VIGC is the Flemish Innovation Centre for Graphic Communication (Belgium). It's a non-profit organization, founded about four years ago and in business since October 1998. Their mission is to help people keep track of new technologies in the graphic arts industry and help them to innovate their business, by introducing new technologies or new market concepts. Both the Flemish and the European government financed the start-up.

Flanders has always been a region with much activity in the printing industry. Gutenberg may be the first printer, but he went out of business. The first successful printing factory was located in Antwerp (Christoffel Plantyn) and Flanders is of course also the home of major technology providers like Agfa, Xeikon, Barco Graphics, Artwork Systems and Enfocus.

Eddy Hagen has a degree in photography and another in communications management. He worked for the Belgian Printing Industries Association for 8 years. Thereafter, Hagen worked in a small publishing house as a prepress manager, and before joining VIGC he was director of a small organization for the education of insurance brokers. Hagen joined VIGC in 1998. His initial job was training manager, and after a few months Hagen became responsible for “trend watching.”

From Hagen’s start at VIGC, they were thinking how to improve the accessibility of their archives - eventually this lead to GraphicBrain.com. He has been responsible for this project from the start.

Eddy - Tell us about GraphicBrain.com and how long it has been around.

We introduced GraphicBrain.com in May at an international conference in Antwerp (Belgium) and have been online for about a month. Our first step was to introduce it in Flanders - the northern part of Belgium, with about 5 million people. This happened during the month of June. And now, we've introduced it to the rest of the world. So the penetration isn't that high at this moment, but the people who have seen GraphicBrain.com, are really impressed by the possibilities. First user statistics show that about one third of the people who have visited our site return within a few days. The average time spent on our site is also encouraging: more than 30 minutes per visit!

We are also approaching the market via other organizations. We have already initiated contacts with similar organizations like VIGC throughout the world and of course also with printing industry associations. The partnership of VIGC with the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is certainly an advantage to approach organizations in the United States. The first agreement is already in place: IDP, a Dutch organization, is offering its members premium access, for free.

We're certainly open to cooperation with other parties. The fact that we're not really a dot com, but a nonprofit organization and that we have no plans to compete with publishers or news sites, makes it also easier for others to cooperate with us.

Explain your pricing model for premium services.

The pricing model for GraphicBrain.com is simple: everybody can access the information you can quite easily find on the Internet with other search engines. To access the information that is harder to find via other tools you have to be a registered user. The personal services like agents, e-mail alerting and the downloading of documents and white papers from our servers are of course not free. But we are only charging 25 Euro per person per year, about 21 US dollars at this moment. For organizations and large companies we even have special discount rates. It's only a small investment and the ROI is very high: just imagine the time you save when you're able to access the right information immediately.

Besides avoiding economic woes, what advantages are there to being backed by governments?

The answer to this question isn't really easy. On the one hand, economic conditions affect all businesses, including ours. But keeping our services up and running, won't be endangered by bad economic conditions. First of all, the European and Flemish government funded our efforts. Because it's VIGC's primary internal tool for gathering information - you could call it our virtual librarian - we have to keep GraphicBrain.com up to date and running. Otherwise we would paralyze our own services.

On the other hand, bad economic conditions might even be in our favor: people want to be better informed before making a decision regarding investments. This is the field of business where GraphicBrain.com is playing: showing the way to the right information.

The costs of operation are, thanks to automation done by MediaMine, quite reasonable. We don't depend exclusively on advertising for our revenues. We also generate money from the registration fees and from 'special projects'. An example is the integration of GraphicBrain.com into the intranet of a company or another web site. So we are betting on different revenue streams, just to avoid being too dependent on the advertising market.

We are not a commercial company; we're a non-profit organization. And all the profit we will - hopefully - generate from GraphicBrain.com will flow back to the improvement of our services and to the collective services of VIGC, e.g. reports on new technology. You could even say that our goal is noble.

