Anyone interested in business information, particularly of the financial and investing kind, will know of the blogging start-up ZeroHedge which has followed guerrilla war-like tactics in forcing its way onto the desktops and mobiles of the 0.0001%. You can only imagine how, as this seemingly piss-ant digital property has grown and grown it has got under the skin of all the big corporate information players which can still get away with charging a huge premium for digital information. 

Bloomberg, where former FT man John Micklethwait was brought in by Mike Bloomberg last year as Editor-in-Chief to try to square the differential circle between the company's multi-billion dollar terminal based information services and its TV channels and excellent retail mobile web offering is probably particularly concerned. Bloomberg’s terminal distribution business charges tens of thousands of bucks for yearly subscriptions while the retail service is free.  

Well, it now seems its all-out war between the two, with ZH accusing the Bloomies of trying to do them down through unscrupulous reporting. Given the tremendous influencer reach of ZH as shown by a graphic in this article, Mike Bloomberg must be thinking whether his new Editor in Chief has taken leave of his senses? Perhaps the former New York Mayor needs to take his mind off things and lobby Hillary to join her on the Democrat Party's ticket as Vice President!

View more on the ZeroHedge/Bloomberg spat at:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-bloombergs-attempt-unmask-zero-hedge

It has long been clear that the litigious nature of the United States with respect to personal injury claims is now established firmly on UK shores. Anyone who turns on the TV at lunchtime during the week will hear how even if you tripped over a fly whilst guzzling the last dregs of your Vodka bottle there is a ‘lawyer for you’. (In fact, these commercials are now so hectoring it’s enough to give you a hangover without the vodka!). But now this pernicious legal trend is affecting the business information industry where companies even sue over public information matters. In one ongoing case, the owners of a liquidated firm are blaming the UK Registrar, Companies House, for their demise (Read HERE). I cannot comment on the detail of this case but it is surely the responsibility of each company and individual to check on their status in this information age and to make every effort to correct inaccuracies with the information providers concerned. It takes time to run down a healthy company. Can one untimely data point be the cause of such destruction? Put me down as a sceptic!

Strike one up for the little guy. (Yeah, right!) So called ‘privacy advocates’ (and who isn’t when it comes to their own information?) are hopping for joy over the European Court of Justice, the European Union’s highest court ruling that we all have a digital right for certain data historic data points to be ‘forgotten’. Google, which delivers 90% of all search in Europe, is rightly worried that the ruling will mean it faces a huge burden which none of its clever algorithms will be able to spirit away. Tech companies are all about automation and scale. Try calling Google with a service question and their response is reduced to the voice activated morass of all big companies. They are simply not set up to deal with grit in the Oyster. Still, they’re smart enough to spot a nightmare when it’s on the horizon. But does the wider business information industry?

Let’s face it when Equifax gets sued because it’s technical and customer service systems can’t handle a chap called ‘God’, what chance does the credit reporting industry have when European punters notice just how much historic data these companies have? What’s more, so much of it is being sold to third parties who aggregate it and post snippets freely to attract web traffic so that visitors will purchase the more up-to-date variety (full disclosure: I built a whole business around this model) it won’t be long before the ECJ’s ruling is a real business disruptor for big business information companies like Equifax, Experian and Dun and Bradstreet. Sleep now while the going's good...