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IIS Breakthrough Recap: 2013 Capital Markets Outlook for the Information Industry

February 5, 2013 By

Michael Thieberg, Consultant, Arche Value Management, Inc.

Written by Michael Thieberg, Consultant, Arche Value Management

Why does “smart” capital lag behind innovations in technology? This was the first question posed by Kevin Worth, CEO of The Deal, who moderated a panel of capital markets experts – research analysts, venture capitalists, private equity investors and M&A advisors to solicit their views on asset valuations and the financial outlook for the information services sector. Tolman Geffs, Co-President The Jordan, Edmiston Group acknowledged that while capital is smart in the long-term, it is not smart in the short-term. As the late 90s speculative dot-com bubble has taught us, advents in technology don’t necessarily manifest themselves into proven business models.

Consequently, although there are pockets of froth (e.g., Salesforce.com’s $689M acquisition of social media marketing platform Buddy Media), we’re in a buyer’s market with larger information publishers remaining fairly conservative in their M&A activities, says Geffs. This sentiment was further exemplified by RRE Ventures Co-Founder, Jim Robinson, who cited the buzz around Big Data, which has yet to materialize as a working business model, as a big idea in the sector that has yet to earn the faith of the capital markets.

With regard to asset valuations, there was an air of optimism amongst this group. According to Piper Jaffray & Co. Research Analyst Peter Appert, established publicly-traded information services companies will trade at a premium to the market due to attractive business model characteristics including top line visibility and predictability (due in part to subscription-based revenue models), operating leverage from scalable, data-rich platforms, strong cash flow generation and low capital intensity. With regard to debt financing, companies with least $10M of EBITDA, leverage equal to 3.5x -4.0x EBITDA is highly achievable says Geffs.

Ongoing access to capital and financing, strengthened balance sheets and divestiture activity will continue to fuel deal activity in 2013. M&A and strategic investments in emerging marketing automation companies is one area in particular which will be a focus for the information sector. There are definitely B2B opportunities for fee-based, curated, moderated social media, says Wayne Cooper of Greenhaven Partners, a private equity firm that invests in emerging information-based companies. Furthermore, social media will continue to impact on the sector in 2013. There isn’t a credible large organization that isn’t struggling with its social media strategy, says RRE’s Jim Robinson. Companies will be spending a lot of money on social media technologies and platforms to better understand the buying behavior of their constituents.

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Michael Thieberg
Michael Thieberg is a independent consultant at Arche Value Management (AVM), a corporate finance advisory firm. Mr. Thieberg has over 15 years of strategic financial management experience in corporate development, investment banking and private equity investing with industry expertise in the B2B information and marketing services sectors.

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IIS Breakthrough Recap: Forrester Research Predicts Technology Thunderstorms at the 2013 SIIA Summit

February 5, 2013 By

Written by Michael Thieberg, Consultant, Arche Value Management, Inc.

Michael Thieberg, Consultant, Arche Value Management, Inc.

George Colony, Chairman & CEO, Forrester Research, kicked off the 2013 SIIA Summit by prognosticating three “technology thunderstorms” social, business and demographic changes fueled by emerging technologies that will change the information industry in the near future. The occurrence of tectonic shifts is due to the fact that societal factors (e.g., capital markets, culture, talent) lag the growth rate of technology innovation. Every 7- 10 years, a new computing wave comes along personal computing (1980s), desktop internet computing (1990s), mobile internet computing (2000s) causing digestion issues when mass adoption finally catches up to technology. In order to survive these technology-led thunderstorms companies will need to evolve or risk becoming disrupted.

Thunderstorm #1: Death of the Web

Colony predicts the Web’s demise, becoming the “AM radio of digital” as performance improvement in processing power and storage capacity outpaces the growth rate in network speed. As a result, there has been an emergence in portable peripheral devices around the cloud (e.g., smartphones, tablets) that leverage the Internet and Apps, defining a new platform Forrester has coined the “App-Internet”, being led by Apple, Google and Amazon.

Thunderstorm #2: Enterprise Social

As the customer audience is changing, along with the workforce, large companies will need to embrace social media to enable better interaction and solve for that common denominator. Each generation show very different media consumption habits from its predecessor, but brands don’t understand the unique requirements of the younger age group (e.g., Generation Y: ages 18-28) including their preference for “multichannel” experiences including instant messaging, social networks and gamification. More importantly, senior management has little affinity with this demographic, as the average age of CEOs at the top 100 global companies is 59, according to Colony. So, instead of blocking social media in the workplace, companies need to espouse it, if they want to hire and retain a workforce that is predominantly Gen Y.

