Dow Jones Acquires Innovator in Business and Relationship Intelligence

Generate’s patented extraction technology, relationship mapping, and trigger events offer unique insight on the connections among companies and executives, helping professionals to create and connect to new business opportunities

NEW YORK .— Dow Jones & Company today announced that it has acquired Maynard, Massachusetts-based Generate Inc. (www.generateinc.com), a market innovator in enabling business intelligence. The acquisition extends Dow Jones’s ability to help financial services and business professionals be more productive and successful. Generate combines business-critical company and executive intelligence with relationship-mapping technology and trigger events to help executives spot opportunities as they unfold and connect to future business partners.

The purchase of Generate is a further example of Dow Jones’s strategy to “Power the Intelligent Enterprise” by delivering authoritative information to an organization’s most information-intensive job functions – when, where and how it’s needed. As part of the acquisition, Dow Jones will form a new business unit called Business & Relationship Intelligence in its Enterprise Media Group that will focus on bringing Generate-powered solutions to market in the enterprise sales and media segments.

“In today’s hyper-competitive market, our customers require a fresh approach to business information. Generate co-founders Tom Aley and Darr Aley and their team have created unique, game-changing technologies that represent the future of business information,” said Clare Hart, executive vice president of Dow Jones & Company and president, Enterprise Media Group. “By bringing together the content and technologies of the two companies we’ve created an unbeatable combination. Now, Dow Jones can help our customers be even more productive and competitive by providing truly unique insight into trends and relationships that will help them power their business decisions.”

Generate’s patented extraction and aggregation technology harvests company and executive data from the Web and maps the relationships among the people and organizations it finds. The company crawls more than 75 million domains extracting comprehensive information on more than four million companies and 6.4 million executives. Generate’s technology also mines in real-time for more than 100 “trigger events” of interest to business and financial professionals, such as mergers and acquisitions, senior executive and board changes, venture financing and more. This company intelligence is integrated with relationship-mapping technology, allowing clients to detect competitive moves, identify prospects and, by optimizing corporate and personal networks, connect to executives through their best relationship path.

“Business and financial professionals are faced with an abundant amount of information and rapid change. In order to be successful, they need to be informed when an event occurs, details of the people involved, what the transaction means to them and how they can take action,” said Tom Aley, president and CEO of Generate. “Together, Dow Jones and Generate provide users with this level of comprehensive intelligence in real time and enable them to capitalize on these opportunities for increased success.“

“Today, information services face a dual challenge: to provide information from a broad sweep of sources, and to present that information so that it does not overwhelm the user,” said Sue Feldman, IDC’s vice president for Search and Discovery Technologies. “To do so, information providers will have to identify the important and pertinent elements of their information stores, and then deliver them within the context of the user’s task or preferences. Dow Jones has a history of categorizing and analyzing trusted sources of information. By adding Generate’s ability to aggregate Web content with their technology for automatically extracting the important elements—names of people, places, events, and relationships—Dow Jones has positioned itself nicely to confront these challenges.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Generate co-founder Tom Aley will lead Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence as senior vice president and managing director, while co-founder Darr Aley will become vice president, marketing and business development, of the new unit. Both are information industry veterans. All Generate employees will join Dow Jones.

The content and technology provided by Generate will be integrated across the product range of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media group, which serves sales, business development executives, wealth managers, investment bankers, public relations, corporate communications and media professionals, private equity analysts, venture capitalists and more.

This is the second time this year that Dow Jones has invested in its enterprise business with an acquisition. In March, Dow Jones announced that it had acquired Betten Financial News BV, the Dutch-language news service covering the corporate sector in the Netherlands. “These acquisitions and the recent agreement for Dow Jones Newswires to distribute editorial content from Agence France-Presse, support our strategy to strengthen our global editorial assets and invest in technologies that move us far beyond traditional search,” Ms. Hart said.