Buying & Selling eContent 2005 Program

Sunday, April 10, 2005

• Open to all registered attendees

Join friends and colleagues on the golf course and enjoy the casual networking that goes along with playing at Indian Bend, Camelback’s beautiful golf course. The tournament is a “best-ball” event, so even if you’re not a par golfer, you’ll have a great time at this special event.

This unique, buyer-focused workshop will help you establish your content requirements and find out what is available in today’s marketplace. You will learn how to source that content in a cost-effective manner and how to give your firm maximum value for its information and market data acquisitions. Topics will include how to establish a baseline for your current information usage, information sourcing and vendor management, effective negotiation processes, rate card and contract models, and how to get additional value for your content investment.

This workshop will include a review of sourcing models used by large information users, success stories with proven results, and will be highly interactive. If you are responsible for, or are involved with, managing or sourcing content in your organization, the 2 hours spent at this workshop will easily cost-justify your attendance at the conference.

Sunset on the lawn at Camelback brings the industry together again for the sixth annual Buying & Selling eContent—content creators, global buyers and information managers, aggregators, distributors, software solutions providers, and others who are focused on content as a primary driver for their business model. Don’t miss this chance to put names with new faces and greet old friends—and enjoy hors d’oeuvres and drinks under the stars while you begin discussions and build relationships that will continue over the next 2 days and beyond.

Monday, April 11, 2005

As we digitize the world's information, we're discovering that the fundamental principles by which we've organized the real world don't apply very well. These principles have a long history, going back to Aristotle, and have determined the traditional shape of knowledge as a tree of categories or concepts. The digital world is uprooting the entire tree, not just changing its shape. Most important is that in the new world information owners no longer control the organization of their information.

Instead of building universal, definitive taxonomies, information architects are finding there is tremendous benefit to creating un-taxonomized, miscellaneous pools of enriched data objects so that users can sort and organize to suit their own peculiar needs. Such systems work best if they are messy, uncontrolled, and saturated with information added by users. The result are information systems that are far more usable, more contextualized, and easier to maintain. And there's one one more result — the authority of institutions and owners of information owners is shaken to the core.

In this provocative keynote, Web visionary and philosopher David Weinberger challenges us to re-think how we organize and distribute electronic content.

The ROI from content at Camelback is equal parts what you hear from the speakers and who you connect with during the breaks and other events. Listen, learn, and introduce yourself during this fast-paced session that helps match names to faces and tees up your networking agenda for the next 2 days.

This content industry outlook, presented by an outstanding panel of industry observers and analysts, gives you a solid foundation for making business decisions in the coming year. Hear about trends to watch and get an understanding of what you can expect to see happening in the content industry as the members of this panel share their unique perspectives.

It’s like the blind man and the elephant—everyone has a different perspective on who buys content and what happens to it, depending on what, who, and where you are in the content marketplace. This session shares insights about content acquisition and usage from different viewpoints, including how buyers acquire content and what they really do with the content purchased. Will the buyer profiles match up to who the publishers and aggregators think they are selling to? Or are content buyers, aggregators, publishers, and solutions providers holding onto the legs, tails, and heads of lions, tigers, and bears instead of one elephant? That may not be a bad thing, as long as a content seller can define his market and satisfy his customers’ needs.

In this powerful afternoon session, listen to buyers talk about how they buy and deploy content inside their organizations, and hear executives in the content supply chain discuss who they think is buying their products and why, and how they are being used. Then draw your own conclusions about where you fit within the content marketplace and how to shape your products to achieve the maximum advantage.

How is content acquired and deployed inside the enterprise? Understanding the complexities of how buyers actually use information purchases will help vendors position their products and their messages to meet customers’ needs. In this session learn how major content buyers are wrestling with globalization, acquisition, deployment, and content integration issues as they strive to deliver relevant content to the desktops of a wide variety of users across business functions and in diverse geographic locations.

