"Trends in business information, provision and use"
By Pam Foster
The VIP publications, VIP and VIP Eye
concerned with the business information industry - its products, its
providers and its users. An overview of their content for the last
quarter of 2004 reveals that it was an active period for forging
alliances, as well as for buying and selling information companies.
New product development was mainly centred on company information
services, as well as mobile technology. Significantly, the influence
of Google increased, following news of its project to digitise library
content, and the launch of Google Scholar and Google Desktop Search.
New mergers, acquisitions and alliances
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The last quarter of 2004 saw a number of companies involved in M&A
activity. Additionally, a number of new alliances were forged and
others were ended.
Bureau van Dijk was acquired by Candover, a London-based private
equity house. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed and Bureau van Dijk
has yet to make an official statement. A statement from Candover said:
'The key attractions of the investment for Candover were BvD's
specialised products with strong brand recognition and leading market
shares, its substantial growth opportunities and its highly
experienced management team'.
In October, Hemscott strengthened its position as an information
provider by buying bigdough, a provider of US and European information
on institutional fund managers, analysts and journalists. Not only
will bigdough's proprietary information expand Hemscott's data
resource, but its software applications will also enable the company
to launch complementary products and services across the enlarged
group. The acquisition was Hemscott's second purchase of a US
information provider during 2004. A couple of months earlier, it
acquired CoreData, a provider of North American company financial
data.
In order to concentrate on its online products, LexisNexis UK sold
more than 600 of its print-based legal and tax titles to Tottel
Publishing. The titles included books, loose-leaf works, journals and
newsletters, as well as the entire Irish list and many of the titles
published by LexisNexis UK in Scotland. Tottel Publishing is a new
venture, established by Jim Smith, the former UK publishing director
of LexisNexis. In 2003, LexisNexis sold its academic list to Oxford
University Press.
Pearson sold its stake in Spanish newspapers fuelling speculation that
it may withdraw from newspaper publishing altogether in order to
concentrate on its more lucrative and successful education division.
Recoletos, the Spanish media group and part of the FT Group, has been
sold to Retos Cartera, a consortium of Spanish investors. Recoletos
owns the Marca and Expansion newspapers. Some industry watchers are
suggesting that the loss-making Financial Times newspaper could be the
next to go. VIP Eye will be closely monitoring the activities of
Pearson over the coming months.
Dow Jones bought MarketWatch for approximately $519 million.
MarketWatch provides business news, financial information and
analytical tools, plus it maintains two free advertising supported web
sites, MarketWatch.com and BigCharts.com. It also operates MarketWatch
Information Services group which licenses market news, data,
investment analysis tools and other online applications. MarketWatch
will be integrated into the Dow Jones Consumer Electronic Publishing
business which comprises The Wall Street Journal Online.
anacubis withdrew its product line in order to undertake a review of
its businesses and technologies, with a view to merging the anacubis
and i2 product lines. The company is a division of the UK
headquartered i2 Group and, to date, both companies have sold
different products, with different feature sets. anacubis believes a
merger will create a more powerful and feature rich product. anacubis
products enable users to retrieve, consolidate and analyse information
from information vendors, web sites, enterprise databases and
spreadsheets, within a visual interface. The November issue of VIP
includes an item from Greg Coyle, General Manager of anacubis who
writes on how the information mountain can be turned into actionable
business intelligence via the use of visualisation tools.
Factiva ended its alliance with IBM Web Fountain. The companies were
co-developing a text analytics product, Factiva Insight for
Reputation, which aims to monitor Factiva's news content and web pages
for mentions of a company and its competitors, and any issues that
might affect a company's reputation. Factiva decided to look for
alternative technologies following IBM's inability to provide the
currency that the product required. Factiva says that it is still
committed to research and development in the areas of text mining and
visualisation, i.e. displaying results via charts and other graphics
which help users grasp trends and patterns from large quantities of
data. Factiva and IBM will continue to work together on other
projects.
OneSource was busy signing up new content providers, following
D&B's withdrawal of its data from the Business Browser products. To
date, agreements have been signed with six new data providers for the
European and Asia-Pacific regions. The company claims that the new
content will provide its customers with a 10% increase in global
company coverage and a 20% increase in executive coverage. Further
details of the six information companies can be found in VIP Eye, No.
