A VC: The Alacra Store

The Alacra Store

Alacra is this great company in the Flatiron portfolio that not enough people know about.

That’s because Steve and Mike, the founders, are the kind of guys who just put their heads down and build, support, and deliver great services to their customers.

Specifically, Alacra has built the largest collection of premium content on the web. But they didn’t stop there.

They have built a number of value added services on top of their premium content database that they sell to their customers in the investment banking, legal, accounting, and consulting industries. These services provide search, display, delivery, packaging, and analytics around the premium content.

I have been involved with a lot of companies over the years, but very few, if any, are as loved by their customers and are as unknown to the rest of the world as Alacra.

But that may change shortly. Hopefully not the “loved by their customers” part. I am talking about the “unknown to the rest of the world” part.

That’s because Alacra quietly, no surprise, launched the Alacra Store last week.

The Alacra Store makes Alacra’s database of premium content available to anyone with a web browser and a credit card.

The next time you do a web search looking for information about the size of the mobile gaming market, you might want to do that search at the Alacra Store instead of Yahoo! or Google.

But like any vertical search opportunity (see my post last week on Indeed), the Alacra Store will not be limited to a stand alone destination.

Look for the Alacra Store to be widely syndicated like any good web service should be.

The idea of the world’s largest collection of premium content being widely syndicated across the Internet is a big deal.

There is a vast amount of very valuable content locked up behind password protected websites that nobody knows how to get to. So it isn’t consumed.

It’s not really the cost that is holding this market back. It’s the availability of the data (see my open vs closed post for more on this).

So a web service that contains a very large portion of the most valuable premium content with transaction capability built in that can be easily syndicated should open the market.

At least we sure hope so.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

UPDATE: To show off how easy it is to syndicate the Alacra Store, I have added the Alacra Store search field to the left column, right under the Google search field. You don't even have to leave this blog to give it a try.

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The Alacra Store

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