First new product since Generate acquisition
Jinfo Blog

22nd September 2008

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We have been waiting for information of any new products to be launched as a result of Dow Jones & Company’s http://www.dowjones.com acquisition of Generate http://www.generateinc.com, which we wrote about earlier this year (VIP 54). As part of the company’s Business and Relationship Intelligence group http://www.dowjones.com/Products_Services/ElectronicPublishing/DJ_BRI.htm, the new products will offer a Dow Jones gClick toolbar and a gDaily industry newsletter for SalesWorks and for Companies & Executives. The Dow Jones g2 content library will be expanded to include The Wall Street Journal http://www.wsj.com and Barron’s http://online.barrons.com/public/main. In announcing the new products, Tom Aley, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence Group, sees them helping business professionals, who are too busy conducting business to carry out their own research. ‘They’re under constant pressure to stay on top of the industries they are targeting. With this novel combination of extraction technology and business intelligence, we’re empowering users to stay on top of the latest market knowledge without slowing them down http://www.generateinc.com/press-releases.aspx?id=45’. The gClick toolbar is described as helping users find company intelligence from anywhere on the Web. While reading a Web page containing information on a company, such as news, press releases, blogs, SEC filing, or corporate websites, users can click the toolbar to drill down into relevant company profiles in the SalesWorks or Companies and Executives products. In VIP’s view this is an incredibly useful addition to the search process. Business researchers are as busy as the staff they support: any tool that speeds up the process of finding a company and tracking down other relevant references on the Web is worth evaluating further. The gDaily industry newsletters are described as covering 25 industry categories from more than 25,000 unique media sources and more than 3 million blogs. The news is selected by Dow Jones editors and enhanced by direct links to other information on the companies mentioned in the articles. Subscribers receive the newsletter via email. In the last of the new offerings, The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s will be added to all Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence products, including Dow Jones g2, thereby expanding news coverage overall. In a testimonial supplied by Jim Dickie, analyst and managing partner at CSO Insights http://www.csoinsights.com/, describes the products as ‘providing a cost effective way to leverage technology to provide each sales person with a ‘digital research analyst’ to help them (sales teams) accomplish that key selling task’. While not wishing to disagree with Mr Dickie, VIP hopes that he will continue to recognise the value of what our contributor, Tim Buckley Owen, calls the ‘warm-bloodied’ professional in supporting the work of sales and marketing executives. We can equally argue that it’s probably time to recognise that overworked business researchers could do with ‘digital research assistants’ of their own, so that they can focus on the high-touch, high-value research services that their organisations need and deserve. These new offerings, combining the expertise of Dow Jones and Generate, seem to be heading in the right direction.

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