WeSRCH was recently interviewed by the National Technology News Examiner of Examiner.com
When was your company founded?
The Company was founded in 1976. The WeSRCH.com website launched on February 16, 2007, for which the development was kicked off in summer before and the beta went up in November 2006.
What's the story behind how you started the company?
We started as an engineering consulting company and morphed into a market research company when our founder discovered that companies paid a lot more when you helped them figure out how to make a business out of technology than they would for just showing them how to make technology. In 1998, we developed our first website to distribute content in parallel with paper and snail mail. In 2001 we dropped paper and went 100% to Internet delivery because we could give them full interactive data analysis.
The story behind weSRCH goes back to 2004 when I started to try and figure out if research costs were indeed escalating, as many claimed, what were the causes, and what could be done about it. I found that it was a problem and that it would have been worse had partnering through consortia hadn’t improved collaboration beyond the historical approach of professional associations, technical journals, and conferences developed in the early 1900’s. What was surprising was that while researchers were great at developing tools to make communication and collaboration more efficient, they were late adopters when it came to using it professionally. It was the cobbler’s children with no shoes.
The Internet was mostly being used for selling and social networking, while most of the techies were still in the PowerPoint - e-mail age. The Japanese companies who made data projectors nary had any in their conference rooms. We saw the potential to use web 2.0 as a medium for professional networking as well . . . that it could become the collaboration tool for this century. Collaboration is critical to research productivity because it is how the ideas are germinated that blossom into products.
What is your company all about?
We are a business research company that sells information on a subscription basis via the web. These subscriptions cost around $60,000 for 4 passwords. It priced so high because there only a few companies that need it and are the costs of developing the data and information bases are high. We essentially allow them to split these costs with their competitors rather than duplicate the costs in each if they do it internally. weSRCH is our first product to use advertising as the primary revenue stream and instead of developing the data ourselves it is essentially an open source model.
How is your company different than your competitors? Competitive advantages?
The biggest differences are 1) openness, 2) greater content, 3) far more applications, 4) we understand what researchers need in information because we are researchers ourselves, not Internet centric, 5) we started with a business model and then built the content model around it, rather than the other way around, 6) we have far higher development productivity in terms of code developed per dollar invested, 6) we have are self funded with no debt and no venture capital.
What are the main challenges your company faces?
Our biggest challenge is the same as everyone else’s in this economy: survival first and prevailing second. The collapse in on-line advertising has hurt real bad and our market research side is struggling as well.
Finally, what's your goal for the next few months?
Increase the visibility of the site among students, scientists, researchers and doctors. This may sound surprising, but getting professionals out of the e-mail cocoon and on to the Internet is harder than one would think. Take doctors . . . They spend all day going from patient to patient mainly writing things down on paper. They get filed and rarely looked at again. This is in large part due the fact that there still isn’t a computer interface that does not harm their productivity and thus cut their revenues. Their professional learning model is based on paper journals and conferences that are made attractive by designing them to make vacations tax deductible. This makes them one of the hardest groups to change, because they won’t use the Internet professionally and thus incorporate Internet learning into their practice until the technology makes them more productive . . . and then they have to radically change their existing habits. Once you get out of this world into the corporate world, you’d be surprised at how outdated the learning models are in many corporations. Many block Internet access, fearing their employees will “just look at porn sites all day” as one CEO told me. But our members are very positive. We have an amazing number of CTO and director level researchers accessing the site regularly. About 20% of the users have Doctorate degrees and one-third of these have MD degrees. So you can see that despite what I said, there are plenty of MDs thirsty for more modern learning tools. The bottom line for all is in their RoR (Return on Research), which starts with access to current information and learning cycles. The best companies at this will develop better ideas and thus will have better products. In the end it’s survival of the fittest.
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