Did wisdom of crowds seal specialist’s fate?
Jinfo Blog

11th January 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

In what’s unlikely to be the only distress sale of 2009, Dow Jones has acquired the database assets of The Library House Ltd, a provider of data on emerging European companies, after it was put into administration just before Christmas. Announcing the acquisition early in January http://digbig.com/4ycgf Dow Jones explained that The Library House data would be combined with its existing and much more comprehensive VentureSource service, which tracks venture capital investment in companies in every industry and stage of development throughout the US, Canada, Europe, India, Israel and Greater China. Current Library House database customers would become Dow Jones VentureSource customers and would benefit from greatly enhanced coverage as a result. It’s not the first time Dow Jones has been on the acquisition trail over the last 12 months. Last April it acquired Generate http://digbig.com/4ycge whose patented extraction and aggregation technology harvests company and executive data from the web and maps the relationships among the people and organizations it finds – and Dow Jones also reminded customers and others that it had acquired the Dutch language news service Betten Financial News BV the previous month as well. Speaking exclusively to VIP 55 last June http://web.vivavip.com/go/vip/ Dow Jones Media Group president Clare Hart cited Generate’s web crawling capabilities and the ability of its trigger technology to generate leads as its key benefits. Combined with a growing critical mass of data, to which The Library House’s is now added, it’s a potentially formidable offering. But why did The Library House fail? According to the online newsletter paidContent.UK http://digbig.com/4ycgg the problem was that venture capitalists were supposedly holding back, trying to raise new funds rather than make the investments that populated The Library House’s database. But one blogger, Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, offers a more reflective explanation. Firstly, he suggests http://digbig.com/4ycgj venture capitalists could no longer afford The Library House’s fees – in which case it makes sense for its database assets to be rolled in with Dow Jones’s infinitely more comprehensive offering. But secondly, Butcher suggests that the information in which The Library House dealt is now pretty easy to get to. Much of it can simply come from the start-up companies’ own ‘About’ pages, he says, and this is increasingly an area filled by crowd-sourced databases like Crunchbase (http://www.crunchbase.com/). ‘It’s easier and cheaper to get the companies to do it for you, so long as the resulting content can have someone cast an eye over it and verify the information,’ Butcher continues. ‘The “heavy-lifting”, the data entry, can easily be done by the companies themselves via RSS, wiki-style approaches, you name it.’ If he’s right, it’s one of the most telling examples yet of the wisdom of crowds supplanting the specialists.

« Blog