DiscoverOrg employs 150 editors to gather its multi-level executive database across 60,000 global organizations.
Fortune employed DiscoverOrg C-Level executive data to analyze the presence of women in the C-Suite. Of the 9,975 C-level executives evaluated, only 18% were female. At the corporate apex, only 6.9% of the CEOs and 6.7% of Board Chairs were women. That is fewer than one in fourteen execs.
Of the twelve titles assessed, only four have female population rates above twenty five percent:
31.9% Chief Legal Officer
36.4% Chief Compliance Officer
48.0% Chief Marketing Officer
62.2% Chief Human Resources Officer
Even more concerning is that the top two positions leading to the CEO position, COO (7.2%) and CFO (8.8%), remain male bastions.
“The biggest surprise to me was how little gender diversity there still is,” opined DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck. “You might expect less than 50% of C-level executives to be women, but I was surprised at how much less it was.”
I also found it interesting that this research was employed using DiscoverOrg data and not a public company dataset from Reuters, FactSet, S&P, Mergent, etc. Any of these public information vendors could have also provided the data as well, but DiscoverOrg had an advantage in that it researches the full C-suite (and several levels below it) and reverifies data every ninety days. While the other vendors are also likely to have highly accurate data for the C-Suite, they are dependent upon SEC filings to recognize executive changes. Thus, they would be as accurate as DiscoverOrg for CEO, Chairman, COO, CFO, and Chief Legal Officer, but are less likely to be accurate for positions which report into the CEO, CFO , and COO. Here, DiscoverOrg’s curated data collection methods have a data quality advantage.
What would be fascinating is if DiscoverOrg analyzed their data by function, level, and sector across the Fortune 1000. They already have data sets for Finance, Marketing, Product Management (TEDD), and IT with several others ready to launched by the end of the year. Assuming DiscoverOrg can provide historical cuts of their database, the IT function can be evaluated going back a half decade or more with Finance and Marketing for a few years. At a minimum, such an analysis would make for some fascinating blogs, but it could also be an invaluable dataset for academic research.
Inc. magazine published the 2016 version of their Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing US private companies over the past three years. To qualify, firms must have at least $100,000 in revenue in 2012 and $2 million in 2015. Firms are ranked according to their three-year growth rate.
Once again, Social123 was the fastest growing company amongst the firms covered by my newsletter. Last year, the firm grew its revenue by $400,000 to $2.8 million. The firm has a three-year Compound Average Growth Rate (CAGR) of 123%. Social123 provides a database of over 300 million global contacts mined from social media which they deploy for prospecting and data enrichment.
HG Data and CB Insights also posted high growth rates (three year CAGRs of 106% and 97% respectively) that placed them towards the top of the list. HG Data has had great success licensing their semantically mined set of technology product and vendor data to sales intelligence and predictive analytics companies while CB Insights continues to grow in the PE/VC intelligence space and launched a PE/VC sales intelligence product in 2015.
US private company growth rates based upon current and historical Inc. 5000 lists.
DiscoverOrg posted the most impressive numbers as it made the list for the sixth consecutive year with a 48% CAGR. According to the tech sales intelligence firm, only 320 companies have ever made the list for six consecutive years and DiscoverOrg ranked 12th in growth amongst them. Furthermore, DiscoverOrg is on pace for $60 million in revenue this year which would easily place them on next year’s list. Noting that the firm has grown revenue 10X over five years, CMO Katie Bullard described their feat as “a huge testament to our customers’ successes and the value they are realizing every day.”
DiscoverOrg recently accepted equity financing for strategic growth purposes, but much of their growth was self-funded as they carefully built out their database to 60,000 companies and their customer base to 2,000 clients. The firm has doubled its company coverage over the past year and built its editorial staff out to 150 researchers. Similarly, they have grown contact coverage by 89% while maintaining a 99% fill rate on emails and 96% on direct dial numbers.
Technology sales intelligence vendor RainKing also demonstrated strong growth with a 31% CAGR to $27 million. Back in June, RainKing announced plans to add an additional sixty headcount to their sales, research, engineering, and client success departments. This is the third year in a row that RainKing has made the list.
