Buying & Selling eContent 2004 Program

Sunday, April 25th

• Attendees may pick up binders, bags, and other materials
  

Kick off your conference with the 5th Annual Buying & Selling
eContent Golf Tournament at The Indian Bend Golf Course at Camelback. The Indian Bend Golf Course at Camelback offers a
unique, links-style experience, paralleling the verdant waterway
for which it is named. The tournament is a “best ball” event, so don’t worry if you’re not a par golfer, you’ll have tons of fun and
make new acquaintances in this special pre-conference event.

*Golf is free for all registered attendees, but spots are limited and assigned on a priority basis according to date of registration.

Connect with old friends, meet new ones with similar interests, and jump-start your conference networking in the casual, southwestern ambiance of the Goldwater Gallery. Iced tea, cookies, and light refreshments will be available.

Sunset at Camelback marks the beginning of the fifth annual Buying & Selling eContent conference. As conference attendees gather at this opening reception in the North Garden, “don’t miss” your first chance to put new names with faces and to greet friends and colleagues. Enjoy hors d’oeuvres and drinks under the stars while you renew friendships with people you’ve met at past conferences or meet ones you’ve heard about around the industry. Establish the beginnings of relationships you will build on during the next 2 days of the working sessions and discussions and beyond.

Monday, April 26th

In 1970, Louis Borders started a company with a vision that it would be the “best source of information.” The implementation is history: Borders Books, the first book and music superstore. In the 1990s, he founded Webvan, the innovative online grocer that briefly soared and then failed in 2001 when the dot-com bubble burst. Now Borders is back to his roots—with the same old vision—to be the “best source of information,” but the new version is online. KeepMedia was co-founded by Louis Borders with CEO Doug Herrington and launched in August 2003. Hear firsthand why Borders chose online as his next playing field and what he sees as the potential, and decide for yourself whether KeepMedia is an encouraging bellwether of future success for the electronic content industry or a risky reprise of the digital newsstand.

The Content Industry Outlook is a fast-paced, intensive briefing on what you can expect to see happening in the content industry over the coming year—and what you need to know to grow and prosper. Anthea Stratigos, CEO and co-founder of Outsell, Inc., will discuss Outsell’s analysis and forecast for the Outsell 100 companies, which have outperformed the market in 2003, and share Outsell’s insights into what is happening inside the firewall with major content buyers. The only research and analyst firm to cover the information content industry, Outsell’s unique perspective is based on numerous in-depth relationships with the major players in the industry, including content creators and aggregators, major corporate buyers and deployers, and solutions providers. Listen, learn, and discuss success factors, trends, and innovative ideas with this keynote speaker who is widely respected as an astute and articulate industry observer.

Each segment of the content industry faces unique challenges and opportunities—publishers worry about distribution channels, licensing, and branding, content buyers face decisions on content deployment and integration, and content commerce and digital rights management solutions are different for content owners, aggregators, or buyers, yet all are common concerns. Listen to a corporate buyer and a major publisher discuss challenges and opportunities from their perspectives, so that we can begin to think together about collaborative solutions. This session frames many issues and topics that will resonate throughout the conference, in the formal sessions, panels, and roundtables, in countless offline one-on-one discussions, and around lunch and dinner tables.

Get ready, get set, network! This fast-paced, introduce-yourself session helps everyone match familiar names with faces and to make the most of the opportunity to talk face to face with clients, customers, vendors, and partners.

Join conference attendees with similar interests on the Sonoran Terrace for a delicious outdoor luncheon and stimulating conversations.
 

Listen to content buyers and sellers discuss how they collaborate to create win-win solutions to manage and deploy content within corporate or institutional environments. Hear how they approach the issues of negotiating contracts, licensing, rights management, bundling, pricing, and deployment in this enlightening, best practices session. Shadow two relationships and learn how they worked together, what some of the pitfalls were, and where they found their greatest successes. Understand what happens at the “point of sale” to global buyers and the resulting implications for everyone, from content creators to technology and solutions providers.

The licensing agreements between content creators and aggregators or distributors are a major behind-the-scenes factor in how products for the enterprise marketplace are structured and sold. This panel of content licensing professionals will share insights and experiences from their different viewpoints so that others up and down the content value chain can understand—and then discuss with the panel—the issues involved in licensing content and managing electronic rights and how they affect product development, channel strategies, and business models.

Relax with friends over a margarita or Corona while you watch the sun set over the beautiful Arizona mountains, and continue discussions that began during the day’s thought-provoking sessions. For dinner, share a table with colleagues—or friendly competitors—and enjoy an authentic southwestern gourmet meal under the stars.

