Please join us at the 2012 Information Industry Summit, taking place January 24-25 in NYC.

Check out our 2011 Highlights

The Future of the Content Industry: Keep ahead of trends by watching these brief videos to hear what these thought-leaders have to say about future of the industry.
CODiE Award Winners: Find out which companies were selected as having the year's best products/services. View our red-carpet interviews with award winners.
Press Coverage: Check out the coverage received for this year's Summit.
Attendee List: You’ll find an impressive roster of industry executives representing all facets of the paid B2B content industry.
Speakers: View our roster of speakers.
Testimonials: Why should you plan to attend next year’s Summit? Find out what some of this year’s attendees had to say.

Summit News

Registration Now Open for the 2014 Information Industry Summit (IIS)

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:24

There is a reason that IIS is called the summit for information industry leaders, IIS explores breakthrough strategies, ideas, case studies and tactics to help them lead their information companies. It draws leaders from media, publishing and information services companies as well as the technology, private equity and other organizations serving them, including:

CEOs, COOs, Presidents, and Division Heads of global and mid-sized information, publishing and media companies,
Managing Partners from top private equity firms, and
CEOs of emerging companies transforming our industry

We just opened up registration and I welcome everyone� to reserve their spot now at the Summit.� This year will be a bit unique in that NYC will be a LOT busier than usual due to an event on February 2^nd in the NYC/NJ area.� �So, if ever there was a year to reserve your Summit tickets early as well as�get your plane tickets hotel room early (while they are still cheap and available) , this is the year to do it!� We have already reserved room blocks at TWO separate hotels in anticipation of the lack of Hotel space.� And, we have already made reservations for dinners a number of NYC venues for IIS attendees�in anticipation of lack of availability that week.

Here are some key links:

I look forward to seeing you in January.

� Kathy Greenler Sexton is Vice President and General Manager for the SIIA Content Division. Follow the Content Division team on Twitter at @SIIAContent

SIPAlert Daily: Industry Outlook Panel Yields Words to Thrive By

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:55

“How far can companies go before they annoy their users?” asked Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, at last week’s Breakthrough: IIS 2013 Conference in New York. That question came up amid a discussion about information at a session titled Titans of the New Information Order. With Facebook’s new Search Graph, Google’s deeper searches and other initiatives based on user data, will the time come where people say the loss of privacy is not worth the enhanced information they can get?

Of all things, a quote from a hockey player set the tone for the discussion. “A good hockey player plays where the puck is,” Wayne Gretzky once said. “A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

Michael Perlis, president and CEO of Forbes Media agreed but said, “It is getting harder to follow the puck. Globalization is really important right now; it’s a big, big marketplace. You have to do more than just put your content out there; you have to create content that can carry your brand’s name. We’re doing that, creating high-quality content with a core professional team, digital and print.”

Perlis added that they also developed a contributor model in order to be more cost-effective about creating content (freelancers vs. full-time) and do a better job of getting social comments. Dyson noted that what LinkedIn has started doing is interesting. “They now have a bunch of bloggers,” she said. “Endorsing people, generating traffic.” Perlis said that everyone is trying to “find the right way to do it.”

“There are many different ways you [can] dole out the same content,” said David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect. He said that what distinguishes Apple and Amazon right now is all the credit card information they have. “Amazon has more approaches, [however] and there are problems dealing with Apple. Amazon will be much more flexible.” He credited that to CEO Jeff Bezos. “He runs paranoid more than anyone – he’s unbelievably energetic to avoid the next pitfall.”

How’s that for a compliment? Perlis, on the other hand, kind of liked the idea of heading into the unknown. “There’s no playbook for where we’re going,” he said. “With it comes worry and triumph.” Referrals are driving “an enormous amount of traffic,” from both search and social,” he added. (See the article on how to get referrals in the January Hotline.)
Speaking of searches, technology reared its multifaceted head often in the discussion. “The pace of change today requires every company to think of themselves as a technology company,” Kirkpatrick said. “[You need to] immerse yourself in technology. [I've] seen way too many examples of stasis that was avoidable, fear of technology and fear of getting yourself dirty. The New York Times had research that most companies are not technological enough, and if you aren’t you won’t be here [for long].”

Thomas Glocer, the former CEO of Thomson Reuters, preferred to talk about content. (He also joked that he’s “gone from managing 55,000 employees to 2, and my goal is to have the same cash flow.”) “Content has found varied forms to showcase, but it’s really hard to showcase crap content,” he said.

“High-value content has legs where I sit,” said Kirkpatrick. “[Now] combine that with point of view. That’s what I’m trying to do-using sponsorships.”

“Both of you have talked about creating value,” Dyson said. “The most important thing is that you have to be nimble. Fluid, dynamic businesses have to be clever. Implementation counts as much as strategy today. You can control your pricing but you can’t control pricing of competitors.”

