Dow Jones enters business social networking market
Jinfo Blog

24th April 2008

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Dow Jones www.dowjones.com has made another important acquisition since it moved into the News Corporation www.newscorp.com stable. Generate Inc. www.generateinc.com, which is based in Maynard, Massachusetts, is described as a “complex business tool, which marries elements of company and people information, and maps it with news information and business intelligence on contacts in a user’s account”. http://digbig.com/4wtjf. According to Generate it works by crawling “more than 75 million domains extracting comprehensive information on more than four million companies and 6.4 million executives. Generate’s technology also mines in real-time for more than 100 “trigger events” of interest to business and financial professionals, such as mergers and acquisitions, senior executive and board changes, venture financing and more. This company intelligence is integrated with relationship-mapping technology, allowing clients to detect competitive moves, identify prospects and, by optimizing corporate and personal networks, connect to executives through their best relationship path.” Initially the new products enhanced by the use of Generate technology will form part of the sales and media segments. Over time the content and technology that Generate brings to the new organisation will be added to each of the products available from the Enterprise Media Group http://www.solutions.dowjones.com. This is interesting news for those of us who have used other ‘business linking’ services such as Capital IQ http://www.capitaliq.com/main.asp or Alacra Connections http://digbig.com/4wtjg. It is sure to find a ready spot in this broader commercial environment. As a result of this acquisition Dow Jones plans to develop a new business unit called Business & Relationship Intelligence as part of its Enterprise Media Group. Business & Relationship Intelligence will be headed by Generate’s co-founder Tom Aley as its Senior Vice President and managing director. Co-founder Darr Aley will become Vice President, marketing and business development. All current Generate employees will join Dow Jones. A list of current Generate senior executives can be found at this link: http://www.generateinc.com/executive-team.aspx. This is Dow Jones’ second acquisition this year. As well as spotting the opportunity to develop business-networking products, Dow Jones has been paying sharp attention to the news world by its earlier acquisition of the Dutch-language Betten Financial News BV. As Clare Hart states: “These acquisitions and the recent agreement for Dow Jones Newswires to distribute editorial content from Agence France-Presse, support our strategy to strengthen our global editorial assets and invest in technologies that move us far beyond traditional search.” http://digbig.com/4wtjh

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