Because VIGC is young and small, we also have to look at the challenges in a different way, leading to innovative solutions. We don't have the manpower to read all the magazines and keep them in a well-structured library like other organizations do; that's the reason why we created GraphicBrain.com.

At PrintPlanet.com, we know that eventually other companies like Yahoo will see the value of more industry specific services. What is VIGC doing to hedge this possibility of competition?

I sometimes compare this with the evolution of the magazines. Once upon a time you only had general magazines, with different sections on economics, politics, sports, arts, science, etc. But now we see an amazing amount of specialized, focused magazines. This is also the way search engines will evolve. There will be general search engines, but there will be a strong growth in targeted tools, like GraphicBrain.com.

The big search engines of course have more people and more financial possibilities than we do. But we have unique selling proposition: At VIGC, we know what's happening in the graphic arts industry. We're in the middle of it. It's even our mission to keep track of all the changes. In doing this, we are confronted with the printer's and publisher's questions and problems every day. This vital experience is translated into GraphicBrain.com. Every new evolution will show up immediately in GraphicBrain.com. This will be the biggest challenge for a Yahoo or Google if they want to enter a vertical market: getting the expertise to know what's relevant to a certain type of industry.

Another reason why GraphicBrain.com is one step ahead is that we are experienced researchers and we have put our experiences in GraphicBrain.com. Essentially, we've created nothing new: the technology was already available, the information sources were out there: general web sites, magazines, discussion forums. But nobody has looked at it from a user's point of view: put it all into one search engine. That's what we've done, because we were getting tired of having to use different tools to get all the information.

A last point that works in our favor are resources: bandwidth and computer power. Most search engines only visit sites every few months or even once or twice a year. They only index the first few levels. GraphicBrain.com visits websites on a biweekly basis; if they have a page with press releases we even do this every day. We are indexing the whole site, from top to bottom. If the 'big' search engines would start providing a similar service like GraphicBrain.com, there costs for bandwidth and computer power would increase very rapidly.

Why did you decide to leave out print vendors and only focus on suppliers?

There are several reasons for this. We consider ourselves more like a reference work, instead of a directory service. We focus on the enabling technologies and market concepts, not on the people using it.

Indexing print vendors would also lead us to some practical problems: a print buyer in Brussels isn't interested in a print vendor in San Francisco. So we would have to build in some kind of geographical filtering, which won't be easy. It would be very difficult for us - in Europe - to keep track of all the new printing companies in the US. The amount of sites that had to be indexed would increase dramatically. The number of technology providers on the other hand is limited and they are all global players, which makes GraphicBrain.com a global service.

So it's both from a conceptual and from a practical point of view that we didn't include print vendors.

Specifically, who will use GraphicBrain.com?

The customers of GraphicBrain.com are quite different, just like the members of VIGC. But they all have one thing in common: they are interested in the graphic arts industry, in the broadest possible meaning of the word.

So we have - of course - printers and prepress houses, but also publishers, schools and of course the developers of technology. Our users are both management and the people on the floor. The first will find enough general information, e.g. in the magazines, the latter will find answers to day-to-day problems in the discussion forums.

Tell our members about the intelligence of Autonomy.

Well, the solution we've bought was not solely Autonomy. In fact we bought MediaMine, an asset management system, that has integrated Autonomy for the indexing, retrieval and personalization.

Because we are working with government money, all our investments have to be announced via a public offering. Four companies made an offer for our 'knowledge management system'. One of them was MediaMine, a young Belgian company, combined with Autonomy. We've had demos of all the solutions and the differences became clear immediately. There was a system in which we had to manually classify every document! Try that with about 1.5 million documents.

Autonomy as a retrieval tool is really powerful. The fact that they don't work with ordinary text searches, but that it analyses a document and derives the concepts from it, makes the results lists much more relevant. Also something nice is that GraphicBrain.com now has the ability to generate summaries on the fly, up to 10 sentences long and based upon your search. This is really unique.