21, 11 November 2004.
Company information dominates new product development
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The majority of notable products launched in the last quarter of 2004
were concerned with company information. The most important of these
are from Bureau van Dijk, OneSource and Hoover's.
Bureau van Dijk launched INVIEW, a new global equity ownership
product. It combines data from Heale Financial with BvD software to
offer a global analysis of equity-holding investment funds and the
quoted companies in which they invest. The INVIEW data also provides
fund information and contact details for individual fund managers.
More information on the new product, together with a profile of Heale
Financial, is available in VIP Eye, No. 23, 9 December 2004. An
in-depth review of INVIEW will be published in VIP later this year.
OneSource made available the first of a new wave of information
modules that employ pattern recognition and linguistic technologies to
extract hard-to-find information from unstructured text reports and
web sites. The company claims that it is the first business
information service to employ content mining technologies that can
extract data from analysts' reports and other resources, company web
sites and online HTML pages. Two new add-ons, Company Insights and
Executive Insights, are available as part of the Global Business
Browser product. Company Insights provides insights into the strategic
initiatives, strengths and weaknesses of major publicly-traded
companies, while Executive Insights provides fielded information on
over 400,000 VP and director-level contacts. OneSource plans to launch
UK versions of Company and Executive Insights later this year. Both
will be reviewed in VIP as soon as they are made available.
Investment by Hoover's parent D&B led to the re-launch of a new
Hoover's UK site and a new premium product, Hoover's UK Pro Premium.
The new service provides information on more than 40,000 of the
world's most influential companies; basic D&B data on 1.7 million UK
companies; D&B's database of 90,000 companies worldwide; and detailed
records on 560,000 UK companies. In line with the new developments,
Gehan Talwatte has returned to manage Hoover's UK. Gehan Talwatte was
previously CEO of PowerInfo, a position he moved to following the
closure of the Hoover's UK office over three years ago. VIP will be
carrying a review of Hoover's UK Pro Premium product later this year.
Information providers taking advantage of mobile technology
-----------------------------------------------------------
Information providers are increasingly taking advantage of mobile
technology. Three well known providers - LexisNexis, Dow Jones and
Yell - have all recently developed new mobile services.
Legal Updater, from LexisNexis, provides tailored email alerts for the
UK legal community. Alerts on judgements, legislation and regulations
on pre-selected subject areas, together with corresponding news
analysis, are received daily, twice daily or weekly on the user's PC
or Blackberry by 7.00 am every morning.
Dow Jones NewsWires are now available on hand held devices throughout
Europe. Financial professionals can select real-time Dow Jones news
covering specific asset classes in their preferred language: English,
French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian or Dutch. Additionally,
MarketStream users are able to access the premium Dow Jones Economic
Alerts service, which informs them of market-moving Treasury
announcements as they happen.
Yell.com Mobile provides information on approximately two million UK
shops and businesses, accessible via mobile phones. Additionally, the
service offers full colour street maps, and walking and driving
directions from where the user is located.
Google becoming even more mainstream
------------------------------------
The impact of Google is becoming even more mainstream following the
launch of Google Scholar and Google Desktop Search, together with the
news that it is to work with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the
University of Michigan, the University of Oxford and the New York
Public Library, to digitally scan books from their collections so that
users worldwide can search them in Google.
Google Desktop Search has now been launched in the UK and rest of
Europe, and is available in 28 languages. Aimed at companies,
universities and government agencies, it enables organisations to
deliver Google-type search results on intranets and pubic web sites.
Google Scholar, which is still only available in beta mode, enables
users to search specifically for scholarly literature, including
peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and
technical reports. Articles will be available from a wide variety of
academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and
universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
These are significant developments, and VIP will feature in-depth
items on Google Desktop Search and Google Scholar later this year.
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Pam Foster has been actively involved in the business information
industry as a writer and reviewer for nearly 20 years. She previously
played a major role in Headland Business Information since its
inception, as editor of its newsletters and directories. More
recently, she has acted as a consultant to several large information
companies. In December 2003, she became editor of FreePint's
subscription-based products, VIP and VIP Eye.
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