The Rise of the Knowledge Market

 Through the centuries, knowledge has been used to subdue and liberate. In many ways, knowledge has always been commercialized. A cobbler has knowledge of how to repair a shoe; your plumber has knowledge you pay for when your pipes burst on a cold winter day. Collectively, we are all full of knowledge and yet we do little with it.

Today, we are beginning to see the emergence of online knowledge marketplaces where you can sell your personal knowledge. You can see its roots in the crowd sourced Q & A trend that spawned sites like Quora, Aardvark, Stockoverflow and others. And sure, you can go to Google or Ask.com and get your questions answered for free.

PROMOTED

I can hear you now. Sell my personal knowledge? Sure, think about it. You can buy, trade and sell almost everything today on the internet – eBay, Etsy, Craigslist, etc., so why not knowledge? Why not pure information?

Way back in 1980, two graduate students from Duke University brought us Usenet, essentially the first online forum for information exchange. Back then, we didn’t know what we had, but we liked it and used it. Usenet was free and you get what you pay for, so there was no confidence the information you received was correct. I picture Al Swearingen in Deadwood when the first telegraph poles went up, saying this would change everything. Usenet did change everything – it softened us for what was to come – putting our personal lives and knowledge on the internet.

Everyone desires knowledge. In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy saga, folks constructed a super computer, Deep Thought, to find the answer. The only problem was they didn’t ask the question.

Until now that is. Two new companies, one Swedish and one Italian, are focusing on changing e-commerce through the monetization of your personal knowledge.

Fresh off their second investment round of $1.1 million from two prominent Swedish investors, Mancx is proving their concept of an online knowledge market to exchange personal information for money is a reality. They have set out to create a new set of standards in social search and global trade of knowledge.

This pivotal round of funding was led by Bo Axel Ax:son Johnson, a private investor whose company, Coding Technologies was sold to Dolby, and Nils-Robert Persson, executive chairman of the board for Cinnober Financial Technology, the Sweden-based provider of electronic trading platforms. This second round of funding indicates confidence in the long-term viability of an online marketplace for knowledge.

Mancx is billed as a fully transactional knowledge market with global payin/payout capabilities. For information buyers, Mancx is the place to go to for answers to the business questions they face on a daily basis. For information sellers, Mancx offers a way to capitalize on accumulated knowledge and to build their personal brand profile as sources of valuable information. Mancx provides a secure environment and anonymity to negotiate and broker a deal of knowledge selling. Mancx takes a 20% commission on every concluded transaction.

Think of it as Quora that you pay for, the mature Quora. With Mancx, users are encouraged to verify themselves with LinkedIN for the purposes of credibility as well as matching knowledge, but in the end users are responsible for all information they buy and sell.

For skeptics who think that no one of significance would reply to the ads posted for information, Mattias Guilotte, co-founder, Mancx, makes this salient point: “The last ad posted on Mancx was from a person looking for contacts for specific housing cooperatives in Sweden. I'm not sure I could find anyone who even would like to answer this on Quora. In many cases what people are looking for is boring factual information that resides far away from the top populist layer of the internet."

Guilotte adds, "We are talking about the long tail of  sometimes boring yet valuable business questions.”

Mancx uses a number of different tools to create a trustworthy environment for the users: ratings, verifications through social networks like LinkedIn, transaction records, etc. Using their connections with LinkedIn, PayPal, VISA, etc. they establish unique user profiles no matter if the user chooses to be anonymous or public.  LinkedIn verification lets two anonymous people meet and verify that the other person is indeed a ‘real person’. This minimizes fraud and makes people dedicated to delivering quality answers.

Mancx’s second co-founder, Henrik Dillman, puts it this way. “Traditionally, information has been collected by a few, acquired by the rich and kept away from curious eyes (individuals and small companies) in general. It has benefitted established structures and players, typically blue chips, bankers and consultants. It has not benefited small companies or the recycling of information and more importantly, it has not promoted transparency.”

This is the same philosophy that Acabiz has regarding information. Acabiz is a new Italian company founded in March 2011, lightly funded by private investors and €55k in long-term funding from the Seed Fund program of Finlombarda, the finance arm of Lombardy’s governmental body. This is significant however because it illustrates a belief in the validity of a global knowledge market.

Acabiz came up with the idea of a knowledge marketplace out of a desire to create a platform for academics to connect with businesses, governments and NGOs. Acabiz is a direct link between the final consumer and supplier of specialized knowledge and cutting out the middleman, consultants.

“Accessing niche or specialized knowledge is mission-critical for any successful and targeted business activity today,” said Guido Uglietti, founding partner, Acabiz.  “Everyone recognizes the importance of academia to business knowledge transfers, but has been no global platform tool to facilitate and promote knowledge transfer in any simple and scalable way.”

The idea behind Acabiz is brilliantly simple. They created a platform for academics, which they call knowledge holders, to connect with businesses, known as knowledge hunters, who are interested in their specific research expertise or knowledge. The Acabiz platform allows businesses to easily and directly tap into the knowledge network of thousands of academics worldwide who all have highly specialized knowledge in fields such as architecture, engineering, law, medicine, science, financial, economics, and others.

But us mere humans are conditioned today to expect information for free online, will we adopt this approach?

Uglietti believes we will. “There is plenty of knowledge available for free on the web and other sources; however, it is often difficult for non-sector experts to translate that knowledge into something useful for their specific business needs. With Acabiz, knowledge holders will not only provide very detailed knowledge, but they will also translate that knowledge into understandable language, adding value to the information that didn’t exist before.”

Uglietti adds, “Last year, companies spent more than $600 billion  acquiring knowledge from consultancy firms, who are often not the primary source of that knowledge, just skilled assemblers of information. With Acabiz, knowledge hunters can spend a fraction of the cost they would spend with consultancies and acquire knowledge from leading experts in their respective subjects first-hand.”

Let’s ponder this: Currently on StackOverflow alone, there are approximately 270,000 unanswered questions and other Q&A websites show similar patterns. Why aren’t people answering these questions?

Mancx’s Guilotte believes they will. When they get paid.