Living in Silicon Valley, running a software company with big ambitions I hear the question a lot. Is this another tech bubble? Isn’t is going to burst again?
The short answer is no.
Pundits covering tech tend to confuse valuation with long term value. We may well be in a valuation bubble but unlike the 2000 tech bubble the companies in question have deep, sustainable revenue models.
There are certainly some high valuations – per Fred Wilson’s view of frothy valuations in April – and these are driven by investor demand. As Father Guido Sarducci so wisely said in the 5 minute university, Economics is about supply and demand. When a few companies have sky high valuations in the public and private markets VCs are chasing good ideas with too much money again and so the early stage and later stage valuations may be getting silly for most companies, but some will be worth it.
Valuation is very different than long term value. Technology, and in particular software, is where long term sustainable value is being built. And when I say long term I am thinking hundreds of years. Marc Andreesen wrote very eloquently about this in the WSJ on Saturday in his essay Why Software Is Eating the World. We are at the beginning of a long era in which technology will reshape every aspect of our lives in ways we are just now beginning to see.
Just as the Industrial Revolution developed over more than 150 years in the 18th and 19th centuries and reshaped machines, industry, transport and the very nature of where people chose to live and work, technology is now reshaping the way we communicate, are entertained, where we live and work and shop and it is rewiring our kids brains for a new world. I’ve believed this for 20 years and the ups and downs of the tech world over that period have done nothing to dissuade me from that belief because technology is steadily, consistently and dramatically changing our lives. (Want to get some perspective on the 150 year change last time around – spend a day in Ironbridge in Shropshire, England.)
It’s happening right now because the pieces are now in place. As Marc writes “Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.”
The cost structure is right, the technology base is ready. In FirstRain’s case we have built a highly disruptive technology that changes the way business people use the web for their critical decision making. As Roger McNamee says in his thought provoking talk “Everything is Changing”, Google’s approach to indexing has peaked. People want apps designed for their specific need (he cites his investments like Facebook and Yelp), not one app for all needs, and they want it on their device of choice – which is a smartphone or an iPad. In our case the business need is even more specific than that. Our users want a business web app so they can tap into the breadth, currency and power of the web as a data source, but they want it tailored to their specific business and role, and they want it in a cost effective way.
Marc and Roger are just two rockstars in Silicon Valley but most people here agree with them (and not just because we are all drinking the same Kool-Aid). Yes we are dealing with some higher valuations, maybe that is a bubble, but the long term value being built in technology is real, and software is where it’s at. And what makes it even better is it a continuously exciting place to build a career, or even a company.
Like many folks I have a Facebook account. I check Facebook on the iPad daily – it is great to keep up to date with the whereabouts of my friends, follow various interests, and to occasionally share notable events with my social circle as well. And these are all common ways in which social media adds value to many of our lives as individuals. But at the FirstRain lunch table the other day we also did some grousing about some of the shared pet peeves in our social media lives as well: the over-posters (5-10 posts an hour, do these people do anything else?), the way-too-personal posters (did I need to know about the re-appearance of your lunch?), the aggressive-posters (would you make that sarcastic comment at a podium in front of 300 of your friends, family and associates? Well you just did), and the simple fact that keeping connected via Social Media can eat significantly into your day, pushing out time spent watching news, or other methods for keeping up to date.
But after thinking about how time consuming these platforms can be, I also started to wonder if something counter-logical is going on. Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter make it easy to connect with friends and co-workers. It also makes it really easy to reach out and make friends with like-minded people across the country and the globe. At face value, they seem to be great tools to associate with people interested in the same things you are. My sister, for instance knits socks (very fancy socks!) and she uses the Web to be part of a community of sock knitters, to share patterns, post pictures and discuss types of yarn, which significantly enhances her enjoyment.
Thinking more broadly, however, even the best of intentions can result in undesirable outcomes. The Web—and Social Media in particular— can make it easy to cocoon oneself in a warm environment of like-minded people. If I do not like what a person is saying I can easily tune-them out. The posts I see on my Facebook newsfeed are filtered based on who I have looked at or commented on in the past. Over time it is all too easy to unconsciously create an environment of like-minded people, who have similar views, and reinforce each other’s behavior. In a circle of fancy sock knitters, this is great, but when mapping this to politics, demographics or any political agenda item, such as gay marriage, the results are less wholesome. On the political front, if Democrats only hang out with other Democrats, and Republicans only hang out with other Republicans, each reading the news from their respective biased sources, each reinforcing their own perspective on events, the result is polarization.
