Pop quiz: What do birthing classes, spice sellers and crematoriums have in common -- besides bracketing the cycle of life?
Give up? They all have trade associations run by the quietest and fastest-growing company on K Street, SmithBucklin.
The Chicago-based firm (with a major Washington office) is the world's largest trade association management company. Its more than 200 trade associations and professional societies include Lamaze International, the American Spice Trade Association and the Cremation Association of North America.
These are not what you'd call high-profile entities, but that's the way SmithBucklin likes it. The company has stayed in the background, helping obscure but useful organizations, since 1949.
"People say, 'My God, there's really an industry for this?' " said Henry S. Givray, SmithBucklin's chief executive. "They don't fully grasp what we do."
What it does is operate full-time trade associations on what amounts to part-time budgets. It hires professional managers -- or develops them from within -- and assigns them to run one or two trade groups. Then it backs them up with teams of experts in accounting, training, marketing, event planning, human resources and, here in Washington, government affairs.
Voila, instant trade association! And the associations' members are none the wiser. Independent associations, however, are not always pleased with the competition. "Stand-alone association execs can sometimes get a little nervous about what we do," Givray said.
But clearly it's working well. SmithBucklin has grown at a compounded annual rate of 11 percent over the past five years and has 750 employees. Its industry (yes, it is an industry) comprises 676 companies, up more than 40 percent from 10 years ago.
Washington is, of course, a major hub for associations. Of the nation's 86,000 trade associations and professional societies, 3,500 are located in the D.C. area, more than in any other locale.
So SmithBucklin has a large and growing office here. In May, it hired Russell Snyder, 45, as senior vice president for its 160-person Washington office. Snyder, who last worked at SmithBucklin's largest competitor, Kellen Co., is a third-generation association executive.
Snyder's grandfather Calvin Snyder worked for the predecessor of the National Association of Realtors. His father, Dick Snyder, was the top executive of the National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association. Dick Snyder was also responsible for roping his son into supervising associations for a living.
Russ Snyder has had responsibility over a weird and eclectic collection of groups: the National Candle Association, the Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association and the Greeting Card Association, among others. He now helps oversee three floors of a building on M Street NW that house 25 associations and a six-person lobbying shop. The associations include a few that you might have even heard of: the Pet Food Institute and the Regional Airline Association, for example.
Snyder's office also conducts back-office functions for the Managed Funds Association, which represents one of the country's most controversial businesses -- hedge funds.
Snyder said he enjoys his new job and would recommend it to the next generation of Snyders. In the meantime, he has had to spend a lot of time just keeping his clients' acronyms straight.
More at:http://www.smithbucklin.com/
Via-WashingtonPost
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Splunk,a system that could accurately track a transaction
Splunk,a system that could accurately track a transaction as it traversed the entire enterprise stack. If the transaction broke somewhere along the way, their software could help IT discover the cause of that failure. While it was clearly a pain point for some businesses, there was no clear customer and the value proposition was a relatively hard one to articulate. But the technology they were building created a whole lot of intelligence built on the fumes of the data center (namely the log files).
They had figured out that if they could track, manage and correlate log files across the entire data center in near real time, that they could create the killer IT Search Engine that would allow an end user to see into their enterprise stack in a way never before possible. The Splunk works using Voip data and how one could track all systems that touched a particular extension by simply searching for that extension in the Splunk engine. It was clearly a better way to manage the massive amounts of IT data that exist in enterprises today.
Splunk team has built precisely what they promised -- a large-scale, high-speed search technology for your data center. But despite the fact that Splunk's software has been downloaded by over 100,000 users and despite the fact that there are now more than 350 paying enterprise customers (including 21st Century Insurance, BEA, British Telecom, Catholic Healthcare West, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Comcast, Dow Jones, FedEx, Fiserv, GE Consumer Finance, LinkedIn, Mantech, Mozilla.org, NASA, Shopzilla, Telstra, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of State, Vodafone and Yahoo!), I would still have a tough time answering the question posed by my Limited Partner.
