Top-Level Domainia

Until recently, ICANN, the body charged with administering the domain naming system, has been very stingy about authorizing new top-level domains (e.g. .com, .net, .biz). Now, however, it's apparently open season. Anyone with $185,000 can have a top-level domain of their own.

Implications? Well first, it's a bit more hassle, confusion and complexity for those of us whose business involves gathering and maintaining this information. Second, it's a potential area of opportunity. Consider a legal publisher that buys the top-level domain ".law" and offers it to its advertisers, or hosts websites for law firms listed in its database. This could be an exciting marketing gambit.

But more profoundly, this move marks increasing erosion in one of the core uses of many directory products: providing basic company contact information. Think about it: you don't need a directory (or a search engine for that matter) to find the website for Microsoft, because the odds are very good that if you type the name of any big company followed by ".com," you'll easily get to that company's website. Should Microsoft acquire the ".microsoft" top-level domain, it will likely get even easier. Many web pundits believe that in the near future, you'll simply type "Microsoft" into your browser, and if Microsoft owns the corresponding top-level domain, you'll go right to it site.

The lesson here, which I've stated many times before, is that basic company contact information has become a commodity, and this new development even further erodes its value. If you think the $185,000 will keep a lid on things, don't forget innovative services like Telnic* that is vying to become a central company phone book on the web. Still not convinced? Then go over to Jigsaw (2005 Model of Excellence winner), which offers its database of 2.6 million company records free for the downloading.

The bottom line is that if "industry phone directory" is a part of the value proposition of your data product, it's well past time to start moving it up the value chain.

*Telnic is a 2009 Model of Excellence finalist, and its CTO, Henri Asseily, will explain how the company is executing on its vision at this year's InfoCommerce Data Content09 conference.

Model of Excellence Awards

We are pleased to announce that Netprospex Inc. is a finalist for an InfoCommerce 2009 Model of Excellence awards.

Review the Netprospex Model of Excellence profile here

Hear Netprospex Founder & CEO Gary Halliwell at DataContent 09
DataContent 09: All Roads Lead to Data. Full program here.

Labels: ICANN, jigsaw, netprospex, telnic

A Database from Wal-Mart

Giant retailer Wal-Mart, as part of a number of bold moves in recent years to improve its image as a good corporate citizen, has just announced that it is now going to display eco-ratings on the products it sells. There's only one small catch, of course: such ratings do not currently exist. Wal-Mart, however, has the answer: it is going to insist that its suppliers participate in this initiative, with Wal-Mart funding the development effort.

Wal-Mart sees this as a three-step process: first, collect data from its suppliers that will be input into a central database. The second step is to collaborate with universities and other groups to work through the various weights to be assigned to each data element. The third step will be to translate the weighted data into a single "sustainability index number," that will essentially reflect how green a product is in terms of how it is manufactured, how it is distributed, and the extent to which it can be recycled.

But just because Wal-Mart is behind this initiative, it's not a closed system. Wal-Mart has publicly stated that it wants to develop a universal sustainability index for all products, and it wants other companies to participate. The product database, as we understand it, will be publicly accessible both to promote transparency, and to spur ancillary uses of the information.

This is a huge initiative, and one that many others have looked at, although generally on a less ambitious scale. Offering meaningful sustainability ratings is not only a worthwhile business, it can be a lucrative business as well. The key, of course, is getting market acceptance and critical mass. That where it helps to have the clout of Wal-Mart, with sales equating to 2% of GDP, and a proven willingness to use supplier mandates to enforce participation.

This is a project to watch as it takes shape over the next few years. Data publishers may want to start carrying sustainability index data along with product information (again, our understanding is that Wal-Mart will make this information publicly available). There may also be some interesting spin-off opportunities in crunching and re-packaging the underlying dataset.

Will Wal-Mart succeed? There's certainly no guarantee, but nothing populates a database faster than a major customer asking its vendors to provide them with some information.

-- @infocommerce

Labels: sustainability rating, twitter:infocommerce, wal-market

An Honest Opinion

In 2005, we gave an InfoCommerce Model of Excellence award to a company called ValueStar. We described it as a "for-profit Better Business Bureau," which doesn't capture all the nuances of the service, but gives you the general idea.

What stood out to us at the time was that while it relied heavily on user ratings, ValueStar went to extreme lengths to assure those that were rating a vendor had actually done business with the vendor. It seemed like overkill at the time, but with so many sites now drowning in user-supplied ratings (many of which are of suspect origin as merchants realize the power of their reviews), ValueStar's concept of validating user input looks prescient.

Last year, I wrote about another company, Tablet Hotels, which had announced it was adding user reviews. No news there, but Tablet Hotels upped the ante in the travel category by limiting reviews to those it could confirm had actually stayed at the hotel they were reviewing. While Tablet Hotels didn't publish the names of those who submitted reviews, it required that users identify themselves when posting their reviews. That might seem crazy to those publishers seeking to build a large volume of review on their sites, but I argued that Tablet Hotels was actually quite clever, because its approach removed all credibility issues while forcing users to take responsibility for their words by asking them to identify themselves.

Just yesterday, I was speaking with Mike Ortner of Capterra, an online buying guide for software. Capterra has gone where few publishers dare to tread: letting its users provide software reviews, including the products of its advertisers.