In the past, before the time of the Web and social media platforms, we had to co-exist with the people living around us, or working with us. News outlets were fewer and had to be broad-based. Now we can choose from a multitude of channels, and create our own custom filters. We now have the luxury to only hear what we want to hear. Sharing this with my co-worker, Ash, it turns out that we’re not the only people questioning the impacts of the web. Eli Pariser, in his book The Filter Bubble, articulates this problem (he also did a great Ted talk on this subject: http://on.ted.com/9BwR). Rather than having to live in the physical community with people around us, we unconsciously end up “opting-out” of reality and “opting-in” to a narrow view of the world defined by our friends and filters.
Many years ago a group of like-minded people came together in Jonestown. They isolated themselves from a diversity of views, associated solely with each other, self-reinforced each other views and allowed their worldview to become dominated by a loud and extreme fringe. Eventually, when their leader told them to drink the cyanide-laden Kool-Aid, 918 people died. Clearly, this is an extreme example, but it really is illustrative of how philosophical isolation and the filtering out other views and interactions can lead to extremely unfortunate choices.
What does this mean in the context of the business world? Obviously, mass suicide is a little extreme. But, the cautionary message still applies. Are people obtaining the necessary information they need to make the right business decisions? It’s very possible that valuable information is not being received due to filtering. The beauty of social media is that it allows access to business intelligence that was not accessible years ago. In order to make the best business choices, professionals must look beyond the people and news they WANT to follow, and direct their focus to the channels they NEED to follow.
Are we entering an era of extreme polarization? Working in the Bay Area, I hope not. The wide diverse backgrounds, ideology and experience of the people in this region are something I value greatly. To travel, and experience how different people live is a great privilege. It’s important that we as Web users take the initiative to expand our bubble beyond our closest circles. Use social media to track areas you wouldn’t have initially thought you’d be interested in. Follow the newscasters and politicians you disagree with, and maybe even hate. Seek out opinions from smart people different than yourself. I see richness in diversity and believe it creates stronger solutions for everyone over the long term.
Yesterday’s news about Google buying Motorola Mobility has set the twittersphere on fire – and generated humor at the same time. Case in point this morning’s tweet from nikcub “If you are a motorola employee and do not want to lose your job, I suggest you show up to work dressed as a patent”
This tweet speaks to the core question about what Google’s acquisition really means. Google paid a 60% premium for a hardware business, purportedly to get access to their patent portfolio. Anyone who lives in the IP licensing and litigation world (as I do as a board member of Rambus), especially in the US software patent world (as I do as CEO of FirstRain) knows that the US patent system is pretty badly broken and it is very hard and extremely expensive to defend and protect your inventions from the idea thieves.
Google was feeling extreme IP licensing pressure from Apple – even going so far as to accuse Apple and Microsoft of a “hostile, organized campaign” against Android – and buying up their own defensive patents was the only way to go. They are just too young a company, and too newly into the mobile phone world to build up enough of an arsenal to defend themselves in court – and Motorola Mobility has 17,000 patents.
Google may simply not have had any other choice than to buy the patent portfolio to fight with – and so they brought the alien onto their ship.
They paid $12.5B for a hardware business and that is so very different than a software business. A hardware business takes a very different kind of DNA. It takes discipline, cost management and high precision supply chain management. It takes strong controls of inventory turns and the cash conversion cycle. All things Google is not known for.
Larry Page has stated that Android will stay open and free, and the cell phone companies, for now, are supporting Google’s move, but for how long? How long until Google realizes that to get a return on their $12.5B (which is a big purchase even for Google) they need to develop a deep integration of OS and phone to compete with Apple and Microsoft? How long until Larry’s promise that “Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers” leads to a move to give Google a product advantage over HTC and Samsung, causing them to develop their own operating systems as Samsung is now doing with Bada?
Remember Google’s snafu with the Nexus phone, when they demonstrated very publicly how little they understood the business of selling hardware products (especially to consumers). While I am sure the Google management team has thought about all the possible outcomes I wonder if arrogance and the lack of hardware DNA will lead them into the world of unforseen consequences?
How long will it be until Google either a) creates a proprietary version of Android for their own phones – while protesting vociferously that they will take care of their Android partners or b) shut down the phone business, ending thousands of engineering and production jobs while creating more work for IP litigators? (and those jobs were going to be on the chopping block anyway with the decline of Motorola’s market share).
