Buying & Selling eContent 2006 Program

Sunday, April 9, 2006

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

• 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.

• Open to all registered attendees

In this practical workshop, content buyers and sellers will learn what they need to know to structure better content contracts, studying what a good vendor should provide in contracts to give fair value and what a prospective buyer should look for in a licensing agreement. Bill Noorlander will present a holistic approach to negotiating content contracts, with an aim toward building relationships and optimizing mutual value, while K. Matthew Dames will discuss how to construct a digital content licensing contract that equitably handles key issues such as copyright, access, usage, and renewal clauses. The workshop will help sellers prepare better contracts in advance, reducing the time it takes to close a sale or a renewal, while helping buyers identify value points and key clauses.

• Open to all registered attendees

Every day millions of people search for what publishers and content technology companies have to offer. However most organizations fail to develop effective marketing and sales strategies. The unfortunate result is visitors don’t find the information they need, resulting in lost revenue and wasted resources. In this lively and interactive workshop, you will learn about effective marketing and sales strategies across all stages of the content consideration cycle. Executives at publishing and content technology companies will take away:

• A clear understanding of what it means to be strategic
• Case studies on how innovative publishers, research firms, and other content creators leverage their keyword-rich content assets (including taxonomies) for search engines to ensure that their valuable content is found at the moment it is needed — when someone is specifically searching for it
• Details about how marketers segment visitors by “buyer persona” to more effectively deliver content and make the sale
• How marketing and sales work together to drive revenue
• Best practices on how publishers and content technology companies use knowledge of their buyers to shorten the sales cycle and deliver more revenue faster.

This is not theory. Drawn from extensive case studies and practical experience, you will learn what innovative companies are doing today to be more effective online.

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 10, 2006

Today content providers and publishers compete not just with each another, but with thousands of users who are creating content for love. Technology and social changes are forcing us to change how we do business. Hear Esther Dyson think out loud about how content companies can survive and succeed when their raw material is often available for free to their customers. How do you add value and refine that raw material? How do you prove the value of your content products in an era when users are channeling content direct to their desktops?

Editor of Release 1.0 and organizer of PC Forum, Esther Dyson is well-known for putting technology innovations in context and bringing groups together to effect change on an international scale. By 1994 she had already explored the impact of the Internet on intellectual property, and in 1997 wrote a book in with chapters about security, privacy, anonymity, and intellectual property, foreshadowing many of today's hot topics. Recently she has focused on topics including social software and networks, registries of people and things, the transformation of email to meta-mail, and identity management.

 

User-generated content, new rules of the road about who owns original content, and easy Web publishing technologies like blogs have made everyone a publisher. Trillions of bytes later, we remain fascinated with the process, but the impact of user-generated content as an information resource has yet to be examined. What does this wealth of unfettered content mean for premium content owners and corporate content specialists? Are user-created resources important sources of information, and if so, why? If you buy, own, or distribute content, how do you position your products or adjust your strategies? What new opportunities arise and how can you come out on the upside of this groundswell of content proliferation?

New content technologies are compelling major changes in work flow and business processes, as well as in product offerings by content companies.

• Content buyers are integrating content purchased from disparate sources on a large scale.
• Web-based solutions allow everyone to become an aggregator (as well as a publisher).
• Software merges with content to create new types of products and software-enabled services.
• Existing aggregators are exploring how to integrate new types of content, such as blogs, into their products.

You'll be inspired to innovate after hearing from this new breed of content aggregators. 

The Web 2.0 meme has become shorthand for much of the buzz about the next-generation Internet.  O'Reilly Media coined the concept as a way to characterize the secret sauce shared by both the Internet companies that survived the dotcom bust and the exciting new companies that have jumped to the forefront of people's attention.  What do trends and products like blogs, podcasting, tagging, syndication, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Google AdSense have that is missing from past Internet concepts and ventures?  What exactly is Web 2.0?  Must companies be "born Web 2.0," or how can they grow Web 2.0 core competencies?  How do Web 2.0 concepts impact the information environment, and thus the future of content publishers, providers, and consumers?  Hear first-hand how O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly defines Web 2.0 and how he sees the role of publishers and authors in the developing Web 2.0 world.

It's time to connect and collaborate! The round-table discussions that are an integral part of the conference have emerged under a new name. Join a Collaborative Conversation and explore an issue, trend, or problem with other attendees who have similar interests. Tap into the collective knowledge and experience of other attendees, and listen, learn, contribute — and collaborate as you discuss one of these topics:

• When Everyone's an Aggregator
  Who aggregates content? Let us count the ways…. Continue the morning's discussion on content integration and the new aggregators. Explore what it means up and down the content chain when content syndication is synonymous with RSS, and buyers of e-journals must become aggregators, and news services are adding blogs to their content mix — and other new content integration trends.
  
