Two IPOs That Merit Review

Angie's List and Yelp, both BTC review sites, are now making the leap to public ownership. Angie's List went public yesterday, ending its first day up 25% from its offering price. Yelp has filed papers for a public offering in the near future.  At a high level, these sites are remarkably similar, arguably even a bit competitive. Dive into the business models, however, and they couldn't be more different. Angie's List has a model that defies conventional wisdom: call it a B2C paid community review site. Get this model right and you build something with enormous power: a massive army of reviewers who have a vested interest in honestly and accurately reviewing local businesses because they are paying for the privilege of accessing that same base of reviews. You also get an engaged community, something that advertisers (at least well-reviewed advertisers) are anxious to tap. Indeed, Angie's List reported advertising revenue of $34 million last year, versus subscription revenue of $25 million. The most remarkable feat of all: avoiding real or perceived conflicts of interest while selling subscription access to objective reviews then selling advertising around those reviews. Spend just a few seconds on the Angie's List site and you will see the intense focus on transparency and objectivity. No effort has been spared to make both businesses and consumers feel they are getting good value, trusted information and fair treatment. It's a delicate business model, but Angie's List has been perfecting it for over a decade. Contrast Angie's List to Yelp, which has a free access model in which access to business reviews are free, and revenues are generated from advertising. Yelp has unquestionably impressive metrics: over 22 million reviews, and 61 million users for starters.

But beyond the differences in business models, Yelp is a distinctly different business. And while its free access model afforded fast growth, it has paid a price for being free. As Yelp became increasingly influential among consumers, it started attracting false and biased reviews from businesses seeking to improve their own ratings or damage the ratings of competitors. Yelp responded with a series of opaque algorithms designed to root out fake reviews, but that ended up doing real damage to Yelp's perceived integrity among both consumers and businesses. Even worse, Yelp showed little sympathy to businesses that claimed that demonstrably false reviews were ruining their businesses. That's an especially big issue because Yelp depends on such businesses for advertising revenue. This lack of transparency and perceived conflicts of interest came to a head when a number of businesses accused Yelp of offering improved ratings to those that advertised. It was a PR disaster, but one caused as much by the business model as specific business actions. And that's another place where you see huge contrasts: company leadership. Angie's List is run by Angie Hicks, who exudes Midwestern values and integrity, and is completely aware that while her mission is to inform and empower consumers, her business model can also recognize and reward good service providers, and that works to everyone's benefit. Contrast that persona with Josh Stoppleman, founder of Yelp, who fashions himself as something of a consumer advocate, with businesses of all kinds inherently the bad guys. When the New York Times asked him about a business trying to get Yelp to remove a bad review for a dish it didn't even serve, Stoppleman's nuanced reply was, "why believe the business owner?" After several such interviews, Yelp's PR team finally got Stoppleman locked in a closet for the good of the IPO. It's difficult to say with certainty which business model is stronger. The Angie's List approach has a lot going for it, but it's a hard road to build a business like this, making the company even more impressive. At the same time, Yelp is to date a success story in its own right, but like so many other large review sites, is fighting issues and complications on almost every front. The need for consumer reviews is clearly large and durable, but we are a long way from a firm conclusion as to how they should be collected and presented.

You Had to Be There!