The process Capterra has devised is highly controlled. Users are required to identify themselves when providing a review, and their company names and job titles (but not their names) are published along with the review. It has purposely built a lengthy review submission form, the better to weed out those who are not serious and engaged. Capterra advertisers are allowed to preview all reviews of their products before they go live, and can challenge factual inaccuracies or reviews from users who aren't customers. There's much more to what Capterra is doing in the area of reviews, but my point here is a basic one: while all publishers are eager to have as many user reviews as possible on their sites, smart publishers are realizing that quantity at the expense of quality is a mistake. Reviews that can be trusted, submitted by responsible parties who are willing to identify themselves, have much more impact and value - even to advertisers, the group you would think would be least interested in seeing unvarnished reviews alongside their advertising programs.

Model of Excellence Awards

We are pleased to announce that Unigo LLC is a finalist for an InfoCommerce 2009 Model of Excellence awards.
Review Unigo's Model of Excellence profile here

Hear Unigo Founder & CEO Jordan Goldman at DataContent 09
DataContent 09: All Roads Lead to Data. Full program here.

Labels: capterra, table hotels, valuestar

Getting the Message

What do email, instant messaging, RSS (generally associated with blogs), social media (I am thinking in particular about such platforms as Linked-In and FaceBook) and Twitter have in common? They are all messaging channels. And each one grew rapidly in popularity after the then-dominant messaging channel became over-used, and thus less effective, particularly for marketers.

Email was the first of these messaging channels. Its low cost, ease of use and lack of rules turned out to be a two-edged sword, spurring rapid adoption, while attracting a tidal wave of marketers, spammers and others whose mail volume soon swamped one-to-one email communications. Users fought back with aggressive spam filters, usage conventions and even legislation, largely taming the channel and adding lots of marketing constraints.Blogging then went supernova for a while, in part because one could attract an audience at low cost, but more importantly I would argue, because it was closely tied to RSS. The great hidden value of RSS was that it bypassed spam filters and landed messages directly on the users' desktop.

Next up: social networking platforms, such as Linked-In with its Linked-In groups, which created privileged communications channels that are still growing in popularity. And now there is Twitter, which is also growing rapidly.

It seems that once a popular messaging channel becomes too clogged with extraneous messages, a new message channel emerges. Once it generates spectacular rates of adoption, marketers, spammers and others seeking to monetize the channel pile on, creating noise, clutter and a commercial tone that many users reject. This sets the stage for yet another new messaging channel to emerge.

The implication for publishers? They should jump on these new messaging channels as quickly and early as possible, which is when they yield maximum benefit. At the same time, publishers need to be cognizant that it's risky to develop dependence on these channels because their marketing half-life will become increasingly short. The messaging channels that prove durable will be the ones that impose rules and technological barriers that limit their value for marketing purposes. The ones with the fewest restrictions are likely to flame-out relatively quickly.The bad news and the good news in all of this remain the same: the message remains more valuable than the medium, and there is no durable short-cut to building an online audience.

The Best Never Rest
Model of Excellence Award Winner
iJet Intelligent Risk Systems
to Speak at DataContent 09

A 2004 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence Award Winner, iJet has tranformed itself several times to take advantage of new opportunities and emerging business needs, while never losing sight of its core competencies and value proposition.

iJet CTO Greg Meyer will be on the highly popular "Excellence Revisited" panel at DataContent 09 where he'll talk candidly about what iJet has learned about what it takes to succeed in the business of business information, hard-earned lessons you can take to the bank!

DataContent 09: All Roads Lead to Data. Full program here.

Labels: ijet

Risky Business

It’s hardly newsworthy that the Internet has been enormously disruptive to both well established businesses and business models. It’s also not news that the Internet enables disintermediation by making it easier to both buy direct and do-it-yourself. We’ve also seen that the Internet has enabled “electronic commons” through social networking and user-generated content.

What happens when you combine all these combustible characteristics in one package and apply them to our global financial crisis? You get start-ups like freerisk.org.

Freerisk wants to challenge, if not replace, the major credit ratings agencies (e.g. Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch) by letting users build and run their own financial risk models. As I understand the plan (and the venture is still very much a work in progress), Freerisk will aggregate public company financial data and provide an interface that lets users pull the data into their own risk models with the hope they will publish their findings on the Freerisk site.

Freerisk is explicitly gunning for the major rating agencies. It’s unlikely they’ll make a short-term dent in the revenues of the big three players, each of which operates with governmental imprimatur, but the risk is that Freerisk over time calls the credibility of these entities into question, a potentially more damaging outcome, and one not outside the realm of possibility. Ratings agencies aren’t the most popular folks these days, and if this young upstart embarrasses them with a series of prescient calls, it could be enough to topple this highly profitable oligarchy.

The lesson for content providers: there’s no room for complacency. New competitors spring out of nowhere, and the web provides them with near-equal footing with you. Further, the economics of the web not only reduce barriers to entry, but they enable even failing businesses to hang in for extended periods of time, causing you pain all the while. Indeed, it’s not unusual for a website to launch with no revenue model (some plan to figure one out down the road; some don’t ever intend to generate revenue).

The solution? The best offense is a good defense. You can’t anticipate these new competitors, and you can’t (and generally shouldn’t try to) fight them. All you can do is stay close to your customers, deeply understand their needs, give them tools that they come to depend on to operate their businesses, and oh yes … always sleep with one eye open.

Labels: freerisk.org