InfoCommerce Group Inc.

2005 Models of Excellence Award Winners

These exemplars are announced to the media and showcased at the annual InfoCommerce conference, the event where the most talented and dynamic infocommerce publishers from around the world meet to collaborate on new ways of doing business. It is a distinct honor to be selected as a Model of Excellence, and here are the best of the best in database information publishing.

2005 Award Winners
	epipeline Inc. Herndon, VA	www.epipeline.com MofE Profile Tim Walsh, President & CEO
epipeline bases its content offering on a feed of government contracting and business opportunities. But rather than stop there, with a product of moderate value in a competitive market, epipeline has pushed further, with the goal of creating a true business intelligence offering that offers extremely high value to subscribers.
	Service Ratings LLC Oakland, CA	www.valuestar.com MofE Profile Lou Morsberger, President & CEO
In the ValueStar model, companies have to demonstrate their credentials and a level of customer satisfaction before they are admitted to the program. Then, in addition to allowing them to promote their ValueStar certification themselves, ValueStar is actively engaged in promoting its listed companies through its Web site, a printed directory and numerous distribution partners.
	Thomson Gale Farmington Hills, MI	www.gale.com MofE Profile Gordon T. Macomber, President
Goliath combines a rich array of business-oriented content, easily searchable through a common user interface that seamlessly unites all this content despite its diverse formats, and makes it all available on a by-the-slice or subscription basis.
	Carroll Publishing Bethesda, MD	www.carrollpub.com MofE Profile Tom Carroll, President
GovSearch, a database of federal, state, county and municipal employees, offers over 700,000 individual government contacts. But GovSearch is more than a simple contact database. It has been enhanced with photos and biographies, offers email addresses and agency URL’s, and allows searching by name, title and function across the entire database. The piece de resistance of the GovSearch Suite is the ability for users to see personnel records expressed as organizational charts, all constructed on a real-time basis
	Business Partnering International Ltd. Glen Allen, VA	www.agencyfinder.com MofE Profile Charles Meyst, Chairman/CEO
AgencyFinder has a "high tech/high touch" approach that is truly unique: it contacts each user of its service at the conclusion of his or her search to “talk them through” their needs and to help them choose among the short list of agencies they have identified through their database search. Only then does AgencyFinder release agency names to the user.
	Thomas Industrial Network Inc. New York, NY	www.thomasnet.com MofE Profile Eileen Markowitz, President
Thomas has been a consistent innovator since the early days of the Web, taking chances while blazing new trails and showing the way for many others in the industry. This relentless embrace of the online medium, coupled with a willingness to buck trends in favor of what made the most sense for the product and the business, have earned it an unassailable position online along with iconic status as the poster child for what’s possible in terms of advertising-supported online information products.
	North American Publishing Co. Philadelphia, PA	www.whosmailingwhat.com MofE Profile Ned Borowsky, President
Here's an outstanding example of a business intelligence databases of equal value both to analytical and creative types. It allows direct mail marketers, copywirters, designers and direct marketing agencies to isolate and review the most successful mailings for any type of product and track the marketing strategies of competitors, all with just a few clicks of the mouse.
	ServiceMagic Golden, CO	www.servicemagic.com MofE Profile Michael J. Beaudoin, co-CEO
Which is harder: finding a good contractor or getting a contractor to return your calls? ServiceMagic addresses both these vexing problems, setting itself up as a matchmaking service that connects consumers with contractors who cover more than 500 types of home contracting services.
	Jigsaw Data Corporation San Mateo, CA	www.jigsaw.com MofE Profile Jim Fowler, CEO/Co-Founder
Jigsaw describes itself as a marketplace where business contact data is bought, sold and traded on a collaborative basis. Jigsaw provides the data platform and participants input business contact information. Subscribers pay a base monthly subscription fee. As members, they are rewarded with points for adding new contact data or updating existing contact information. The more points a member has, the more contacts he can access on Jigsaw, providing a strong motivation to both add and maintain data for the common good.
	Ziggs Boston, MA	www.ziggs.com MofE Profile Tim DeMello, CEO/Founder
Ziggs is -- depending how you choose to view it -- either a search engine for people, or a Web-based biographical directory. Two key aspects of The Ziggs Index are that it drives searchers to the professional profiles of individuals on their own company Websites, ensuring the accuracy and currency of the data found, and Ziggs will drive paid name search for customers for premium visibility across search engines for a small fee. An ambitious model with lots of innovative aspects to it.
	Primary Intelligence Draper, UT	www.primary-intel.com MofE Profile Ken Allred, CEO
Primary Intelligence seamlessly and elegantly blends custom research and traditional compilation techniques to produce its Account Profile product, a standardized-format report that provides underparalleled depth of information and insight about prospects and competitors -- a powerful, packaged competitive intelligence product.
	Advertising Specialty Institute Langhorne, PA	www.asicentral.com Norman Cohn, Chairman
Few information companies as thoroughly dominate their vertical markets as does the Advertising Specialty Institute. Its endless stream of innovative new products and a well-accepted product numbering system make it the central clearinghouse for its industry. Its market position is derived from maintaining the industry's central product database, and ASI has been aggressively moving it online in a number of different ways, one of the most noteworthy of which is called ESP Online. This product couples a powerful database which offers organized access to over 650,000 promotional products and 100,000 manufacturer catalog pages plus strong infocommerce tools to help users quickly and easily create customized sales presentations. This product is an excellent example of how an information company can embed itself in its user's business workflow, thereby ensuring its dominant industry position.
	UpTick Data Technologies Inc. San Francisco, CA	www.uptickdata.com Tom Elliott, Founder
UpTick Data's remarkable FundXtra product suite takes highly detailed financial performance data and turns it into well-written analyst reports -- but without the analysts. The firm uses proprietary software to convert data into readable and informative text, and not simple boilerplate phrases strung together. As UpTick's founder Tom Elliot says, “...the neat thing about rules-based text generation is that we can create unique commentary for every mutual fund out there each month. We are not limited to covering only the most widely held funds or staggering the update frequency. This is what really sets these reports apart from others that are available.” One major growth area in infocommerce is data-text integration; UpTick may be paving the way for more products that will be based on data-text generation.