It's All How You Look at It
For most subscription data products we've seen, however, the approach to data manipulation can be described as "you're on your own." Subscribers are allowed to download data in spreadsheet format, and they can analyze it any way they want with whatever tools they want.
This sounds like a perfectly reasonable compromise, and it is, but at the end of the day it remains a compromise. With competition strong and customer expectations high, it's increasingly risky to push customers to use your data outside your application. The more you do for them, the more value you provide, and the happier your subscribers will be.
That's why we were intrigued by the tour we got recently of a newly launched site called GraphPortal.com. GraphPortal offers a powerful capability for quickly and easily building interactive graphs of your data. Even more exciting, you can embed these graphs on your own website, all free of charge. If you want the world to know about your data, you can optionally publish your charts to the GraphPortal site, where they are available for others to use on their own sites, a graphic form of viral marketing.
Keep in mind these graphs are not static; users can filter and manipulate them for different views of the data (Excel users: think pivot tables). Click here or on the image above to get a sense of the power of these graphs -- which can be chained together to form a presentation "deck." There's even a way to add annotation to each graph.
And yes, the folks behind GraphPortal have a revenue model: they'd like you to buy the underlying software, which you can run in-house or use on a hosted basis. The software, which is more powerful than the features available in GraphPortal, even allows the development of interactive "data dashboards."
Is GraphPortal for everyone? No. If you've got a graphing capability as part of software you already use, GraphPortal doesn't bring much to the party. But if you're dabbling in graphic presentation of your data and would like to get your feet wet without a big up-front investment, it's well worth a look.
Labels: graphportal.com
All a Twitter
You've doubtless noticed the phenomenal buzz surrounding Twitter, a social networking service that allows very short messages (140 characters or less) to be broadcast to a closed group, or publicly to as many people as may choose to sign-up to receive your messages or "tweets."
What purpose does Twitter serve? It appears the overwhelming majority of users are tweeting their current activities to their groups, "I'm in the car going to the mall" and the like. Why anyone wants, much less needs, to know the activities of others in such excruciating real-time detail is a discussion best left to mental health professionals.
Ah, but who cares about its purpose if it's making gobs of money. Actually, you may not be surprised to learn that Twitter not only doesn't generate a profit, it currently doesn't generate any revenue. There are even third-party contests now to suggest a revenue model for Twitter!
Yet, the buzz around Twitter continues to grow. You can bet that we'll shortly be hearing the case for why Twitter makes sense in B2B environments. An article in yesterday's New York Times illustrates how we will begin to move down this slippery slope with the writer recounting his use of Twitter while on a panel at a conference. He sent out a tweet pertaining to the panel conversation and quickly received useful responses. Frankly, this strikes me as akin to conference speakers and panelists doing Google searches to answer audience questions, but let's not stand in the way of the Twitter juggernaut with such trifling objection s.
Twitter is fun. It is interesting. I am not sure how much of a breakthrough it is given that you can easily send an email or instant message to a pre-established group, and you can certainly post to a blog that others can subscribe to and receive push updates. We're not lacking for ways to communicate, and an arbitrary 140 character limit precludes most serious uses. So let's not tie ourselves up in knots seeking B2B applications for Twitter.
Some are comparing the superheated buzz around Twitter to the superheated buzz that once surrounded Second Life. I also recall the insistent refrain that Second Life had huge B2B applications as well. Remember Second Life? Enough said.
ISN'T IT IRONIC DEPARTMENT: It was reported today that Google has purchased a newsprint mill in Finland ... in order to convert it into a data center for its online search operations.
Labels: google, second life, twitter
The Blue Book Adds New Website Features
The Blue Book of Building and Construction, which serves the commercial construction industry with its database of general contractors, subcontractors and suppliers, has launched a new feature on its website (www.thebluebook.com) designed to help construction professionals better manage their vendor contacts online.
The new offering, "My Blue Book," is a free application that enables registered users to customize the selection, sorting, viewing and storage of information found in The Blue Book database. Additional functionality has been included, such as the addition of "My Contacts" and "My Preferences" tabs that allow users to access their private vendor information.
This is a great idea from The Blue Book and will certainly be well-received by users. Online personalization is huge these days. Users want the features and functionality that online databases afford, but they also want to be able to manage their data in a way that meets their own personal needs. Enabling users to do just that will make them even more likely to utilize your content in the first place, make that content even more valuable, and will also motivate those users to return to your site again in the near future. Personalization can most definitely equal loyalty and retention.
Hopefully, The Blue Book isn't finished adding these personal touches to its website.
