Re: Meteor Monitor - Friday, September 01, 2000
Meteor Monitor: New analysis confirms huge size of 'hidden' business-to-business market for ThoughtShare
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There's a new study just out that shows that a key industry that ThoughtShare, our major investment, is entering exceeds US$140 billion per year -- and that's just in the United States.
The new market-sizing research project from Outsell, Inc. -- an information industry research and advisory firm based in Burlingame, California -- reveals the business-to-business portion of the information-content market
is a major and previously hidden industry.
ThoughtShare is in the process of creating a stable of programs that will help businesses and individuals manage and make available electronically stored information in new ways. These new ways will make it easier for their customers, clients and staff to get to that data quickly and easily. This report is one of the first major analyses of just how big that market is. And the rule of thumb is to add 15% to the size of a market like this if you want to include Canada.
"While the information-technology side has been tracked and analyzed, there has been limited focus on the information-content side of the industry," says Louise Garnett, Outsell's vice president. She says the information-content market is made up two major parts: the business-to-consumer segment and the business-to-business segment. The focus of this study is just on the business-to-business portion. "Information technology has provided the backbone and infrastructure required to pipe in huge amounts of information content that companies rely on to understand and react to their market environments," she notes.
From the point of view of the President of both Meteor Technologies and ThoughtShare, Fred Fabro, the enormous amount of content that's now on-line and coming on-line is creating an equally enormous demand for electronic
ways to get the right type of data or knowledge in the hands of the person who needs it at the time they need it -- and that usually means the quicker the better. That, he says, is where ThoughtShare comes in. Its first
program out of the gate, to be released publicly October 9, will help people who know where specific patterns of data are located to capture those relationships electronically and save them for their own use or share them with others, immediately turning that information into valuable knowledge.
Garnett says that information content will be increasingly scrutinized by companies that intend to thrive in what she calls "the knowledge economy." She says a person who wants a specific type of knowledge or information
'buys' it by investing time or money or both. "With the preponderance of corporate intranets, extranets and [information] portals, choosing the right and most reliable information content is a strategic decision. And buyers face a daunting array of companies, products and 'solutions' for the information-content dilemma." ThoughtShare software is intended to reduce the 'cost,' particularly in the investment in time a person makes in acquiring knowledge.
Outsell's comprehensive study has identified five main categories in the business-to-business information-content industry:
* Market research, reports and services;
* News and trade; company, credit and financial;
* Scientific, technical and medical;
* General aggregators, distributors and services; reference; and
* Education and training.
Fabro notes that he expects ThoughtShare's products to be used and useful in each one of these major categories.
Garnett says, "The information industry is really a collective of different markets which includes all forms of content as well as the technology that enables the distribution of that content."
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