Archive for the ‘KnowledgeBid’ Category
Investment Research after the storm
Filed under: Integrity Research, KnowledgeBid, expert networks, hedge funds, information |
Leave a Comment The last two weeks have kept most in the finance community glued to the headlines trying to figure out which earthquake will hit next. Mainstream media analysis has been focused on global economic issues and with numbers like $700B being thrown around, the $5.7B investment research industry, which has felt a substantial impact from the debt crisis and the Wall Street shakeup, has been largely overlooked. Nearly 3,000 equity research professionals have already been directly impacted. Read more »
Expert networks and sell-side research analysts
Filed under: KnowledgeBid, economics, expert networks, markets |
Leave a Comment The recent partnership announcement between the Gerson Lehrman Group and Credit Suisse sparked some commentary from research industry insiders who were surprised that GLG was letting sell-side analysts access the GLG network, even for what is sure to be a hefty fee. I was a bit surprised to learn they weren’t doing this already. GLG and other expert networks have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of experts in their networks. Sell-side research operations, while they may be on the decline, still control 75% of the $5.7 billion in trading commissions distributed to research providers annually. At KnowledgeBid, our best customers are firms that sell research and services based on primary research. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about our network and how we can help you meet your customers’ needs. We’d love to help.
Investment Research: Continued Shift
Filed under: Integrity Research, KnowledgeBid, deals, hedge funds, information |
Comments (1) Ongoing market turmoil and the intensifying financial crunch have accelerated ongoing shift within the investment research industry. This morning Credit Suisse and the Gerson Lehrman Group announced a strategic partnership that will 1) give Credit Suisse analysts access to GLG consultants; 2) give GLG clients access to Credit Suisse analysts; 3) give GLG access to Credit Suisse distribution channels.
It’s the recruiters, stupid!
Jobs have long been targeted on the web. The economics involved are attractive. People want good jobs and employers are willing to pay for good employees.
In the last ten years, hundreds of businesses have launched with the goal of using the web to bring efficiencies to job markets and capturing value in the process. As a result, newspaper classifieds have died, consumed almost entirely by dynamic, searchable sites with tens of millions of listings.
Recruiters and headhunters, on the other hand, haven’t gone anywhere. Read more »
The classified puzzle
Filed under: Facebook, KnowledgeBid, LinkedIn, ODesk, eBay, economics, markets, outsourcing |
Comments (4) It’s a funny coincidence that Microsoft will be pulling the plug on their little known Live Expo classified service just three days after MySpace announced that they will be ramping theirs up with Oodle. These changes are indicative of the larger trend: the classified game remains elusive for large major new entrants. Facebook‘s classified service has been less than stellar (I can’t even find a link to it right now) and Edgeio has been shuttered while Craigslist and eBay continue to dominate the all-in-one classified scene. Read more »
LinkedIn quietly launches Research Network and DirectAds…let the monetization begin.
Filed under: Facebook, Google, KnowledgeBid, LinkedIn, advertising, hedge funds, information, markets, regulation, social networking |
Comments (8) LinkedIn DirectAds
LinkedIn has quietly launched a beta version of a dynamic CPM text advertising platform called LinkedIn DirectAds. No formal announcement of the launch was made on the LinkedIn blog or elsewhere. According to the DIrectAds FAQ, advertisers will be able to dynamically target ads by age, gender, geography, educational institution, industry, and seniority. Minimum order size for an advertisement is $25, with the minimum number of im
pressions dependant on the targeting audience chosen by the advertiser. The rate that you pay for a CPM (1000 impressions) changes as you add or remove targeting options from your ad. Apparently the product will give click-through rates to advertisers, but billing will be based on CPM. In a unique twist, ads will also include the advertisers name and a link to their LinkedIn profile in hopes of “increasing transparency and visibility into the advertiser.” Much like the Facebook SocialAds platform, advertisers must have a profile on the network to launch an ad, although LinkedIn says they are limiting advertisers by completeness of profile, number of connections, date of profile creation and a number of other factors. I was unable to access the platform through my profile.