“Nimble” was an interesting word to use because David Foster, CEO of SIPA member BVR, had just recently emphasized to me the importance of “technological nimbleness for digital publishers” where solutions are integrated and disparate software work together.

Glocer also took on the subject but preferred to separate B2B from B2C. “The advantage of the professional information world,” he said, “is that it moves more slowly than the consumer world. It’s a slightly slower perch, but ultimately it’s not just content. [You need] to better filter it, have ways of personalizing it, understand the workflow of your clients, and give them tools to make it easier to fit into their workflow. The consumer world is different; it’s hard to know exactly what they’re doing.”

Dyson said that she also sees “two very different businesses: content for consumption and real investigative reporting. The thing that hasn’t been mentioned is getting your people to do whatever it is [that will work], motivating and finding the right people, running a team. Running a business is really hard. In reality, most might have great vision,” but who are the ones doing something about it?

Perlis summed up things nicely. “We’ve all experienced the collapse and the relapse, and now we can’t relax,” he said. “In the next three years, we may never get to a place where we can coast. Relaxation is out unfortunately.”

Ronn Levine began his career covering sports for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering diversity and Newspaper in Education (NIE), before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor.

IIS Breakthrough Recap: Using Big Data to Build Prognostication Capabilities

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 01:01

Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

In a back stage interview, Factual Inc. CEO Gil Elbaz and Cortera Inc. CEO Jim Swift discuss the drivers and requirements to build a Big Data capability plan.

By Marie Giangrande, Public Notions

Tracking Behaviors Fuel Big Data
“It’s all about tracking events and behaviors in order to improve the accuracy of your decision making” asserts Cortera CEO Jim Swift. Cortera produces credit worthiness rankings from tracking the purchases and payments that a Company conducts. “When evaluating companies it’s good to hear what they are saying, but most important is to see their actual behaviors; tracking actual payments and purchases, for example will give a more accurate prediction of a company’s credit worthiness” continues Swift. Factual’s CEO, Gil Elbaz, agrees: “People expect and need the context to correctly interpret data… stitching together the facts and illustrating the backdrop is what Big Data is all about.” Factual offers a path for companies to source external data, enrich their own data and incorporate a variety of new data sets.

Prognostication Capabilities – The Next Competitive Battle
Behavioral targeting has been used extensively by online companies to target advertisements. Now, this concept is gaining broader appeal as a long term competitive advantage enabling Information Companies to match their content to their client’s workflow and distribution preferences. Companies can use behavior tracking to build predictions about client preferences, to identify partnerships and to develop value added services.

The pursuit of prognostication capabilities has a tremendous consequence: It redefines the importance of data in an organization. It puts an emphasis on data management capabilities. Can I handle streaming data from Twitter feeds or social media outlets? Is a ‘just in time approach’ to data collection needed? Can I enrich my data in order to monetize it? Is the data accurate and extensible?

The Strategic Information Spine

“A lot of companies are living with inefficient collection and maintenance of data. They ignore missing data and inaccurate data because they do not associate the underlying data to their ability to compete” comments Factual’s CEO, Gil Elbaz.

However, as soon as executives link their ability to compete with the value and accuracy of their data, the ROI presents itself. “It’s like an Information Spine” reflects Cortera’s CEO, Swift.”For information companies, the core stream of data is the spine and off this, hangs all their products and services.” The implication is that a company’s ability to compete will come back to the design, sourcing, accuracy and strategic health ‘of the spine’.

An Asset or Liability?

As firms embrace the use of big data for a competitive advantage, it changes all the questions and answers. It leads companies to develop a more strategic view: they identify data assets and data liabilities around maintenance and accuracy.

�”But many companies don’t discriminate between data that is an asset versus data that is more common and can be outsourced.” comments Factual�s Elbaz. “If you can buy the data, it is most likely not a strategic asset to build internally” continues Elbaz. In fact, Data that is missing, inaccurate and difficult to maintain may not only be an opportunity cost, but it can be a liability, especially if not kept fresh.

For non-proprietary data, companies are developing Data Acquisition plans to give them new agility along with a managed cost structure. “Just as IT Managers embraced Open Source code, now Business Managers are embracing Open Sourced Data” Factual CEO Elbaz concludes. Elbaz points to dozens of internal databases that should be deleted and licensed from readily available, external, sources. He asks, “Why allocate internal resources to manage data you don’t have to?”

Finding the Skills
But finding the skills to manage the internal build, the external licensing and the data architecture is hard to find. “The biggest problem is the lack of people and talent needed for companies to bootstrap their efforts” claims Cortera’s Swift. Data architects and data developers are very different from software developers and IT managers. And both CEO’s agree this is not -necessarily- the role of a CTO or CIO.

Who, inside your company, could nurture and expand your newly found Data assets? The first step, it seems, is for us to prognosticate on that.

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