20 TO WATCH IN 2006

Introduction

This report profiles companies, projects and services which EPS believes will have an important impact on the publishing community in 2006.

Search and datamining

Social networking and communities

Business models

Repositories

Bookmarking and tagging

Technologies

Workflow

This impact could be technological or strategic. The services chosen are not necessarily new market entrants or small start-ups, but have demonstrated during 2005 that their offerings have shaken up the marketplace in which they operate such as to force publishers to re-evaluate their activities. For example, Craigslist is reportedly costing San Francisco Bay Area newspapers between $50 and $65 million annually because of the business which it is pulling away from these publishers. In other cases the impact is less direct financially in the short term, but could be just as challenging in the medium to long term. Wikipedia is a strong challenger in the reference publishing world, particularly given the recent Nature study which indicated that its content was comparable in terms of quality to that contained in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Some of the services profiled in this report are changing the way in which end users access information, and as such as are challenging publishers to come up with new and innovative ways of serving their audience. Smart Tea?s electronic lab notebook product could have a significant impact on laboratory researcher behaviour, and indeed publishers like Elsevier have already noted this, and have brought out their own electronic lab notebook services.

Companies like Jambo, with its pay-per-click advertising model, are offering both users and advertisers new abilities to make a connection, and this is an area where publishers must react quickly. Offering these kinds of services is becoming fairly simple, but not offering them could be disastrous.

The intention of this report therefore is to indicate where changes are taking place in and around the world of publishing, and to try to shed some light on where publishers may find new competition and threats emerging in 2006.