@ SIIA: Preview Day Showcases Content-Related Start-ups — And Free Content Message
Hit some sort of trifecta today — three separate events in just under eight hours. In the middle slot, SIIA Previews featuring demos by content-related companies interspersed with a couple of sessions. VC Fred Wilson used the keynote to explain his vision of free content, asking “if information’s becoming free then where’s the money?” His answer: in attention. Anyone who’s been paying attention to Wilson should be familiar with much, if not all, of the ground he covered. But the context within an afternoon devoted to ways to make content pay and to protect content added some resonance. I could see people nodding as he mentioned a quote he likes from cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon: “What does an abundance of information create? A scarcity of attention basically, right?” Many of the companies showcased today specialize in managing that abundance of information. But “attention” in this case means more than standing out from the crowd. In Wilson’s parlance and that of others including Steve Gillmor, attention is what you get out of what you do. Provide your blog for free and you’ll get paid in other attention-based ways.
– What are the leverage points in an attention-driven model? Discovery, navigation, trust, governance, values. Wilson: “The future of this whole business
staci
i posted my slides on the USV blog
http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/01/siaa_preview_ke.html
thanks for the plug. it was fun.
Just to clarify – The Cranium Softworks product mentioned in the story tracks the number of computers used by a user without relying on IP sniffing technology – as was indicated by the author. It is a sophisticated electronic ticketing system that can track the mobility of username and passwords across multiple computers even behind corporate firewalls.
Multiple computers behind a corporate firewall would all show the same IP address to the outside world, which is really the weakness in systems that try and track users by their IP addresses.
For the B-to-B information industry, most abuse and piracy occurs when an organization obtains one or just a few subscriptions and then shares the credentials among all of its employees. Since most of those employees would normally access the online content from behind the company’s firewall, any solution that attempts address this issue must do so without regard for the user’s IP address.
The product that accomplishes this very effectively is called the Entitlement Management Solution (EMS) by Cranium Softworks. It has the capability to log and report abuse or even automatically take action when abuse is detected.
For more information, please visit http://www.craniumsoftworks.com/ems.
We use Cranium's EMS software on a few of our "high dollar" newsletter products, and can say with a high degree of certainty that it works beautifully. Within a very short period of time we were able to get a window into how our products were being used and read inside large organizations.
We are currently rolling out that technology to other flagship products within our portfolio.
Rons Dixon
CIO
Hart Energy Publishing