Every fall, the team here at InfoCommerce Group announces our pick for the InfoCommerce Model of Excellence awards. This program profiles industry exemplars to show how real revenue is generated by selling and distributing information online. To decide what companies are selected to become a model of excellence, we scan the business information landscape to identify companies whose products – both new and established – that have important new business models, or offer technological innovation within the field of online information and highlight them as a (ahem) model for other companies to emulate.
Below are our picks for the 2013 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence, with a short summary of each. Click the PDF link to open up a detailed “Business Information Framework” report for each company, which includes detailed company information on products, ownership and other information.
Equilar
Location: Redwood City, CA
Website: www.equilar.com
Business Model: Subscription
About: Equilar has built an extremely successful business by analyzing and most importantly, normalizing, public company executive compensation data from SEC filings, creating a database companies can use to benchmark their own compensation policies and practices and aid in regulatory compliance.
Products/Services: Atlas is a smart move by Equilar to leverage its existing data to make it available to other markets. With detailed knowledge of company directors as well as top executives of the largest companies, including their pay and overall compensation plans, Atlas makes this data available and useful for sales prospecting, fundraising and board member recruitment.
Through a representation of existing data, along with a new user interface, Atlas helps colleges and universities find relationships among their most successful alumni. Salespeople can upload their LinkedIn contacts to find relationships they can leverage. Fundraisers can see not only full compensation for thousands of executives, but the date of their next “wealth events” (e.g. option awards) as well.
As one of the best quality databases of public company executives, Atlas is a natural tool for board recruitment. And while not explicitly designed as such, Atlas can be used to explore board overlaps and interlocking directorships. Most importantly of all, Atlas is a textbook example of the coveted “flip” opportunity to repurpose data for multiple marketplaces simply by representing the data and altering the user interface. All-in-all, a powerful and creative new product from an already successful industry player.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for Equilar, click here.
Enigma
Location: New York, NY
Website: www.enigma.io
Business Model: Subscription
About: Enigma has integrated and indexed over 100,000 public domain databases to provide unparalleled access to data that is often valuable, nominally free, but difficult to source and use effectively. Think of Enigma as a search engine for public data.
Product/Services: Enigma puts a common index and consistent user interface across over 100,000 public domain datasets, making them easy to discover, search and analyze. Focusing on data associated with organizations and individuals, the Enigma search engine delivers fast and convenient access to information that would otherwise be too specialized or obscure to locate individually. Indeed, much of this information isn’t discoverable at all via the major search engines. Moreover, Enigma pre?processes that data, working to eliminate the hassles of varying data formats, poor documentation and weak user interfaces. Enigma effectively liberates data by making it easier to source, search and use.
The applications for business and competitive research are obvious, and Enigma provides a powerful user interface that not only helps with discovery and offers strong presentation, but provides a series of basic analytics capabilities as well, allowing users to compare data and quickly draw valuable insights from it. In addition to individual and group subscription licenses, Enigma also offers API access with several pricing options, and an associated toolset. For some data content providers and internal users, Enigma can be an efficient way to connect to public datasets by leveraging its acquisition and normalization work.
Most of us intuitively understand that there is a lot of hidden value in the myriad public datasets that exist. But to mine this value, you first needed to know the data existed, and the agencies creating the data often have little incentive to publicize it. Further, these datasets are often presented in complex structures, and available only in specific, sometimes outdated formats. Enigma makes all this invisible to its subscribers, allowing them to focus on extracting value from this vast but hidden source of facts and insights.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for Enigma, click here.
Entelo
Location: San Francisco, CA
Website: www.entelo.com
Business Model: Subscription
About: Entelo is the newest entrant into an emerging category of big data driven recruitment platforms for employers seeking programmers and other technology workers who are (1) strategically critical and (2) hard-to-find. Entelo joins companies including Gilt and TalentBin, which have proven that employers are willing to pay for subscription services that allow them to mine huge databases of IT candidates who have demonstrated their skills on social networks. Entelo’s market distinction is its Sonar product, which goes beyond the popular search function to serve up candidates who might be open to a new position, even though they are not actively looking
Product/Services: Entelo currently has two products, Search and Sonar. Search mines a database of over 300 million profiles aggregated from publicly-accessible online communities for programmers and IT pros, such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, Dribbble and GrabCad, as well as generalized social platforms such as Twitter and Quora. For a subscription price of $500 monthly or $5,000 annually per seat, in-house recruiters (not third parties) can perform unlimited searches and use Entelo’s CRM to store, export and share candidate data. Unlike profiles on sites such as LinkedIn, which present information mostly controlled by the candidate, Entelo’s profiles include the candidate’s self-reported skills and experience but also their actual work, as demonstrated in code they have written on GitHub, questions they have answered on Stack Overflow and followers they have on Twitter.