The DirectAds platform will bring LinkedIn closer to Facebook’s Social Ads technology, with these two leaving Bebo, MySpace, Plaxo, Friendster and the rest of the social networking world behind for now. I hope to be able to try the LinkedIn platform soon and give a head-to-head comparison. LinkedIn will continue to extract a premium on their advertising, as it seems they will be setting the price per CPM internally. A true market (e.g. Overture/pre-Panama Yahoo) or partial market (e.g. Google quality score) influence on price would likely result in prices lower than they would like, and they are clearly avoiding a CPC model for a reason since they are measuring CTR anyways. I think this slow transfer is very smart on their end especially considering their pre-IPO status, but as an advertiser I wish they would switch to a free market faster. Their ad margins will likely be lower than what they were getting with their rate card (although perhaps not), but the volume of advertisements will definitely spike upwards as you no longer have to go through a traditional advertising salesperson process to launch a targeted ad on their network.
LinkedIn Research Network
Additionally, on Thursday of last week LinkedIn quietly launched the LinkedIn Research Network, a product the company first mentioned back in February. No formal announcement of the actual launch was made on the LinkedIn blog or anywhere else, but the Research Network product page is live and linked to from the Premium Product
footer, along with job, corporate, and upgrade links. Also linked is a 2 page product summary PDF. The product page outlines what is essentially a premium version of InMail (pdf). A Research Network subscriber can send send 20 InMails at once, and no monthly or daily limits are mentioned. Previously, LinkedIn BusinessPlus subscribers had the most InMail access and were limited to 10 InMails per month, so this is a dramatic increase in potential InMail volume. In the past advertisers could send targeted InMail blasts through LinkedIn’s advertising platform at $1 – $5 per recipient.
The LinkedIn Research Network is an attempt to move into the expert network industry and will be sold primarily to hedge, private equity and venture funds. According to a recent Integrity Research Associates report, there are roughly 25 expert networks in existence today. Aside from my company KnowledgeBid, every other expert network service operates on a subscription model. LinkedIn is likely gunning for the fat subscription fees that players like the Gerson Lehrman Group are pulling from investors (+$50k for access to one industry vertical of experts for 6 months), but the product they have launched is far more like the resume search/direct email services offered by Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, Dice, etc. than an expert network. Perhaps down the road LinkedIn will try to facilitate the actual expert matching, but this iteration of the product just enables subscribers to send a large volume of cold emails to potential consultants. Additionally, the product page makes no mention of facilitating consultant payment and the only compliance functionality mentioned is a “research history”. Legal compliance is arguably the largest issue faced by expert networks today, and something that expert network users have come to expert from service providers. It’s possible that LinkedIn is intentionally not involving themselves with payment of experts in an attempt to remove themselves from the chain of liability if their service were to be used to facilitate insider trading or the like.
Congrats to LinkedIn on the product launches. I’m glad to see them competing with Facebook on the advertising technology side of things (let’s see an API guys!) and will certainly be keeping tabs on these products as they mature.
Facebook Ads now targeting professional titles, taking LinkedIn head on…
Filed under: Facebook, KnowledgeBid, LinkedIn, advertising, social networking |
Comments (3) Facebook continues to quickly and quietly improve their advertising platform. In yet another innovation launched without formal announcement, Facebook now allows advertisers to target ads based on professional titles in user profiles. Previously ads could only target by keywords listed in users’ “interests” field. Now Facebook has indexed professional titles and allows for dynamic targeting through the Facebook Ads platform. Perhaps the recent launch of the advertising feedback function was in anticipation of an aggressive move towards monetization via heightened ad targeting? We’re still waiting on the Facebook Ads API but LinkedIn is still using a massively inflated CPM rate card despite their recent $1B valuation and and MySpace still uses Google adwords, putting Facebook miles ahead of the rest of the social networking pack when it comes to advertising technology.