Splunk has not built an application. Nor is Splunk merely selling software. Splunk has created a software enabled platform that continues to be extremely broadly applicable. Is Splunk mission critical when it comes to maintaining availability of large scale enterprise systems? Yes. Is Splunk invaluable in the fight to maintain the security of your data center? Yes. Does Splunk uniquely simplify the process of data compliance? Yes. Can Splunk help you dig into your data and analyze it like no other solution? Yes. But, frankly, that's just the tip of the iceberg -- once you are able to query individual pieces of data across your entire data center in real time, the applicability of the platform is limited only by the creativity of its end users. And those end users are driving value back into the platform, creating applications we hadn't thought of before.
More at:http://www.splunk.com/
They had figured out that if they could track, manage and correlate log files across the entire data center in near real time, that they could create the killer IT Search Engine that would allow an end user to see into their enterprise stack in a way never before possible. The Splunk works using Voip data and how one could track all systems that touched a particular extension by simply searching for that extension in the Splunk engine. It was clearly a better way to manage the massive amounts of IT data that exist in enterprises today.
Splunk team has built precisely what they promised -- a large-scale, high-speed search technology for your data center. But despite the fact that Splunk's software has been downloaded by over 100,000 users and despite the fact that there are now more than 350 paying enterprise customers (including 21st Century Insurance, BEA, British Telecom, Catholic Healthcare West, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Comcast, Dow Jones, FedEx, Fiserv, GE Consumer Finance, LinkedIn, Mantech, Mozilla.org, NASA, Shopzilla, Telstra, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of State, Vodafone and Yahoo!), I would still have a tough time answering the question posed by my Limited Partner.
Splunk has not built an application. Nor is Splunk merely selling software. Splunk has created a software enabled platform that continues to be extremely broadly applicable. Is Splunk mission critical when it comes to maintaining availability of large scale enterprise systems? Yes. Is Splunk invaluable in the fight to maintain the security of your data center? Yes. Does Splunk uniquely simplify the process of data compliance? Yes. Can Splunk help you dig into your data and analyze it like no other solution? Yes. But, frankly, that's just the tip of the iceberg -- once you are able to query individual pieces of data across your entire data center in real time, the applicability of the platform is limited only by the creativity of its end users. And those end users are driving value back into the platform, creating applications we hadn't thought of before.
More at:http://www.splunk.com/
ZoomInfo is a business related people search engine
ZoomInfo is the premier business information search engine, with profiles on more than 35 million people and 3.8 million companies. ZoomInfo delivers a single site for quick and easy access to in-depth information on industries, companies, people, products, services and jobs. Find out more about how ZoomInfo can work for you.
The site aims to cover a large field. Search by company, people or job. Refine your search by geography or revenue. ZoomInfo will list info about where a person has worked as well as career highlights. If you need something more extensive, ZoomInfo has something called PowerSearch. It gives you the ability to perform in-depth people and company searches.
More at:http://www.zoominfo.com/
The site aims to cover a large field. Search by company, people or job. Refine your search by geography or revenue. ZoomInfo will list info about where a person has worked as well as career highlights. If you need something more extensive, ZoomInfo has something called PowerSearch. It gives you the ability to perform in-depth people and company searches.
More at:http://www.zoominfo.com/
TagTogga
TagTooga is going to change your experience of searching on internet. Dont go for Googles, the MSNs and the Yahoos, which all basically give you the same results, check out TagTooga.com, TagTooga will show you results that you might had never found if you went through the regular search routes. Anyone can submit their site to TagTooga as well, it is a simple 1 minute process. It is a totally free directory that anyone can edit. If there is a site that you like, and you think it should be more easily seen by the internet searching public, submit it in to the site and it will show up in search results, its that simple.
More at:http://tagtooga.com
More at:http://tagtooga.com
Mirro For You"Its New Media Player"
Miro is a free, open-source software project led by a non-profit organization. It's a platform that benefits everyone by keeping online video open. Our organization isn't controlled by venture capitalists or stockholders, which means we always put our users first. Open video will only have a real impact if it can reach a mass audience. Your ideas and efforts work better than any paid marketing campaign, because it comes from somewhere real.