Like the crew of the Nostromo who allowed their crewmate Kane back onto their ship to save him from the alien attached to his face, only to find it killed all the crew except Ripley, who then blew up the ship, has Google taken on an alien business that can eat into it’s market position and profitability. Will they, in the end, chose option (b) and blast it out of their ship?
How to organize marketing of B2B high tech products is always challenging. The best products rarely come from marketing people and the deeper the technology the more the R&D team is in the inventive role and driving marketing.
As a result, where to have marketing report is an ongoing political battle in many companies – and Cadence Design Systems marketing revolving door is a fresh example of this. According to the online gadfly DeepChip.com, editor John Cooley reports “Cadence CMO Bruggeman rumored ousted in unexpected palace coup”, confirmed also by Gabe Moretti on his EDA blog because of the decision to put “product marketing within the three divisions responsible for product development. According to Pankaj [Mayor, chief of staff to the CEO], who will act as Head of Marketing in addition to his other role in the interim, this is the event that precipitated John’s departure”.
Product marketing belongs close to R&D, but as companies grow they often oscillate between a functional org chart (all R&D in one team, all marketing in another) and a BU org chart (all R&D and marketing for a business line working in one unit). Having been a part of this oscillation more than once in my tenure in marketing I have seen both sides. There are advantages and disadvantages both ways, but the deeper the technology the more important it is that R&D and product marketing work very closely together and so I favor marketing within the business unit.
The reason for this is that in very complex technology products R&D is leading the customer, not the other way around. The classical view that product marketing goes out and talks to customers, figures out what they need and then comes back and specifies a product for R&D to build is the road to a mediocre, losing product.
With breakout products customers don’t know what they need. Sometimes they know the problems they are going to face, sometimes they can describe the performance, time-to-market or cost problems they are facing but they can rarely describe how to solve the problem.
Consider Salesforce. Did CRM users know they needed a cloud based product they could easily configure themselves? No, when Salesforce was emerging customers were asking for more and more features on their Seibel systems. And yet Salesforce dramatically reduced the cost of deployment and support of CRM systems.
Consider Synopsys. Did logic designers know they needed to radically change the way they described chip logic by moving up to the RTL level instead of drawing gates? No, they asked for more and more features to draw gates faster within their Daisy or Mentor systems and yet the move to RTL based design dramatically changed the complexity of designs that were possible.
Centralized marketing makes sense for all the cross functional responsibilities. Communications needs to be one voice with common positioning and messaging. Third party business development – coordinating partnerships and industry initiatives – needs to present the company as one entity to partners. Market research and competitive intelligence is more cost effective and can serve the sales force with one set of tools and content (like FirstRain) if the intranet and intelligence are run centrally.
But product marketing needs to be close to R&D, sitting with R&D and not confused about their role. Design collaboration with R&D, interface specification, customer introduction, field training and support all need to be done working hand in glove with the R&D team that is pushing the envelope of the technology. Org charts should not, in theory, change behavior but they do.
Organizational change is also almost always good and keeps people on their toes – and shows you a lot about the organization. Holden powerbase selling methodology teaches sales people that change illuminates the power structure in an organization. Any time you see a reorg someone wins and someone loses. If you want to really understand where the power lies take note of which executives build a little bit of power every time. Subtle, continuous, increases are a sign of someone strategically building power.
It’s true that product marketing has an important role to play. Much of the time the work to be done is incremental, and then it does not really matter where product marketing reports. But when you are building a product that has to leapfrog your competition and stay on the bleeding edge you are reliant on the R&D and conceptual brains to figure out the leap and product marketing needs to be part of the leaping team.
If you had the chance to sell your tech company for a great price would you – or would you play the long game?
This is a decision successful entrepreneurs end up facing and is a question for some tech entrepreneurs right now as we go through what is arguably another bubble – and there are some very interesting cases to think about – and think what would you have done?
Consider the Huffington Post: A success story to most people – purchased by AOL for $315M in February at a 6.3X multiple of $50M in revenue and very small profits. The last investor, Oak Investment Partners, tripled their money in just over 2 years which is a great result for a late stage investment decision. And yet, as Jeff Bercovici of Forbes writes in his somewhat damning review of the HuffPo/AOL honeymoon, the difference in interests that can appear between investor and entrepreneur in very visible in this case.
