AUTHOR: Russell TITLE: Top-Level Domainia DATE: 10:21 AM ----- BODY:
Until recently, ICANN, the body charged with administering the domain naming system, has been very stingy about authorizing new top-level domains (e.g. .com, .net, .biz). Now, however, it's apparently open season. Anyone with $185,000 can have a top-level domain of their own.

Implications? Well first, it's a bit more hassle, confusion and complexity for those of us whose business involves gathering and maintaining this information. Second, it's a potential area of opportunity. Consider a legal publisher that buys the top-level domain ".law" and offers it to its advertisers, or hosts websites for law firms listed in its database. This could be an exciting marketing gambit.

But more profoundly, this move marks increasing erosion in one of the core uses of many directory products: providing basic company contact information. Think about it: you don't need a directory (or a search engine for that matter) to find the website for Microsoft, because the odds are very good that if you type the name of any big company followed by ".com," you'll easily get to that company's website. Should Microsoft acquire the ".microsoft" top-level domain, it will likely get even easier. Many web pundits believe that in the near future, you'll simply type "Microsoft" into your browser, and if Microsoft owns the corresponding top-level domain, you'll go right to it site.

The lesson here, which I've stated many times before, is that basic company contact information has become a commodity, and this new development even further erodes its value. If you think the $185,000 will keep a lid on things, don't forget innovative services like Telnic* that is vying to become a central company phone book on the web. Still not convinced? Then go over to Jigsaw (2005 Model of Excellence winner), which offers its database of 2.6 million company records free for the downloading.

The bottom line is that if "industry phone directory" is a part of the value proposition of your data product, it's well past time to start moving it up the value chain.

*Telnic is a 2009 Model of Excellence finalist, and its CTO, Henri Asseily, will explain how the company is executing on its vision at this year's InfoCommerce Data Content09 conference.

Model of Excellence Awards
We are pleased to announce that Netprospex Inc. is a finalist for an InfoCommerce 2009 Model of Excellence awards.

Review the Netprospex Model of Excellence profile here

Hear Netprospex Founder & CEO Gary Halliwell at DataContent 09
DataContent 09: All Roads Lead to Data. Full program here.

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----- -------- AUTHOR: Russell TITLE: Fill 'er Up DATE: 11:56 AM ----- BODY:
A new launch by Picaphone, which aims to create the first international phone directory, caught my eye this week so I decided to check out www.picaphone.com.

After dozens of searches for all types of companies, big and small all yielded no results, I was pushed to an inexorable conclusion: this database nothing in it.

Back to the press release again and I noticed the statement, "The success of this ambitious project depends on the cooperation of web surfers all over the world." Yes, it's all about user-generated content, but with the remarkable goal of trying to collect every telephone directory listing in the world. Imagine how many listings would have to be contributed (and maintained) for this to become a site worthy enough for users to return to repeatedly.

I certainly have no beef with this company's audacious business objective. My point is that the window is rapidly closing for online data ventures that set up shop with a user interface and back-end database and then say to the world, "fill 'er up." Why? Very simply, the novelty factor is gone. That's why last year's Data Content Conference featured companies such as Snooth and BrownBook. Both these companies see user-generated content as integral to their success, but both started out supplying an initial dataset that delivered value while encouraging users to augment this information. With this approach, these companies deliver value to users immediately, rather than hoping magic will happen and users will do a credible (and rapid) job building out the database from scratch. I'd go so far as to argue that the bigger the scope of a user-generated database product, the more important to provide an initial dataset.

But what about companies like Jigsaw and Linked-In you may properly ask. These two very successful databases were built entirely from user-generated content. To this I would respond that these companies caught the wave of early excitement around user-generated content, so they had great timing going for them. I'd also argue that these databases, while they certainly became more valuable as they got bigger, were still able to deliver value to users while quite small. Think about it: both Jigsaw and Linked-In could deliver some value to users with 50,000 names; a database claiming to be a global telephone directory cannot.User-generated content certainly isn't dying; in fact where user-generated content augments a publisher's existing database it is very much alive and well. User-generated data products where the database starts completely empty are also lacking much promise.

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----- -------- AUTHOR: Russell TITLE: A Model of Excellence Winner Does Us Proud DATE: 1:14 PM ----- BODY:
I don't think you can gush too much about a data content company that has an army of hundreds of thousands of field researchers gathering company and executive information, data entering it all into a central database, and best of all, doing it all for free. That company, as you may have guessed, is Jigsaw, an InfoCommerce Group 2005 Models of Excellence winner, and the company is finishing up a very busy week.

On Wednesday, Jigsaw announced the launch of Data Fusion, a service that I think truly qualifies for the label "revolutionary." Simply described, Data Fusion hooks seamlessly to company CRM databases to perform continuous data scrubbing. This scrubbing goes far beyond merely standardizing existing data to deleting dead records, updating current records and even adding new records. Data Fusion is a SAAS (software as a service) offering, meaning no software to buy or install, and steady recurring revenue for Jigsaw. I've been in this business for nearly 25 years, and publishers have been fantasizing about an offering like this for at least 24 of them.