MediaMine, who also did the integration and customization for us, also showed a clear vision. Already several years ago they decided to focus only on Java and XML. They were probably one of the first to have a pure XML-database as its core. Workflow automation is also one of their strong points.

What is your selling proposition to content creators?

At the Seybold conference in Boston earlier this year, Thad McIlroy said that the amount of information would double every 67 days by the year 2020. Imagine this! Managing this amount of content will indeed be a very big challenge, not only from the creator's side, but also from the user's side. We are placing GraphicBrain.com in the middle of this. What we are doing is providing the creators with a platform to make their content accessible for others. GraphicBrain.com is showing its users the way to the relevant information.

Our offer to content providers is that we can and want to index their content - if it's relevant - and make it accessible for the users of GraphicBrain.com. This is completely free of charge and we can even do this in a secured way. This means that a document creator can have his documents indexed, but in such a way that users can only retrieve them, but not access them. We even have the possibility to link a document to a 'network' of users, e.g. members of an organization. Then the document will only be retrievable for the people belonging to this network.

Everybody is a winner in this model: the content creator will attract more people to it's content, without an extra cost, the user will retrieve everything that's somewhere out there. GraphicBrain.com can meet its goal: to be the ultimate information resource for the graphic arts industry.

Regardless of the quality of GraphicBrain.com, how can you gain traction as a resource with so much competition from associations and trade magazines?

We don't have vast marketing budgets, so we're taking a different approach. Because we are a non-profit organization and we have an interesting, low budget solution, we are establishing relationships with other organizations in the graphic arts industry. They can offer their members a free access to GraphicBrain.com. The fist agreement is already a fact as I mentioned before: the Dutch IDP Group is offering free access to its members.

On the side of the technology providers, VIGC has already a quite extensive network of contacts, throughout the world. We will use this to try to 'sell' GraphicBrain.com to these companies, to integrate it into their own Intranet.

Of course we are also counting on the content creators that want to use GraphicBrain.com as a vehicle to 'advertise' their content. We are seeking cooperation with major industry sites, like PrintPlanet.com.

And the last support we are counting on is the word-of-mouth advertising. We are convinced that GraphicBrain.com has a really nice offering and we hope that our users will spread the worth.

You have discussed your revenue streams - tell us about your projections, specifically revenue from actual users.

At this moment we are in a luxury position: the investments were paid for with government funding, including the software and hardware support for the next years. This gives us an advantage for some time, but we are aware of the fact that to keep in a leading position, we will have to make investments in the future. In our business model we anticipate revenue streams from three different sources: registration fees, advertising and the special projects, e.g. license fees. Our goal is to cover all the operational costs starting next year. The figures we've calculated in our business plan are realistic, so we have confidence that we will reach this break-even point very soon. This is all thanks to a really huge amount of automation, to keep the administration as low as possible.

It will of course be a change of mind for many people to have to pay a registration fee for the use of what's just another search engine. But I think that it has already been proven that when the offer is good, people are prepared to pay. Just look at the Wall Street Journal. We also see others, like you at PrintPlanet, doing this. Whenever there is a real added value, and the price is right, most users will be prepared to pay a fee.

Going forward, what are the challenges you see specifically with indexing sites using Flash and other secured sites?

First of all, we will keep working on the fine-tuning of GraphicBrain.com as it is right now. There are still some things that can be improved. On the technical side, we will be starting with test runs to index flash-sites. This is - once again - an industry first for Autonomy. No other software does that. Autonomy was also the first to index pdf-files. On the organizational and promotional side, we will try to convince as much content creators and organizations as possible to cooperate with GraphicBrain.com. The first reactions are positive. And we're quite confident that we can make some interesting announcements in the coming months.


Thank you very much Eddy for explaining this exciting new technology and service. We look forward to working with GraphicBrain.com.