Intent data firm Madison Logic made the list for the second time with $45.1 million in revenue. The growth was particularly impressive as Madison Logic spun off its Madison Logic Data division in April 2015 as Bombora. “Madison Logic’s priority is to provide B2B marketers with the most comprehensive account based marketing solution and deliver real ROI of their efforts,” said Tom O’Regan, Madison Logic’s CEO. “Our growth is a result of all our teams — from engineering to sales — being aligned behind that priority. We could not have done it without our partners and customers who have selected Activate ABM to power their account based marketing programs.”
Zoominfo returned to the list last year after a seven year hiatus. The firm appears to have found a successful growth strategy. Over the years, Zoominfo pursued multiple markets including web mined biographies, sales intelligence, and executive recruitment tools only to be big footed by Google and LinkedIn. A few years ago, Zoominfo began to gain traction in the data hygiene services space. Over the past year, they launched Chrome and Eloqua connectors and refreshed their Salesforce integration. They also rebranded and enhanced their sales and marketing platform as the Zoominfo Growth Acceleration Platform. The new service helps sales and marketing teams “identify, connect, and engage with qualified prospects and replicate success.”
“Our mission is to help businesses accelerate their growth by using our data and tools,” said Zoominfo CEO Yonatan Stern. “We use our own tools and have experienced accelerating growth together with significant profitability over the past five years.
Advertising sales intelligence vendor The List returned to the Inc. 5000 after a five-year hiatus. The List has long been a respected database covering the national advertising and agency sector. Late last year, the firm launched a new sales intelligence service for sales professionals who target agencies, media sales, marketing technology firms, and corporate sponsorships. The Winmo service combines advertiser and agency search, agency relationships, creative portfolios, and sales recommendations along with prospecting, advertising-specific sales triggers from DailyVista, and an SFDC connector.
Pure Incubation made the list for the third year in the row with revenues of $9.5 million. The Massachusetts firm provides lead generation and database services for the medical (MedData Group) and IT fields (PureB2B). PureIncubation CEO Melissa Chang attributed the firm’ success to the launch of several PureB2B products including “marketing qualified leads, a unique integrated Account Based Marketing product, and our latest digital strategy – a GuidesFor site network that utilizes intent data to identify in-market buyers and drive ready-to-purchase buyers to technology companies.” Chang also noted that “we have made a number of operational enhancements to increase efficiencies, and set the industry standard for quality data delivery.”
Interestingly, not a single predictive analytics company made the list. Several firms were pre-revenue in March 2012 so would not have qualified this year. Other firms may have chosen not to publish their revenue and growth rates.
I was privileged to be recently interviewed by Rick Holmes for the Corporate Data Show podcast. The two of us discussed the benefits of sales intelligence, how sales intelligence differs from business intelligence, data collection methods, CRM and MAP integrations, ABSD, and sales triggers.
Rick is the CEO of Every Market Media so also very knowledgeable about the content industry. EMM is a compiler of US and global B2B Emails.
Brexit happened. Most of us didn’t think it would, but it did. As an outsider, I’m not going to address the foolishness of the vote and the harm it is already doing to British financial and currency markets. That would simply be piling on.
But as an analyst of the sales intelligence space, I can make some observations about how it is likely to impact my industry. The short-term impact will mostly be financial as US firms find that H2 revenue will decline due to the fall in the Pound (and less so the Euro). Sales Intelligence products are priced in Pounds and do not float so the impact will likely be felt by American vendors reporting lower revenue from their European operations. I expect the term “currency headwinds” will again become popular on earnings calls. This situation may be compounded by British firms being more conservative in H2 due to political and economic uncertainty. They may choose to license fewer seats or hold off on licensing a service.
The British Pound is down ten percent vs. the US Dollar since the Brexit vote (Source: XE.com)
Should the pound remain weak going forward, vendors may raise sterling-denominated prices in 2017; but this decision is somewhat dependent upon the location of staff, denomination of licensing contracts, and degree of Brexit economic contraction. As UK company content is mostly licensed from UK vendors, it is likely to be denominated in Pounds so content licensing expenses are also likely to drop for American vendors. (US companies will often sign licensing deals in pounds as it provides a partial hedge against currency fluctuation).
Britain is the second most important market for sales intelligence services after the United States. While other markets may be growing faster, Britain has long been either the home of sales intelligence products (Bureau van Dijk, DueDil, Artesian Solutions) or the logical second market for American firms. US firms have long enjoyed access to the European market via offices in London and some even configure their products with regional UK and European editions. Britain will remain a critical market for these companies and there is little reason to believe that American firms cannot continue to sell into the EU via these offices.
