Reportlinker's blog : Web 3.0, Vertical Search, Information Industry and Market Research News

Sunday 3 June 2007

10 years of market research aggregation : history

By Nicolas on Sunday 3 June 2007, 19:13 - Market Research Aggegators

Private market reports publishers sales forces have a lot of choice in their e-business strategy: Banners, press articles, interview... they are using classical marketing tools to generate traffic and sales over the Internet.

But for few years, they also sign distribution agreements with a new kinds of distributors : market research aggregators. What’s a market research aggregator ? What are the characteristics of that market ? What’s its history ? today’s situation ? future ? Who are the leaders ?

We are in this business for 6 years. And have seen so many new incomers ! We propose you to discover this market today through different papers and interviews we will post in the coming weeks.

What's a market research aggregator ?

The aggregator is an intermediary between off the shelves market research publishers, such as Datamonitor, and clients. They are the most famous indirect e-channel sales for market research publishers..

Their business model is based on commission given by publishers on each sales. No fix fees, only success ! To multiply the occasion of sales, they gather as many reports as possible, on different industry, players, countries… For an aggregator : Catalog = Content, Content = Traffic, Traffic = Commission

We estimate that 200 000 multi-clients reports are available online. But few publishers providing deep catalog on the market : Datamonitor, Euromonitor or IDC are the most famous. All of these use the aggregator channel to distribute their industry reports.

Thus, leading aggregators share almost the same catalog. And nowadays, their only tangible difference is the language in which the user interface is translated. Aggregator now exist in English, French, Spanish, German, Korean….

Market Characteristics

The entry barriers on the market are really low, which explain the multiplication (proliferation ??) of new comers. Anyone can open a website, sign few agreement and begin to sell worldwide. Skills required are distance selling knowledge, and a dash of good sense

Publishers offer’s is really atomised. If a very large number of publishers sell industry reports, few of them are global, large and famous ! This last have developed specific part of their organization towards aggregator (ex : licensees manager), and specific offers too. Publishers conditions to enter an aggregator catalog are quite basic : warranty about marketing operation (ex : Call Center), and safe financial situation

The clients are potentially any organisation looking for information on market, competitors, products …. The benefits of using aggregator is double : - simplify their search - simplify ordering process, especially in case of multiple reports acquisition

If we had to make a typology, we could share clients between - Industry focused professional o They regularly look for information on a single industry, their company core market. Usually, they are working as marketing or sales manager - Multi-industries players o They look for information on a number of industry, their company is selling services to different markets. Obvious examples are consulting firm, banks, VC…. - Administration and Governmental organisation

We will publish next week the second chapter of this paper, and will then present the competitive landscape and the most important event that occurs for 10 years

Friday 1 June 2007

SLA 2007 Begins on Sunday

By Nicolas on Friday 1 June 2007, 19:19 - Industry Agenda

The Special Libraries Association Annual Conference begins this Sunday in Denver. The organizer offer this year to the attendees the opportunity to listen to Vice President Al Gore (Opening General Session Speaker) !

The event can be follow over the Internet on Infotoday's blog..

Thursday 31 May 2007

An Interview of Reportlinker CEO

By Nicolas on Thursday 31 May 2007, 22:24 - Reportlinker in the press

Decideurstv interviewed Benjamin Carpano last week. Ben gives its vision of Reportlinker, explains here how our search engine works, where the reports comes from, how to access the service... Interview is enclosed, for French speaker only. By the way, Horizon Entrepreneurs presents on their blog an interesting summary of the interview.

one attachment

Wednesday 23 May 2007

I-expo 2007 tries to save the French information industry !

By Nicolas on Wednesday 23 May 2007, 17:00 - Industry Agenda

Worldwide Information industry : $ 365 billion in 2006, $ 458 billion in 2009 ? French information industry less than $ 2 billion in 2006 !!!

If the Information Industry plays a strategic role worldwide, its importance on the French market is clearly limited. - Financial market information player is a strongly consolidated industry (Thomson Corp takes Reuters over for more than $17 B) !!! - Coface is the only international player. The French giant bought this week Dafaslien, a French database weighting less than 1 M€ of revenues. - Information is key in Competitive Intelligence market, French players provide services and software - Scientific and medical information ??? No French actor among leaders.

Many explanation can be given to this situation. The language barrier is the most obvious : French language information service are rarely used outside France And the limited potential of this market pushes French information industry specialists to launch services in English, as Reportlinker does.

In this singular landscape, one of the most important event will open its doors in less than a month. I-expo will gather 6000 visitors (!!) among 70 exhibitors between the 12 and 14 of June.

Workshop are organised beside the show, and one can be really interesting to French information industry players : "Climate change? Market & Technological Forces that will impact the Professional Information Industry over the Next Five Years" This conference aims at analysing the future evolution of the industry. Speakers are Anglo Saxons specialists. The smallest of the warranty attendees can have !