Fred Harman, the Oak partner who made the HuffPo investment, told Forbes “Our goal was an IPO rather than building up the company to be acquired by another media company” and that he and the HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau “were still inclined to roll forward as an independent company out of the belief that The Huffington Post could continue to rapidly scale and be the dominant social news company on the Web”. But for Arianna, AOL meant personal liquidity and a much larger stage and budget to build her dream with.
(full disclosure: my current company FirstRain is funded by Oak. They like to swing for the fences – as do I)
In contrast look at Zillow, which went public last week and, on 2010 revenue of $30.5M, now commands a valuation of greater than $1B. Is this valuation a surefire sign of a tech bubble? On Seeking Alpha screener.co writes that “The vast difference in valuation between a recent tech IPO and similar publicly traded competitors is not limited to Zillow” – Pandora’s valuation is almost as shocking as Zillow’s and outrageous in comparison to their comp RealNetworks. So long term public valuation (and so the team’s return) is at risk here.
In the enterprise social media space, Radian6 decided to sell to Salesforce instead of taking the long road. At a valuation of $326M and 10X revenue Techcrunch thinks SFDC overpaid but 10X trailing revenue is a terrific valuation for an enterprise software company and being integrated into Salesforce takes all the return risk out for the founders – plus SFDC smartly put additional options on as an earnout over 2 years (not unusual when a public company buys a private company and wants to keep the founders around). But also consider that maybe Salesforce creates a larger platform with deeper pockets for the Radian6 team to execute their vision on.
And waiting in the wings we have Groupon. They did not sell to Google last Fall for $6B and, if they can get over the questions about their business model and profitability, hope to IPO for $20B – and are lining up enough banks to make it happen.
All this leads to questions of timing – are today’s valuations fashion driven because tech IPOs are hot now? – and what would you do if it was you? I’ve been there, it’s a gut-wrenching decision.
If you sell:
+ You get secured liquidity and wealth for you and your team (especially if you are bought for cash)
+ You play on a larger stage, often with a larger budget
+ You may get access to many more customers on a larger platform
+ You create long term job security for your core tech team
- You lose final authority on strategy and budget
- Many members of your team (non tech) may lose their jobs
- You lose the essential joy of building your own venture
If you go public:
+ You get significant capital to grow your business with
+ You stay in charge (for now…)
+ Your investors get a great return in 6 months (after the lockup comes off)
+ You may get a significantly higher return over a longer time period
+ You continue to drive the strategy and M&A to execute you and your team’s vision
- Limited liquidity for you or your team for the foreseeable future
- You are running a public company (no picnic!)
- Your return is not secure, you are subject to volatile markets
… and there are many more pros and cons…
One of the best pieces of advice I got was to, in the end, focus on how my management team is successful and makes money from their hard work. Not my ego or my net worth. Not my investor’s return. My team, the ones who built the company with me. If they make money, everyone else will make enough.
The underlying way in which FirstRain adds such value to our customers is our unique ability to extract only high-quality Business Web content from the consumer internet, and then deliver it up to folks who need it to make decisions about their company, their industry, their products, their competitors, etc.
But one thing we’ve focused on a bit less is delivering information about the actual practice of certain roles. In other words, rather than the content a sales executive needs to succeed in their job (which we currently do very well), it’s the content that’s ABOUT being a sales professional: the tools they use, the best practices in the space today, the emerging trends, the industry changes, the major purchases, etc. If you’re a sales enablement, operations or support professional, or a manager looking to successfully lead your team to exceed their goals, this information is of great interest.
And it turns out, FirstRain is is pretty good at finding this stuff too! Of course, our friends at Selling Power have been providing leading edge information about sales sucess for many years via Selling Power magazine, SellingPower.com, their conferences, custom publications, and more. So when we sat down to chat about this challenge a couple of months ago it seemed natural to team up!
Monday (June 20) at the Selling Power Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston, MA, Selling Power CEO Gerhard Gschwandtner and I had a chance to discuss the challenge now facing Sales people as they struggle to find useful information on Sales 2.0 issues using Google and other consumer search tools:
And as I mentioned in the video, we’re very happy to announce a new collaboration between FirstRain and Selling Power, delivering new Sales 2.0 “Hot Topics”, powered by FirstRain, right to the home page of SellingPower.com. Included are topics such as CRM & Sales Enablement, and Sales Management & Compensation, and each features high-quality Business Web content found by FirstRain and delivered in real time to SellingPower.com readers.