Entelo Sonar is based on “patent-pending technology to help discover candidates who may be open to new opportunities.” This algorithm identifies potential passive job seekers by analyzing over 70 different variables, including if the person has recently updated a social profile or if the company for which they currently work has announced poor earnings or downsizing. Prospective candidates that match a current open position are delivered directly to customers via Sonar. The number of candidates is not limited, but the $500 monthly fee only includes one Sonar candidate search; additional searches cost $300 per month.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for Entelo, click here.
FindTheCompany
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Website: www.findthecompany.com
Business Model: Advertising/Sponsorship
About: FindTheCompany has built one of the largest business and organization databases, providing deep entity profiles derived from a mix of public domain, licensed and public domain sources.
Product/Services: With nearly 32 million businesses and other organizations in its database, FindTheCompany would be impressive just by the sheer scale of its coverage; but it is blazing other new trails as well.
Most significantly, FindTheCompany is delivering an impressive mix of aggregated data, drawing from extensive web research, public domain databases, and licensed commercial data products. Putting them all together yields a deeper organizational profile than offered by most other company information providers. For example, FindTheCompany reports on whether the company has government contracts, some of its software and systems, competitors, etc. These layers of insight complement detailed data on the organization itself, revenue estimates and employee and director contacts.
FindTheCompany currently has an advertising based business model, but as it continues to expand and perfect its data, it clearly has the opportunity to explore a range of other monetization options given the wealth of information it is offering, some of it unavailable elsewhere. It represents an impressive step-up in the arms race to use a mosaic-style strategy to build out deep company dossiers by aggregating data from a wide variety of sources. And by aggressively mixing harvested, public and licensed data, FindTheCompany is an excellent showcase both for what’s possible and where things are heading.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for FindTheCompany, click here.
Relationship Science
Location: New York, NY
Website: www.relsci.com
Business Model: Subscription
About: Relationship Science (RelSci) is all about networking for business development and fundraising, using an innovative relationship mapping approach and backed by a huge research team to build and maintain deep, structured profiles on over 2.5 million important decision?makers and the organizations they work with across the public, private, finance, and nonprofit sectors.
RelSci wants to unlock the potential and unleash the power of professional relationships for individuals and institutions.
They provide two simple things:
– Insights and ideas on how to best leverage meaningful relationships – both yours and your organization’s.
– Research-grade intelligence on the people you do and want to do business with so every interaction is a warm one.
Product/Services: Let’s get this out of the way straight-off: Relationship Science is not a LinkedIn knock-off. That’s because it is different from LinkedIn in one fundamental and critical way; it – not its users – builds and maintains its database and profiles. As a RelSci subscriber, all you supply is your own list of contacts; you don’t link to them, you don’t supply any information about yourself, and nobody links to you.
RelSci relies on an army of 500 researchers, coupled with software that monitors nearly 10,000 web sites for relevant changes. Individuals are only added to the database (now 2.5 million names strong) if they are deemed to be sufficiently important, and if so, a human research team goes to work assembling key facts from numerous public domain sources and putting this information into a structured database to permit powerful and precise searching. If a subscriber can’t find a desired individual, all it takes is an email to RelSci and a dedicated team qualifies the individual and creates a record.
RelSci sells to demanding audiences seeking to make extremely high?level contacts, so it understands the importance of maintaining the data, and uses both advanced software tools and human researchers to keep its data as accurate and current as possible.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for RelSci, click here.
RepairPal
Location: San Francisco, CA
Website: www.repairpal.com
Business Model: Advertising/Sponsorship
About: At a high level, RepairPal helps consumers find quality, trusted auto repair shops nationwide. But this brief description doesn’t do justice to the rigor of its vetting process or its impressive repair price estimator, advice pages, tools to manage car maintenance, and a powerful mobile app.
Product/Services: Auto repair shops have long had a reputation (not entirely fair, but still present) of being sharp operators. RepairPal has set out to bring transparency and standards to the industry and help drive more business to those repair shops with strong skills and good ethics. The process starts with intense background, online reputation and customer satisfaction checks that all shops must pass before they are listed. Further, accepted shops have to agree to a 12-month guarantee policy and that their prices will conform to those in RepairPals’ RepairPrice Estimator tool. Add user-generated consumer reviews to the mix to understand the incredible detail offered on each repair shop.
