Elsevier to improve mobile capability

STM publisher Elsevier is to invest in a new online platform – Smart Content – to improve mobile capability for more than 500 of its health, medical and life science websites.

The platform will offer improved search accuracy and high quality readability for mobile devices. The content will be semantically tagged to help with automated or curated topic collections.

For more information, see the original Elsevier press release.

British Library opens Business & IP Centre in Newcastle

The British Library has launched a new business service for the north east of England.

The new Business and IP Centre Newcastle is one of six new Centres planned for UK city libraries (Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield). 

London’s Business and IP Centre launched in 2006 and has helped over 350,000 businesses.

See original press release.

The Financial Times launches ‘Fast FT’

The Financial Times has launched a new ‘bite-sized news’ section of its website.

Fast FT, which also has its own Twitter account, will provide rolling business news and expert commentary in short articles (up to 250 words long) and is designed to meet the needs of increasingly mobile readers.

You can read more about the launch at The Guardian and see screen shots via PaidContent.

“Add value or die” – listen to our first podcast!

The March issue of Business Information Review includes this year’s Business Information Survey.

Researched and written by Allan Foster, and now in its 23rd year, the latest survey has been given the rather challenging subtitle “Add value or die”.

You can hear Allan discussing his findings with Sandra Ward on our very first podcast which you can access here.

Some of the key findings of the Survey include:

·         Very mixed fortunes of respondents, from modest expansion to disbandment
·         Serious senior management scepticism of the traditional centralized information services model
·         Outsourcing, on or offshore, still a popular organizational model, with notable successes and failures
·         The professional development pipeline for IM/IS personnel has been damaged by, amongst other factors, outsourcing
·         The notably successful services are finding new and imaginative ways of adding value, sometimes well outside traditional IS/IM boundaries
·         The more removed the head of the IS/IM service is from the senior management and Board, the more vulnerable is the service

Patent trends – the state of global innovation

The Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters has released its annual analysis of global patent trends.  The State of Innovationreport tracks patent activity across 12 key technology areas.

Key findings include:
·         Computers and peripherals had the largest volume of activity in the whole of the technology sector.  There were 232,000+ filings in 2012.  Scanners declined by 34%
·         Medical devices saw a 15.7% increase in patent activity. 
·         ‘Tobacco-related innovation’ increased by 58%
·         ‘Sugar related inventions’ increased by 56%

The full report can be found here.

Pearson reveals mobile traffic statistics

According to Pearson’s 2012 annual report, 30% of FT.com’s traffic is coming via mobile devices – including 15% of new subscriptions.

Pearson has continued to invest in mobile technology, including the launch of a Windows 8 app.  The Financial Times passed the 50% digital subscriptions milestone in 2012.

Penguin e-books accounted for 17% of global book revenues (up from 12% in 2011).

Source: The Appside

Business book of the year winners announced

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has announced the winners of this year’s Business Book of the Year competition.

The competition is sponsored by Henley Business School and run in association with the British Library.   

This year’s overall winner was The Management Book: How to Manage Your Team to Deliver Outstanding Results written by the entrepreneur Richard Newton.  Newton identified his top three tips: 

·         The management role is made, not given. You need to shape it rather than let it shape you.

·         If you let your team be successful, you will be successful.

·         Being a manager is something to be proud of. Fundamentally every organisation builds from its management.”

Category winners:
Management and Leadership Textbook
Managing Equality and Diversity: Theory and Practice by Savita Kumra and Simonetta Manfredi

Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Winning at Innovation: The A-F Model by Fernando Trías de Bes and Philip Kotler

The New Manager
The Leadership Skills Handbook: 50 Essential Skills You Need to be a Leader by Jo Owen

The Commuter’s Read
The Strategy Book: How to Think and Act Strategically to Deliver Outstanding Results by Max Mckeown

Which business book(s) should you read?

If one of your new year’s resolutions is to read more business books you may have found yourself overwhelmed by the quantity of books available. 

Over on the State of Search website Bas van den Beld has come up with some great ideas for your next business book read.  An infographic designed by Koozai helps take you to choices in a number of subject areas, including:

·         Branding

·         Web analytics

·         Business development

·         Content marketing

·         Paid search

·         SEO

·         Web theory

·         Social media

The post is well worth a look.

BvD releases updated Orbis

Business information publisher Bureau van Dijk (BvD) has released an updated version of Orbis, the company database. 

Orbis contains information on over 100 million companies from around the world sourced from more than 100 information providers.  
 
Enhancements include the addition of over 11,000 CICI (company identifier) numbers; and two additional measures of financial strength and user access to additional original documents.

More information via Information World Review.