Cloud Consulting + Distributed Professional Services
Filed under: Cloud Consulting, Delphi technique, Distributed Professional Services, KnowledgeBid, ODesk, litigation, markets, outsourcing, platforms |
Comments (1) The Times recently ran an article by Michael Fitzgerald on the red hot cloud computing trend. Fitzgerald defined cloud computing to be “obtaining computing resources . . . from someplace outside your own four walls, and paying only for what you use.” The concept of cloud computing makes perfect sense: instead of paying for massive amounts of computing capacity to be ready for spikes in usage, site owners pay only for what they need, when they need it.
Fitzgerald’s definition illustrates the parallels between cloud computing and what we’re up to at KnowledgeBid as well as, in a larger sense, a growing trend in the professional services space. Like cloud computing services, KnowledgeBid provides services on an as needed basis, the difference being that instead of tapping into a cloud of computational power, KnowledgeBid facilitates access to a cloud of expertise and information.
A new lean breed of professional service companies is maturing with similar operating models, silently taking market share from the incumbent players. These firms have minimal office leases on their balance sheets and aren’t burdened with massive annual partnership payouts. They offer customized, lower priced services and often have broader offerings than their traditional competitors. The management of these firms plays a new and rapidly evolving role, combining matchmaker, headhunter, temp agency, accounting firm, compliance officer, and human resources department.
One of the hottest of these new breed is Axiom Legal Solutions, Inc. Founded in 2000 by Mark Harris and Alec Guettel and backed by Greenhill & Co., Benchmark Capital, and Panorama Capital, Axiom is disrupting the legal world by working closely with the in-house counsel at major corporations to fuel them with niche, qualified attorneys on a contract basis. Axiom “combines the flexibility of outside counsel with the best attributes of a sophisticated corporate law department”, collecting fees on attorney hours but without the weight of partner payouts and massive office leases. Axiom “is not a law firm” and “does not provide legal representation or advice” but does interview attorneys, hire them full-time, then place them directly with clients for specific engagements. Their clients include American Express, Bank of America, Cisco, Dow Jones, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, New York Times, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, and Viacom, among others.
The most advanced segment of these new service providers is arguably the web development and design sector. Dominated by oDesk and eLance, these companies give customers access to a global network of developers, designers, and database architects. They don’t hire service providers directly but serve as a platform for clients to screen, interview, monitor and compensate service providers. These companies have seen explosive growth thanks to the web 2.0 boom. The chart above shows the number of hours worked through oDesk by month since 2003.
Running a similar model in the engineering space, Exponent, Inc. hires professionals on full time and staffs them with clients according to their specific needs much like Axiom. Exponent has been around in one form or another since 1967, and has morphed several times. It’s currently a publicly traded company and employs over 500 engineering and scientific professionals, covering 20 practice areas including biomechanics, buildings & structures, civil engineering, construction consulting, ecological & biological sciences, electrical & semiconductors, environmental & earth sciences, health sciences, chemical registration, food safety, epidemiology, biostatistics, computational biology, toxicology, mechanistic biology, exposure assessment, public health, industrial hygiene, industrial structures, mechanical engineering, materials science, statistical & data sciences, thermal sciences, and vehicle analysis. Exponent does have significant lease liabilities (~$5M in ‘07) but most/all is non-premium warehouse and laboratory space. The company saw solid growth vs the S&P last year.
At the end of the day these companies all provide value by making connections and managing relationships. As the world becomes more and more connected, I think this trend will continue. The professional services cloud will become more accessible, and the companies that facilitate access to it will gain market share at the cost of traditional professional service providers.
Investment Research + Massive Industry Shift
Filed under: Integrity Research, KnowledgeBid, economics, hedge funds, information, litigation, markets, platforms |
Comments (3) I had the opportunity to present KnowledgeBid at the Investorside Alternative Research conference in New York last week (conference agenda), attended by an interesting mix of independent alternative investment research providers and buy-side folks. The investment research industry has undergone massive change in the last 10 years, much of which is a result of the information technology explosion, Regulation FD, and unbundled commissions. The dominant groups at the conference last week primarily fell into three categories: 1) expert networks, 2) data mining, and 3) research management. Very few, if any, new players are producing traditional research reports with buy/sell recommendations or general industry analysis. Even fewer are associated with particular trading desks, something that never would have been seen 10 years ago. The recent explosion of the alternative research space has in large part been at the expense of traditional sell side research.