It’s yet another example of the power FirstRain can deliver Sales, Marketing, Finance and other business professionals, and it’s great to be able to do offer it in collaboration with our friends at Selling Power. For us it’s a bit of an experiment, so check it out and let me know what you think!
Let’s start with everyone’s favorite pastime in our current age of agile developed, game changing, paradigm shifts: remembering how things used to be.
In this case let’s remember those days of when most people consumed news via one medium: Newspapers. Newspapers, which have existed to serve various objectives (news reporting, editorializing, political agitation), all had three, seemingly inextricable attributes: the content (the news or opinion you created), the medium (content printed on paper and distributed to readers) and the container (or format, such as pamphlets, newsletters, tabloids or broadsheets). For any given publication, these three attributes were all of a piece. One couldn’t imagine extricating the news from the method of delivering it. Why produce news if you don’t have a way to get that news to people? And attempting to separate your content into multiple, simultaneous containers was unheard of.
But as broadcasting emerged as a new medium naturally suited to news distribution, people began looking to multiple mediums to suit their news consumption needs. And while some would only select one preferred medium for news consumption, most would leverage both mediums for various aspects of their day (e.g., reading the paper in the morning, hearing radio news in the car or during their workday, watching the evening TV news. Still, most producers of news content would specialize in just one medium and container (apart from an occasional marketing partnership, or vestigial business, e.g. CBS radio news) and only really competed with other content producers within their medium.
Fast-forwarding to today, a new medium has emerged (Internet) and become dominant, multiple consumption containers now exist, ranging from devices (PCs, smartphones, tablets) to programs within those devices (browsers, content-specific apps) to services within those programs within those devices (news Web sites, Twitter, social networks, aggregators). And as traditional content producers from print and broadcast mediums rush to find sustainable plays in the Internet medium, the traditional competitive landscape has exploded: The New York Times now competes with The Huffington Post who competes with Fox News Channel who competes with the Associated Press.
And in my opinion, this is a great development. In one sense, medium and container are fundamentally artificial. One should create great content that serves a need and provides value, and then offer it via whatever medium suits your target consumers best. But at the same time, this also implies how much the container does matter. Various containers help us consume the content we care about when we want it (on your smartphone during some down-time), where we want it (in our social network, where we may spend a substantial amount of our online time) and how we want it (through innovative readers like Flipboard, which allow you to consume your real-time news and social media feeds on a tablet in a magazine-like format). And just as importantly, these use-cases are usually not mutually exclusive.
And that’s what makes the latest discussion about the threat Flipboard represents to publishers so interesting. Although this analysis by Frederic Filloux is a good one, I think its problem is that it makes the same fundamental assumption that everyone seems to be making: that controlling the containers, as well as the content, is an attainable goal for a content brand.
Today, there are simply too many platforms, technologies, formats and use cases to expect anyone—much less a firm who’s specialty is content creation—to be able to own and control every outlet. To seriously expect to do so is naiveté at best, ignorance and hubris at worst. And worst of all, it seriously limits your ability to effectively execute on the thing you actually do best: create content that lots of people want and are willing to let you monetize in some way (monetization is actually the 4th fundamental attribute here that I haven’t yet mentioned, but as oceans of ink have already been spilled on the changing nature of content monetization, I’m going to steer around it while acknowledging that it’s a fundamentally related issue).
This doesn’t mean that content brands won’t be really effective at owning or creating certain containers. A content producer’s Web site is by definition their own space, and they’ll offer different ways to offer and monetize their content in that space (free, ad-supported, subscription, metering). And some will come up with a kick-ass smartphone or tablet app here and there. And for some users, just that one content site or app may be the only news source they use in their daily life. But for most of us (and here’s the point of that history lesson …) we’ll continue to want a variety of content sources, mediums and containers to fill different use cases within our lives. As content sources that were once separated by differing mediums now compete with each other across mediums, they often seem to forget that they were always part of a content ecosystem in our lives.