The RepairPrice Estimator provides a range of locally adjusted prices for hundreds of common car repairs. For traffic and user engagement, RepairPal also offers online appointment requests, detailed car repair advice pages, and an innovative “MyCar” tool to manage the health of your car and learn about relevant recalls.
RepairPal easily trumps every site we have seen to date with regard to the level of diligence it performs on candidate auto repair shops before they are added to the database – far beyond the simple license verification and user reviews seen at most other sites. It’s a truly impressive way to build confidence. Moreover, auto repairs shops must agree to standard warranty terms and even to keep their pricing in line with the RepairPal RepairPrice Estimator. Wrap this package up with in?depth consumer advice and car repair management tools (all available via a mobile app as well), and you can see why RepairPal is such a compelling business proposition.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for RepairPal, click here.
Segmint
Location: San Francisco, CA
Website: www.segmint.com
Business Model: Subscription
About: Segmint takes customer transactional datastreams from its clients and tags each customer with a variable number of “Key Lifestyle Indicators” that are used to drive sophisticated marketing campaigns, coupled with predictive analytics indicating propensity to purchase. Segmint is executing on the fundamental goal of every marketer: to make customer data actionable by creating and delivering targeted, relevant messages customers want to see, remember and act upon.
Product/Services: At a high level, Segmint enables its clients to maximize and leverage their data to create relevant experiences for their customers. While it is initially focused on the financial services market, Segmint can take customer transaction data of any type, from businesses across multiple industries (or verticals), classify the transactions by type into its proprietary Key Lifestyle Indicators (KLIs), then apply an unlimited number of KLIs to each individual customer. There are obviously some powerful categorization algorithms at work to make this happen, and the KLIs can be put to use immediately to improve targeting of marketing messages (and by the way, Segmint’s “Privacy by Design” architecture means that all customer data remains anonymous). It never sees an actual customer name). KLIs are not static; they are assigned and re?assigned dynamically based on new transaction data.
But beyond lifestyle flags to improve messaging, Segmint also has a powerful predictive analytics capability that drives off of a rolling window of transaction history to identify which customers are most likely to be interested in any specific client offer. It’s all rolled up into a powerful but simple user interface that lets marketers get as granular as they want, or lets Segmint provide recommendations. Segmint also provides strong ROI analytics along with reporting that can attribute lift and increased revenue, and a re?targeting program (also anonymous) that lets Segmint clients deliver targeted ads to their customers on thousands of websites. Overall, it’s a powerful, real world application of Big Data in the marketing realm.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for Segmint, click here.
STELLAService
Location: New York, NY
Website: www.stellaservice.com
Business Model: Subscription
About: STELLAService helps consumers find businesses with great online customer service, and helps businesses improve their customer service. It provides customer service ratings to companies based on its independent analysis of over 200 customer service metrics and random customer service calls to companies by STELLAService analysts.
Product/Services: STELLAService builds on the well?established concept of the “mystery shopper,” where companies hire third parties to pose as actual customers and record their experiences, and applies it to online shopping. But unlike the mystery shopper model, STELLAService conducts this research independently, allowing it to develop a powerful set of aggregate performance data benchmarks that it offers through its Stella Metrics platform. STELLAService is currently evaluating and measuring thousands of online businesses, the largest of them on a daily basis. It actually buys merchandise online, monitors delivery, tests the company’s customer service with its own analyst s and builds a comprehensive database with comparable data to allow subscribing companies to evaluate their own performance, and benchmark themselves against their peers. STELLAService also offers a Stella Seal to outstanding companies as a trustmark they can display on their websites.
In short, STELLAService seeks to find and recognize those online retailers that provide stellar service, and to build a database and diagnostics tool that online retailers can subscribe to continually monitor how they stack up and get early warning of where improvement is needed.
STELLAService provides a clean, intuitive and powerful tool to retailers focused on an area – customer service – that increasingly drives online success and failure. Its neutral market positioning gives its data insights and trustmark program added weight and value.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for STELLAService, click here.
Russell Perkins, our INSIDER Guide to Data Publishing Strategy, is the Founder and Managing Director of InfoCommerce Group (ICG). InfoCommerce Group is a boutique consultancy serving the global business information industry, with expertise in commercial data products focused on corporate and product data strategy, new data product development, assessment of existing products to help accelerate growth (or stem declines), and acquisition due diligence. (Read Russell’s full Bio)