Miro is downloadable for absolutely free and also has an emphasis on the open source video market, hence the old name, Democracy TV. Miro boasts that it has more HD TV than any other media player, which is an excellent selling point since laptops and recent computers are HD compatible. With Miro you can watch over 1500 free channels, and now on to the really cool stuff... You can download and save videos from YouTube and program Miro to automatically download any videos that show up within your search criteria.
More at:http://getmiro.com/
Miro is downloadable for absolutely free and also has an emphasis on the open source video market, hence the old name, Democracy TV. Miro boasts that it has more HD TV than any other media player, which is an excellent selling point since laptops and recent computers are HD compatible. With Miro you can watch over 1500 free channels, and now on to the really cool stuff... You can download and save videos from YouTube and program Miro to automatically download any videos that show up within your search criteria.
More at:http://getmiro.com/
Snooth is a wine review and recommendation service
Snooth is a wine review and recommendation service that launched early last month. The idea is simple--provide a few simple ratings of wines you like or dislike, and Snooth will serve up ones it thinks you'll enjoy. It runs on a similar system to the one you find on Netflix, with one to five star ratings, and a bevy of user reviews. The system currently has a listing of over 1.5 million wines, and if you can't find one you've had or liked in the past, you can simply add it.
In addition to showing user rants and raves, Snooth pulls professional reviews from online publications, which it pools into separate ratings. Each wine's page also features the option to buy it from one of the partnered wine dealers, which will jump you off Snooth's site, and onto their online store. In most cases, I found that the deals on the partner sites weren't that much better than the prices at my local wine dealer, but it's nice to have that option.
There's also a friends system, with user profiles that let you see what your Snooth buddies have been rating on the site, and an RSS feed in case you feel like keeping tabs in your favorite feed reader.
I like Snooth. I think it's simple to use, and does its job. After just five ratings you start getting recommendations, which is handy. As for actually purchasing wine online, I think I'll stick to my favorite.
More at:http://www.snooth.com/
In addition to showing user rants and raves, Snooth pulls professional reviews from online publications, which it pools into separate ratings. Each wine's page also features the option to buy it from one of the partnered wine dealers, which will jump you off Snooth's site, and onto their online store. In most cases, I found that the deals on the partner sites weren't that much better than the prices at my local wine dealer, but it's nice to have that option.
There's also a friends system, with user profiles that let you see what your Snooth buddies have been rating on the site, and an RSS feed in case you feel like keeping tabs in your favorite feed reader.
I like Snooth. I think it's simple to use, and does its job. After just five ratings you start getting recommendations, which is handy. As for actually purchasing wine online, I think I'll stick to my favorite.
More at:http://www.snooth.com/
Oh, don’t forget is a very simple tool used to send text message reminders
Oh, don’t forget is a very simple tool used to send text message reminders.
After entering your cell number, the date and time you want the message to be sent, and the message, Oh, don’t forget sends out the text message to your phone free of charge. This is a really handy tool for keeping track of those fleeting thoughts and random appointments that are thrown at you each day.
As explained in the F.A.Q. of the site, the service works without knowing the cell phone provider because “ohdontforget is actually one half web application, and one half magic voodoo potion. Even I’m not sure how the magic voodoo potion works :)” Makes sense to me.
More at:http://ohdontforget.com/
After entering your cell number, the date and time you want the message to be sent, and the message, Oh, don’t forget sends out the text message to your phone free of charge. This is a really handy tool for keeping track of those fleeting thoughts and random appointments that are thrown at you each day.
As explained in the F.A.Q. of the site, the service works without knowing the cell phone provider because “ohdontforget is actually one half web application, and one half magic voodoo potion. Even I’m not sure how the magic voodoo potion works :)” Makes sense to me.
More at:http://ohdontforget.com/
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