The Numerati: Swimming in offers

Posted by: Stephen Baker on April 15

It’s hard to keep track of the Numerati, the datahounds I write about in my book. People keep throwing money at them. Since I finished writing the first draft, last summer, most of my cast of characters has changed jobs or ownership.

Dave Morgan of Tacoda, sold his behavioral advertising company to AOL for about a quarter of billion dollars last summer. He left AOL a couple months ago.
Samer Takriti, the stochastic analyst who was modeling 50,000 of his consultants at IBM, left late last summer for a quant job at Goldman Sachs.
Howard Kaushanshy and his team at Umbria, a company that analyzes blogs, sold a couple weeks ago to J.D. Powers (part of McGraw-Hill).
This morning I learn that Tony Conrad and his partners at Sphere, the blog-search start-up, just sold to AOL. (Om adds a nice personal note.)
If I were to search through the manuscript looking for the next deal, I think I’d take a close look at Neal Goldman’s Inform Technologies. It’s a competitor to Sphere. Looks like that market is heating up. (UPDATE: I should add that I have absolutely no information about this. It’s pure speculation on my part.)
(I also talked quite a bit to Yahoo’s research chief, Prabhakar Raghavan. But I don’t think it’s quite fair to characterize Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo as part of the Numerati trend. It’s a tad broader.)

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/

Reader Comments

Tom O'Brien

April 16, 2008 02:56 PM

Aspiring numerati here:

http://motivequest.com/

TO'B
MotiveQuest LLC

Keith DuBay

April 17, 2008 12:22 PM

The problem with sharing audience across platforms/publications is one of demographic. A local newspaper does not generally want most of the readers outside its own location. How's it going to convince a car dealer to advertise to someone in another state or country? It only helps on national ad campaigns where large companies have a saturation tactic.

Content sharing can work for national/international publications that depend on advertisers bent on worldwide brand. You can say specialty companies selling stuff on Ebay may find such advertising useful, but they don't depend on display branding anyway. They're into search.

So once again, the local newspaper finds itself getting the ol' Screwgie by giving its content away. Really, once local advertisers are the wiser, why should they care about all those out-of-town clicks?

janet A. Ginsburg

April 17, 2008 03:41 PM

When is the book coming out? Not much info on Amazon....

thanks!

steve baker

April 17, 2008 04:29 PM

Hi Janet,
The book comes out on Sept. 16. There's a bit more info on the Amazon page than there was last week. They've put in some of the material from the catalog, but not all.
Right now, I'm trying to figure out what kind of blog/web page to set up for this thing. Leaning heavily toward something bloggy. Any advice welcome. Thanks

Post a comment

 

About

In Blogspotting Senior Writer Stephen Baker and Associate Editor Heather Green take a look at how cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society. Whether its blogs or wikis, data crunching or data targeting, technology’s advances are reshaping the world that we live in.

RSS Feed: Blogspotting

BW Mall - Sponsored Links