But a long-term problem may be staffing their British offices with multi-lingual sales, support, marketing, and editorial staff. The status of EU citizens working in Britain is unclear and may not be resolved for two years. A study by Wayra UK found that 34% of British start-up employees are not British citizens with 20.7% of employees carrying EU passports. Whether EU citizens will continue to freely live and work in Britain is an open question subject to negotiation over the next two years.
Wayra UK found that British startups have a built in competitive advantage from this diversity. They found that 79% believe that cultural diversity helped them compete while 75% said it helped them overcome challenges and 72% argued that it assisted with new market entry. However, if EU work visas become an issue, the British will lose this competitive edge. There is also the negative impact of reduced work and study opportunities for British citizens which will erode British understanding of individual country markets. In the context of information services, the cost and difficulty of maintaining a multi-lingual research and support staff in Britain may increase.
“Without access to Europe the pool of applicants shrinks dramatically,” DueDil founder Damian Kimmelman told Forbes. “We are a venture-backed business, and a venture-backed business means we are invested in to create super growth. But you can’t create super growth if it’s so difficult to hire the people that can create that super growth. People in tech are the number one commodity.”
DueDil is in the middle of building out its sales intelligence coverage of Europe so multi-lingual staff is critical. Kimmelman is already looking at expanding operations outside of Britain and will be spending the next few weeks researching options with DueDil executives. “We’re going to be opening up new offices. We have to. We’re scaling far too quickly to jeopardize our ability to scale because we have to hire people in the U.K.”
One area of benefit for UK information services may be around Safe Harbour. The EU is moving towards greater restrictions around personal information and it has always been difficult to gather and market emails. However, the British have been an exception to this rule with vendors including UK business emails in their products. A Brexit suggests that the EU Safe Harbour negotiations may become more difficult as continental sensitivities will no longer be balanced by British openness. The net is emails and executive profiles are likely to remain available in the UK but that complying with EU Safe Harbour restrictions could greatly limit access to executive information and create issues for American multinationals and cloud vendors.
As a shorthand, I’ve color (or should I write colour for the Brits?) coded my analysis to highlight the benefits and drawbacks to Sales Intelligence vendors. The net is rather negative. Unless you are marketing British contact files for email campaigns and teleprospecting, it is unlikely that you would welcome the vote’s outcome. For vendors providing global information services, Brexit provides additional financial and planning challenges in the number two sales intelligence market.
Microsoft ($MSFT) put in a $26.2 billion cash bid for professional social networking company LinkedIn ($LNKD) yesterday. The deal is the largest transaction of the Satya Nadella era and represents a fifty percent premium over LinkedIn’s Friday closing price. The deal provides Microsoft an entrée into professional social networking, enterprise recruiting, and learning and development (Lynda.com). The deal also brings LinkedIn Sales Navigator into Microsoft’s enterprise product line.
Microsoft benefited from a dip in LinkedIn’s stock price earlier this year when the firm provided soft guidance for fiscal year 2016. Although the stock has rebounded some following a recent strong earnings report, the bid is below LinkedIn’s stock price at the beginning of the year.
The deal is expected to close later this year. Both boards have already approved the offer. Regulatory approval is required in the US, EU, Canada, and Brazil with the firm “confident” in approval.
LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman called the transaction a “re-founding moment” for LinkedIn, which went public in May 2011.
Merger Plans
Jeff Wiener will continue as the CEO of LinkedIn with no changes in the firm’s organizational structure. He will report directly to Nadella. LinkedIn will continue as an independent brand and product line but will move to integrate the social network and its products with Microsoft Office and Dynamics. Nadella is looking to accelerate LinkedIn’s growth rate while “partnering on product integration plans with the Office 365 and Dynamics teams.”
LinkedIn will be rolled into Microsoft’s productivity and business processes segment, which includes Office and Office 365.
One of the merger’s goals is to provide “a professional’s profile everywhere.” Microsoft noted that professional data is scattered in disparate silos which are often outdated and incomplete, but that “in the future, a professional’s profile will be unified and the right data at the right time will surface in an app, whether Outlook, Skype, Office, or elsewhere.”
“Now you have the ability whenever you’re looking up a contact not only to see that contact with the information that’s contained in active directory, but you can get at the full richness of their information in the professional network and who are all the others in their professional network, so that is sort of what we mean by the social fabric of your digital work and Office 365,” said Nadella.