Thunderstorm #3: Mobile Engagement

The proliferation of mobile devices will to continue to grow in terms of processing power and sensors and is poised to become the de facto system of engagement for customers, partners and employees. To remain vital, enterprises’ current systems of record will need to be upgraded to become systems of engagement. Consumer behavior data will be captured by adaptive learning technologies and used for predictive analytics in “context-aware” apps to provide real-time insight on what the customer is going to need. Instead of launching applications, in the future, users preferred apps would alert them and make recommendations based on explicit preferences and past activities.

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Michael Thieberg

Michael Thieberg is a independent consultant at Arche Value Management (AVM), a corporate finance advisory firm. Mr. Thieberg has over 15 years of strategic financial management experience in corporate development, investment banking and private equity investing with industry expertise in the B2B information and marketing services sectors.

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IIS Breakthrough Recap: Titans of the New Information Order Chasing Each Other

February 5, 2013 By

Written by Deborah Richman, Consultant, Zions Bank

Deborah Richman, Consultant, Zions Bank

What do titans like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and possibly Twitter have in common? Of course, they offer platforms where users access and share content. As titans, they also aspire to become each other – while currently delivering different value from their platforms.

During the Information Industry Summit, key publisher and digital leaders offered clear-eyed views of these companies and their intrinsic rather than market value. “There are more interesting things than making a ton of money in the last quarter,” declared Esther Dyson, EDVentures principal.

The titans were not getting judged by form factors, such as the computing, mobile or operating systems. While that’s important to the companies and shareholders, the IIS leaders focused on how titans should improve their connections to users.

Sell people a mirror

Most of the titans know they should personalize their offerings and “show you what you didn’t know you wanted to know,” said David Kirkpatrick, Senior Technology & Internet Editor at Fortune. It comes down to algorithms based on their platforms.

Of course, Facebook leads in capturing social connections and friend links. Google is trying to keep up through its own G+ social circle. Yet they are challenged by defining relevant content. Friend or content sources may be throttled or controlled through personalized Facebook feeds or Google search results.

Will the titans succeed in selling mirrors? Will these mirrors show relevant content and connections? Esther Dyson wondered “how far these companies can go before they start annoying their customers.”

Use commercial insights

Google, Apple and Amazon bring powerful, highly-scaled advantages due to their search, shopping and/or buying functions. Google’s search and online advertising hegemony not only creates value for consumers and businesses, but also keeps those shopping behaviors tight to its vest.

Meanwhile, Apple and Amazon bring their own online retailing powers. Apple makes so-called razor sales, offering media and other apps through its operating system. Amazon makes money from its blade sales, along with enterprise efforts. It will be interesting to see how these titans take further advantage of their “big data” capabilities regarding buyers, products and services, and credit cards.

Future of the titans

All the titans grew with their founders at the helm. While some, like Apple and Microsoft, have next generations in charge, Amazon, Facebook and Google are run by their founder entrepreneurs.

Dyson voiced her concerns about the titans’ abilities, explaining “they’re all really badly managed inside.” By contrast, Forbes CEO Michael Perlis felt the titans would continue “making each other better. They all have aspirations to [become] each other.”

Thomas Glocer, ex-Thomson Reuters, wasn’t sure how the titans would work together or with other content providers in the future. He asked, “who’s in front, behind, the Trojan horse?”

Impact on publishers

Perlis, from Forbes, explained that consumers aren’t that interested in who wins. As a publisher, he has different content distribution or advertising relationships with all the titans. “We have experienced collapse, avoided relapse [and] don’t relax. You can’t just coast,” he cautioned.

Glocer shared his concern about living “in a world at multiple speeds including repressive regimes, and platforms. I do worry about the lowest common denominator where the platforms [have] content geared for wherever.”

“Everyone will have to constantly re-evaluate paths,” said Fortune’s Kirkpatrick. “The pace of change requires every [publishing] company to think of themselves like a software company. Be unbelievably curious and not afraid.”

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Debby Richman spent her formative years at D&B, leading the reference business from print to online and web offerings. She has since held digital leadership roles at Overstock, About.com, Looksmart, Starz, Collarity and Zions Bank.

 

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IIS Breakthrough Recap: Content Dethroned By Technology

February 5, 2013 By

Deborah Richman, Consultant, Zions Bank

Written by Deborah Richman, Consultant, Zions Bank

At the Information Industry Summit’s crossfire session, experts agreed on one thing: content is no longer king. Gone are the days when business information was controlled by a few, stable, necessary sources delivering to ever-loyal customers. Here’s how the experts view technology’s destabilizing force:

  • “Technology is extremely critical, and content is what you have to have,” said Andy Prozes, senior advisor at Warburg Pincus.
  • John Hartig, CEO of Sports Information Group believes the industry’s in “hand-to-hand combat” between offering relevant data and leveraging technology.
  • Our business is now about “peaks and troughs and rapid cycles of developments,” explained Stephen Ryden-Lloyd, SVP at Innodata.
  • Denzil Rankine, executive chairman at AMR International, declared “you have to have a CEO who gets it and understands technology.”
  • “Is technology endlessly complicating the business model?” asked Dan McCarthy, a DeSilva+Phillips partner. Yes, indeed.