The theme of this year's DataContent Conference was "Crowd, Cloud and Curation." But in addition to those big themes, another word cropped up in almost every session: mobile. The excitement around mobile was palpable, and there seemed to be general agreement that tablet devices are already starting to have a significant impact on the industry, and a largely beneficial one, provided publishers embrace the tremendous shift to mobile online access and start to leverage the power of these new devices. My view? As a reliable skeptic, you might expect some push-back, but I'm fully on board. Mobile devices, tablets in particular, are rapidly changing how users access data, and even how they do business. This creates opportunities in some markets, but more fundamentally, it means publishers cannot allow themselves to be left behind as usage patterns and user expectations for data products begin to radically shift. Our keynote speaker, Clare Hart, CEO of Infogroup, nicely set the stage for the sessions that followed by noting that to maximize the value of data, "you have to innovate around it." This well sums up the InfoCommerce Group view that data publishers need to focus on "data that does stuff," not simply providing mountains of raw content from which users are expected to find and extract value on their own. Clare illustrated this with a sneak peak at a soon to be launched Infogroup product called Yesmail Marketing Intelligence that will provide remarkable competitive intelligence to marketers, coupled with a powerful user interface and real-time alerting. Among our 2011 Models of Excellence nominees, we got in-depth looks at two barely-launched ventures: BestVendor, which is doing some exciting work in social discovery, and First Stop Health, a new data-driven health concierge service. We also got a good overview of FeeFighters which matches businesses to credit card processing services, an area that's gotten a lot of attention lately. We also learned about newly launched Chaikin Power Tools, which integrates mountains of data and sentiment analysis into a simple, elegant buy/sell indicator for investors. We also heard from another startup, Brilig, which lets online marketers precisely tap specific market segments, precision that's been sorely lacking to date. Resolute Digital and b2bAnywhere confirmed the stampede to mobile in our session on that topic, and gave us some useful thinking on how B2B mobile will evolve. Anne Holland of Subscription Site Insider presented some preliminary findings from a study conducted in conjunction with InfoCommerce Group on paid subscription product renewal rates and retention marketing best practices. In our always popular "Excellence Revisited" Wanted Technologies, Alacra andAgencyFinder offered candid assessments of what went right - and wrong - with products that had previously won them our Model of Excellence award. The level of candor, as always, was incredibly insightful. Also insightful were presentations from DonorBase and The Praetorian Group and our own Janice McCallum who offered specific revenue generating ideas with potential applicability to many in the audience. And we also got helpful case studies from Depository Trust, PDR Network and ZoomInfo about what's involved in launching a new data product inside a company that's not in the data business, and how to successfully re-position existing data businesses that have lost their way. We also went interplanetary this year, as we learned about the launch (first publicly announced at our conference) of Saturn, a new service jointly developed by Locationary, Neustar and theLocal Search Association. Designed to be a frictionless cloud-based platform where data publishers can upload data, the goal of Saturn is to help business partners standardize, synchronize and maintain their data to improve accuracy. There's a lot more to Saturn, and the potential to revolutionize data collection, enhancement and maintenance is huge. Best of all, none of this vision involves making all information free! Conference attendees also got the inside scoop on Infochimps, a company with the ambitious goal (well underway) of collecting all the data on the web, arguably doing for data what Google has done for text. It's a breathtaking vision, a vision, I should note, that fully supports the role of paid data products. In fact, Infochimps would like to be the central marketplace for such datasets. The 2011 Model of Excellence award winners? This year, the awards went to Artlog, Depository Trust and FeeFighters. If you now really wish you were there, you can view some of the speakers and presentations here, in Pancasts provided byPanopto. Our compelling programs are our best advertisement, so consider this our first promotion for DataContent 2012. You have to be there!

Hammer Time

Who can resist the opportunity to talk about the new search engine venture announced yesterday by of all people the rapper M.C. Hammer?

 There are so many ways to come at this announcement, most of them humorous and pun-laden. Indeed, the announcement seems to have been more interesting to the entertainment press than the tech press.

 The details are sketchy, and the site itself is "pre-beta" (which may or may not be the same as "post-alpha"). We do know the site is named WireDoo (which my spell checker wants to correct to "weirdo") and its tag line is "search once, see what relates."

 WireDoo is described alternatively as "deep search" and "relationship search." The goal, apparently, is to provide sort of a split-screen search results page: traditional links on the right, and content that is related, but that wouldn't normally come up in a search of the word or phrase being searched on the left. Sounds intriguing, especially since so much of this related content seems to be data-oriented: percentages, statistics, ratings, lists, etc. A search for "car," for example, might pull back related data on operating costs, MPG, insurance costs, unit sales, etc.

 It's an interesting if not entirely novel concept, where success lies in execution. If Mr. Hammer can pull this off, I think he's entitled to crow, "U Can't Touch This," because this type of automated curation has inherent value in providing context and, if you remember the early days of search, you'll remember this term: serendipity.

 Intriguingly, most of the other search engines launches (DuckDuckGo, Blekko) employ a reductive strategy designed to filter and focus search results. Mr. Hammer arguably looks to expand search results, but with a high degree of relevance.

 M.C. Hammer joins the growing list of celebrities (think Ashton Kutcher and Justin Timberlake) who are investing in technology, a sure sign to some that we are in the late stages of a tech bubble. That view is only reinforced when Mr. Hammer, when asked why he is investing in a new search engine of all things, replied "Why not swing for the fences...no one is playing for singles in the Valley anymore."

 New search engines, tech bubbles, celebrities ... mix it all together and you get one thing for sure: complexity. And it's exactly this complexity we'll be tackling head-on at DataContent 2011 -- just two weeks away. Don't miss this unique opportunity to sharpen your understanding of where things are headed --register today!

If You Compile It, They Will Come

Can a website offering 1,300 reviews have any hope of competing against a website with over 50 million reviews? Possibly. It's all how you go about it, and it speaks to some larger themes in the industry. Luckily, we have a real-life example to examine.

You likely know about travel industry review behemoth TripAdvisor.com. It recently celebrated reaching its 50 millionth crowd-sourced review, largely of hotels. There's little question that TripAdvisor is the place to go if you want the real story on a planned hotel stay. Or is it?