Implying that content or news sources should have invented Flipboard misses the point because they not only would have been highly unlikely to do so (i.e., the Innovator’s Dilemma), but even if so, would have more likely to have been a costly distraction or outright failure to in the end. The NYT isn’t going to want to be pumped into Huff Po’s consumption tool, and WSJ won’t have any interest in ceding that space to MSNBC. Instead, Flipboard succeeds BECAUSE it’s not a content creator. It’s only about giving consumers a great consumption experience. And conversely, technology companies (are you hearing me @Google?) fall flat when they try to own content creation (anyone remember Microsoft’s attempts to become an original content creator in the late-90s?).
None of this is to say that content companies have to cede all control of their destinies. They have every right to try and set the terms of use around their content so as to maximize alignment with their own monetization(e.g. requiring links that drive traffic back to ad supported pages, or pay-walled/metered news sites), and to block access to their content to those containers they feel are at odds with their strategy. But to fume because *gasp* Flipboard or others may claim some ad dollars around links back to their content feels pretty short-sighted.
‘Interrelators’ like FirstRain also play an important role in this ecosystem. We’re creating real added value for thousands of business users around the globe by connecting them with original business content that, too often, they would not otherwise find—and then driving those users back to those content producers for monetization. And we’re doing it through multiple containers as well (Web, mobile apps, intranet widgets).
Overall, it’s an incredible playground in which we’re all now playing, and our content lives are much richer for it, as long as we can remember that it’s been the emerging diversity of containers—not the attempt by any one content creator to fully control their own distribution—that has made it all possible.
Terrific article in TechCrunch last week by Ben Horowitz – What’s the Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing your own psychology.
Managing inside my own head is by far the most difficult thing I do as a CEO and I appreciate Ben being so out and candid about what’s going on inside. As he says “Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it, and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.”
Ben covers classical psychoses like “If I am doing a good job why do I feel so bad?”, and the cliche (and truism) “It’s a Lonely Job” – especially when you are facing a crisis and you have to make the decision to cut staff which impacts the livelihoods of the very people you are working so hard for and care about.
The piece of advice I liked is “Focus on the road not the wall”. It it so easy to stare at all the things that can kill your company – and at any moment in time, even terrific times, any number of things can wipe out a small company. It is this single difference that makes being a CxO in a large company feel so emotionally different than being a CEO of a small company and I have done both. Large companies have mass and momentum – you have time to recover from mistakes most of the time. (A good example is Cadence Design Systems (CDNS) which crashed and fired it’s entire executive team on one day – it’s coming back because of the resiliency of the installed base and the R&D leadership team’s commitment to great products.)
The aspect Ben writes about that I have had in my head many times in the last 15 years which I can testify never goes away is A Final Word of Advice – Don’t Punk Out and Don’t Quit As CEO, there will be many times when you feel like quitting. I’ll add though that the most effective management tool I have found for this personal challenge is to get in the pool and pound the laps until my head is clear – which can be anywhere between 1 and 2 miles before I am calm.
If you have an ambition to be CEO one day read the article very carefully several times.
In addition to creating a monitor to put an Eye on Japan’s Economy™ (which you can subscribe to here) we have also added a twitter feed of highlights on the same subject. You can follow @EOJE_FirstRain. @FirstRain_Japan.
Like Eye on Japan’s Economy™, the Twitter feed will select highlights of articles on disruptive market developments in areas like the Auto Industry, Base Metal Trends, the Semiconductor Industry and the Oil & Gas Industry Outlook, to name just a few of the topics covered, and macro economic trends of interest to business professionals.
We are all shocked and saddened by the terrible events in Japan over the last two weeks, and our thoughts are with the people of Northern Japan impacted by the tsunami. We have also been watching the impact of this disaster on the world’s markets and the potential disruption to products and supply chains and realize that these disruptions may impact our customer’s businesses and investment strategies.
It is our objective to help our customers quickly and easily see the critical developments that impact their industries and businesses – using our patented categorization technology to report the right, relevant content. So in a economic disruption on the scale of Japan’s tragedy we can provide a business monitor to help everyone – customers or otherwise – keep track of the impact of the disruption on Japan’s key markets.
Our new monitor – Eye on Japan’s Economy™ – is available to everyone. You can sign up here:
Sign me up for Eye on Japan’s Economy™
Eye on Japan’s Economy™ covers disruptive market developments such as the Auto Industry, Base Metal Trends, the Semiconductor Industry and the Oil & Gas Industry Outlook, to name just a few of the topics covered.
If your business is impacted by the terrible events of March 11 we hope this new monitor will help you manage through the next few months by providing you with information on Japan’s economic developments as they happen.
