Patrick Spain

Mid-Meeting Keynote Address

Back to the Future: Will All Content Be Free (Again)?

Most widely distributed content, whether news or data, used to be free (or nearly so)in its original print or broadcast form. You turned on your TV and watched ad supported shows. You purchased a print newspaper for a nominal price. The exception was for narrow data and information interesting to only a few (usually business) people. Today, almost nothing is too narrow to an online audience approaching 1 billion people. Some people find this intimidating, fearing its impact on their businesses and on their libraries, while others exult in the tumultuousness of a rapidly changing electronic environment. What do you think? Carry on the conversation in small groups….

BIOGRAPHY

Patrick J. Spain, CEO, HighBeam Research, Inc.

Patrick Spain is the founder of HighBeam™ Research, Inc. Spain created HighBeam™ Research as Alacritude, LLC in August 2002 to serve as a vehicle for building an online research service for individuals. Between August 2002 and April 2003, Spain raised a total of $4.3 million to fund HighBeam™ Research from Prism Opportunity Fund (Chicago), 1 to 1 Ventures (Stamford, Conn.), and a variety of individuals, including the original angel backers of his former company, Hoover’s, Inc. HighBeam™ Research is headquartered in Chicago and has additional operations in Philadelphia and New York.

Spain is a cofounder and was former chairman and CEO of Hoover's, a leading online provider of company information headquartered in Austin, Texas. Spain helped found Hoover's (then known as The Reference Press) in 1990, serving as its CEO from 1993 to 2001 and chairman from 1994 to 2002. Spain was on the board of Hoover’s when the company was sold to Dun & Bradstreet in 2003 for $119 million. During his tenure, Spain led Hoover's from an unprofitable private book publishing company with a few hundred thousand dollars of revenue to a publicly traded profitable media and business information company with $31 million of revenues. Along the way he raised approximately $60 million of capital from both private and public markets, attracting such investors as Time Warner, Media General, NBC and Disney, and developed important strategic partnerships with such companies as Bloomberg, Dow Jones, The Financial Times, Lexis-Nexis, Microsoft, Oracle, Reuters and Yahoo!, among others.

Spain was among the first to recognize the value of online information services (in 1993 Hoover's became AOL's first business information offering) and the Internet (the company launched one of the first subscription based Internet services in 1995) to build brand, expand sales reach and reduce marketing, selling and distribution costs for publishing companies. By using technology to reach millions of businesspeople cost-effectively, Spain created a unique, rapidly growing business enterprise that generated multiple revenues from individual and enterprise subscriptions, advertising, licensing and e-commerce.

Prior to Hoover’s, Spain worked in the telecommunications industry first as a lawyer and then as a business executive, as a real estate developer and as an economic consultant.

Spain sits on advisory boards of several private technology companies and on the board of Stockgroup Information Systems Inc. (OTC: SWEB). He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago in Ancient History and a J.D. from Boston University.

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