 

The “new normal” challenges

Depending on your marketplace and customers, there are different ways to integrated content, commerce and technology. Still, these “new normal” challenges need to be addressed.

Technical DNA here: Perhaps the largest challenge relates to having or injecting technical DNA in the company. If your company began life as pure-content business, then new executives will need to help evolve the business and culture. Companies must be willing to invest in technology, functionality and people.

Continuous product cycles: It’s not possible to roll out a product and sit back for a year or two anymore. You must understand road maps and agile releases, to be responsive to the market. You also must stay abreast of technology platforms, with the right partners. And whether you “make or buy,” remember to budget for R&D and development.

To workflow or not workflow: Information will get distributed through multiple workflow systems used by your customers. You could work closely with customers to integrate into their workflows or develop more standard applications familiar to them. If appropriate, you might be able to focus on outcomes rather than workflows.

The information industry will thrive

The information industry is still growing and attracting new entrants and sources. It is still undergoing a massive transition, due to game-changing digital technologies accessible to publishers and customers.

“This will remain an attractive market,” explained AMR’s Denzil Rankine. “A trend is that it is a tougher to be alone, as a sole supplier to the market. More entrants, providers will have a downward pressure on margin.”

Innodata’s Stephen Ryden-Llloyd observed the competitive pressures:  “Authority can come from multiple places today.  Also from social networks or wisdom of the crowds. There’s a huge degree of cleverness, opportunity” in the marketplace.

“But if you build new tech, the growth rates are there,” declared Warburg’s Andy Prozes.

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Debby Richman spent her formative years at D&B, leading the reference business from print to online and web offerings. She has since held digital leadership roles at Overstock, About.com, Looksmart, Starz, Collarity and Zions Bank.

 

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IIS Breakthrough Recap: Now That Is Big Data

February 5, 2013 By

Written by Deborah Richman, Consultant, Zions Bank

Deborah Richman, Consultant, Zions Bank

“We just had our 10 petabyte party,” declared Brewster Kahle, to Information Industry Summit attendees this week. Universal access to all knowledge may sound like a pipe dream, yet Kahle and his Internet Archive team have been doggedly pursuing this goal and using up petabytes to collect, digitize and share content.

The Internet Archive is best known for creating the de-facto web historical repository. Since 1996, Kahle’s team has visited “every page on every web site, every two weeks.” There are more than 240 billion URLs in the archive today. For better or worse, anyone may access them at the WayBack Machine.

Fortunately web tools and sources have improved, and Kahle also relies on others to help. At this point, there are some 1,700 curated collections from 200 places included in the archives. “Personal digital archives are next,” says Kahle. “But our stuff is all over the place. And things are gone.”

It’s more than websites

The archive.org team, comprised of 150 staffers, has been making books, audio, video and TV news available at a dizzying rate. Kahle reported on archival progress for SIIA members:

  • Books: 3mm e-books, 500k for blind and 300k modern e-books.
  • Audio: 1mm items in 100 collections, including 100k concerts from 5k bands.
  • Video: 2 – 3k movies, plus industrial, educational, other specialty films.
  • TV news: 20 channels collected since 2000, and TV news for three years.

The Internet Archive sidesteps copyright issues by behaving like a library consortium. Libraries and individuals are free to make their multimedia collections available online. Then patrons, aka site visitors, are able to view unrestricted materials or check out others from the holdings.

No modern-day industry titans, like Andrew Carnegie, have come forth and made this digital access dream come true. Instead, a non-profit organization filled with dreamers and technologists have been knocking down access barriers to digitized content for two decades. It’s pretty sweet.

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Debby Richman spent her formative years at D&B, leading the reference business from print to online and web offerings. She has since held digital leadership roles at Overstock, About.com, Looksmart, Starz, Collarity and Zions Bank.

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IIS Breakthrough Talk Recap: Incubating Innovation

February 5, 2013 By

Written by Ric Camacho, Chief Strategy Officer, MyCollegePrice

Ric Camacho, Chief Strategy Officer, MyCollegePrice

How do large, established institutions foster innovation and significantly encourage the growth of the start-up community in their area?

