Business Wire: Is this Warren Buffett's "senior moment?"

By Tom Foremski - January 17, 2006

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

OMAHA, Neb. & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2006--Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A and BRK.B) announced today a definitive agreement to acquire Business Wire, a privately held company that is a leading global distributor of corporate news, multimedia and regulatory filings. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

I guess you have to hit a dud occasionally, otherwise you wouldn't be mortal. I think Business Wire had about 30 seconds to live.

Maybe Mr Buffett's advisors hadn't heard of RSS and the fact that Business Wire has a customer (pissed-off) list--and that is all. A pissed-off customer list is not a defensible business model, (maybe he needed a fast depreciating asset for tax reasons?)

Anybody could disrupt Business Wire. I'll do it today, I'll call up Fergus Burns at Nooked, and some other contacts in the RSS sector.

We'll get every Silicon Valley corporate news room RSS enabled, and feed those feeds directly to the media news desks, investors, and any shareholder or anybody with an RSS news reader, in fact, we'll give you a news reader for free, already set up with the feeds you need.

And yes, this does satisfy Full Disclosure regs--much more so than Business Wire I would argue. Because FD calls for the broadest dissemination of news that is material to a company's business activities. RSS gets you into more places much faster and for far less money.

So give me a call if you want to skip Business Wire, I'll send out your releases for $50 a piece rather than $600 plus. . .

Hey Fergus, (and others...) let's create a media business on-the-fly and in real-time. Call my cell 4one5 threethree6 seven54seven. Now.



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By Tom Foremski - January 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comment | Category: Media Watch
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Comments (2)

Hi Tom

Great idea - its about time people started using RSS to get around the "walled garden" of businesswire, etc.

We've knocked up a quick "service" - http://www.svwnewswire.com

Regards
Fergus


Maybe. My guess is we'll see a bifurcation in the market, as we have in others. As long as Business Wire and PR Newswire ladle on what at least what appear to be increasing features that promise closer-to-real-time tracking, monitoring, campaign improvement, their big buyers will probably stay with them. I have no idea how well those services work, having been mostly on the receiving end of the releases as a journalist over the years.

It's akin though to Factiva's push in "repuation management," ( http://www.factiva.com/reputation-management.html ), a field it's making a big push into. The Fortune 500s+ will overpay, to be comfortable with a service, to be able to report up that things are taken care of. That's been an important business rationale for the old business.

While Nooked (and the svnewswire.com notion) may provide a great alternative, they'll have to catch fire as either fuller-service options, or reach markets may care less about 1) those options; 2) needing to manage up. Obviously, there are large worlds of companies and organizations that fit there.

Where does Google Base fit here?

Ken


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