictions. One infamous example of this was the F*ckedCompany.com site, now mercifully defunct. We're seeing more and more company profiles within Wikipedia, but they tend to get lost in this vast online encyclopedia.

Will people take the time to contribute to an open access company database? Can such a database rise above angry posts from disgruntled employees and disinformation from disingenuous competitors? Will people share valuable inside information about firms? Will individuals maintain constantly changing company information? Well, it seems we may be about to find out.

A new company, TradeVibes.com, still in beta, is aiming to become a user-generated company database. It rolls together wiki-like features with rating systems, company discussion board, job boards and more. It also offers a strong organizational taxonomy to allow discovery of companies in addition to research on known companies. It may very well be a glimpse of the future.

There's a lot of fresh thinking going on at TradeVibes, and a lot to commend its content model. If TradeVibes can get critical market traction, it could herald the next big thing in the data world: high-value, user- generated company information.

Labels: brownbook, jigsaw, Linked-In, tradevibes, vault.com, wikipedia

Marquis Launches Online Art Gallery

Marquis Who's Who this week announced the launch of an Artists' Gallery web site that will feature artwork from hundreds of prominent artists. The gallery first appeared in the 2008 print edition of Who's Who in American Art before launching as a standalone online offering.

The Artists' Gallery (www.whoswhogallery.com) is searchable by artist name and media. Works range in style from oil and watercolor to sculpture and photography, and are selected by the artist. Each listing includes information such as title of the work, media, dimensions, representing gallery, personal web site and the artist's contact information. In addition, they also contain the artists' full biographical entries as they appear in the Who's Who in American Art.

The public can view the site free of charge. Marquis has already announced plans to include more artists on the site later this year.

What a clever idea. Of course, something so visual should have visual representation. Text listings just don't give such listings justice. This is really giving artists a true online portfolio; one that can't be communicated through those traditional text listings. Such listings, of course, provide value. But that value is only supplementary in this case. A picture really is worth 1,000 words.

The value extends to the featured artists (who will gain tremendous additional exposure) as well as Marquis. Since the company likely charges a fee for inclusion on the site, the new offering will help the company sell more subscriptions to the print Who's Who in American Art, thus serving as an innovative new source of revenue for Marquis.

CCC Information Services Tool Launches Workflow-Integrated Product

CCC Information Services Inc., a provider of automotive claims and repair solutions, this week launched the CCC Valuescope Salvage Management Solutions. The new product includes a data-driven decision support tool to help with workflow related to total loss and salvage processes. The new offering will eliminate manual processes, such as data entry.

The solution includes a salvage assignment and workflow feature that eliminates users' needs to call salvage vendors for assignment. Instead the tool sends an assignment to the vendor during the handling process. Users can also obtain updates to help them determine the status of salvage disposal. In addition to the assignment and workflow feature, they can also use the CCC Intellisphere Reporting Solution to measure salvage process efficiencies during a claim's life.

This is yet another segment of professional business information users that will benefit from a solution that is integrated into the workflow. It's certainly becoming the norm, and not the exception, these days for information providers to combine content and services to create efficiencies in the workplace.

Users of the CCC Valuescope Salvage Management Solutions will undoubtedly reap immediate benefits. Perhaps the only challenge will be the learning curve. Transitioning users accustomed to manual processes may take some time. But if CCC's solution is as user-friendly as such solutions strive to be, user acceptance won't be far behind.

McGraw-Hill Product Integrates Content with CRM Capabilities

McGraw-Hill Construction, a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies, this week launched Network Express, which provides project information from the McGraw-Hill Construction Network (built on the company's Dodge database) that can be integrated into customers' CRM systems. The new service also offers company data from the McGraw-Hill Construction Sweets Network, media sites and Target Leads/Spec Alerts.

Customers will now be able to integrate Dodge information into their CRM systems and immediately yield results for their sales and marketing efforts. The Dodge database contains more than 90 percent of all U.S. and Canada-based construction projects with values of $500,000 or more.

With this information in their CRM systems, McGraw-Hill's sales customers will be able to identify people, companies and projects that they want to follow up with. They will also be able to follow up on sales leads from McGraw-Hill Construction Media and the Sweets Network, access plans and specifications and track progress through the entire sales cycle.

Customers can access content through a direct feed from Network Express and a set of certified partners who have experience integrating content into CRM platforms, noted Andrew Fischer, senior director of the McGraw-Hill Construction Network, in a company statement. Those partners include Astadia (Salesforce.com), Code Theatre (Siebel On Demand), Infinity Info Systems (Microsoft CRM and Sage SalesLogix) and Ingenium (Construction Points).

This is yet another example of the power of combining content with services. McGraw-Hill recognizes the limits of content at face value. Customers will always need great content, that's for sure. But they need to make it actionable as well--and quickly yield benefits from that content.

Network Express is designed to do just that. If it delivers as promised, McGraw-Hill will have a real winner.