Red Herring Launches New Research Division

The new division will provide reports on five primary IT sectors but will focus mostly on disruptive technology and emerging markets.

Magazine publisher Red Herring May 2 dived into a pool that includes such well-known research giants as Gartner, IDC, Forrester and Yankee Group when it launched a new division, Red Herring Research, at its Spring 2007 conference , being held through May 3 in Monterey, Calif.

Red Herring Research will offer analyses on "emerging and disruptive influences" in five primary technology sectors: CleanTech (green technology), life sciences, communications, information technology and consumer technologies, Managing Director Chris Bonnet told eWEEK.

"Basically, we want to complement what we have been doing in our publications and online," Bonnet said. "We also have our events [division] ; the missing component with all the knowledge we've accumulated in-house was a research division to talk about some of the disruptive and emerging trends that are happening globally."

Bonnet said that 10-year-old Red Herring "has people on the ground all over the world already. What we've done is duplicated that effort and created - a team of - about 30 people - split between senior analysts and technology writers - and those people are creating reports on various themes.

"What we want to do is find the next emerging trends, the small private companies that are creating disruptive technologies, so that we can understand better the IPOs - initial public offerings - and M&A - mergers and acquisitions - activity of tomorrow," Bonnet said.

In its first published reports, Red Herring - true to its maverick style - released such offbeat titles as "Liquid Assets: Residential Water Technologies," "Femtocells: The Next Wave in Fixed Mobile Convergence" and "NIRS: Emerging Living Tissue Monitors."

"We're looking for things that are, for lack of a better word, disruptive, so we can give institutional investors and industries an idea of what the next wave will be," Bonnet said.

With Red Herring Research, which will be based at company headquarters in Belmont, Calif., people now will have access to the "most incisive and up-to-date commentary on emerging patterns and financial activity in the global technology industry," said Alex Vieux, CEO and chairman of Red Herring.

Red Herring Research expects to publish about 50 reports per year, Vieux said.

The Red Herring Research team comprises more than 30 senior analysts and technology writers located in North America, Latin America, India, Western and Eastern Europe, and China.

Copyright 2007 by Ziff Davis Media, Distributed by United Press International