On Thursday, Jigsaw announced a deal to license its executive contact information to D&B. It's a pretty slick maneuver when you can turn a competitor into a sales channel, and if nothing else, it's a major validation of Jigsaw's data quality and increasingly comprehensive database. All-in-all, not a bad week!Lessons for the rest of us? First, you can build a trusted, quality database off user-generated content if you go about it correctly. Second, the users who contribute data to you don't seem to mind at all if you aggressively monetize the resulting database, provided they continue to see value in participating. Third, with a well-crafted licensing agreement, it is possible to do business with competitors, so don't rule out this possibility without thorough examination. Fourth, software can add tremendous value to data when it empowers the business processes and workflow of your customers. The goal, as I like to put it, is to move from reference-oriented data to "data that does stuff." Jigsaw is showing us all that success in data publishing isn't puzzling at all.

Mark your calendars now to meet this year's Models of Excellence companies at the InfoCommerce Group's annual Data Content09 conference, October 27-29, at The Ritz-Carlton, Philadelphia.

2009 Model of Excellence Award Nominee: Telnic Limited


We're pleased to announced that Telnic Limited has been nominated for a 2009 Model of Excellence award for its "dot tel" product.

Click here for our full MofE product profile.

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----- -------- AUTHOR: Russell TITLE: User-Generated Sales DATE: 3:43 PM ----- BODY:
In February of this year, I brought to your attention a UK-based online yellow pages start-up called BrownBook.net. While online yellow pages is a crowded and generally unremarkable category of online content, BrownBook was coming at it with a fresh and audacious approach by relying on the wiki model. Yes, user-generated content for yellow pages.

We know wikis can work. Just look at the success of Wikipedia. We know that databases can be built with user-generated content. Witness both Jigsaw and LinkedIn (both former InfoCommerce Models of Excellence winners). But the general thinking to date has been that users will contribute only when they're passionate about a topic or there's something in it for them. Most would agree that "yellow pages" and "passion" are rarely seen in the same sentence.

Despite this, BrownBook has persevered with this new approach, and by all reports, it's working. Strong site metrics are suggesting BrownBook may be onto something big with this innovative model.

Not content simply to revolutionize how yellow pages databases are built and maintained, BrownBook has just announced an equally remarkable innovation: it wants to turn its registered users into a commission sales force.

In a nutshell, if a registered user of BrownBook contributes content about a business, and that business later pays to enhance its listing, the registered user receives a portion of that revenue. But to make things more interesting, this isn't a one-time payment. It's a lifetime commission stream to that user as long as that business remains an advertiser. So while users can likely make a few dollars passively, they can potentially make a lot of money by actively encouraging the businesses they write about to advertise in BrownBook, and to remain advertisers in BrownBook as well. Consider too the potentially viral aspects of this model as BrownBook users start to receive checks, initially for not doing anything. It won't take them long to spread the word to their friends and recognize that by talking up BrownBook to their favorite retailers, they can develop a nice stream of ongoing cash.The best way to get the full story on BrownBook is to be at InfoCommerce 2008 in Philadelphia - just 16 days from now - where you can hear Marc Lyne, BrownBook's co-founder, on our kick-off Meet the Evolutionaries" panel. See you there ...

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----- -------- AUTHOR: Russell TITLE: Good Vibrations DATE: 1:51 PM ----- BODY:
One thing that's been curiously missing from the social networking/user-generated content frenzy of the past few years has been efforts to harness these concepts to build good company databases. It's particularly surprising given the success of professional sites such as Jigsaw and Linked-In, both of which have built remarkably robust databases of business professionals. But where's the company information?

We have seen a few attempts at letting users build out company content. Two basic models have been employed to date: a "backbone" model, where users can append comments to a fixed list of companies, and the publisher takes on the task of maintaining basic company contact details. Successful examples of this model include Yahoo Finance, Vault.com and start-up yellow pages sites such as BrownBook. The other model is "free-form" model where users decide what companies to cover and in what way, with the publisher supplying no content, and few if any restrictions. One infamous example of this was the F*ckedCompany.com site, now mercifully defunct. We're seeing more and more company profiles within Wikipedia, but they tend to get lost in this vast online encyclopedia.

Will people take the time to contribute to an open access company database? Can such a database rise above angry posts from disgruntled employees and disinformation from disingenuous competitors? Will people share valuable inside information about firms? Will individuals maintain constantly changing company information? Well, it seems we may be about to find out.

A new company, TradeVibes.com, still in beta, is aiming to become a user-generated company database. It rolls together wiki-like features with rating systems, company discussion board, job boards and more. It also offers a strong organizational taxonomy to allow discovery of companies in addition to research on known companies. It may very well be a glimpse of the future.

There's a lot of fresh thinking going on at TradeVibes, and a lot to commend its content model. If TradeVibes can get critical market traction, it could herald the next big thing in the data world: high-value, user- generated company information.

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----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:Anonymous John DATE:3/31/08 8:19 PM Hi Russell,

Interesting article. As I last heard it LinkedIn just launched their company profiles. One thing I'm curious about (and full disclosure here that I work for them) is why no mention of Spoke when talking about Jigsaw & LinkedIn as data services with company information.

www.Spoke.com has more than twice the people (40 million businesspeople profiles) & over 2.3 million compnay profiles. We even give members of any company the ability to come in and update incorrect or outdated company information, provided they prove they work for that company with a verified corporate e-mail address.

What are your thoughts on giving full reign to people to control company information? Isn't that the domain of company (e.g. public companies can't have people making false claims about their annual revenues, their HQ address, etc. or face consequences from the SEC)? ----- --------