The sell side and other large financial service players are now actively partnering with, investing, and acquiring alternative research operations. There has been an explosion of activity in the space in the last six months, part of a larger trend that has been emerging since Reg FD was passed eight years ago. I’ve aggregated major announcements and milestones below (let me know if I missed anything interesting).
- 10.23.2000: Regulation FD Ratified by the SEC
- 3.2001 – 11.2001: US Economic Recession
- 10.15.2001: FirstRain $11M Series A
- 4.28.2003: $1.43B Global Analyst Research Settlement
- 7.15.2003: FirstRain $8M Series B
- 7.21.2003: BNY launches Jaywalk initiative
- 2.2004: Bessemer Ventures invests in Gerson Lehrman Group
- 3.4.2005: Standard & Poor’s acquires Vista Research
- 2.6.2006: Goldman Sachs invests in Investars
- 3.2006: UBS announces partnership with ASSET4
- 6.2006: Goldman Sachs launches Hudson Street initiative
- 6.29.2006: GS / Hudson Street invests in ASSET4
- 9.7.2006: DFJ invests in Monitor110 $5M Series B
- 10.30.2006: DFJ invests in Monitor110 $11M Series C
- 12.20.2006: Morgan Stanley partnership with Tamale Software
- 2.9.2007: GS / Hudson Street invests in Connotate Technologies
- 3.29.2007: BNY / Jaywalk announces alliance with Code Red
- 4.5.2007: GS / Hudson Street invests in iSuppli
- 5.2.2007: Evalueserve acquires Nitron Advisors
- 5.8.2007: GS / Hudson Street invests in Medley Global Advisors
- 9.10.2007: GS / Hudson Street invests in Lusight
- 9.27.2007: Merrill Lynch announces partnership with ASSET4
- 12.19.2007: Silver Lake invests +$200M in Gerson Lehrman Group
- 1.14.2008: Oak Partners invest in $13.6M FirstRain Round (Series C ?)
- 1.25.2008: RiskMetrics $245M IPO
- 2.11.2008: GS / Hudson Street invests in TrimTabs
- 2.27.2008: BNY / Jaywalk announces alliance with Tamale Software
- 3.6.2008: UBS invests in Integrity Research Associates
- 3.21.2008: GS / Hudson Street invests in QSG
- 3.27.2008: Morgan Stanley partnership with Gerson Lehrman Group
- 4.7.2008: Standard & Poors / CapIQ announces alliance with FirstRain
- 4.9.2008: Merrill Lynch launches Open Minds with Asset 4; Audit Integrity; Cypress Group; Decision Resources; Global Media Intelligence; HPDI and Primary Source
- 4.17.2008: Instinet exclusive relationship with Norbury Financial
My picks: The best service providers for startups
Filed under: Braintree Financial, Google, KnowledgeBid, MediaTemple, My picks, Netvibes, RingCentral, Wordpress, blogging, outsourcing, telecom |
Comments (29) A friend of mine…I’ll call him Arnold Babar…is in the early stages of starting a company. Over a few beers the other night, Arnold asked me a few general questions about service providers we’ve used for various aspects of building the KnowledgeBid expert network management platform and other projects. A few came to mind immediately…then I thought of a few later that night…then a few more the next day. I’m putting them all into a post in the hopes that I might save someone else the hours of head + wall collisions it took me to find these guys. I’m only going to include services that I use heavily myself and would recommend to a close personal friend. I’ll add to this as more come to me. My top priorities: 1) cost; 2) functionality / flexibility; 3) quality; 4) reliability.