InsideView Receives Additional Financing; Looks to Expand Offerings
InsideView Inc., a Sales 2.0 application provider, has announced that it has secured $6.5 million in second round financing, which was led by current investors Emergence Capital Partners and Rembrandt Venture Partners. InsideView plans to use this latest financing to bolster its sales and marketing functions and further develop its platform.
InsideView's Sales Intelligence application, SalesView, works like this: it uncovers sales opportunities across traditional editorial sources and social media and presents them directly within a CRM application. SalesView is designed to help sales teams increase their productivity by helping them determine the right prospects to connect with at the right time.
InsideView leverages Sales 2.0 technology by aggregating and analyzing the personal, professional and corporate information that is available in social networks, websites and subscription-based sources to help users find new customer engagement opportunities. InsideView's CRM mash-ups provide sales professionals with real-time access to news alerts, relationship analysis and company information.
It's not surprising that InsideView has received this monetary support along with the confidence by its inventors that the company will continue to succeed. Regardless of the economic climate, sales and marketing professionals are under enormous pressure to succeed as well. Yet, during our current economic situation, that pressure is building.
Thus, the need for solutions such as InsideView's SalesView is undoubtedly strong and will continue to grow. The premise behind InsideView's technology is already very impressive: utilizing such online content as social networks is certainly innovative and most likely very effective for sales professionals seeking any competitive advantage they can gain. It will be very interesting to watch how InsideView uses this latest round of financing to improve the features and functionality of the SalesView solution even more.
Transparently Clear
In a settlement announced this week with the New York State Attorney General, UnitedHealth Group has agreed to shut down two databases maintained by its Ingenix subsidiary. In addition, UnitedHealth will pay $50 million to re-create the databases under the aegis of a non-profit organization to be established for the purpose.
The two Ingenix databases involved are Prevailing Health Charges System and the Medical Data Research database. The two products track "usual, customary and reasonable" physicians' fees. Most insurers use Ingenix's data, which is not available to the public or doctors, to calculate patients' out-of-pocket costs when they seek out-of-network care. Physician groups have complained bitterly about under-reimbursement driven by these databases, and consumers may have been under-reimbursed as well. This settlement does not address the claim of under-reimbursement.
In addition to the under-reimbursement claim, the New York State Attorney General also attacked the Ingenix data products for "lacking transparency." It does seem remarkable that a commercial, subscription-based data product would be obligated at all to be transparent. The New York Attorney General also charged a conflict of interest in that Ingenix is a subsidiary of a health insurer that also makes use of the Ingenix data for calculating reimbursements. Again, what's implicit in this charge is that these databases are so important that they've become bigger than the organization collecting them and become something of a public trust.
This settlement brings to mind the furor that erupted in 2006 when the First DataBank unit of Hearst Corporation was engaged in what appeared to be some very sloppy updating of its wholesale average price database for pharmaceuticals. Instead of surveying the industry to develop a true price average, it was instead gathering all its data from a single drug wholesaler. As a private, subscription data product, this would normally be just a huge embarrassment. In the case of First DataBank, however, this database was driving pharmacy reimbursement rates nationwide and reportedly led to inflated reimbursements to the tune of many billions of dollars. Here again, we have an example of a private industry database with outsized influence. While Hearst can't be claimed to have had any conflict of interest, this clearly seems to be a case were increased transparency regarding data collection practices might have prevented the problem in the first place.
Should private sector databases that are used to drive payment systems, particularly where taxpayer dollars are involved, seek to meet a higher standard of transparency? On reflection, I think the answer is "yes." Data publishers whose products fuel mission-critical applications shouldn't need to hide their work. If your work is sloppy, you have a perpetual litigation threat hanging over your head, as these two cases well illustrate. If your work is first-rate, you have a selling advantage. As to the proprietary aspects of building a database, I'm not (necessarily) suggesting that you open your algorithms to the world, since their quality can be measured based on results. Rather, I am suggesting that your data inputs and your process for creating gold from dross might benefit from some sunshine. After all, any data publishing veteran knows well that most of our value is wrapped up not in secret methodologies but rather that we sat down and did the messy work nobody else wanted to do. We aggregate, we scrub, we normalize, we purify. It's not rocket science, and there are few secrets, just skilled practitioners. In our business, transparency builds trust, and trust builds increased utilization, meaning greater revenues. Suddenly, the case for transparency seems perfectly clear.
Labels: FirstDataBank, Hearst, Ingenix, Medical Data Research, Prevailing Health Charges System, UnitedHealth Group