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August, 2007:

Factiva’s New Multimedia Offering

Aug 13th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
4 comments

Now that we had our successful launch this weekend, I now feel more comfortable discussing the new Factiva multimedia offering launched in partnership with EveryZing. One of my over-zealous colleagues, Daniela Barbosa, decided to provide insight into our new search offering some time ago. (I think she was just looking for a reason to use Sketch-up). As way of a little background, feel free to take a look at the Factiva press release. And today, we had some very good coverage from Outsell regarding the initiative.

For me, it was a really interesting product that came together working with a great team. Multimedia was a new space for us to enter and it took some real creative thinking in product, technology, content, legal and marketing to make it happen. It is definitely one of those projects that you remember (both the good and the bad) but that is what makes new product development so great.

Making things even more interesting from a personal level was how the partnership came together in its beginning phases. Just as the team and I were in the midst of our modeling and multimedia partner diligence, I received a LinkedIn update alert that one of my MIT Sloan colleagues, Jeff Baer, joined the business development team. (Who says social networking doesn’t work?) After a couple of preliminary conversations, we were off to the races. Have to give special thanks to Jeff as he worked through many of the elements of the partnership, we really collaborated as two organization (and the thanks goes to many on both sides) to ensure it was a partnership that was win-win but most importantly were putting a product out that added a tremendous amount of value for Factiva customers. Great stuff…

Here are a couple of screen shots that I took from the product today:

Kudos to Anagran

Aug 10th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
No comments yet

Specifically to their PR group, their PR agency, K/F Communications, and their collective astute use of the blogosphere.  On Wednesday, I wrote a post that expressed mixed reviews of the company’s prospects.  I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting some referring traffic from their news page.

Think it is fantastic how the company is looking at who is talking about them in the blogosphere.  And even better that they are embracing both those that express doubt about the business and market (as I did) as well as those who think that they may be onto something (okay, I did that too).

The point being, this is exactly some of the elements of the blogosphere that foster a place where companies can control their message and be part of the conversation.  They should take it one step further to join the conversation through a blog of their own and commenting.

Spock Launches Public Beta

Aug 8th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
1 comment

Spock, the well-publicized, people search engine leveraging natural language processing technology came out of private alpha and made itself available to the world.  A good write-up from VentureBeat.  One can tell that they are heading into a compelling direction even in the face of some tough competition ZoomInfo  LinkedIn  are also trying to perfect the way you navigate and search people.  You can read more about them at their blog.

Will Spock be differentiated enough?  Time will tell.  I like what they are doing with crawling the web completely oriented about people and the 30% number being thrown around is definitely providing an interesting market size.  (For those who don’t know, apparently 30% of Google searches are about people).  I also like that Spock allows the user to search bilaterally, meaning I can search for ‘Reggie Bush‘ or ‘USC running back‘.  Did a second search on ‘Dallas Cowboys running back’ and Ron Dayne came up on the first page of results, I’ll have to figure that one?

Once quick comment or piece of constructive feedback is SPEED.  Spock must do something about the speed of their engine and overall service response time.  I have not yet had an experience except for searches like ‘George Bush’ where the response time was not severely delayed.  It would be very unfortunate if they lose momentum on a good idea based on users having a poor initial experience.  One of Google’s key tenets in search success is SPEED.  That is one element (besides people search) that Spock should absolutely take to heart and steal.

Some other coverage:

Second Time is a Charm?

Aug 7th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
1 comment

Matt Marshall over at VentureBeat had an interesting post yesterday regarding Anagran. What I find interesting is not about Anagran’s new flow-based router. It is the other elements of Matt’s post that is more interesting to me and really brings up one single question:

How can one idea that burned through $137M in venture funding can re-played under a different company’s moniker with the same founder and secure $22M more?

Is second time a charm? What is different this time that allows high quality players such as Argon Capital, ArrowPath Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson to invest? InfoWorld has a comprehensive write-up on the company and offering.

Now, let me clarify, I have no appreciation for the promise of Anagran’s technology and how it may change the face of the router marketplace. It could be the next Riverbed Technology. If you asked me to make a bet, I would say it is a tough space to succeed and has some real heavyweights as incumbents. Perhaps when you have an internet pioneer like Larry Roberts, perhaps there is a natural built-in pass or clear articulate explanation for prior results. My question is more fundamental about whether this is good money after bad simply based on the earlier failures.

It has to be some game-changer is the best I can tell from the outside-looking-in.

Other related posts:

Planning your fall conference line-up?

Aug 5th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
4 comments

Apologies for the short blogging hiatus. I was off for my first pilgrimage to Albany to attend Giants training camp. Yes, I am a huge Giants fan and three days of watching practice wasn’t nearly enough football for me to quench my withdrawal from last season. Anyway, games will be here soon enough… I digress.

For those of you planning your fall lineup, figuring out how to weave the conference circuit amongst the football season, be sure to add Defrag to your schedule. It will take place November 5th and 6th and has a fantastic set of speakers. Eric Norlin has been doing a fantastic job of outlining the topics that will be covered and it looks to be real intimate set of conversations covering the implicit web amongst many other topics of conversation.

And until the conference, the Defrag blog is a great way to not only keep up with the conference happenings but also covers a wealth of topics right in the stream of what Defrag is all about.

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