Microsoft is also looking to leverage LinkedIn’s newsfeed service which they built upon the Newsle and Pulse acquisitions. Microsoft told investors that “since information lives in silos, professionals miss relevant news and waste time. In the future, the newsfeed will be the place to go for every professional to stay connected with the happenings in their network, industry, and profession. Beyond all this, the feed will be constantly informed and tailored to the happenings at work like the meeting coming up and projects underway.”
The intelligent newsfeed will increase membership, monthly active users, and ad revenue.
Likewise, Microsoft anticipates an improved digital assistant as Cortana leverages LinkedIn professional and news intelligence. “Just imagine you’re walking into a meeting and Cortana now wakes up and tells you about the people you’re meeting for the first time, but tells you all the things that you want to know before walking in and meeting someone, because you have the access to the professional network. Cortana is about knowing everything about you, your organization, the work and now the professional network,” said Nadella. “So really being able to reason about all of that and be your personal digital assistant, that’s truly the best professional digital assistance is a fantastic opportunity.”
Microsoft Dynamics sales reps will benefit from a direct connection with LinkedIn Sales Navigator allowing them to engage in social selling. The firm told investors, “this will transform the sales cycle with actionable insights and the ability for each seller to build deeper relationships with prospects and customers – all to accelerate results.”
Other end user benefits include improved “organizational insights and transformation” via LinkedIn Recruiter and “just in time social learning” via Lynda.
Nadella told Microsoft employees that the merger expands market opportunities for Microsoft:
We are in pursuit of a common mission centered on empowering people and organizations. Along with the new growth in our Office 365 commercial and Dynamics businesses this deal is key to our bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes. Think about it: How people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done and ultimately find success requires a connected professional world. It requires a vibrant network that brings together a professional’s information in LinkedIn’s public network with the information in Office 365 and Dynamics…As these experiences get more intelligent and delightful, the LinkedIn and Office 365 engagement will grow. And in turn, new opportunities will be created for monetization through individual and organization subscriptions and targeted advertising.
The merger will make business professionals more productive while “reinventing selling, marketing and talent management business processes.”
The Economic Graph
Microsoft published the following summary of “The Professional World” covered by Microsoft and LinkedIn:
Product counts from the Microsoft – LinkedIn Acquisition Fair Disclosure presentation on June 13, 2016.
Microsoft sees the acquisition as an opportunity to merge the Microsoft and LinkedIn Graphs. In a presentation to the market, Microsoft stated that “today, all the information a professional needs to be successful lives in silos. By connecting the world’s leading professional cloud and the professional network, we can create more connected, intelligent and productive experiences. We also have the opportunity to accelerate the realization of the Economic Graph.”
The Economic Graph is LinkedIn’s BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal). A good BHAG should be viewed as internally achievable even if others view it as simply fanciful. Furthermore, a good BHAG provides a long-term vision and mission for framing business decisions and motivating employees.
In March 2015, Weiner said that the Economic Graph’s goal is to “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce” of over 3 billion people and 780 million “professionals, knowledge workers and students” by capturing broad economic information including employees, companies, universities, jobs, skills, etc.
Merging the Microsoft and LinkedIn graphs to advance the Economic Graph. (Slide from Fair Disclosure call on June 13, 2016).
Other elements of the graph include a “profile for every company in the world”. Weiner sized this at 60 million to 70 million companies “if you include small and medium-size businesses.”
Beyond people and companies, the economic graph would “be a digital representation of every job available in the world — that would be full-time, temporary, for profit and volunteer” along with “a digital representation for every skill required to obtain one of those jobs offered by one of those companies.”
“When you combine Microsoft’s corporate graph with LinkedIn’s professional graph we think we’re going to be able to take a very substantial leap forward in terms of the realization of our vision, which is creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, and we’re going to do that through the development of the world’s first economic graph,” said Weiner. “Just as we have changed the way the world connects to opportunity, this relationship with Microsoft, and the combination of their cloud and LinkedIn’s network, now gives us a chance to also change the way the world works,” Weiner said. “For the last 13 years, we’ve been uniquely positioned to connect professionals to make them more productive and successful, and I’m looking forward to leading our team through the next chapter of our story.”
Analyst Perspective
“Based on the income statement and balance sheet, the numbers look high for an acquisition,” Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insight and Strategy said. “I see the potential for a beefed up business social media service which is more than a resume posting service as it is today. I can envision a service where businesses more freely collaborate, leveraging online versions of Office 365, Skype for business and OneDrive.”