Best Corporate Telephony / PBX / Fax Service: RingCentral
My previous write-up on RingCentral is here. Super flexible PBX, digital fax delivery, digital voice mail delivery, $19.95/month. Can’t beat it. Mac friendly except for the sound recording / uploading feature.
Best Payment Processing Service: Braintree Payment Solutions
My previous write-up on Braintree is here. The payment processing industry is a total mess. The Braintree guys are straight shooters. Save yourself serious pain and go straight to them.
Best Press Release Services: PRZOOM, The Open Press
The web has antiquated the newswire industry. These two providers are free and get your PR messages on sites other than your own, which is all you really need. PRWeb and the others try to get you to pay, but it’s really not worth it.
Best Conference Call Service: Free Conference
My previous write-ups on the free conference call industry are here. The FCC says these guys can stay in business and so long as you just need them to work for your call tomorrow or next week, you’ll be fine. Call quality is good and reliability is good. I would advise against trying to bake them into your app though…you get what you pay for and who knows how long their loophole will be open.
Best Desktop Sharing Software: Glance
This a simple, functional, reliable piece of software perfect for sharing your desktop for demos. No install needed for your clients, but this means there is no way to see the screen of the person on the other end. It’s $39/month and WebEx has dropped prices in response. There may be some free stuff out there too but I would rather have my demos work and pay a little. Glance is Mac friendly, WebEx is not.
Best Domain Registrar: One and One
One and One is clean, easy to use, without constant upselling, ads and pop-ups. GoDaddy is a nightmare IMO.
Best Hosting Service: M5 Hosting
Previous mention here. These guys were referred to us by a friend and they have done a great job so far. Stay the hell away from MediaTemple.
Best Blog Platform: WordPress.com, WordPress.org
The best blogging and simple content management system out there, IMO. Open source so there are an amazing number of plug-ins, style sheets, and high quality WordPress designers out there so you can really make anything. WordPress.com is a free, hosted blogging platform (example here) while you need to host WordPress.org on your own server (example here, here, and here).
Best Corporate Email Solution: Google Apps for Your Domain
Face it, yourcompanyname@gmail.com is JV. Google Apps makes it free and easy to have Google tools under your own domain.
Best Bug Tracker: Mantis
We’re coming up on our 300th mantis ticket and so far, so good. Free, open source bug tracking & project management. We tried some of the more trendy solutions out there and were very disappointed.
Best Stock Photography: Stockxpert
High quality stock photography on a pay-as-you-go model. Many other players out there have high subscription fees which sucks when you only need 1 or 2 pictures. Examples here and here.
Best Professional Voice Recording: VoiceVector
These guys and gals are based in Alaska but you wouldn’t know it. $1o for your first 12 words and $8 for each additional group of 12 or fewer words in a single recording. Quick, easy, high quality, and they give you your recording in lots of formats. For example call here.
Best Screencast Solution: Camtasia
The web video world is like the credit card processing world…it’s a total mess. Camtasia makes it easy to record a screencast, polish it up, and host it so anyone can watch it. Example here. They have a free demo period. Tip: don’t try to cut and splice within a single recording – just go all the way through.
Best Competitive / Industry Monitor: Google Alerts
Previous write-up here. Cut down on your unnecessary news reading and get productive.
_______________________
I’d love to hear comments on these and other solid services out there. I’m actively looking for these:
Best Headset for Blackberry 8703e
Best Low Volume SMS Solution
Best Free CRM
Best Password / Login Manager
Efficiency through Google alerts
Filed under: Google, KnowledgeBid, My picks, Netvibes, blogging, information, outsourcing |
Comments (2) One of the reasons my posting has slowed over the last month or so is because I have drastically cut down on my news consumption and a good amount of my posting was derivative of the random stuff I read on the web. I still check my Netvibes page every day or two, but in the past I spent at least an hour a day staying current on various tech, econ, VC, law and entrepreneur blogs and news sources. A major factor in my slimmed down news diet has been thanks to Google alerts. I’ve set up alerts for a variety of keywords that I’m interested in monitoring (my company name, competitive company names, friends’ company names, my name, etc.) and get emails from Google alerts when new material is on the web that includes those keywords. I didn’t realize it at the time, but a big driver behind my news consumption was the fear that I would “miss something” relevant to my life. Google Alerts is far more efficient in monitoring the web that I could ever be, and now I can spend my time on more important things without worry that I may be out of the loop.