In reality, TripAdvisor has lots of issues surrounding it. First, while everyone in the reviews game believes more is better, I'd suggest TripAdvisor has reached a point where it has a "big data" problem of its own: more information than can be usefully processed or analyzed by the user. My TripAdvisor experiences have always been the same: lots of reviews available, with half of them extremely positive and half of them extremely negative. I leave every TripAdvisor session paralyzed by indecision: the hotel could be great or it could be horrible. In short, I generally leave feeling more worried than informed.

Layer on top of that increasingly vocal complaints about hotels gaming TripAdvisor, and fraudulent reviews (both good and bad). There have been news stories suggesting a whole cottage industry has sprung up to post fake positive reviews (for your hotel) or fake negative reviews (for your competitors). Indeed, one reputation management firm is now publicly claiming that as many as 10 million of TripAdvisor’s 50 million reviews may be fraudulent.

Finally, TripAdivsor has adopted a number of opaque processes to fight false reviews with automated tools. As a consequence, many of the reviews submitted never appear online at all. Presumably these are false reviews, but who knows for sure? The deeper you dig, the more the wisdom of crowds seems to be more like a Tower of Babel.

The fix to what ails TripAdvisor may be an entirely different approach. Enter plucky star-up Oyster.com that supplies one review per hotel -- its own. It sends its own people undercover to the hotel, and they write detailed reviews documented with candid photos. Oyster.com currently has only 1,300 reviews (perhaps 1% of all hotels worldwide), but its reviews are detailed, unbiased and unambiguous. It's not a new idea; a service like this has been available to travel agents for years. But this is a consumer play, one that's going toe-to-toe with one of the biggest review sites on the web.

Do they stand a chance? Well, it's inherently fraud-free, it provides detailed and comparable information, it makes it easy for me to reach a conclusion ... in short, what's not to like? Obviously, it's got to scale its coverage quickly, and that's not easy or cheap, but the content is compelling, trustworthy, definitive and let's not forget, proprietary. Monetization? Through hotel bookings tightly integrated with the content.

With all the focus on crowdsourcing and automation technology, maybe there is a place for good, old-fashioned human writing and editing after all!

Evidence-Based Selling

Rumors abound that Indian outsourcing giant Infosys is close
to a deal to acquire the healthcare information business of Thomson Reuters. If
the deal is in the $700+ million range as reported, it would be the largest
acquisition made to date by Infosys.

Has Infosys gotten religion about the content industry? It's
possible, but it seems to be the most immediate gain to Infosys would be a huge
boost to selling its existing services to healthcare organizations, primarily
in the United States.

I realize this may seem to be an odd stance for me to take.
After all, I have been one of the loudest proponents of the power of software
tools to increase the value of content, particularly data content. Indeed, many
of the most successful data publishers today are so successful because of their
strong and early embrace of integrated software tools. Yet as I think about it,
I see an interesting asymmetry: while data content companies clearly strengthen
themselves by developing software tools, it is not so clear that software
companies strengthen themselves by developing or acquiring data content.

Yes, Infosys can certainly boil some of the IT and editorial
costs out of the Thomson Reuters healthcare business, but that's hardly enough
reason to make such a large acquisition outside of its core competency.
Similarly, Infosys could arguably help the healthcare business get to market
faster with new platforms and new products. But if IT investment was truly all
that was holding back the healthcare group from certain growth, Thomson Reuters
is more than capable of making such investment.

What seems more likely is that Infosys wants to be a major player in the U.S. healthcare
industry, and the Thomson Reuters healthcare business buys it strong market presence,
entree and gravitas. With a mass of respected healthcare data and analysis,
Infosys will be in a position to not only identify problems, but solve them ...
and get paid for doing both.

Moreover, Infosys buys deep and trusted relationships within
the domestic healthcare industry, the ability to sell based on proprietary
knowledge, and at least some opportunity to bundle its data with the systems it
develops. It's all good for the goal of advancing the business of Infosys, but
it's not clearly so good for the goal of advancing its new healthcare data
business.

I say this because when Infosys gets into the healthcare
data business, that data business loses one of its key intangible strengths:
neutrality. Will the business be able to credibly continue its respected Top
100 Hospitals awards when Infosys is seeking multi-million contracts from these
same hospitals? Awkward. Can the healthcare business fairly evaluate electronic
health records systems when Infosys is developing same? Will analytical reports
citing various trends in healthcare start to be perceived as sales collateral
for Infosys? Indeed, can the healthcare business maintain a position of thought
leadership when its parent is actively selling big-ticket projects into the
same market?

Assuming this deal happens, maybe Infosys can pull it off
and make it work. But the path to accomplishing this means lots of independence
for the healthcare business, and the greater the independence, the less the
leverage for Infosys. We'll see how it plays out, but I think I am right in
saying that as a general rule, software sells data, but data doesn't sell
software.