The Alacra Store

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The Alacra Store

Alacra is this great company in the Flatiron portfolio that not enough people know about.

That’s because Steve and Mike, the founders, are the kind of guys who just put their heads down and build, support, and deliver great services to their customers.

Specifically, Alacra has built the largest collection of premium content on the web. But they didn’t stop there.

They have built a number of value added services on top of their premium content database that they sell to their customers in the investment banking, legal, accounting, and consulting industries. These services provide search, display, delivery, packaging, and analytics around the premium content.

I have been involved with a lot of companies over the years, but very few, if any, are as loved by their customers and are as unknown to the rest of the world as Alacra.

But that may change shortly. Hopefully not the “loved by their customers” part. I am talking about the “unknown to the rest of the world” part.

That’s because Alacra quietly, no surprise, launched the Alacra Store last week.

The Alacra Store makes Alacra’s database of premium content available to anyone with a web browser and a credit card.

The next time you do a web search looking for information about the size of the mobile gaming market, you might want to do that search at the Alacra Store instead of Yahoo! or Google.

But like any vertical search opportunity (see my post last week on Indeed), the Alacra Store will not be limited to a stand alone destination.

Look for the Alacra Store to be widely syndicated like any good web service should be.

The idea of the world’s largest collection of premium content being widely syndicated across the Internet is a big deal.

There is a vast amount of very valuable content locked up behind password protected websites that nobody knows how to get to. So it isn’t consumed.

It’s not really the cost that is holding this market back. It’s the availability of the data (see my open vs closed post for more on this).

So a web service that contains a very large portion of the most valuable premium content with transaction capability built in that can be easily syndicated should open the market.

At least we sure hope so.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

UPDATE: To show off how easy it is to syndicate the Alacra Store, I have added the Alacra Store search field to the left column, right under the Google search field. You don't even have to leave this blog to give it a try.

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» ON SELLING PREMIUM CONTENT, WEB 2.0 STYLE from *michael parekh on IT*
KNOW WHAT YOU'RE PAYING FOR VC Fred Wilson has a post on one of his portfolio companies, a vendor of premium content information, that has just launched a web storefront (beta of course). Alacra Store's parent company is Alacra, which provides (quote f... [Read More]

Tracked on Aug 15, 2005 6:41:54 PM

» Alcara Launches Premium Content Store from PaidContent.org
: Alacra, one of the B2B premium content vendors/distributors, has launched a biz/consumer-focused online store, called the AlacraStore, in beta. It has information from sources such as D&B, CreditSights, Thomson Financial, Freedonia, Snapdata, Hemscot... [Read More]

Tracked on Aug 15, 2005 6:59:01 PM

Tracked on Aug 15, 2005 7:00:17 PM

Tracked on Aug 15, 2005 7:01:44 PM

» Cool New Site - The Alacra Store from michael's thoughts
I was reading this post on Fred Wilsons A VC site. One of the companies hes invested in, Alacra, has opened an online store. Ive never heard of Alacra before, but apparently they allow access to premium web content... [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 7, 2005 3:21:12 PM

Posted August 15, 2005 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Of course, make sure the syndication extends to the search results!

Posted by: Gabe | Aug 15, 2005 3:39:25 PM

I guess it needs some more testing before starting word-of-mouth :).

That's not a very good response to disabled cookies:
-------------------

http://www.alacrastore.com/cgi-bin/alacraswitchISAPI.dll

We are sorry, but your request cannot be completed.
Please go back and try again. If the problem persists,
please call 1.888.333.0820 or email help@alacrastore.com

Template file c:\usr\Netscape\server\docs\cookiesDisabled.htm not found.
(code #-1)
---------------------

Posted by: pf | Aug 15, 2005 7:04:50 PM

I might be missing something here, but doesn't this compete with the likes of Hoovers?

Posted by: Raj Bala | Aug 16, 2005 1:04:47 AM

hoovers doesn't have anywhere near the amount of premium content aggregated that alacra does

Posted by: fred | Aug 16, 2005 5:33:11 AM

Good Stuff,

The word is xreferplus.com is making billions selling content to university libraries. It looks like the universities have stopped buying books altogether and just pay more electronic databases.

It's a strange thing...I've never felt like there hasn't been enough information for us to access. The problem is how to digest, manage and manipulate all the info that we're bumping into everyday.

With information- quantity is last, quality is second and accessibility is first.

I can't wait to see what Alacra does with tagging and RSS. It's going to be a lot of fun. For example, what I would like to do is tag a topic (e.g. Australian private equity), subscribe to the feed, get visual analytics about the feed (most popular keywords, changes in number of posts etc.) and view who else is subscribed to that feed and what other feeds they are subscribed to. This setup would solve my information needs.

So yeah, Alacra, tags, rss, social soft and we're cooking. Good luck with it Fred!

Posted by: Daniel Nerezov | Aug 16, 2005 6:59:44 AM

Hi Fred,

great service! The only problem? The quality and price of content. I did several searches regarding my industry (mobile content and services), and found only a few interesting docs, all priced over 250 $. Looking at the table of contents, I noticed that nearly everything is info that I can get elsewhere, for free. So, probably Alacra has to expand his reach but, firstly, content providers have to understand that they can't sell us, on Web 2.0, the same 1.000 $ researches they used to sell pre-web. Information is everywhere, for people who know where to find it!

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