Thomson announced to its customers (though not in a press release) that it intends to dispose of its market research and news product lines. To those with long memories, that translates to selling Profound and NewsEdge. Profound, you may recall, was the product vended by Dan Wagner’s company, then called M.A.I.D. In 1998 M.A.I.D. bought Dialog/DataStar and changed the name of the company to The Dialog Corporation. Thomson bought the company in 2000 and then acquired NewsEdge in 2001. They stuck all these together under the Dialog company name. A few years later they unstuck them, demoting Dialog from company to product status and assigning it to
Thomson Scientific in Philadelphia. The Profound/NewsEdge piece, along with Investext (aka Broker Research), InSite, and the news research product, changed its name to Thomson Business Intelligence and went to Thomson Legal and Regulatory to be run under the West banner. Ummm, that never made a lot of sense, since business intelligence isn’t really legal in nature.

Now there’s more rearranging of the deck chairs. In addition to selling Profound and NewsEdge, Thomson will move Broker Research and Insite to Thomson Financial. This seems redundant, since Investext is already a Thomson Financial product. I’ve got a whole review of Investext in the January/February 2007 issue of ONLINE , but I guess it will give them another platform that they will eventually phase out. Investext remains as two databases (files 545 and 745) on the Dialog platform.

The News Research service will disappear in a puff of smoke, so it seems, on December 31, 2007. At least we have lots of notice about this.

So who’s going to buy Profound and NewsEdge? Dan Wagner’s probably not interested, since he’s got his e-commerce company, venda to worry about. Sure would shake things up if it was a search engine company like Google or Yahoo, both of which would like to get into the content business.