Tuesday, April 27th

Industrial-strength, enterprise-quality content doesn’t come neatly bubblewrapped and off the rack from Wal-Mart—nor does it appear on Google—yet. As for costs, once it was possible to do comparison price/feature shopping, but no more, given the complexities of today’s products and marketplace. What is the current thinking on innovative pricing and packaging of content for the enterprise market? What business models are evolving? Hear from several content executives about how they are structuring content products—and why.

In the second segment of this session, speakers from the business models panel will be joined by two additional panelists representing major corporate buyers for a discussion of issues, challenges, and solutions. Ask questions and think out loud with the panelists about how to mesh the needs of a demanding marketplace with the realities of doing business profitably.

Google, Microsoft, IBM, and other technology players have raised the art and science of applying software solutions to content challenges to a new level in recent months. Hear firsthand how technology plus content adds up to some intriguing new products, applications, alliances, and partnerships—and explore what this convergence means for everyone who has a stake in the content industry.

Join your colleagues over a working lunch to debate and discuss the issues and trends that you have heard over the past 2 days and to explore hot topics at a more granular, small-group level. After lunch, each facilitator will report on the substance of each discussion to the conference at large, offering everyone a chance to “eavesdrop” on what was discussed at other tables as well as your own.

Wrap up and validate what you have learned at Buying & Selling eContent by hearing a take-away report from each roundtable facilitator, based on the discussion and framed through his or her prism of expertise and experience.

Explore how to deal with the complexities of the convergence of software, technology, and content within an enterprise setting. Options and choices abound, ranging from deploying Office 2003 with its integrated Research Panes to industrial-strength turnkey “content publishers” or portals, or content management systems and unstructured data-handling solutions. There are no easy answers and much to consider. Discuss the challenges and pitfalls and trade ideas about what works and what doesn’t.

Content owners balance distribution and access issues with the need to leverage and protect their assets; aggregators suggest creative business models, and rights management providers offer asset management solutions. These often intricate, intensely private business relationships are the nub of the content industry, and this roundtable offers a chance to explore common problems, issues, and business models with other content owners, distributors, and solutions providers.

Digital content, the Web, DRM and e-commerce developments combine to create myriad opportunities for repurposing content into diverse distribution channels to maximize revenue and create new revenue streams. This imperative
extends not only to commercial content but also into the realm of monetizing internal content. Brainstorm with other publishers, content owners, and internal content creators about how they are innovating their content distribution strategies and diversifying their business. 

In today’s upside-down content world, the leading publishers are often individuals and institutions equipped with their own powerful publishing tools. Portals, Web services, search engines, data mining, and simple, yet potentially disruptive technologies such as Weblogs are all part of a landscape of change that is forcing established vendors to question their roles as providers of content services. Similarly, “portable content” technologies and devices, DRM, e-commerce, rich media, and the integration of content with software are challenging traditional content vendors to reinvent themselves. Explore the future of content publishing and distribution through the prism of emerging technologies.

How to package content is a tough decision for content owners, and a thorny problem for corporate buyers who know what they want—and what they don’t need. One size doesn’t fit all, and one company’s ideal package doesn’t match another’s specifications. Tight budgets have forced buyers to parse the details of what they are getting and not to contract for what they know they won’t use. On the other hand, customized or one-off packages offer lower profit
margins and headaches for content owners and aggregators. Join a group of content buyers and sellers to debate this thorny issue and discuss possible solutions. 

Linking represents one of the Web’s greatest strengths for content users and is part of its core character. Similarly, e-journals fulfill another promise of the Web for some authors and publishers. However, the road to reality for links to full text from A&I databases and between systems has proven to be complex for traditional database producers, publishers, and content owners, and managing e-journals adds still more challenges to the mix. And now, federated search again ups the ante in the demand for increasingly linked and linkable content sets.

Want to mull over some of the ideas that surfaced during the conference, but in a less structured format? Join this open discussion group and participate in wide-ranging and informal conversations with other conference attendees.

The crisis of digital media and the difficulties associated with rights management is the most pressing issue in cyberspace today, according to John Palfrey, the executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Center. “Perfectly portable content” is a concept that balances the need for access versus control and which would allow copyrighted content to move from device to device without uncontrolled copying. It would "meet publishers' needs to control unauthorized and uncompensated copies while allowing consumers a sense of ownership and the ability to engage in fair use manipulation of legitimate digital content," said Mike McGuire, a research director at Gartner G2. In a thought-provoking closing keynote, Allen Weiner from the Gartner Group will discuss “perfectly portable content” and the Gartner-Berkman Center Digital Media Project, which is designed to examine future copyright scenarios and analyze the comparative advantages of each.