By Shyamali Ghosh
We are pleased to announce the opening of a new Austin office to accommodate Information Evolution Inc. (IEI)’s growing U.S.-based management team. The new workspace is located on 5th Street between Chicon and Comal, near the corner of Comal, in an area of East Austin that has recently grown into a diverse mixed-use district. IEI’s new office is easily accessible on foot or by bicycle, as well as by car. It is also next to the Saltillo Plaza light rail stop, making it quick to reach from downtown Austin.
IEI’s president, Matt Manning, comments “We are very pleased to have relocated to Austin’s booming lower east side. Not only is the area is a hotbed for creative firms, its proximity to downtown and excellent transportation infrastructure make it an ideal location for our employees and customers. We look forward to being a positive corporate citizen in this exciting and growing area of the capitol city.”
The new IEI offices provide workspace for six local employees supporting customers in the US, UK, and Canada. The design of the new IEI workspace allows our American managers to share their collective experience and to collaborate on larger projects. The new office also provides Information Evolution with room to grow further. Most of IEI’s 110 employees and operations remain in South India. “We are fortunate to have such a nice space in a great, accessible area,” says Matt Manning, President. “Our new location provides an open, attractive environment where our managers can work efficiently, and leaves us a good amount of room to expand.”
Information Evolution’s new address is 1601 East 5th Street, Suite #109, Austin, TX 78702. All of IEI’s phone numbers and fax numbers will remain the same.
IEI provides human resource and technology services to companies, mostly in publishing or related industries, that need to manage large databases in real time. For more information, call (512) 650-1111.
posted by Shyamali Ghosh on January 2, 2012
In the early days of the Internet boom there was a customizable “newspaper” called CraYoN (“Create your own newspaper”) that allowed folks to mix and match chunks of content (stock graphs, sports team news, regional news, industry-specific news, etc.) to create their own “current awareness” service. You don’t need to look around very much these days to see that these folks really saw the future coming very clearly.
As Internet media matures those early chunks of code that CraYoN users could mix and match are now a wide array of APIs that can be integrated into web sites and apps. In fact, the proliferation of APIs has made it possible to create unique and compelling information services by mixing and matching these APIs and adding just enough of a barrier to entry (proprietary content, services, unique software functionality) to stave off copycats. Firms taking this approach (Kayak, Bankrate, etc.) are using differing business models, but they usually involve state-of-the art SEO strategies, the sale of advertising and preferred placement, and LeadGen bounties from ecommerce partners. Their success is spurring the creation of next-generation services and there is likely to be a real boom in new product development based on this mix-and-match approach as the barriers to entry gets lower and lower.
One Austin-based firm, Infochimps, was set up specifically to help folks find those APIs and datasets that can power these new information services. They see markets for these APIs both with the developers of publicly available information services as well as with those folks designing the proliferating in-house applications behind corporate firewalls. Of course, the folks selling news and information services into enterprises have long been aware of the market for API-versions of their services. The sophistication of internal applications is getting to the point now, however, where many of them rival and exceed the functionality of content aggregation and other information services from the industry’s major players.
Will the information industry completely devolve to the point where the display and organization of proprietary data (the work that costs us so much to do and is fraught with pitfalls) is simply not our responsibility anymore? I think industry players will have to choose either that route (focusing on making their data unique and must-have) or commit to the development of truly robust applications. Which side of this great divide will your firm be on come 2015?
posted by Shyamali Ghosh on December 26, 2011