Mark Vickery of D.M. Martins Research views the transaction as one that wraps sales and recruiting professionals within the Microsoft-LinkedIn product universe:
At an individual level, it starts with pre-professional networking and the job search, areas in which LinkedIn has been dominant as the leading professional network platform for a while now. But then it continues with professional development, through LinkedIn’s Lynda and, most importantly, with the integration of productivity tools, including Microsoft’s Office, SharePoint and Skype. A sales representative at Company XYZ, for example, who originally found his or her job through LinkedIn, could not only generate sales leads through the same platform, but also manage calendar (MS Office), meetings (Skype), and share documents (SharePoint) more seamlessly, provided that the many tools are properly integrated, without ever having to leave the Microsoft umbrella of products and services – all with a single sign on. In the end, the hypothetical salesperson could very well have an all-Microsoft experience in the office, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and never have to seek (or encourage his or her employer to seek) workplace productivity solutions elsewhere.
Forbes contributor Grant Feller said that calling LinkedIn a social network would be akin to calling Google a search engine. Both descriptions are accurate but miss the true value of the firms. “LinkedIn is a content company. In effect, Microsoft has just bought one of the world’s most influential, specialised, highly read, constantly-updated (and, it must be said, occasionally annoying) digital media companies around,” said Feller. “The real value of the site is as a content-publishing platform in which key executives can expand their networks, their influence, their fame, their knowledge, their personas and their opportunities for a better-paid job by providing original content.”
Feller continued that while LinkedIn may at times be annoying or advertorial, LinkedIn produces much of its content. “It doesn’t just steal and redirect, though it does perform those acts admirably – it allows users to create material that intellectually nourishes.” However, Feller warned that Microsoft needs to protect LinkedIn from “a creep towards the banalities of Facebook” and improve the user experience.
Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp. and partner of venture firm Kapor Capital, noted that Microsoft has a mixed record with integrating acquisitions. “Sadly, history has shown [synergies] are very difficult to realize when two big companies combine, especially to the extent LinkedIn is remaining an independent fiefdom within the Microsoft empire.”
A general concern is that Microsoft is probably overpaying for LinkedIn. Some analysts also questioned the mixing of a non-profitable growth company with a slower growth cash flow company.
Moody’s has placed Microsoft’s ‘AAA’ credit rating under review as Microsoft will be issuing new debt.
Note: I hold no positions in Microsoft and LinkedIn and have no professional relationships with either firm.
FirstRain coverage of Lattice Engines includes web volume, business influencers, market drivers, Twitter trends, recent stories, related topics, and subject filtering.
The following is a Quora post I wrote concerning news aggregators…
As an industry analyst that publishes a weekly subscription newsletter on the information industry, I follow companies and industry topics related to my industry. Coverage spans about fifty companies across North America and Europe with many of the firms having global footprints. As such, press releases are likely to come from North America and Europe but news coverage needs to be global.
Alerts are basically a distraction so I employ daily push (email alerts) and pull (portals) approaches. I only want alerts for major events (e.g. PE/VC fundings and M&A activity).
Also, I am not performing due diligence or media analysis, so duplicate filtering and high precision are critical. I do not want five variants on the same AP story or passing mentions of companies in the twelfth paragraph of an article. I also am not interested in stock market news as it is ephemeral.