Busy month
- I got married
- We went to Hawaii
- We moved to San Francisco
- KnowledgeBid was named a firm to watch in the expert network space
- Semi-regular posting will resume/continue…
LinkedIn Research Network…LinkedIn Experts Part II
This week, LinkedIn announced the future launch (apparently you can do that) of the LinkedIn Research Network. Product manager Mike Gamson spoke about the service earlier this week to eWeek and at the Money:Tech conference currently being held in NYC. O’Reilly reported on it as well. The LinkedIn Research Network, if it is ever actually launched, will actually be the relaunch of the failed low-tech LinkedIn Experts service (screenshot), which was little publicized and went dead several months ago. The service charged users $500 for a 1 hour conversation with LinkedIn network members, of which LinkedIn retained $250. LinkedIn seems to have dropped the pay-per-conversation model with the new LinkedIn Research Network, which, according to reports, will be yet another expert network subscription service. The tough thing for LinkedIn is that fact that any sort of “connection” service beyond the standard LinkedIn profile messaging services is an acceptance on LinkedIn’s part that the standard services they offer don’t actually work. For a company that has been gearing up for an IPO for the last year and scrambling to catch up with Facebook’s API and user growth, this seems like a strange time to start cannibalize their existing revenue streams and launch a project that is likely draw the attention of the SEC…they should ask Gerson Lehrman about that. Additionally, LinkedIn’s 18 million users are all accessible to any other LinkedIn user, along with KnowledgeBid and anyone else looking to source specialized expertise…and so are all of Facebook’s 50 million users, let alone everyone else you can find with a simple Google search. For these reasons we at KnowledgeBid concluded long ago that the expert network subscription model is dead. We build expert network management software that allows researchers to quickly and easily grow and manage their own proprietary expert networks with no subscription fees.
NYSE Panel on Expert Networks
Filed under: Integrity Research, KnowledgeBid, information, markets, regulation |
Leave a Comment The morning the New York Stock Exchange hosted a panel entitled “Expert Networks: Issues and Opportunities for Public Companies”. The session was moderated by Keith Ackerman, who is Global Head of Next Generation Research at Thomson Financial. On the panel were Howard Dicker, Partner at Weil, Gotshal; Jonathan Glick, Director of Research Operations at the Gerson Lehrman Group; Michael Lynch, Managing Director, Global Commission Management at Merrill Lynch; and Michael Mayhew, Chairman & Co-CEO at Integrity Research. The video of the panel can be found here. The group had a very interesting discussion focusing on the trends within the expert network space. I’ve posted my thoughts on the discussion over on the KnowledgeBid Blog.
Integrity Research: The Future of the Investment Research Industry
Filed under: Integrity Research, KnowledgeBid, SEC, hedge funds, information, outsourcing, regulation |
Leave a Comment The folks at Integrity Research Associates recently published an interesting forecast for the investment research industry. Integrity provides syndicated research and consulting services to the investment community. In short, the Integrity is forecasting a continued decline in “traditional” investment research consumption from investment banks and research analysts, coupled with a continued increase in demand for alternative research services, like expert networks. Integrity cites Regulation FD, soft dollar codification, and continuing technological innovation as the major drivers in the revolution. These trends are in large part what inspired me to start building KnowledgeBid over year ago. The full report can be viewed here.
