SIIA IIS Preview Companies
Jinfo Blog

2nd February 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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One of the highlights of last week's SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York City (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27860) was the series of presentations by 'Preview Companies' , CEO presentations by innovative, early stage companies in the information industry. Presenters were given a strict five minute limit followed by audience Q&A, and were seeking investors and business partners. Among the nine companies that impressed me the most were: Boardroom Insiders (http://www.boardroominsiders.com/) Boardroom Insiders uses public source data to build detailed profiles of senior executives at major companies nationwide. Customers may purchase individual profiles or a subscription to the Boardroom Insiders database, which includes the ability to request additional profiles as needed. Watch for Penny Crossland to provide more detail about Boardroom Insiders in an upcoming LiveWire post, as a companion to the review she wrote in January's VIP Magazine on relationship database vendors. NetProspex (http://www.netprospex.com) Another product focused on people data, NetProspex has built a database of crowd-sourced business contacts, overlaid with a central authority technology system to determine and maintain quality. We are planning a spring review of social networking platforms for business, including Jigsaw (www.jigsaw.com) - the company whose model NetProspex most closely emulates. DeepDyve (http://www.deepdyve.com/) DeepDyve is an online rental service for scientific, technical and medical research with over 30 million articles from thousands of authoritative journals. The business model seems really robust - by making one-off articles available to rent for as little as $US0.99 to the proverbial 'long tail' users, DeepDyve provides a valuable service and generates new, non-subscription revenue for publishers. Will be interested to watch this company grow. HaraBaraTM (http://www.harabara.com/) HaraBara is a global information gateway for information related to green, sustainable, environmentally oriented products, company actions, technology, research, engineering and government developments. The informational items originate across multiple channels and media types, including news, blogs, social network conversations, and company and government websites. Green is obviously big right now - but is there a revenue-supported model for a dedicated gateway? HearPlanet (http://www.hearplanet.com/) HearPlanet was one of two featured preview companies providing services for mobile (the other was Snac, Inc - http://www.snacinc.com/) HearPlanet enables aggregation and creation of media and delivers it to mobile phones focusing on audio content, making it a good solution for driving, sightseeing, museum going or 'any time you want information without distraction or slowing down'. Will be interesting to see how this sort of audio and geolocation technology gets baked into B2B applications. Other preview companies included ORLive, an online medical and surgical broadcaster (http://www.orlive.com/) and Parse.ly, a platform for personalized content recommendations (http://parse.ly/). Judging from the lively Q&A sessions following each presentation, as well as the traffic to the Preview Company tables situated outside the conference room, IIS was the right place for these early stage companies to make connections.

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