I provided the above as I use information services to meet specific workflow needs. Your needs may differ. Here is how I achieve the above objectives (in order of importance):
FirstRain – I have used FirstRain for five years. They have extremely high precision meaning that stories are almost always about the topic in question. They include a FirstTweets feature which provides ten Tweets about my subject. Instead of simply looking for Twitter keywords, they follow the Twitter links and analyze the linked content. Thus, FirstTweets provides me with side door access to blogs, company website posts, and social media. I am setup to receive daily news for companies and industries and can explore their news archive by company, industry, or business topic. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE
Owler – Owler combines semantic mining of open web news with social media crawling (Blogs, YouTube, and Vimeo), polling (e.g. CEO and transaction favorability), crowdsourcing (e.g. company size estimates and competitors), and editorial resources. Editors review story tagging to improve precision and collect funding and M&A information. I receive daily alerts of news and social media that complements FirstRain well. I also receive editorially created M&A and funding alerts that provide transaction details and company overviews along with curated story hyperlinks. FREE SERVICE
Feedly – I use Feedly as my RSS portal. I have it setup for company blogs, industry analysts, trade publications, and a few individual bloggers. I generally use Feedly as a backup system to make sure I haven’t missed a story or for when my newsletter is short and I’m looking for additional ideas. FREE SERVICE
Seeking Alpha – I have a short list of public companies that I cover with earnings news flashes. Seeking Alpha provides me with alerts on transcripts, filings, and investor analysis (I generally ignore the investor analysis). The key things for me are the earnings bullets and transcripts. FREE SERVICE
Trade Publications – I am setup for weekly feeds of a few trade publications. FREE SERVICES
Factiva – Factiva is a subscription service, but I can access it through my alma mater’s library. I generally access Factiva only a few times per quarter for archival research (they go back over thirty years) or Wall Street Journal articles (Factiva and the WSJ are both owned by News Corp). SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE
YouTube – I have setup the corporate YouTube sites for many of the companies I follow. YouTube provides corporate positioning videos, product demos, webinars, conference keynotes, and training tips. I live in YouTube the week of Dreamforce (SFDC’s annual show) as I am not able to attend the show. FREE SERVICE
I also have licenses to various sales intelligence services but do not use them generally for my newsletter as it could bias my research. If you have access to a subscription sales intelligence service (e.g. InsideView, Avention, Hoover’s) or news service (e.g. Factiva or LexisNexis), it can also be part of your aggregation mix.
Jim Fowler, who founded three crowdsourcing startups (Jigsaw which was acquired by Salesforce.com and renamed Data.com, InfoArmy, and ), was asked how crowdsourcing has changed over the past decade. His observation was broader than crowdsourcing and applied to any tech company looking to gain mindshare:
I think they change in the same way that we all have. We all are just overloaded with information. Getting people’s time and getting them to pay attention is much more difficult now than it was back in the beginning of Jigsaw for sure. Getting journalists and analysts to talk and write about you is different because there’s so much going on. In fact a lot of the big publications don’t even exist or don’t write about it anymore.
It’s become much more flat, if you will. More players in it, so that’s interesting, but I just think the biggest thing is just people … There’s so much stuff flying around out there now that really making sure you have a crisp clear message so that they understand the value is even more important than it ever was and that’s just been the big change. People are more sophisticated, they’re more … They know how to use data and I see that trend continuing.
Fowler also noted that Owler combines crowdsourcing and semantic mining with editors. While machines can do much of the work around event aggregation and structured alerts for exec changes, M&A, and funding rounds, editors ensure that information is properly tagged and mapped. While this editorial review of news introduces a short delay in information delivery, it reduces the number of false positives and passing mentions of companies. Furthermore, it allows them to de-dupe the stories and accurately capture M&A and funding content.
Basically, it solves your signal to noise problem through the addition of a short editorial review step.
If you just used technology to try to do this, you would get a lot of noise in there because really it’s a lot harder than it looks to figure out that the article is actually about Apple. Apple gets mentioned in millions of articles. To know that it’s actually about Apple is … To just do it with technology is really hard. What technology can do is say, “We think this is an article about Apple and we think it’s an Apple acquisition and we think this is the company that they did and we think this is it,” but what you need to do is create a task that gets prioritized very highly that a human looks at really quick. Checks out all the data and goes, “Ah, that’s right. We’re good,” and then sends it on to the people.
Otherwise you get a lot of noise, what I’m getting at is that technology can get you way down the road, but you need humans to get you all the way down the road if you want high quality data.
It is this multi-process approach that is likely to be the future of data collection and aggregation. Traditional methods of data collection via phone interviews or analyzing filings information are quite expensive while semantic mining can get tripped up on context (is this about company X? Is this a relevant story? Is this a discussion of current events? Is this an actual event, proposed event, or mere rumor?). Likewise, crowdsourcing requires a very large audience to obtain the wisdom of the crowd and works best on easily defined fields such as address, phone, and email (i.e. Jigsaw contacts). Crowdsourcing also works well at gauging sentiment. For example, Owler captures sentiment around whether the CEO is doing a good job and the projected fate of private companies. But crowdsourcing does a poor job around complex information such as industry code tagging or corporate linkage. It is through complementary methods that vendors will drive qualify forward while keeping data costs in check.
Brexit happened. Most of us didn’t think it would, but it did. As an outsider, I’m not going to address the foolishness of the vote and the harm it is already doing to British financial and currency markets. That would simply be piling on.