Well one way is to take Cornell University’s high profile approach of pouring millions of dollars into a new technology campus in NYC. The other is NYU-Poly’s incubator approach. “It’s more art than science”, according to Steve Kuyan, executive director of the NYU-Poly Incubator Initiatives. Kuyan gave a brief talk on NYU-Poly’s initiative to kickstart innovation at the 2013 Information Industry Summit in New York last week. At the heart of New York’s burgeoning start-up environment, NYU-Ploy’s formula offers a combination of mentorship, educational resources, access to capital and industry leaders, community and physical “ecosystem” along with a healthy dose of “celebration and inspiration.”

The NYU-Poly Incubator Initiatives is one of the large number of university-based organizations around the country that seek to encourage and capitalize on the growth of technology. According to the National Business Incubation Association, fully one-third of the business incubators around the United States are associated with universities. The incubator initiative at NYU-Poly has been successful in helping over 20 companies in the past three years raise significant venture funding. According to to Kuyan, with as little as $3 million in investment, the incubators initiative has had over $200 million of economic impact and this is expected to grow to just under $1 billion by 2015. That’s no mean feat for a relatively new endeavor within a start-up environment — New York City — that, although going from strength to strength, has numerous initiatives clamoring for investment and capital.

NYU-Poly’s approach promotes the idea of “innovation anywhere” emphasizing the importance of the right physical environment and access to tools while also imposing some discipline around process and procedures and meeting metrics and milestone expectations–all in an effort to channel creativity and innovation.

In the end, Kuyan believes that their approach is key to lending validation and credibility to entrepreneurial start-ups. In the end, they are critical to accelerating and harnessing innovation. “All entrepreneurs today face similar problems”, according to Kuyan, and NYU-Poly’s success can be attributed in part to meeting their very basic needs.

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Ric Camacho

Ric has held senior product and management positions at a number of start-ups as well as at Reuters Media and Dow Jones. Most recently he was GM at Vitals, a NYC area-based Health 2.0 start-up, and headed up its B2B segment that delivered tools, technology and digital marketing services to the health provider market. Currently Ric is working on strategy and business development work for MyCollegePrice, an education innovator providing analysis and forecasting tools for the college advisory market.

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IIS Breakthrough recap: CEOsThe Key Catalysts for Innovation

February 5, 2013 By

Written by Ric Camacho, Chief Strategy Officer, MyCollegePrice

Chief Strategy Officer, MyCollegePrice

Closing out the 2013 SIIA Information Industry Summit was a rather interesting roundtable on the importance of the CEO to change and innovation in enterprise. David Reimer, CEO at Merryck & Co. moderated with the participation of Nina Link, former CEO at both the Children’s Television Workshop and the Magazine Publishers Association as well as Merrill Brown, Director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University.

Although billed as a discussion around the critical role of the CEO, much of the discussion centered around the challenges of large “legacy” companies acquiring and integrating innovative smaller companies. Both participants emphasized the challenge of corporate culture and how big legacy companies repeatedly stifle the sought after innovation – one of the principle reasons for an acquisition – as they often subsume the acquired company within a company where innovation is alien and change isn’t necessarily the overarching mode of operations. Link emphasized that importance of running parallel operational tracks – in essence leaving the acquired company alone – so that innovative practices can be absorbed by the larger entity – admittedly a tall order.

Brown indicated that significant and systemic changes often need to and should be adopted by the legacy company and in particular, these companies often need to adopt the perspectives and working culture of the smaller entity around things such as product strategy and development and the myriad of marketing and other activities that surround that endeavor.

Both Link and Brown thought the CEO had to be at the heart of these changes and foster an atmosphere of change within the organization while also pushing the agenda at the board level. Interestingly, Link thought it was hugely important to co-opt outside industry leadership in support of an CEO – led innovation initiative at the board level to give those efforts gravitas and integrity and to help navigate around potential resistance.

One of the trickier issues was raised by Brown. He indicated that one of the significant challenges in legacy organizations is the empowerment of change agents, particularly in companies where generational shifts in expertise and digital competence were at the core of the necessary change. Oftentimes, he said, a company’s first reaction to revenue pressures is to downsize and let go new, young talent with little seniority – talent which generally holds the keys to overall change, new thinking and innovation. Companies need to rethink their efforts in this regard and CEOs need to spearhead the management of this change.

One important shift in corporate governance that Merrill brown has seen in recent years is a greater willingness of corporate boards to provide better executive incentives to support innovation and move away from the quarter-by-quarter goals that often militate against risk-taking and innovation. Only time will tell whether this shift truly takes hold and provides a significant boost and support to C-suite behavior in that direction.

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Ric has held senior product and management positions at a number of start-ups as well as at Reuters Media and Dow Jones. Most recently he was GM at Vitals, a NYC area-based Health 2.0 start-up, and headed up its B2B segment that delivered tools, technology and digital marketing services to the health provider market. Currently Ric is working on strategy and business development work for MyCollegePrice, an education innovator providing analysis and forecasting tools for the college advisory market.

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