  
• Exploiting Alternative Media: Mobile Content, Podcasts, Video, & Streaming
  Who's doing it and how — and who's thinking about it? Is there any money in it? What's the potential? Factiva has posted a podcast, Thomson Gale is adding podcast feeds to their databases, and Chemical Abstracts Service announced a new interface for hand-held devices. Mobile content and streaming media are yet to be fully exploited by premium content providers, but here's your chance to listen and learn what's happening on the leading fringes.
  
  
• The Google Effect: Re-Thinking Content Delivery, Licensing, & Interfaces
  The impact of the search engines on premium content providers is tremendous and felt in many ways, from new search patterns and expectations to different discovery processes to changes in licensing and branding strategies. Explore these thorny problems with others who are struggling with the same issues.
  
  
• Social Network Tools & User-Generated Content
  What do blogs, wikis, and other user-generated content mean for serious publishers and information users? Should you be re-thinking your strategies? Will these new tools exist in parallel, or do they threaten premium content sources? Or, perhaps it's time to embrace the technology and reach your users in new ways?

There's no blueprint for turning hot new technology into real companies and products, but this session features several entrepreneurs who have combined next-gen technology and a sense of market potential to create viable — and intriguing — business ventures. Get an inside look at their strategic thinking, get inspired by their vision, and get a jump on your competition by learning how to think about your business with a Web 2.0 mind-set.

A stunning sunset viewed from Mummy Mountain is the setting for this casual evening networking event. Wear your boots and jeans — and don't forget your cowboy hat — and relax with friends and continue discussions inspired by the day's sessions. Enjoy margaritas, Coronas, and a delicious Southwestern dinner under the stars — and among the best and the brightest in the content industry.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

In today's chaotic content world, with users taking control, traditional publishers must contend with a radically changed environment. Scientific/Technical/Medical (STM) publishers face an author and reader community that increasingly believes that research information "wants to be free." This challenges publishers to justify the value they add and to recognize that publishing e-content is fundamentally different from publishing in the print world. Elsevier's Y.S. Chi looks at publishing from
a humanist and a business perspective, attempting to reconcile his various constituencies — librarians, scientists, researchers, and information providers.

Y.S. Chi is vice chairman of Elsevier and a prominent figure in international publishing.  He recently joined Elsevier to head up its global academic and customer relations, after serving as chairman as Random House Asia.  He formerly held several president and CEO positions at Ingram Distribution Holding, the parent company of Ingram Book Group.  He is on the board of trustees of Princeton University and also serves as a trustee of Princeton University Press.

Is it time to abandon the subscription model, or are there innovative ways of billing for usage — and advantages — that might convince you to stay the course? Weigh your options in light of what you'll hear from speakers with experience on both sides of the equation, and learn about emerging trends for service model and subscription and usage pricing.

In a competitive content industry driven by search engine traffic, licensing takes on new meanings and often becomes branding, as publishers jockey for strategic positioning. In search of valuable eyeballs, controversial tactics such as contextual linking and advertising give away content, creating new and decidedly nontraditional revenue streams. As a publisher, re-think your licensing strategies as this speaker and panelists explore new ways to monetize content assets. And if you buy content, you know there is no free lunch, so another big question is: Who's picking up the tab?

It’s a frequent mantra, but finally the web and ecommerce are offering some major advantages in the quest to “know your customers.” The one-to-one relationship of direct sales is tantalizing, but the reality is often complex. Lou Celi at EIU has turned his revenue sources and business model upside down in the past 10 years. Now most of his sales are direct—with a tremendous impact on product offerings and on marketing and sales strategies. As the speakers in The Subscription Dilemma session discussed, web analytics are essential tools. Jeff Lunsford from WebSideStory outlines crucial new ways to analyze web site usage and describes how to know exactly who’s buying what. In yet another take on the mission to know who’s buying content, and how and why, John Blossom reports on a recent survey on content purchasing patterns in business organizations.

Stakeholders in the content industry are expert watchers of the content players Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and Microsoft. These search engines turned content gorillas have become forces to contend with for everyone who deals with information content. Our business strategies and product
developments are driven by what they say and do. Our success or failure often depends on reacting correctly to the challenges they present. We've invited the executives in charge of search and content in these companies to join us for a lively discussion about their views of digital content and how we can work to expand the industry — together.

As e-content dynamics shift around us, as relationships between buyers and sellers evolve, and as technology presents us with increasingly interesting possibilities, the way forward is anything but intuitively obvious. What was once a straight path is now a maze, with some trails leading to dead ends and others to success. In this new environment, it's difficult to look ahead with any certainty, but you won't want to miss what this panel of industry luminaries thinks might lie around the next turn.