Changing Client Demand
A decade ago, buy-side investors relied on detailed fundamental company analysis produced by sell-side investment banks and brokerage firms. However, in the past few years, Regulation Fair Disclosure and Sarbanes Oxley have effectively reduced the value of investment bank research as sell-side analysts have less and less access to company management. The reduction of this confidential information in sell-side research has prompted many buy-side investors to bring a great deal of their analytical needs in-house. In turn, this has changed the type of research that buy-side investors have found most valuable.Today, most institutional investors value access to experts, company management, various sources of proprietary data including channel checks and custom market research, profitable trading ideas, and new and innovative analytical techniques. In addition, many buy-side investors (particularly hedge funds) value information that is not widely distributed to other investors.
This change in buy-side research tastes has had a negative impact on traditional fundamental company research – including that of most sell-side firms and many alternative (independent) research providers. At the same time, it has stimulated the growth of new types of research providers, including expert networks such as Gerson Lehrman, channel checking firms such as Off the Record Research and web-oriented research providers such as Connotate, Kapow and First Rain. It is the new, innovative types of research which are growing the fastest, increasing the demand for alternative research overall.
The Integrity Forecast
These developments lead us to conclude that the research industry will experience a significant amount of “barbelling” in the coming years as bulge bracket investment banks lose some share of the research market, second and third tier sell-side firms suffer deep losses of research revenue, and a number of alternative research providers experience increased demand for their services.Our forecast indicates that sell-side research revenues will fall close to 18% from $4.9 billion in 2006 to $4.0 billion in 2011. This decline is consistent with a survey done this past summer by financial services consulting firm Greenwich Associates, which revealed that almost 20% of the buy-side analysts expect their firms to either “reduce” or “significantly reduce” their use of sell-side research in the coming year.
Integrity expects that alternative research providers will gain at the expense of the sell-side, growing from $1.81 billion in 2006 to $2.47 billion by 2011, thereby increasing their share of the market from a 14.5% in 2006 to 19.8% in 2011. However, we do not expect all boats to rise with this tide. The most innovative research providers should experience the best growth, while traditional fundamental research providers could actually decline over this period. This forecast is consistent with the recent Greenwich Associates survey which showed that 39% of buy-side analysts expect their firms to increase their use of independent or alternative research in the next 12 months.
Finally, the team at Integrity Research anticipates that buy-side institutions will increase their spending on their internal research capabilities by 28.8% over the next few years from $5.8 billion in 2006 to $7.4 billion in 2011 as they continue to rely less and less on sell-side research and they rely more on their own research capabilities.
KnowledgeBid public profiles, private contracts, and blog bling
We’ve had a couple of busy weeks at KnowledgeBid and have launched a bunch of new features. Folks that have identified valuable information providers can now send them private listings directly. Private listings allow information seekers to securely and anonymously reach out to people who hold information. Also, providers can create public profiles and link to them with buttons from their personal website, blog, or social networking page. I have one of our new buttons here on my blog (upper right). Click on it and you can see my public profile and a link to initiate a private contract with me. You can read more about the new features over at the KnowledgeBid blog, where we post regular updates about what we’re up to. We’re excited about them and hope you will find them useful!
KnowledgeBid = officially launched
After months of hard work, I’m proud to announce the public launch of KnowledgeBid. KnowledgeBid is a web-based information market platform that allows users to access offline information and earn money sharing what they know with others. People looking for information or expertise can create listings on KnowledgeBid that describe what they want to know and how much they are willing to pay to learn. Information providers can then apply or create alerts to be notified when their expertise is in demand. Everyone has unique exposure to markets and industries through life experiences, so anyone legally and ethically able to do so can be a valuable information provider.
Much of what I have been blogging about here over the last several months has been directly related to KnowledgeBid. Some of the connections:
- KnowledgeBid is a market for information
- KnowledgeBid is a platform
- KnowledgeBid allows users to engage in the Delphi Technique
- KnowledgeBid target customers are hedge funds and private equity funds, along with day traders and market researchers
- KnowledgeBid uses VoIP technology to dynamically and securely schedule and track conference calls
- KnowledegBid can has robust transaction processing capabilities
So check out the site, subscribe to our company blog for updates, and check out our press release for full details of the launch. We love feedback and criticism, so please don’t hold back!