Conference on Wednesday the 13th of June 2007, 14h30-16h00, Salle Dürer.

Tuesday 22 May 2007

Inforum 2007 begins on Tuesday

By Nicolas on Tuesday 22 May 2007, 17:44 - Industry Agenda

The 13th annual conference of INFORUM that deals with professional electronic information resources for research, development, education and business purposes will be held from May 22 to May 24, 2007 in Prague.

Since 2003 the original territorial focus on the Czech Republic and Slovakia has been expanded to the other Central and Eastern European countries and it has become the main event in this field in the region. The conference is attended especially by information professionals from special and public libraries, private corporations and state agencies, IT managers, physicians, lawyers, university teachers and students.

Friday 18 May 2007

Informa takes Datamonitor over

By Nicolas on Friday 18 May 2007, 17:36 - Information Industry Deals

The market research industry is quickly changing ( and consolidating) this last weeks !

Two weeks after aggregators, (We made a post recently regarding the acquisition of Profound - TBI by Marketresearch), two publishers are making the headlines today.

Informa takes Datamonitor over, for the humble sum of $ 1 billion ! Whouou!!! Well, we can consider that Datamonitor business model is stable, that a important part of their revenues are based on subscription (if anyone can give us more information about that, we would really appreciate !!)

Synergy must be really significant between these two organisations to reach such a price. Here are two of them that seems obvious to me : - Both of them are targeting Fortunes 500 companies - They are not covering the same industries

If you are publishing or distributing industry reports, keep a eye on our blog ! We will keep you informed about next operations. And do you know what ? I bet this will involve web 3.0 information specialists, such as Reportlinker….

Monday 14 May 2007

Entreprise Search Summit begins on Monday

By Nicolas on Monday 14 May 2007, 21:09 - Industry Agenda

ENTERPRISE SEARCH SUMMIT is a highly intense, in-depth, 2-day conference that covers how to develop, implement and enhance cutting-edge internal search capabilities. I ENTERPRISE SEARCH SUMMIT targets information manager or IT or search professional.

During this two days, on specific conference can be really interesting : "In Search of the Next Google: The Upstart Panel" Since 2004, venture capitalists have poured more than $350 million into almost 80 Internet search startups. Many are convinced they can become the next Google of consumer search, or that they can challenge the leaders in the enterprise and site search space. Hear directly from several of these “upstarts,” and get an inside glimpse how they are pushing into the next generation of search technology.

Friday 11 May 2007

Irish researcher annonunce super-fast RDF search engine

By Nicolas on Friday 11 May 2007, 18:14 - Web 3.0

A super-fast RDF search engine have been developed in Ireland. At least, that's what we can read from Electric News.

Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI (Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute) is definitely enthusiastic about its team work. The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated. These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links. The technology also allows us to combine information from the web, for example the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them.

By the way, what is RDF ??? Wikipedia gives the following definition : Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling information, through a variety of syntax formats.

RDF is often used for disseminating news article summaries and sharing weblog content. So this technologies will be able to gather information from deep web, link them together, and brong more sense to each piece of information, , as Reportlinkler does.

We are quite impatient to see how this technology will change the semantic search engine landscape. We will keep an eye on it !

Wednesday 9 May 2007

Reuters To Takeover ClearForest : Unstructured Content Technologies Are Hot !

By Ben on Wednesday 9 May 2007, 00:19 - Information Industry Deals

Web 3.0

Reuters acquisition of ClearForest highlights value for unstructured content technologies. The post published by Shore Communications gives more details regarding this deal.

Reuters' acquisition of ClearForest follows another very recent deal we already talked about in this blog : Salesforce takeover of Koral. It shows the interest of big industry players such as Reuters for unstructured content technologies and emphizes the new era of Web 3.0 is really on its way.

ClearForest is one of the pioneers of mining content from Web sites, weblogs ... and other sources for businesses seeking to make sense of the flow of content that doesn't reside in neatly structured databases. ClearForest's mining and semantic analysis techniques allow unstructured content to tell tales that can lead to faster evaluation of financial opportunities, customer support issues and other mission-critical functions.

Tuesday 8 May 2007

Benjamin CARPANO, CEO

By Ben on Tuesday 8 May 2007, 23:20 - About Authors

In charge of operations and product development for 6 years, Benjamin cofounded Ubiquick in 2001. He is responsible for strategy, product road map and day to day operations.

Benjamin earned a MBA in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Bordeaux Business School.

Prior to cofounded Ubiquick, Benjamin hold a position of Product Development Manager at Ciao.com an internet start-up focused on consumer reviews. Prior to this, he was consultant in Strategic management services at Ernst & Young.