MeansBusiness Inc., a privately held Boston-based company offering an online database of business ideas and annotations drawn from more than 1,000 books—announced two new partnerships aimed at providing e-learning platforms for executives. The company completed an agreement with DaimlerChrysler that will utilize MeansBusiness to providing business content for the DaimlerChrysler Corporate University.
Earlier, it had contracted with the popular career site Monster.com to offer its database to ChiefMonster senior executives as part of Monster's Power Tool service.
"We're being much more selective about partnering," MeansBusiness CEO and founder David Wilcox told PW about the company's strategy. "In almost every instance, we're targeting the top people in the company." Going forward, Wilcox plans to continue to market MeansBusiness's database on its own Web site (www.meansbusiness.com), as well as those of business schools and corporate universities. Other clients added this summer include City University Business School in London and the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College.
Like other Internet-dependent businesses, MeansBusiness has been affected by the decline of dot-coms. "We certainly haven't generated a lot of revenue for publishers yet," Wilcox acknowledged, referring to contractual arrangements with 27 publishers for the rights to sell abstracts of their books online. In addition, changes in the business landscape have caused many executives to adopt a back-to-basics approach when it comes to books. "Part of what we try to get across to our clients," said Wilcox, "is that there's a whole range of innovative and new stuff that's not related to the Internet. Loyalty and customer-relationship management is not just a Web-based concept."
Although MeansBusiness continues to update its database, it has slowed its efforts. Just last year the company abstracted as many as 100 books a month; now, it does only 10 to 15 books. "When we reached 1,000 books," said Wilcox, "we got to critical mass. We've got a couple thousand ideas in each category. That's pretty extensive content."