To be effective in setting a new, forward-looking strategy for marketing and delivering content products and services, it helps to understand how buyers acquire and manage content and what their needs are. Hear from an outside observer and buy-side consultant about how buyers currently approach the information acquisition process, how they define their business objectives and requirements for the content they purchase, who the internal players are in the content buying process, and what content buying strategies are in play inside large global organizations.

Content publishers create content to meet a perceived need for a defined audience, but do they know who is really buying their content? Hear two publishers discuss their target markets, how they are reaching that market, and how they think their content is being used in the marketplace. Listen and learn as they answer these questions:

•  Who do you think you are creating content for?
•  Who really buys your content? What type of person in the customer organization?
•  What do they do with it?
•  How are you selling your content?
•  What happens to your content after you’ve sold it? How do you know?

Aggregators in the content industry are the prototypical middlemen, acting as buyers and sellers, and so have a unique view of how content is both bought and sold. The speakers in this session will concentrate on who their customers are, how they are reaching them, and what they think happens to their content after the sale, discussing these questions:

• Who are your customers, by demographics, including industry segments and job types?
• Who do you talk to (positions and departments) in an organization when you are selling your products?
• What do you think/know your customers are doing with your content?
• Who are the actual end users? Describe one or two.
• How does your content get to users’ desktops and what do they do with it?

Technology solutions providers offer services to custom-fit content delivery, rights management, and payment options for content buyers and sellers or to manage and integrate internal and external information. They are perfectly positioned to understand who is buying content and how it is being used at and after the point of sale. Listen to their views on who is buying content, and why and how, and how it is being used. Hear their insights on these key questions:

• Who is buying and using content (from your vantage point)? What kinds of content?
• How is it being delivered to desktops?
• What features and functions do buyers need to help them integrate and manage content?
• Who are the end-users and what are their expectations from your perspective?

Now, a time for discussion after an intense afternoon of hearing people at all points on the content value chain talk about who buys content and how it is used. Conference attendees have a chance to ask questions and hear the panelists query each other. The take-away is a reality check that enables you to filter what has been said through your own prism of products and experience and reach distinctive conclusions about how to leverage your position in the content market.

Wear your best boots and jeans, and bring your roping gear! Come prepared to enjoy a beautiful Arizona sunset from Camelback’s famous Mummy Mountain. Relax with friends and continue discussions inspired by the day’s conference sessions over margaritas, Coronas, and a delicious Southwestern dinner.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Can you make a business (model) out of a technology? RSS, blogs, wikis, niche publishing, contextual linking, desktop search, visualization—there’s no shortage of new technologies and ways to create, publish, and distribute content. Some are “off the grid,” individualized ventures, and others have broken away from the traditional content value chain. Are any of these new schemes driven by profit motives? Are any making money? Hear from several businesses which are applying new technologies in such a way that they leverage technology to create content or add value—and make money. Listen and learn from the hopes and dreams and strategies for success as expressed by these new content industry innovators.

You asked—for more small group discussions on issues, trends, challenges, and hot topics that emerge during the conference. Join your colleagues to explore problems and issues of common concern at these real-time communities of interest. The round-tables have become an integral part of content at Camelback, and a superb way of tapping into the knowledge and experience of all the conference attendees. Come prepared to listen and learn—and contribute.

Continue your round-table discussions in smaller groups over lunch, or join a lunch table on a different topic to get a quick briefing on another discussion.

Finding the right business model has been the mantra of the content industry, but while the debate continues, the real secret to success and profitability may not be reinventing your business model, but pursuing well-founded strategic goals and objectives. In this high-powered panel, top executives from major content-centric companies share their critical thinking about business strategies they are using to turn threats into opportunities and challenges into profitability.

What did you learn, what did you hear in the sessions and around the conference? What do industry observers and analysts have to say about what was discussed at the conference? Get the “cliff notes” from this thoughtful panel, and return to your office with a firm grasp of where the industry is headed and inspired with strategies for success in the coming year.